Anecdotal accounts of copywriters’ experiences suggest that chatbots have laid waste to human employment there. CC-licensed photo by ProCopywriters on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. NB: it’s the last week of The Overspill this year. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
“I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.” Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry • Blood in the Machine
Brian Merchant:
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And so we end 2025 in AI Killed My Jobs with a look at copywriting, which was among the first jobs singled out by tech firms, the media, and copywriters themselves as particularly vulnerable to job replacement. One of the early replaced-by-AI reports was the sadly memorable story of the copywriter whose senior coworkers started referring to her as “ChatGPT” in work chats before she was laid off without explanation. And YouTube was soon overflowing with influencers and grifters promising viewers thousands of dollars a month with AI copywriting tools.
But there haven’t been many investigations into how all that’s borne out since. How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.
Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.
As for Jacques [head of support operations at a software firm], he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”
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The stories that follow are dark. Copywriting has long been a tedious but well paid job because sensible catchy words were hard to generate. No longer.
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Ukrainians sue US chip firms for powering Russian drones, missiles • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Dozens of Ukrainian civilians filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest US chip firms of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths last year.
Their complaints alleged that for years, Texas Instruments (TI), AMD, and Intel have ignored public reporting, government warnings, and shareholder pressure to do more to track final destinations of chips and shut down shady distribution channels diverting chips to sanctioned actors in Russia and Iran.
Putting profits over human lives, tech firms continued using “high-risk” channels, Ukrainian civilians’ legal team alleged in a press statement, without ever strengthening controls.
All that intermediaries who placed bulk online orders had to do to satisfy chip firms was check a box confirming that the shipment wouldn’t be sent to sanctioned countries, lead attorney Mikal Watts told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday, according to the Kyiv Independent.
“There are export lists,” Watts said. “We know exactly what requires a license and what doesn’t. And companies know who they’re selling to. But instead, they rely on a checkbox that says, ‘I’m not shipping to Putin.’ That’s it. No enforcement. No accountability.”
As chip firms allegedly looked the other way, innocent civilians faced five attacks, detailed in the lawsuits, that used weapons containing their chips.
…Ars could not reach AMD or TI for comment. But TI’s assistant general counsel, Shannon Thompson, testified to Congress last year that the company “strongly opposes the use of our chips in Russian military equipment” and that any such shipments “are illicit and unauthorized,” Bloomberg reported.
An Intel spokesperson provided a lengthy statement to Ars, admitting that the firm cannot always control or trace chips or other products bypassing sanctions.
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Posha review: this robot chef cooks better than me • The Verge
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:
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Meet Posha, my latest foray into the fascinating world of smart kitchen gadgets. Posha is a $1,500 countertop cooking appliance with a $15 monthly subscription that uses AI computer vision, a robotic stirring arm, and automated food and spice dispensers to autonomously cook a meal from start to finish.
It’s an absurd luxury, too dependent on the internet, and feels like a first-gen device in many ways. But it’s also a really good cook, saved me hours of standing over a hot stove, and is a glimpse into the future of home robots in the kitchen.
It took me less than five minutes to load the mac and cheese ingredients into Posha, and the robot handled the rest: sauteing some garlic, pouring in the milk, flinging in the pasta, filling it up with water to cook the pasta, then adding the cheese and stirring it all into a thick, gooey mass.
The result was that, even during my 10-hour workday, I could still offer my daughter a tasty home-cooked meal at 4:30PM, when she got back from school. The alternative in a similar time frame would be a hastily microwaved box of processed mac and cheese. The Posha meal tasted much better.
This is the whole idea behind Posha: to help working families put freshly cooked meals on the table every day without spending a lot of time doing it. As any working parent will tell you, eating well and having enough time to eat well can be a real challenge.
Posha founder Raghav Gupta grew up in India, where he says he saw love expressed through food and witnessed friends and family struggle to choose between careers and providing home-cooked meals to their families. That struggle is global, and entire appliance categories and businesses have been developed to solve it.
