Go Read This: The Verge’s favorite reads from all over the web

While it might be fun to interact with Character.AI’s user-created chatbots, a report from Wired shows the challenges of taking down chatbots that impersonate people without their consent, including a teen who was murdered in 2006:

Given that Character.AI can sometimes take a week to investigate and remove a persona that violates the platform’s terms, a bot can still operate for long enough to upset someone whose likeness is being used. But it might not be enough for a person to claim real “harm” from a legal perspective, experts say.

In a long blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei considers the upside of artificial general intelligence (AGI, or as he prefers to call it, “powerful AI”). He pushed back on the idea that he’s a “pessimist” or “doomer” by outlining some grandiose claims for the future of AI:

I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

I’d like to point out that the company is reportedly in talks to raise money at a $40 billion valuation.

Ride share drivers in New York are guaranteed a minimum wage — but Uber and Lyft gamed the law by locking drivers out of the app, making it impossible for them to earn more, a Bloomberg investigation found.

Bloomberg collected more than 7,000 screenshots of lockouts and estimated how much the companies could save using the lockout tactic.

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who broke the original story, just published a detailed account of what went down. Settle in with some popcorn — it’s pretty wild.

The $700 Evergreen edition of the iconic kitchen appliance is apparently not recommended for whipping eggs, as Ellen Cushing discovered in this delightful takedown of the gadget where she compares it to an engagement ring:

“Both are expensive status symbols generally acquired in the spring of one’s life; both are of limited use and enduring popularity; both are signifiers of domestic attainment; both are things people excitedly post to Instagram.”

Before you buy something like Anker’s new MagGo SD card reader to take advantage of that high-fps video capture on the iPhone 16 Pro, go read PetaPixel’s warning about product marketing and the limits of SD cards.

PetaPixel today confirmed that the iPhone can technically shoot 4K at 30 frames per second (FPS) in ProRes Log to a UHS-II SD card, but attempting to choose a higher frame rate would guarantee dropped frames.

Fossil fuel giants have used AI for years to increase production. Now, Microsoft sees the generative AI boom as an opportunity to boost profits for itself and oil and gas companies it wants to strike deals with, Karen Hao reports for The Atlantic. Microsoft’s own greenhouse gas emissions are growing with its focus on AI, taking the company further away from its climate goals.

Ezra Edelman, who directed the Oscar-winning masterpiece O.J.: Made in America, has been working on an expansive nine-hour film about Prince. But as the New York Times Magazine reports, the artist’s estate is attempting to block its release, which they worry will tarnish the reputation of Paisley Park.

We might not have a doc to watch, but in the meantime, Sasha Weiss’s story has many details from the film and incredible material about Edelman’s editing process.

The New York Times meticulously pieced together the bitter power struggle inside Disney between CEO Bob Iger and his successor, Bob Chapek, who was fired in 2022. The piece, which follows up a 2023 report from CNBC, chronicles Chapek’s rise and fall, and Iger’s quest to return to power.

I’ve always wondered, and Lucas Zelnik has a shockingly simple and good answer:

I think the biggest thing is to stay in front of people’s faces. You just have to put out so much content. Jokes take so long to write. I will put out chunks of material but very selectively, and, frankly, I probably won’t put out any more material until I’m ready to release an hourlong special, which I think I want to give that a few more years.

Kevin Roose, whose New York Times story about horny Bing chats went viral last year, writes that chatbots are at times very negative about him since, having seemingly picked up on criticism of his piece.

Now, he writes about how he used techniques that could be considered an AI-focused version of SEO to influence how they respond when asked about him — and what that portends.

The claim that the Titanic was swapped with a sister ship and intentionally sunk for an insurance payout is, according to Reuters, a long-running and meritless rumor.

But it’s entirely new to me! And extremely hilarious! You should treat this (and anything else on that cursed site) with the gravity and weight of fanfiction, but let’s be real, fanfiction is fun.

And they’re worried that everybody else got really worried for a minute, too, and then just kind of moved on. And so maybe the worriers missed their only chance:

“There was almost a dog-that-caught-the-car effect,” she said. “This community had been trying so long to get people to take these ideas seriously, and suddenly people took them seriously, and it was like, ‘Okay, now what?’”

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say US whistleblower laws weren’t intended to be used by people like “Richard Overum,” who has turned himself into a super spy one whistleblower reward at a time. But he’s making it work! And he’s recruiting.

I can’t decide if this is a Robin Hood story or kind of scammy or both, but I can’t get enough.

After The New York Times reported that Walz was a Dreamcast fan, IGN did the legwork to find that he apparently really liked Crazy Taxi. Now I’m wondering if Walz knows all the lyrics to “Escape From the City,” too.

Author and journalist Malcolm Harris found a bag filled with Project 2025 merch and documents on the street this week — apparently nothing top secret, but interesting nonetheless.

The Washington Post reports that the Heritage Foundation, the right wing think tank spearheading Project 2025, filed a police report for “theft.” Then the cops showed up.

Jessica Grose writes in the NYT about educators struggling with students using AI in the classroom. One major worry expressed is that relying on it for brainstorming and writing could make students less likely to power through tough assignments on their own.

It’s almost as if the speed of available technology is making them assume that their human brains should have all the answers.

Right now, teachers have to deal with this issue on their own; some policymakers “appear to have drunk the Kool-Aid on artificial intelligence.”

For more of the backstory and ambition behind Worldcoin, the eyeball-scanning-for-cryptocurrency startup that Sam Altman thinks could one day save us all from an AI-controlled world, check out this piece from Bloomberg’s Ashley Vance:

Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.

Just weeks after the NYT profiled Blake Benthall about his Silk Road 2.0 role and post-prison endeavors, 404 Media has identified a co-founder, Thomas White, as its “Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0.”

Between his 2014 arrest and receiving a five-year prison sentence in 2019, White apparently launched DDoSecrets with Emma Best, which was eventually tagged a “criminal hacker group” after publishing the “BlueLeaks.”

I had to the good fortune of reading an early copy of Andrew Chow’s smartly researched and brightly written new book, Cryptomania (which I always say to the tune of “Lisztomania”). It joins Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up as one of the great chronicles of the crypto boom, and it’s out this week.

The New York Times profiled the guy who ran Silk Road 2.0 — apparently after eight months in prison he worked for the feds as “a full-time, ankle-monitor-wearing cybercrime consultant, paid in freedom and a stipend that covered dollar pizza slices, toothpaste and subway rides.”

Now he’s shilling his crypto compliance startup, arguing that “his criminal experience can help unmask fraud before it leads to another scam like FTX.”

JD Vance’s former coworkers say the vice presidential candidate wasn’t very good at being a venture capitalist. One person said he was too consumed with his book tour around Hillbilly Elegy to show up to work.

I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.

One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?

According to The Information, OpenAI is in discussion with Broadcom and other semiconductor designers about developing its own artificial intelligence chip to address shortages in its supply chain and reduce dependency on Nvidia. OpenAI has apparently also hired former Google chip staffers.

Bloomberg previously reported in January that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was planning to raise billions of dollars to set up a network of chip factories.