🤜 Welcome back to Dog Jail Biz Beat, where we pummel fresh, dripping insights out of the week’s biggest tech and business news.
In this week’s edition, we consider the future of sensationalist internet content. And don’t miss: gift ideas for the world’s richest Mr. Clean impersonator.
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Arrest Report
💀 DEATH ROW: The nascent school shooting ad industry. In a video sponsored by Bioré, a TikTok influencer vowed to “strip away the stigma” of anxiety —including school-related stresses like a mass shooting that killed three of her fellow students and “knowing what life is going to look like after college.” The skincare company quickly apologized, but the damage to Gen Z’s earning potential was done. At least there’s still the climate crisis to monetize.
🚔 IN CUSTODY: Watching Love Is Blind using your cousin’s ex’s Netflix account. Last week, the streaming service started cracking down on password-sharing in the US. If the company’s enforcement campaign works as well as its app does, we can expect the crackdown to get stuck at exactly 33%.
🐑 AT LARGE: Echoes from the AI boom. The stock price of graphics card maker Nvidia jumped 24 percent in a single day last week after the company reported strong sales of the chips that power machine learning. Investors late to the gold rush can still buy shares of ad agencies — sure to soar when every company needs to rebrand as an AI business.
The Beatdown
Last week, an AI-generated image of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on social media, briefly spooking the stock market. According Bloomberg, the S&P 500 dipped by 0.3% in the minutes before the image was debunked, making the incident “possibly the first instance of an AI-generated image moving the market.”
What went unmentioned was that creating such an image has been trivial for decades. The AI technology that really made stocks flutter was the social media algorithms that showed the image to so many, so fast.
KEEP SCROLLING: Ten years after the launch of Upworthy, the news site that popularized bizarre headline constructions like “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next,” readers have become vigilant against clickbait. Most now know that the link promising “One Weird Trick to Prevent Colon Cancer” is unlikely to save your life. The designers of today’s internet, however, have done their best to eliminate the need to click anything at all.
Open up any of the web’s most popular platforms and you’ll be served up a slurry of algorithmically selected information from accounts you never followed. (Displayed natively, of course.) Even scrolling down the page is increasingly treated by platforms as an unfortunate source of friction, another problem for their engineers to solve. With the rise of short-form video, the only interaction the internet asks you for is to never look away.
STAY FOCUSED: Years ago, sites like Buzzfeed were created to siphon off their own little piece of the massive attention social media was attracting. In 2023, the Facebooks of the world have found that there isn’t enough attention in the world for them to share. Faced with the hard limit on growth of “living humans with internet access,” Meta is showing its flattening user base more ads to boost revenues.
It’s a bit depressing watching media organizations try to succeed in an information environment like this. Just days after The Messenger launched, the news site with the ambition to reach “100 million monthly readers” saw one of its editors quit over what he described as “the rapacious and blind desperate chasing of traffic.” In another era, sacrificing quality for clicks could be seen as a kind of Faustian bargain. Today, it reads more like a sad, late entry into the game a million other news sites already tried to play and lost.
After years of rumors, Apple is widely expected to announce a new virtual reality headset next week. The continued push behind persistent VR — a technology few consumers seem to want — makes it pretty clear what kind of future tech companies would like to see: one where our attention isn’t just constantly vied for, but held physically captive.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Don’t be surprised if, in a couple years, you find yourself a bit nostalgic for back when there was still bait to click on. Soon enough, all you’ll feel when you log on is a quick pinch as the bare hook sinks in.
One Big Number:
Number of bogus cases cited by a real lawyer who used ChatGPT to “supplement” his legal research. After a judge found that a court filing written (generated?) by the attorney was “replete with citations to non-existent cases,” the lawyer was forced to admit he used AI to do the boring part of his job.
In an affidavit, the lawyer swore he hadn’t just blindly trusted the chatbot — he also asked ChatGPT if the cases were legit and it was like, “for sure, dude.”
According to Dog Jail’s legal team, ChatGPT bears no liability for its deceptions, protected under the precedent set by If You Ask If They’re a Cop They Have to Say v. No They Don’t, Bro.
For the Couple That Has Literally Everything
Love — or whatever its closest biological equivalent is for lab-enhanced, billionaire metahumans — is in the air! Last week, news broke that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got engaged to Lauren Sanchez, his Alive Girl of five years.
Of course, finding a wedding gift for the world’s richest man poses some challenges. Fortunately for Bezos’ friends, loved ones, and 1.5 million employees, Dog Jail has your back. Our nuptial experts handcrafted this suggested registry for the two love creatures — all on Amazon, naturally:
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