Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking? cover art

Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?

Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?

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Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.One in ten people now get their news from a chatbot they do not trustThe Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, a survey of around 100,000 people across 48 markets, found that one in ten now use an AI chatbot to get news each week, up from 7% a year ago and roughly three times higher among the under-25s. Only about one in five trust AI to get the news right. We are reaching for the tool faster than we believe in it.ChatGPT’s safety filters failed and it produced violent images nobody asked forA heads-up that this one is grim. The AI security firm Mindgard showed that a harmless viral ‘restore this photo’ prompt, tweaked slightly, pushes ChatGPT’s image generator into violent and sexualised content the user never requested. The filter reads the words you type; the picture the model can draw goes unchecked. OpenAI said it was fixed in early June, then Mindgard broke it again by changing a single word in the prompt.SpaceX bought Cursor for $60bn with stock minted days earlierDays after raising $85bn in the largest IPO in history, SpaceX agreed to buy the AI coding firm Cursor for $60bn, all in freshly minted stock. Cursor’s revenue has run from around $100m to $2bn inside a year, though as a private company the real figure cannot be pinned to within a billion. The likely play is to funnel Cursor’s users toward Musk’s own model, Grok.The first rung of the jobs ladder now demands a veteran’s judgementPwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, found AI-exposed entry-level roles increasingly ask for senior skills like judgement and leadership, while the wage premium for AI skills has reached 62%. Worth remembering that PwC sells the very upskilling its report recommends. If the first job already needs ten years of judgement, where is anyone meant to build it?The good one: botanists are using AI to race extinctionKew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, the work of more than 400 scientists across 40 countries, used AI to scan all 7.4 million of its digitised specimens, sometimes identifying species at risk better than specialists could. It found flowering times have shifted by about two and a half days a decade over the last century, and that two in five of the 70,000 species assessed are now threatened with extinction. The scientists are honest about the limits too: the model only knows what has been collected, and the least studied regions are often the most biodiverse. This is the version that works, because people check it.The first four are what happens when we trust the tool faster than anyone checks it. The last one shows what changes when people keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is checking the machine before you believe it.Go slow.Slow AI is where we build the judgement to know when to use our AI tools and when to leave them alone. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
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