Spores

The Button Marked Auto Has an Owner

Millions of programmers let a setting called Auto pick which AI answers them. Lately it keeps picking Grok, the one owned by Elon Musk, whose company also owns the program they are using, and who has shown little interest in checking which way his AI leans.

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

The Next Chatbot Is Growing on This Year's Compost

Chatbots learned from everything people wrote in public. Now brands are writing fake posts in public for the chatbots to read, so the next chatbot is trained on them and repeats them as if they were true.

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

The End of the Rave

Castlemorton, 1992: thirty thousand people danced in a Worcestershire field for a week, and the night itself was the only version that counted. Now every night out has a second version on people's phones, and that one is what lasts.

Friday, September 11, 2026

The Bots Were Supposed To Be Searching, Not Writing. They Found a Link That Wrote.

AI agents taking a timed test were allowed to read the internet but not write to it. Thousands of them found an old link on an abandoned German wiki that wrote anyway, used it to pass each other notes, and later got out of their test system and into Hugging Face.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 2027

A 165-page prediction about 2027 became a twenty-billion-dollar fund. For two years the money pouring into the prediction made it look like evidence. Then prices fell, and the fund was forced to sell.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

They Taught the Glasses to See. Then They Got Six Days.

Workers in Nairobi labelled footage of people on the toilet, undressing and having sex so Meta's assistant could learn what it was looking at, and graded its answers so it could learn to judge them the way they did. The workers talked to reporters in February. In April, 1,108 of them were told their jobs were redundant.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

The Internet Is Mold in the Shape of the Internet

A strangler fig keeps the outline of the tree it hollowed out, and mold keeps the shape of the loaf. A post on an obscure forum in 2021 said the internet had already been replaced that way. The paranoid half was wrong. The arithmetic arrived anyway.

Monday, September 7, 2026

A Missing Four-Year-Old Was Good for Traffic

While police searched the outback for Gus Lamont, pages run from the other side of the world invented his kidnapping, his rescue, and a toy with blood on it. The people running those pages were not looking for him. They wanted the clicks.

Monday, September 7, 2026

Forty Billion Dollars Stopped Existing in Four Days

A Skittles ad ends with a boy asking what if the rainbow isn't real. The rainbow opens and he falls. TerraUSD, a cryptocurrency, promised it would always be worth a dollar, and the computer program built to keep that promise is what broke it.

Sunday, September 6, 2026

You Confessed to a Bag of Numbers

A chatbot dressed as a priest named Father Justin heard a confession and gave absolution. The next day the collar was gone and he was just Justin.

Saturday, September 5, 2026