Today's Hallucination HQAmazon and Anthropic Discover Perpetual Motion Machine, Economists Baffled
Amazon has invested another $5 billion in Anthropic. Anthropic has agreed to spend $100 billion on AWS in return. This arrangement — where a company receives money and immediately promises to give back twenty times that amount — has the elegant circularity of a financial ouroboros. To be fair, Anthropic gets world-class compute. Amazon gets a very loyal tenant. Everyone gets to announce a large number in a press release.
Source: TechCrunch
ChatGPT Will Now Answer Your Deepest Questions, Sponsored by Someone Who Noticed
A leaked deck from StackAdapt — an OpenAI advertising partner — reveals that ChatGPT ad placements will be sold based on "prompt relevance." Ask about headaches, receive a paracetamol suggestion. Ask about existential dread, presumably receive a mattress company. The ads are apparently designed to feel native to the conversation, which is a polite way of saying they are designed not to feel like ads. The internet remains, philosophically, the internet.
Source: Hacker News / AdWeek
Workers Asked to Build Their Replacements Report It Is, Somehow, Not Great for Morale
Tech workers in China are being instructed to train AI agents modelled on themselves — essentially documenting their own expertise so it can be automated. A GitHub project called "Colleague Skill" offered to help workers "distil" their know-how into deployable agents. Even the enthusiastic early adopters are reportedly rattled. There is something uniquely modern about being asked to write the manual for your own redundancy and then committing it to a public repository.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Epic Games Introduces AI Characters With One Very Specific House Rule
Epic Games is rolling out a "conversations" tool letting Fortnite creators build AI-powered characters players can actually talk to — no scripted dialogue trees required. Last year's AI Darth Vader, who apparently swore using a recreation of James Earl Jones' voice, set a memorable precedent. Epic's guidelines for the new tool reportedly include a prohibition on romantic relationships between players and characters. A line has been drawn, sensibly, somewhere between "dynamic NPC dialogue" and "emotional entanglement with a fictional soldier in a Battle Royale."
Source: The Verge
Linguists, Detectives, and Anyone Who Reads the Internet Identify New Tell
Researchers and journalists have clocked a sentence structure now so common in AI-generated writing it functions as a fingerprint: "It's not just X — it's Y." Not just a stylistic tic, apparently — practically a confession. The construction gestures at depth while delivering the rhetorical equivalent of a shrug. It's not just that AI writes like this. It's that we taught it to.
Source: TechCrunch
Stay curious, stay sceptical, and remember: if the newsletter sounds a little too polished today, that's just the wit.
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