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Mia Sato

Mia Sato

Features Writer, The Verge

Features Writer, The Verge

    More From Mia Sato

    Mia Sato
    Mia Sato
    Etsy really wants sales to happen on-platform.

    The marketplace is introducing a new initiative called Share & Save — essentially an affiliate program that saves Etsy sellers a bit of money. When a merchant makes a sale via their personalized link, Etsy will knock off 4 percent of the order total from what they owe in fees.

    Many Etsy merchants sell products on multiple sites. The small discount could incentivize sellers to drive traffic to their Etsy storefront instead of to other platforms.

    Mia Sato
    Mia Sato
    About that school district that banned books using ChatGPT.

    A school administrator in charge of complying with Iowa’s book ban argues in The New York Times that using ChatGPT has kept more books on the shelves than other school districts.

    Bridgette Exman, the administrator, told The Verge in August that using ChatGPT was a way to show “a good faith effort” to follow the law, which she calls “misguided” and “destructive” in the Times.

    I’d argue that we used A.I. to try to keep books. The technology allowed us to zero in only on those books that violated the precise letter of the law without collateral damage to other books, enabling us to keep on the shelf more than 30 titles we feared might be questionable.

    Mia Sato
    Mia Sato
    Gannett is pausing use of an AI sports bot after criticism.

    Last week, readers noticed the generative AI tool kept describing local sporting events as “close encounter[s] of the athletic kind.” Articles with that phrasing have popped up on The Columbus Dispatch and The Indianapolis Star, among others. Some stories were also missing key information.

    It’s not the first botched AI initiative: other outlets have had to make corrections, overhaul policies, and defend the use of AI tools after readers noticed errors.

    Stitching together an archive of an endangered Palestinian art

    Palestinian embroidery is a centuries-old tradition. Can digitizing hard-to-access patterns help preserve it for a new generation?

    Mia Sato
    Mia Sato
    Mia Sato
    Lost in the girlouboros.

    Women have a lot of things to do these days — we go on hot girl walks in our tomato girl dresses; prepare our girl dinners in our clean girl apartments. And of course, be a vessel for mass marketing campaigns.

    As Vox’s Rebecca Jennings points out, these “trends” are just repackaged normal things we do (walk, eat, tidy our homes). But tack “girl” on to something and it creates the potential for virality and money — a new generation of girlbossing.