Short posts
Some personal news: I’m now a visual reporter covering AI for the Washington Post’s excellent tech team.
I’m a hacker/journalist with a comp sci background. Expect analysis, explainers and experiments on how AI really works and what it means for us.
RSS heads can find me here kschaul.com/index.xml
Tech giants keep touting a system they built to label AI-generated content. But it only works if everyone uses it.
So I checked. They’re not using it.
I generated a video with OpenAI’s Sora and confirmed it had the Content Credentials metadata, which marks it as AI-generated. I posted it across social media. Every site stripped the metadata off my video. Only YouTube displayed any indication that it was synthetic (hidden behind a menu).
I also tested generating Sora clips using the API and could not believe the outputs have no visible watermark or Content Credentials metadata. I still don’t know if that’s on purpose or an oversight because they don’t answer my emails.
Anyway, many more details in the article (and so much more to say than can fit in one article)
Just tried out Atlas (OpenAI’s new browser). Asked it to find me some cheap ram.
3 mins later, it told me Microcenter’s best price was $299. I checked manually (took 10s) and found one at $183. None are $299.
🥸
(Video sped up 5x)
My lukewarm take is that this might work sometimes for some tasks. But woof are the privacy and security implications bad. The risk/reward is hopelessly unbalanced.
Trump has posted at least 62 AI-generated images or videos on his socials, which NYT has rounded up here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/21/business/media/trump-ai-truth-social-no-kings.html
New from me: Last year, the best open-weight AI models were made in the U.S. Now, they are all made in China.
More data and what it means -> 🎁 wapo.st/4nPUBud
My colleagues obtained recordings of a private lecture series by tech investor Peter Thiel where he:
- calls AI critics are “the Antichrist”
- said wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy” (he’s worth $27 billion)
- pitches a religious vision of Silicon Valley
Just saw the end of the Phillies-Dodgers, absolutely brutal. Bartman has nothing on that.
We’re about to get flooded with deepfakes.
Here’s an AI-generated clip of me “asking” Sam Altman what they train their systems on (made in 10 seconds with Sora 2):
Here are a couple real answers, if you’re still into that whole truth thing:
Just ran some evals on Claude Sonnet 4.5. It’s better than 4 on some but worse on a lot. LLM progress is so weird. You really gotta test this stuff on what you care about.
Worth a read: OpenAI released an eval for real work tasks across a bunch of industries. They didn’t release the individual results (lame), but you can replicate them from the prompts and files.
A usable nugget: If you’re outputting pdfs, xlsx or pptx, use Claude.
https://openai.com/index/gdpval/
