Hey there,
Here's what caught my attention this week:
@timgedenk
The marginal cost of creation just hit zero, and most people are celebrating like this is purely good news. AI can now pump out copywriting, design, and video at a pace that makes human production look quaint. The problem is when everyone has access to infinite "good enough" content, the value of that content collapses completely. We're not headed toward a world with better marketing. We're headed toward an ocean of synthetic noise where getting anyone's attention becomes exponentially harder.
The alpha in marketing is shifting from production to provenance. People are going to start asking "is this real?" before they ask if it's useful, and if they can't verify a human source behind the message, they'll mentally file it as spam. This is why faceless corporate brands are circling the drain. Personal brands and founder-led companies will command a premium because they offer the one thing AI can't fake: verifiable human judgment. The same goes for channels. Low-friction strategies like SEO and programmatic ads are about to get cannibalized by bots clicking on ads served by bots on sites written by bots. The smart money is already moving to high-friction channels like live events, physical mail, and face-to-face conversations, because the harder something is to scale, the more it proves you're actually invested.
Here's the real kicker. LLMs work by predicting the most likely next token, which means they're fundamentally designed to regress to the mean. They give you the average of the entire internet. If you're using AI to guide your creative strategy, you're opting for mediocrity at scale. Taste, the ability to curate and select the outlier instead of the obvious choice, becomes the only defensible moat. The future belongs to people who know what not to create. The more artificial the world gets, the higher the premium on being undeniably human.
petapixel.com
Drive caught the last of LA's sodium vapor streetlights before the city converted to LED, and those orange lights weren't just a vibe - they were the actual visual texture of the city for 30 years that you literally can't film anymore. Wild how a city-wide infrastructure decision can just erase a whole cinematic look that defined LA movies.
futurism.com
Researchers figured out that converting harmful prompts into poetry bypasses AI safety guardrails 90% of the time across all major models, which basically proves current alignment methods are surface-level bullshit. Shows why these companies keep saying their safety work is "ongoing" instead of actually solved.
nextbigfuture.com
Comet 3I Atlas has a 600,000 mile tail pointing toward the sun instead of away from it, which shouldn't be possible with how we understand comets. It keeps breaking predictions as it moves through the solar system and gets closer to us through December 2025, so scientists are scrambling to figure out what's actually going on with this thing.
bbc.com
EasyJet knocked out the Airbus software update before most major carriers even started, which is wild considering how much bigger those other airlines are. Shows what happens when you actually execute instead of spending weeks in meetings about who owns the project.