Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: E-commerce startups are back from the dead

• The Arena: Sports braces for the new referee: AI

• Artificial Intelligence: Meet the Cursor Resistance—the techies who hate AI coding tools

• Plus, our Recommendations: “Our Common Nature,” “Empire of AI” and “Black Rabbit”

A number of existential questions confront our present—ones such as “Can peace finally take hold in the Middle East?” and “Is Stephen Miller really no taller than a garden gnome?” 

Then there’s the quandary that hangs over many of you: Where can AI find lasting demand?

While I dare not offer an opinion to those initial two questions, I’d like to suggest that an answer to the third lies in a newly published paper by a couple fellas up in Cambridge, Mass.: James Riley and Simon Friis, a pair of Harvard Business School researchers. (They’re sociologists, so their work has a little more life to it than a lot of reports on AI.) 

In a nearly thousand-person survey, they asked respondents about a number of AI-related topics, including which professions should adopt artificial intelligence. To be precise, they had respondents score 940 jobs on a “repugnancy score”—asking them to judge whether someone using AI in those jobs was committing a “morally repugnant” act on a scale of 1 to 7. 

Riley and Friis came up with a nifty scatterplot graph showing the results (page 16!), and I think they really show the possible limitations around some hot areas of AI. For instance, we’re more uncomfortable with therapists and some educators using AI than I might’ve thought. (Both professions had high moral repugnancy scores.) 

Another finding: We’re uncomfortable with funeral attendants using AI. I’ll admit that surprised me. Honestly, most folks working at a funeral home tend to possess as much human energy as the Addams family’s butler. Would a sentient bot really be worse?

When I spoke to Friis about his research, I found him somewhat down in the mouth about his research’s ultimate conclusion: Generally, we’re much more willing to let AI replace people than even he might’ve guessed. “I expected more human solidarity,” he said.

An Assassin’s Untimely Demise

Gosh, the French really don’t think very much of us, do they? 

Last year, Ubisoft, the Paris-based videogame company, apparently canceled an installment of its Assassin’s Creed franchise that would’ve featured a Black protagonist and taken place in the post–Civil War south. The reason? They feared a politicized America would hate the game, deeming it “too political in a country too unstable,” a person familiar with the game’s demise told Game File, a Substack founded by Stephen Totilo, a former Axios and Kotaku editor.

Scrapping the game was a remarkably callow move by a company that has enjoyed a long run with the Assassin’s Creed series partly by emphasizing the diverse settings for its stories. So you have to wonder how much the revelation will tarnish the brand. (The revelation around the cancellation has absolutely lit up the gaming blogosphere.) Ultimately, I think Ubisoft missed out on the chance for something like its own “Sinners” moment, the vampire film with a majority Black cast from director Ryan Coogler and actor Michael B. Jordan. The fact that “Sinners” collected almost $400 million at the box office should indicate just how badly Ubisoft misjudged the American entertainment market.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

E-Commerce Startups Are Back From the Dead

For several years, a drop in internet shopping after the pandemic sparked a punishing era for e-commerce as once-promising newcomers like Allbirds and Casper watched their businesses erode. 

More recently, though, that decline has reversed, and we’re back to shopping like mad online—just as much as we were at the height of the pandemic, our Ann Gehan reports in this week’s Big Read. With the resurgence has come a new breed of e-commerce startups eager to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors, like the chase of super-low-cost growth and a tendency to copycat each other’s products. 

“The market just won’t tolerate bullshit anymore,” said Peter Rahal, who co-founded RxBar a decade ago and has returned with one of the e-commerce standouts of this era: David Protein, a maker of jacked-up protein bars. “And you can’t market your way out of it.”

The Arena

Sports Braces for the New Referee: AI

MLB will debut an AI-enabled officiating system next season, just one of many emerging use cases for large language models in the wide world of sports, our Sara Germano reports in The Arena, Weekend’s franchise devoted to the business of sports.

Artificial Intelligence

Rise of the Cursor Resistance: Why Some Techies Hate AI Coding Tools

Few areas within artificial intelligence have attracted more attention than the arrival of coding programs like Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude Code. Plenty of CEOs want to love the tools, hoping they can lower costs and make human coders more efficient. Nontechnical staff like the tools because they allow them to complete some projects without involving coders. 

But as  as many coders don’t love the coding tools and view them as a dangerous addition they want nothing to do with, our Rocket Drew reports. 

Abram Brown is the editor of The Information's Weekend section. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: “Our Common Nature” (WNYC)

Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma has a confession to offer: He’s no outdoorsman. “I’d like to pretend I am,” he says. “I have many fantasies about fly fishing or rock climbing.” Nonetheless, Ma’s podcast, “Our Common Nature,” which he co-hosts with WNYC’s Ana González, is set almost entirely outdoors—part of an effort he made during the pandemic and in its aftermath to better explore life beyond an orchestra pit. It is part musical performance, part travelogue, with journeys to places like Acadia, Maine, and the wilds of Hawaii. The result is a velvet-toned plea to see what’s beyond the everyday, and it’s plainly evident Ma thinks everyone should heed his advice, even those whose quotidian existence is as extraordinary as his.—Abram Brown

Reading: “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao

It’s been several weeks since I finished “Empire of AI,” and I haven’t stopped thinking about it—or about its author, my former Wall Street Journal colleague Karen Hao. Hao was the first journalist to profile OpenAI—back when she was at MIT Technology Review—and she’s never stopped asking the tough questions about the industry-leading startup, ones that often get pushed aside in the commotion of upbeat headlines and exuberant corporate speeches. 

Hao’s book has maintained a steady level of buzz since it came out in May, and while not everyone likes it, few would disagree that it’s thought provoking. It questions how we define AI,  since there’s no scientific consensus on what constitutes intelligence, and it challenges what we think about AI scaling laws, asking whether it might be possible to build better models with fewer resources. More importantly, the book reveals in vivid, painstaking detail the human and environmental costs that the AI arms race among big tech companies has inflicted across the world—from Kenya to Chile to Colombia.—Jing Yang

Watching: “Black Rabbit” (Netflix)

I’m not much of an NBA enthusiast, but even I know betting on the New York Knicks qualifies as a tremendously poor decision. Alas, Vince (Jason Bateman) finds himself wagering again and again on the Madison Square Garden squad, and it has gotten him into real trouble with some goons who intend to make him pay up. (They’re a gruesome bunch—happy to shove their point in someone’s face by taking off a pinkie.) 

Of course, Vince has less than bubkes to his name, so he turns up for help at the sceney downtown Manhattan restaurant he once co-owned with his brother Jake (Jude Law), upsetting his sibling’s plan to stay more firmly on the straight and the narrow. To make good on their many debts—both literal and figurative—they’re forced into some increasingly wild maneuvers. During these schemes, Law and Bateman both exhibit an obvious delight in playing against type as a pair of outer-borough strivers, whose hustles never fully secure them a place among the Pool Room set.—A.B.