The Shohei Ohtani multimillion dollar gambling scandal made headlines last week — but it’s a symptom of a larger environment where online betting has become ubiquitous and perhaps too easy.
In The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang writes about the legalization of sports betting, the gamified apps, and the effects on players, fans, media, and the integrity of the game.
[The New Yorker]
A Poynter article about using AI in newsrooms was ripped off and rewritten by a pink slime site called Tech Gate. Guess they didn’t read the guide.
I took a browse around the site and saw some familiar faces — Tech Gate also republished a mangled version of a Vergecast segment, including using our image. My favorite line:
Simply after that, we launch Nilay Patel into his Mexican vacation, and we do a newsy lightning spherical.
It’s not just TikTok — other apps like Shein, Temu, and WeChat are popular in the US, too. The TikTok ban focuses on ByteDance-owned subsidiaries including CapCut and Lemon8, but includes a carve out for popular shopping apps, The Washington Post reports. On the other hand, “everything app” WeChat could be in a gray area.
[Washington Post]
Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Shopify promise AI tools will improve our experience of buying things online. The fashion brand Finesse even uses AI to design clothes — but that doesn’t mean products are actually good.
I tried $400 worth of AI clothes, plus product image and text generators to see how they live up to the AI hype.
Set to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” a TikTok user cut together idyllic, quaint clips of their hometown — followed by a bunch of sterile data centers being built.
On TikTok, the medium is the message. Not everyone seems to know what a data center even is (the recommended search query below the video is “data center explained”) but the video works. This trend, as they say, has potential.
Governor Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, which updates the state’s right of publicity laws that dictate how a person’s likeness can be used. The ELVIS Act expands the law to protect voice, too, in the age of AI clones.
In 2023 I wrote about the patchwork system of right of publicity laws in the US. Tennessee — with its significant entertainment industry — has some of the strongest laws in the country.
Outdoor Voices, a popular athleisure brand once seen as the next Lululemon, is closing all of its stores on Sunday. The direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand was valued at $110 million in 2018, but has been on the decline following internal friction. It’s the end of an era for the e-comm startup once considered a model for founders — the company will go back to selling strictly online.
[The New York Times]
