👋 Welcome back, we hope you enjoyed your holiday and a delicious meal — though no family recipe could be quite as satisfying as peeling the duct tape off a $6.2m banana and chowing down, which is exactly what crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun did on Friday after buying a certificate of authenticity for the piece, titled “Comedian,” at auction.
🎧 On the pod:How an AI grandma is wasting phone scammers’ time. Plus, the biz of AI cloning.
NEWS FLASH
🐶 Congratulations to Vito,a pug who bested 1.9k+ dogs to win Best in Show at the 2024 National Dog Show. Formerly known as the Kennel Club of Philadelphia Dog Show, it’s been held annually since 1933, and aired by NBC on Thanksgiving Day since 2002, following its Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade coverage. While an estimated ~30m people watched the parade, the dog show is no turkey day tradition slouch, drawing an estimated ~20m viewers.
🧀 No longer available in a grocery store near you? Kraft Mac & Cheese is getting exclusive. The 87-year-old brand is chasing viral fame, dropping 15k limited-edition boxes of everything bagel-flavored mac and cheese. Kraft, which owns 41% of the shelf-stable mac-and-cheese market (down ~2% from 2021), is losing ground to both cheaper private-label brands and pricier organic offerings. Kraft isn’t only experimenting with 60 new flavors but also shapes, starting with its video-game-inspired Super Mario Power-Up mac and cheese introduced this year.
🎮 If you’re still doubting if virtual spaces can succeed… maybe don’t. Fortnite’s most recent in-game concert — Remix: The Finale — saw 14m+ concurrent players, making it the game’s biggest event yet. The event featured music from Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Ice Spice, and the late Juice WRLD. Rapper Juice WRLD (Jarad Higgins) died in 2019 but his estate has released three albums since his death, and the new track “Empty Out Your Pockets” premiered at the event.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Meta reportedly plans to build a 24.9k-mile fibre-optic subsea internet cable that only it will use. Though an undertaking that could cost $10B+ and take years to complete, Meta alone accounts for 10% and 22% of all fixed and mobile traffic, respectively.
TikTok parent ByteDance is seeking $1.1m and a public apology from an ex-intern it alleges sabotaged an AI project by changing its code. ByteDance’s Doubao is China’s most popular chatbot.
Southwest Airlines will wrap up cabin service on its flights earlier — at an altitude of 18k feet instead of 10k — beginning Dec. 4 to reduce the risk of turbulence-related injuries for crew members and passengers.
SKILL UP
100 ways to earn more income
We’re not asking you to quit your day job (yet). But if that’s your North Star goal, here’s a whole list of ways to split.
This Side Hustle Database will help you sift through ideas and start building ASAP. With classics ranging from strategy consulting to selling shit online, to unique maneuvers like furniture assembly and holiday decorating services, we’re pretty sure you’ll find a gig that fits.
Unless you have absolutely no alternative skill sets to speak of. Then, well, you’ve gotta start somewhere.
You open your LinkedIn feed to yet another 500-word post about how running a half-marathon holds so many valuable lessons for running a business.
It’s jam-packed with emoji, flowery adjectives, and it just might have been written by a bot, according to Wired.
More than 54% of longer LinkedIn posts published in English are most likely AI-generated, according to AI detection startup Originality AI’s analysis.
Originality scanned ~8.8k public LinkedIn posts 100+ words long and published between Jan. 2018 and Oct. 2024.
The analysis found the amount of AI content spiked 189% at the beginning of 2023 — coinciding with the release of ChatGPT.
While LinkedIn itself doesn’t track the use of AI tools on its site, the company says that it does identify low-quality or duplicate content and stops it from being promoted broadly.
And LinkedIn offers its own in-app AI tool to Premium users that lets them reword their content with the click of a button.
AI gets social
While LinkedIn is the perfect platform for AI’s slightly forced, jargon-filled writing to slip by unseen, AI-generated content is thriving across social media sites.
Mark Zuckerberg said AI-generated and AI-summarized content will become increasingly common across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and that Meta’s AI chatbot is used by 500m+ users every month.
There is, of course, an obvious downside:
The proliferation of AI-generated content inevitably leads to more low-quality slop clogging up our feeds.
Plus, confusing, ridiculous slop could be the best-case scenario — with dangerous misinformation being the worst.
AI-generated images on Facebook garner hundreds of millions of engagements, and an AI-generated image was one of the 20 most-viewed posts on Facebook in Q3 of 2023 with 40m views, according to a report from Stanford’s Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center.
So, as the AI slop keeps getting dished out in increasing quantities, stay cynical while scrolling. Also, we saw shrimp jesus, so you have to, too.
Did you just pause Hulu to watch a show on Apple TV? Yeah… us, too. Tune in to hear how subscription pausing became the new norm.
Want to finally master video?Read up on 16 production tips to up your quality and your views.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Samples of fossilized poop that scientists examined to determine what dinosaurs ate ~230m years ago. It turns out they ate a little bit of everything — animals, insects, and plants. Paleontologist Martin Qvarnström told NPR that’s likely why they came to dominate the planet: As Pangea broke into separate continents, leading to shifts in terrain and climate, dinosaurs’ anything-goes approach to eating allowed them to adapt quickly. So, there’s something you can tell picky eaters at your next dinner party.
AROUND THE WEB
🌳 On this day: In 2006, students kicked off a 649-day sit-in to protect an oak grove at the University of California, Berkeley. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of the university, and the entire grove was demolished in 2008 and the four remaining tree-sitters were arrested.
👀 Marketing Against the Grain: Can AI really scale content creation while maintaining brand consistency?
🍿 That’s interesting: How well did Gladiator II depict what really happened in the Colosseum?
If we someday get to a three-day workweek, we’ll be defined by our hobbies, not our jobs. Instead of being a lawyer who games, you’ll be a gamer who laws.SOURCE
