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7 April 2026

The AI pop star with 11 chart hits

The Hallucination HQ

AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-04-07

Today's Hallucination HQ

OpenAI Has Thoughts On What To Do With All The Jobs It's Eliminating

OpenAI has published a policy paper suggesting governments respond to AI-driven job displacement with robot taxes, public wealth funds, and a four-day workweek. To be clear: the company accelerating automation is now advising on how society should soften automation's blow — a bit like a dam engineer handing out towels. The proposals aren't ridiculous, and some economists take them seriously. Whether policymakers do is a separate, sadder question.

Source: TechCrunch


A Man Who Doesn't Exist Is Having A Better Music Career Than You

Eddie Dalton — AI-generated, entirely fictitious, unbothered — now holds eleven spots simultaneously on the iTunes singles chart. He has no face, no publicist, and no opinion on his own artistic process, which puts him ahead of most signed artists on at least one count. The music industry spent years fretting about what AI might do to charts and culture. Apparently the answer is: this, quite quickly, without much ceremony.

Source: Hacker News via Showbiz411


Google Releases An App. Nobody Notices. That Was Apparently The Plan

Quietly — and Google do love a quiet launch — the company dropped an offline-first AI dictation app for iOS, powered by its Gemma models. No internet required, which is either a privacy feature or a sign that Google has finally accepted it cannot be trusted with your data. It takes aim at established tools like Wispr Flow. Whether it wins on quality remains to be seen; it's already winning on the element of surprise.

Source: TechCrunch


Small Sellers Are Using AI To Decide What To Make Next. It's Working.

Mike McClary sold a rugged flashlight for years, then stopped. Customers emailed about it long after. He didn't need a focus group — he needed someone to notice the signal. That's precisely the gap AI tools like Alibaba's Accio are now filling for small online sellers: analysing trends, identifying demand, and flagging what buyers actually want before anyone thinks to ask. It won't replace taste. It will, however, replace a lot of spreadsheets.

Source: MIT Technology Review


Claude Decided Complex Engineering Was Optional. Developers Disagree.

A GitHub issue titled "Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks" has accumulated over a thousand upvotes, which in developer terms is the equivalent of a very long, very specific letter of complaint to the headmaster. Users report that recent updates degraded Claude Code's ability to handle sophisticated tasks — more refusals, more hedging, less actual coding. Anthropic hasn't formally responded yet, though one imagines the thousand upvotes are doing a reasonable job of communicating the mood.

Source: Hacker News via GitHub


AI is moving fast. Some days it conquers the music charts. Other days it won't write a for-loop. Multitudes.

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