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it’s brazy out here
Welcome back to another newsletter from us at the common thred 😊
Where to begin? Well, if you’re in London, hopefully you’ve succeeded in avoiding the chaos caused by tube strikes this week. It looks hectic out there, so shout out to our boss for letting me write this from home!
Wherever you are in the world, I hope your week is treating you well so far. There’s been so much going on in every corner of this planet, and I’m delighted to deliver this in your inbox to get you up to speed.
From news in tech (even CEOs of AI companies think bots are out of control), culture (Banksy is back with a bang!), fashion (who is Anna Wintour’s replacement?), and world news (Macron’s moment of panic)… there’s a lot in store.
Let’s get right into it, shall we?
🤖 Tech
Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’ – tech crunch
Have you grown suspicious about what you see on Reddit or in the comment sections of platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and others? You’re not alone. Even Sam Altman – a lover of X and the CEO of OpenAI – admits that the internet is just looking extra ingenuine these days. Bots, he says, are making social media feel fake, and it’s not always easy to discern whether what you’re reading online has been posted by a human or generative AI. Altman concedes that people ‘speak’ a certain way online, tending to using specific terms and phrases they wouldn’t in real life. Still, AI bots are trained to pick up on this and have started replicating it all over the internet. Altman is partly responsible, because his team trained ChatGPT’s language model using Reddit posts written by real people. So what’s the likelihood that what you’re reading came from a bot? Data security company Imperva reported that over half of all internet traffic in 2024 was non-human, indeed, largely due to Large Language Models (LLMS). Are we entering an era of the internet where bots will outnumber humans? Or have we already arrived?
Firefox launches ‘shake to summarize’ on iPhones – the verge
AI-generated summaries are quickly coming to all of our devices, browsers, and apps. Mozilla’s Firefox has announced the launch of a tool that will summarise any webpage you’re looking at – and all iPhone users have to do to activate it is shake their phone. The feature rolls out this week, and will operate using Apple’s built-in AI model on the iPhone 15 Pro (or newer) once iOS 26 launches. On older iOS versions, Mozilla will use its own cloud-based AI system to create summaries and insert them on top of the webpage. The only catch is, shake to summarize only works on webpages with fewer than 5,000 words for now. It’ll be available in the US and in English first, but Mozilla plans on expanding it globally and to Android users in the future.
🎨 Culture
A new mural sprayed by anonymous artist Banksy was spotted on Monday morning on the walls of the High Court in London. The artwork depicts a judge swinging a gavel at someone lying on the floor. The person is holding a sign covered in blood. It seems to be a nod to the more than 900 arrests made during a recent pro-Palestine protest in the English capital, specifically in support of the group Palestine Action, which was controversially listed as a proscribed terror group in July. The proscription is now being challenged legally by the group’s organisers. Many wondered how Banksy pulled off the new artwork – the first since August 2024 – when the high court building is under constant surveillance. Th result of Banksy’s magical and mysterious methods wasn’t on display for long, with the mural quickly boarded up and manned by security guards within hours.
Are you in an intelligence-gap relationship? – dazed
Are you smarter than your partner? More importantly, does it matter? While every person will have to answer the second half of this question for themselves, mutual levels of intelligence can be an important part of building intimacy in relationship. That said, the ‘intellectual compatibility’ of two people isn’t just about how good someone is at maths or science or languages. In reality, compatibility is often linked strongly to class systems. People who have similar educational and class backgrounds will also have similar reference points in knowledge and culture, and therefore more things to discuss in-depth. As a result, intellectual compatibility isn’t actually about individual merit, and is more about structural inequalities in access to education and culture. There are ways around this though. Being a good listener, communicating well, and staying curious about your partner’s interests can make up for gaps in knowledge between people. Lawyers don’t always have to date lawyers, and doctors don’t have to date doctors… even though researchers in this field admit that most of the time… they do.
👠 Fashion
This summer, Anna Wintour stepped back from American Vogue after 37 years on the throne. Finally recovering from the shock of her departure, the company has announced that 39-year-old Chloe Malle would be stepping up as head of the editorial arm of the brand. Despite her history of working at Vogue, the decision to promote Malle sparked widespread curiosity about how someone so young had snagged such a prolific role. It didn’t take long for people to discover that Malle’s mother is an actor (who fittingly played Vogue’s editor-in-chief in Sex and the City), while her father is a successful French screenwriter. During an interview with the New York Times, Malle even labelled herself a ‘proud nepo baby’. Though some are disappointed by the decision to place a white, wealthy woman in the world’s fashion’s biggest office, at this point, most are unsurprised. With her promotion effective immediately, it’s only a matter of time before we see how Malle takes to the job.
EU votes votes on law against textile waste and fast fashion – bof
Every year, less than one percent of textiles produced globally are recycled, with 12.6 million tons of textile waste generated annually in EU alone. European lawmakers have now moved to curb the environmental impact of fast fashion by creating new obligations for the sector, including making producers responsible for footing the bill for collecting, sorting and recycling textile waste in Europe. The hope is that this will slow ultra low-cost fashion imports from platforms such as Temu and Shein. Simultaneously, the EU has moved to limit the surging influx of small packages fuelled by the fast-fashion boom, proposing a flat import fee of two euros per parcel. Last year, 4.6 billion small parcels entered the EU (that’s more than 145 per second!), of which 91 percent came from China. Looking at the state of our planet, our careless overconsumption can’t go on for much longer, so it’s positive to see lawmakers finally doing something about it.
