One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.

The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.

Thousands of miles away in Ranchi, India, Sahil Tigga, a 22-year-old student, regularly earns money by letting Silencio, which crowdsources audio data for AI training, access his phone’s microphone to capture ambient city noise, such as inside a restaurant or traffic at a busy junction. He also uploads recordings of his voice. Sahil travels to capture unique settings, like hotel lobbies not yet documented on Silencio’s map. He earns over $100 a month doing this, enough to cover all his food expenses.

And in Chicago, Ramelio Hill, an 18-year-old welding apprentice, made a couple hundred dollars by selling his private phone chats with friends and family to Neon Mobile, a conversational AI training platform that pays $0.50 per minute. For Hill, the calculation was simple: he figured tech companies already capture so much of his private data, so he might as well get a cut of the profit.

These gig AI trainers – who upload everything from scenes around them to photos, videos and audio of themselves – are at the frontlines of a new global data gold rush. As Silicon Valley’s hunger for high-quality, human-grade data outpaces what can be scraped from the open internet, a thriving industry of data marketplaces has emerged to bridge the gap. From Cape Town to Chicago, thousands of people are now micro-licensing their biometric identities and intimate data to train the next generation of AI.

This ends well.

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

“I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota’s proposed age-verification bill, simply won’t “protect children.” It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users’ identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we’ve discussed before, the bill’s definition of speech that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors” is notoriously broad—broad enough to sweep in lawful, non-pornographic speech about sexual orientation, sexual health, and gender identity.

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law.

But despite years’ worth of evidence to back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countless media outlets and religious advocacy groups for her statements. Rep. Finke’s testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people’s best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

Shy Girl, a horror novel by Mia Ballard, was one of those buzzy books that leapt from self-published prominence into full-on trade publication. Until yesterday, that is, when publisher Hachette pulled the book from the UK market and canceled plans to bring it to the US.

The move came after a New York Times investigation suggested that AI had been used in significant parts of the work.

Shy Girl was self-published in 2025 and quickly found an audience on social media. The novel follows a depressed, OCD woman named Gia who, down on her luck, encounters a “sugar daddy” who pays off her debts. All she has to do? Live as his literal pet. Eventually, of course, living like an animal makes her into an animal, and things apparently get nasty.

Creepy. And the prose? “I’m obsessed with the way Mia Ballard writes,” said one reviewer on Goodreads.

Not everyone thought the book was good, though, or even well-written. Another reviewer on the site called the book “absolute f—ing garbage. overwritten, repetitive, poorly executed, atrocious formatting. nothing to do with actual feminine rage and revenge.”

Just another domino.

This is admittedly somewhat redundant to the earlier post about the taskbar, but there's enough additional information that I find it worth posting.

If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?

That’s the conundrum facing the Windows team at Microsoft right now. Windows VP Pavan Davuluri has gone on the record several times since the start of the year to insist that Microsoft is committed to Windows 11’s quality, most recently in a post today titled “our commitment to Windows quality.” Windows 11 is an operating system that many people use but that few enthusiasts seem to love, either because of recent high-profile bugs or the steadily increasing flow of annoying add-ons, notifications, “helpful” “reminders,” and ads for other Microsoft products and services that coat most of the operating system’s virtual surfaces.

“Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows,” Davuluri wrote. “And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”

Today’s post at least shows Microsoft attempting to put its money where its mouth is, as it included a short list of specific changes the company will begin rolling out to Windows Insider Program testers between now and the end of April.

The publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “wrongly put words into people’s mouths”.

That is an interesting portfolio.

Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he “fell into the trap of hallucinations” – the term for AI-generated errors – when using the technology.

Vandermeersch, a fellow of “journalism and society” at the European publishing group, has been suspended from his role.

The experienced journalist said he had summarised reports using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s NotebookLM, and not checked whether the quotes from those summaries were accurate. He subsequently published them in his Substack newsletter.

The errors were highlighted by an investigation by one of Mediahuis’s own titles, NRC, where Vandermeersch had been editor-in-chief in the 2010s. NRC alleged Vandermeersch had published “dozens” of quotes that were false and that seven quoted individuals in his posts said they had not made the statements attributed to them.

Again, this is a cockroach situation; there are many more cases of such things across industries that never get caught and don't make the news.

In retaliation for the ongoing U.S.–Israeli war, Iran responded with a novel form of counterattack. For the first time in military history, private sector data centers came under deliberate attack.

In an era when companies known for e-commerce, social networks, and search engines have also become close collaborators with militaries, is bombing their servers fair game?

Three days after the U.S. and Israel began their joint bombardment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched kamikaze drone strikes against Amazon-owned data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that provide an array of cloud computing services to customers throughout the Middle East. The impacts and subsequent fires “caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” according to Amazon, resulting in service outages across the region.

The motive behind the attack, according to Iranian state television, was not to block people from ordering groceries or posting to social media, but rather to highlight “the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.

"My friend just sent me this video, told me she’d found me in it,” read the text. “As I was looking for myself, I noticed you’re in it too. I didn’t know I was being filmed, guess you don’t either, just wanted to let you know …”

When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn’t heard from in years. “I was panicking,” she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out.

“You don’t know what you might have been caught doing,” she says. “What if they’ve got a horrible video of me?” She saw herself a few minutes in, with a friend she had been with that night as they visited the city’s bars. Clearly oblivious to the camera filming her, she stands on a pavement outside a doorway on her phone – calling a taxi, she recalls – her hand on the hip of her khaki miniskirt. Then the film-maker zooms in on her face and lingers there before recording her reaching across to wipe something from her friend’s cheek.