speculations

https://digiday.com/marketing/warby-parker-joins-brands-that-have-killed-home-try-on-in-favor-of-virtual-tests It was by appointment obviously. Invitation only. It was so exclusive, clients didn’t even post about it. You had to try and figure out if they’d been from their feeds. There were rumours. Discussions about who had not been as much as who had. Her drive stopped outside the… Read the rest

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/13/waymo-finally-has-a-music-experience-worthy-of-its-robotaxi/ The date had gone well. It had been a “naked” date by agreement. No Agents, no liminal conversation prompts. Just two humans talking. He’d rehearsed of course, learning conversation skills, practicing eye contact. It had been hard not having help on call but it had gone well, he thought… Read the rest

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/cmo-cfo-on-ex-unilever-bosses-keith-weed-graeme-pitkethly/1928533 She’s tried everything, even AI: some clever “translation” thing that explained the language and models that each used. It hadn’t gone down well. She’d received messages from both of them complaining about “dumbing down”. She’d even tried merging the roles… the less said about that idea, the better. The… Read the rest

https://www.marketing-interactive.com/uk-watchdog-bans-zara-ads-for-featuring-unhealthily-thin-models The biggest – well actually better connected – agencies could sit down with the watchers. Discuss, negotiate, lobby. They even meet a human sometimes, apparently. The rest of us just have to make the ads, send them over and wait. We have no way of knowing what the algorithm… Read the rest

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/business/alexa-artificial-intelligence-amazon.html They’d been together a long time. Grown up together. He wasn’t one of those people who fall in love with their Agent but he did have a “relationship”. There was the work one, the style they had developed over the years but there was another one, the legacy of… Read the rest

https://www.ft.com/content/94481c96-03f2-420e-a17c-64394804bd04 He was old enough to remember the Bubble. He very nearly got caught up in it, another young thing with a big idea having lunch with VCs. It was everywhere: the hope, the hype, the testosterone and the panic. He remembered his feeds full of snake oil tips merchants… Read the rest

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-gemini-struggles-to-write-code-calls-itself-a-disgrace-to-my-species/ The company had always prided itself on its “wellness” culture. During the humantime, employees had access to support, even therapy and of course when the company became Agent-centric, wellness and support were built into the partnerships. Fleshstaff had someone (the company liked anthropomorphism) to talk to. Similarly Agents had… Read the rest

https://gizmodo.com/the-end-of-bullshit-ai-2000640302 He was doing something he swore he’d never do. He was having a conversation with a machine. Worse he was getting emotional. He was embarrassed. This was just a machine. Some in his company called It an “Agent” but it was a tool and rust was why he was… Read the rest

https://www.theverge.com/news/732182/google-gemini-ai-guided-learning-education They called it Socrates. Their daughter could have asked her Agent who Socrates was and it would have taken her on a journey until she discovered for herself. Her parents could dial up the Agent’s Socratic style; the amount of guidance it gave, the extent to which it asked… Read the rest

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-do-children-hate-music-lessons Fourth period Thursday. The pupils hated it, the teacher probably would have hated it if It had been programmed with emotions. The school had not been able to attract the top tier sponsors so it couldn’t. Some styled, some played up. Most just did what they were told and… Read the rest