Saturday, April 18, 2026

The Whispering Earring (AI roundup)







Allbirds stock tumbles after nearly 600% rally as the shoemaker rebrands as an AI company

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— Yahoo Finance (@yahoofinance.com) April 16, 2026 at 2:15 PM

Authors are slamming Reese Witherspoon for telling followers 'it's time to learn A.I.'

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— Los Angeles Times (@latimes.com) April 17, 2026 at 3:45 AM



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— Aaron Bossig (@aaronbossig.bsky.social) April 16, 2026 at 3:35 PM

"Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data."

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— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix.bsky.social) April 16, 2026 at 5:41 PM








("a planning lawyer, decided to investigate the letters pro bono, because while acting for the nightclub during the licence suspension his suspicions were aroused by the [fact that the letters seems obviouskky generated by an LLM]")







The Mississippi Free Press got inundated with a raft of AI-generated opinion pieces—which we pay writers for—from people who don't exist pretending to be Mississippians. One of those columns made it to publication before we caught the scam. Kevin Edwards, editor for our Voices section, explains:

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— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 6:24 PM








We found more than a half-dozen instances in which Dan Abrams' Mediaite appeared to invent stories out of thin air, fabricate quotes, or misattribute reporting to the wrong person or outlet. Details in @status.news: www.status.news/p/mediaite-c...

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— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 8:03 PM








WaPo website replaced search with AI and it's going great

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— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) April 13, 2026 at 7:08 PM
















Why do the Japanese like their buns askew (2026)

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— Accented Cinema (@accentedcinema.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 12:41 PM








Resounding victory for wordcels. Good job encoding all your shape rotations in tokenizeable natural language, dummies. Your puny mathematics exist as a low-dimension subspace inside the machine that generates infinite reddit posts

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— jason grinblat (@jfg.land) April 15, 2026 at 7:52 PM








(Didn't see another source for the trophy design)







The entire card







I saw no giraffe merch







Haven’t been to a Starbucks in 5+ years, and guys, this isn’t inspiring me to return. Also, if this (and the shoe company pivoting to AI) doesn’t scream “bubble,” I don’t know what does.

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— Joe Adalian (@tvmojoe.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 7:56 AM