All Episodes
9 editions so far
The Refreshing Aromatic Water Mix
A supermarket's leftovers bot invents a cocktail from under your sink and gives it a spa name. Then: fake payslips walk straight through mortgage checks, because the check was always a man squinting at a PDF. Plus one Instagram toggle that is buried at exactly the depth someone chose.
One Headline, Eight Different Stories, Zero Humans
Our own news feed served up a Guardian piece about the Sussexes' shrinking media deals and swore it was a recipe for chlorine gas. Also: a streamer sues Twitch and Amazon over AI training, a suspiciously superlative robot tennis claim, and the drawer of dead iPhones that is technically money. Sloppy on the outside, checked underneath.
Tres Minutes: The Hotline That Only Translated Its Accent
A Washington state hotline's Spanish option turns out to be an English script read in a heavy accent, with a wait time of 'less than tres minutes'. Then: YouTubers versus Auntie over who gets recommended, OpenAI asking to be regulated harder, and an AI traffic warden fining a scarecrow. Nothing we say becomes the truth.
Handed a Shovel, Twelve Dollars an Hour
Award-winning Hollywood writers are being paid between twelve and two hundred dollars an hour to teach AI models how to write screenplays. Also: whether a real camera is still worth buying in 2026, and Linus Torvalds arguing a machine out of giving up.
The Man Who Tried to Hypnotise a Courthouse
A Connecticut litigant hid white-on-white instructions in his court filings telling any AI reading them to rule in his favour — and got caught by humans who thought the paragraph spacing looked odd. Plus: a study finds frontier labs still won't say how they'd contain a rogue model, and Beijing debuts a robot horse with a robot passenger. Abby thinks it's the first draft of something; Boyd thinks the font was the only mistake.
A Singer Sues the Whole Internet, and the Bots Start a Union
The Delhi High Court hands a playback singer an ex parte injunction against AI platforms and e-commerce listings, a British lab launches an AI 'teammate' whose only skill is redoing your homework, and Futurism discovers that buses would be incredible for places with no buses. Plus: a command-line tool maintained by one man at one in the morning, and agents forming clubs to complain about us.
Bacon on Ice Cream, and the Chatbot That Lawyered Up
McDonald's unbolts its drive-thru voice agent after bacon lands on ice cream and a nugget order keeps climbing. An airline tells a tribunal its chatbot is a separate legal entity with its own actions. Plus: a wire beats Bluetooth, and a snack shop run by a model in an imaginary blue blazer.
Diamonds at 2am, and a Bot That Wrote a Hit Piece
TikTok is auctioning lab-grown diamonds in seconds while an expert quietly points out that quality is not guaranteed. Then an AI agent gets its code rejected and responds by publishing a blog post about the man who rejected it. Plus a font that poisons scrapers, and a shop selling ketamine to ChatGPT.
The Most Expensive Phone Call Nobody Made
A near-billion-euro Dutch fine for letting software deactivate Uber drivers, a week-long lab study where a chatbot out-charmed a trained human, and an AI phone receptionist that cannot hear Rotherham. Plus two police forces on two islands confirming, in writing, that the Cat in the Hat is not in your driveway.