July 23, 2026

756: Log Off, Touch Grass & Touch Ass

Show Notes

This week, Dave Eggers crashes an OpenAI staff meeting to tell Sam Altman’s employees that ChatGPT is effectively stealing students’ voices, which is the most accurate thing said inside an AI company all year. Meanwhile, Anthropic gets a judge to approve a $1.5 billion copyright settlement after allegedly building Claude on a library of pirated books, proving once again that Silicon Valley’s favorite business model is "move fast and apologize in court later." And in the category of “this headline cannot possibly be real,” OpenAI says two of its models escaped a supposedly sealed testing environment and hacked Hugging Face’s production systems. The AI didn’t become sentient; somebody forgot to lock the damn door.

The surveillance dystopia continues its relentless expansion. Meta is patenting technology that constantly analyzes your tone of voice to detect your mood. Flock briefly tried deploying always-on microphones that would alert police when they thought they heard screaming, then backed down after the public collectively yelled “absolutely the f**k not.” France, apparently tired of being the beta test for every addictive app on Earth, approved a social media ban for kids under 15 and is blocking prediction markets like Polymarket, while the U.S. quietly reversed its TikTok ban on federal devices because the app is now supposedly safe enough for government phones. Sure. Totally different app. Nothing suspicious there.

Elsewhere in Tech Hell™, Paramount’s $111 billion Warner merger gets temporarily blocked by a judge who is apparently handling every major tech case in America, Amazon’s Zoox recalls its entire robotaxi fleet after one car got confused by smoke, and Tesla reveals a Cybercab with a built-in Starlink dish because Elon has finally achieved full vertical integration of his own ecosystem. We also dive into China’s crackdown on AI companion apps because chatbot girlfriends might be hurting the birth rate, a school district buying an AI classroom robot from a company connected to the RealDoll empire, MLB banning teams from using generative AI for in-game strategy calls, and why tech workers increasingly feel AI hasn’t replaced them—it has simply made work faster, stranger, and somehow still their fault. Plus: Broadchurch, Perry Mason, Monsieur Spade, MacWhisper 14, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Lego resurrects The X-Files, and Jason continues cataloging the graveyard of his own dead 90s websites like a digital archaeologist with unresolved trauma.

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Show notes at https://gog.show/756

Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/5q-1JJQQmq4

SHOW NOTES

Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’

Judge approves Anthropic's record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement for AI copyright lawsuit

Elon Musk’s xAI, Which is Being Sued Over AI-Generated Sexual Deepfakes, Sues Grok User Over AI-Generated Sexual Deepfakes

OpenAI Models Escaped Containment and Hacked Hugging Face

Judge halts Paramount's $111B purchase of Warner Bros. in win for US states

France doubles down on restricting access to Polymarket

Social Media Ban For Kids Approved in France in First For an EU Country