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None of this contradicts the idea that Silicon Valley devizes things to replace their mothers. Honestly, for $1,500 plus $120 per year you could go on a cookery course, or perhaps pay someone to make meals. Ten-hour workdays with no space even to cook cheese pasta sound mad, too. (And of course it has AI vision. It’s 2025, nearly 2026!)
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52 things I learned in 2025 • Medium
Tom Whitwell has been at it again:
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3: You can (maybe) avoid paying tax on an unused office block by filling it with plastic tubs containing snails and lettuce. The office becomes, legally, a farm, so (maybe) exempt from tax under UK law. [Jim Waterson]
4: You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]
5: In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd] (I learned about this while prepping for the Dyski Radio Music retreat.)
6: London is safer today, with fewer murders, than at any time since I moved here almost 30 years ago. [Fraser Nelson]
7: A fusion energy start-up has developed a process to turn mercury into gold. Each year, their plant would produce 5 tonnes of gold and one gigawatt of electricity, both worth a similar amount. Unfortunately, the gold will be slightly radioactive, so must be left for 14–18 years before it’s safe to handle. [Tom Wilson]
8: Job apps for nurses can set payment rates by analysing a nurse’s credit card debt to decide how desperate they are for work. [Katie J. Wells & Funda Ustek Spilda]
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And many more. (Definitely read as far as finding out what robot hands must have.)
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They droned back • Digital Digging
Henk van Ess:
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Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast — and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.
Let me walk you through what Michèle Borcherding, Clara Veihelmann, Luca-Marie Hoffmann, Julius Nieweler, Tobias Wellnitz, Sergen Kaya, and Clemens Justus of Axel Springer Academy for Journalism and Technology pulled off.
Just so you know, I’m familiar with them. I did a long OSINT training with them in Berlin. I can tell you: they went far beyond anything I taught them. The physical verification alone—chasing a ship across France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—that’s not something you learn in a classroom.
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No point wasting what is a remarkable story by excerpting it; enjoy it for yourself on the page. (The only part that’s behind a paywall is a presentation showing what they did. But the whole of the work is free to read.)
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It’s official: Substack is enshittified • The Republic of Letters
Autumn Widdoes, calling for writing to be written by actual humans:
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Since joining, I’ve discovered many amazing writers, artists, filmmakers, and thinkers on Substack. The platform has begun to do what it has set out to do. It has reinvigorated literary culture in a way that felt impossible several years prior. It is moving us out of a stuck, fearful era that has made everything into a copy of a copy of a copy. People want to read about, write about, and discuss issues that impact us. And they’ve been doing this here, without the fear of reprisal. Many people are truly excited about the possibilities that Substack has created for those of us who long felt it was impossible to ever find audiences for our work.
This is why writers and artists (and editors) should be concerned, because in many ways writers and artists have traditionally been the change agents of culture. If we’re crowded out on every platform on the Internet by bad writing, or soulless writing that isn’t even created by a human being, we should be deeply concerned about what is happening.
If Substack is to be the home for great culture, it can’t be filled with slop. The only way to prevent this is for Substack to go to great lengths to create guardrails against bad writing, in particular AI-generated writing and art, so as to prevent it from clogging up this platform. This will protect Substack writers and artists from competing with non-human LLMs that can easily generate large sums of soulless work. It will also provide a firm stance on what great culture means as we continue to understand what it means to be human in an increasingly technological age.
Without this guardrail, small accounts like mine will likely never get discovered on this site as it continues to fill up with accounts created to generate marketing funnels, bitcoin tips, celebrity gossip, and fake literature. Creating safeguards will protect original writing and allow it to be what drives this new economic engine of culture.
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You could demand that every page had to be an image of handwritten prose and people would develop a “messily handwritten” font and print their chatbot-generated content using it. There’s no obvious way around this except to keep reminding people to look out for it.
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Dopers are beating the system, says athletics integrity chief • BBC Sport
Mike Henson:
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Cheats are winning the battle against anti-doping authorities in elite sport, according to a top official.
David Howman, who chairs the Athletics Integrity Unit and served as director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) for 13 years, says the anti-doping system has “stalled”, allowing those who take banned substances to prosper.
“Let’s be honest and pragmatic – the system has stalled,” Howman said. “Intentional dopers at elite level are evading detection. We are not effective enough nowadays in catching cheats. Our ineffectiveness in dealing with those who are beating the rules is hurting the anti-doping movement’s credibility.”
Former world 100m silver medallist Marvin Bracy-Williams was banned for more than three and half years last month after admitting doping offences, while fellow American Erriyon Knighton was banned for four years in September after testing positive for steroids. Women’s marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich was banned for three years in October after her sample showed a banned diuretic commonly used as a masking agent.
The unity of world anti-doping effort has been compromised in recent years. Wada and the US anti-doping agency have clashed over the handling of a doping scandal involving 23 Chinese swimmers, funding and the staging of next year’s Enhanced Games, an event which encourages the use of banned substances, in Las Vegas.
The anti-doping authorities in Kenya, whose athletes have been involved in a spate of positive tests, are on a Wada watchlist, while Russia, whose officials were found to be involved in the systematic cheating and swapping of samples at the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi,, external are still judged as “non-compliant” by Wada.
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Doping is biochemical technology – figuring out how to boost athletes’ performance while not being caught by the AIU and similar bodies. The dopers are better at this game; unsurprising, because there’s big money in success for athletes who can set records and win big without getting caught.
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The last useful man • Metropolitan Review
Aled Maclean-Jones:
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In the world of Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, where the [antagonist/bad AI] Entity is all-seeing, things unsearchable and uncheckable like secret clues and symbols become vital. The president convinces an admiral to help her by writing down a date whose significance only the two of them understand. That admiral earns the trust of the USS Ohio’s commander by giving [Tom] Cruise a medal whose meaning is private between them. To fool the Russians, who they know are listening in, Cruise’s team sends coordinates that direct him to the opposite side of the world from where he needs to be: a feint they know only he could decode.
What Cruise and his team carry in their heads and bodies not only saves them but the world. Donloe, the CIA chief exiled to Alaska, knows the submarine’s coordinates because he memorized them a decade ago. Tapeesa, his wife, can deliver the lifesaving decompression tent because she still knows how to navigate by compass and sextant. Grace, Hayley Atwell’s pickpocket-turned-teammate, saves the world through a skill so subtle it can barely be named: the thing that separates a ‘good pickpocket’ from a ‘great one’ — timing.
This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form.
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This is a wonderful analysis of writing and films that embody this crucial difference – knowing what v knowing how. And of course Tom Cruise, who has spent the past 40 years or so embodying knowing how, often while running a top speed or riding a motorbike.
It’s just a pity that Final Reckoning was turgid and overdone because it tried too hard to tie all the previous films together.
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Saloni’s guide to data visualization • Scientific Discovery
Saloni Dattani:
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Until a few years ago, I thought data visualization wasn’t very interesting. At best, it was a nice bonus in my work. I preferred writing because I found it gave me the space to get across the details and clarifications that people would often miss on a flashy chart.
Anyway, most data visualizations I had come across were not very good. A lot of graphs were (and still are) confusing, misleading, or overly simplistic. I’ve seen quite a lot – three dimensional bar charts, double-axis charts with completely different scales for the same metric, unitless charts, pizza slice charts with sizes that corresponded to nothing in the data. Even now I come across charts that are ugly in such novel ways that I wonder how much imagination it must have taken to create them.
But with time, I’ve increasingly understood the importance of good data visualization. A lot of credit goes to my colleagues at Our World in Data for inspiring me and giving me feedback during the four years I worked there. I spent time thinking more deeply about the value of charts, and when they worked better than a written description. In the end I came to the conclusion that there were several situations in which I would prefer a chart.
In this post, I want to give you a sense of why data visualization matters, and walk you through how to make it more effective, accurate, and beautiful.
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Ironically, the failure of many dataviz attempts is that they make things too complex. 3D representations on 2D outputs are a big source of trouble.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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