Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The AI cold war heats up
  

• The best wedding planners for a tech mogul blowout
  

• Plus: Netflix’s “Jaws”; Paul Giamatti’s peculiar podcast; and how Toyota caused toilet paper shortages.

Lately, misinformation researchers have expended a considerable amount of energy sounding the alarm about fake online content manipulated by artificial intelligence. They worry that as AI proliferates, more people with nefarious intentions will produce fake content so sophisticated that we won’t be able to differentiate it from the real stuff.   

This issue dominates the current conversation around misinformation to the point where you might think we’ve successfully solved all the issues we had with the older, less sophisticated forms of misinformation that don’t rely on AI. And from time to time, we see glimmers of hope that we have indeed wised up and gained some valuable immunity to misinformation. One example: the recent elections in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi attracted an underwhelming number of votes despite an onslaught of pro-Modi misinformation. 

And then there are moments like the one involving a fake cannibal that make me realize futuristic fears of AI are the least of our worries: We’re still falling for the dumbest fake news possible. Of course, I’m talking about the collective online freakout over a story told by dim-witted actor Glen Powell on a fitness podcast: According to Powell, a friend of his sister went on a date with a man who rubbed lotion on her that began breaking down her skin as if he meant to soften her up to eat—all right, let’s stop there. You get the idea. 

Enough people believed Powell’s story was true that the actor then had to publicly admit someone had fooled him into believing the tale. The joke’s on us, though, and it underscores just how perilous our relationship with misinformation remains. 

Going forward, I’d like to suggest we apply what I’ll call the Powell Test to mostly everything on the internet—whether we suspect it’s possibly manipulated by AI or not. We should stop and ask ourselves: Is this something that beggars belief—something we could imagine hearing a dim-witted actor recount on a podcast? If so, do a touchhhh more research and think a moment more before sharing it. I promise you won’t even need an expensive agent, manager and publicist to put the Powell Test into action.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, fears this column may qualify him as a hit man. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

How the World Plans to Stop American AI Domination

“Of course, we’re very worried that the U.S. is going to run away with it again,” lamented Hermann Hauser, the Austrian co-founder of U.K. semiconductor company Arm. 

You can guess what Hauser is talking about. He made the comment to our Julia Black, whose globetrotting reporting brings us this week’s Big Read on the efforts across the planet to develop artificial intelligence to rival America’s and China’s. Companies in countries including Britain, France, Japan and India hope not to repeat the same mistakes as their predecessors—allowing U.S. and Chinese businesses to make off with all the riches, just as they have done in every technological era since the PC became a common household appliance.

Those worries have intensified in the run-up to November’s presidential election. “Especially if Trump becomes president again, he could say, ‘You’ve got to do whatever we tell you in order to have access to our AI models.’ That would not be a good situation to be in,” Hauser said.

The Top 5

The Best Wedding Planners for a Tech Mogul Blowout

High-end wedding planner Ashley Smith enjoys it when a prospective tech founder or venture capitalist client reaches out: She knows they’re going to have standards—demands, you might say—and that’s a pleasant challenge after 15 years in the business. “Silicon Valley–type clients have seen it all. They go to events often, they travel often, and they have access to social clubs and high-priority access memberships that change their perspective on weddings, travel, fashion and lifestyle decisions,” Smith said. 

Our Julia does double duty this Weekend. Showing off her reporting versatility, she has compiled this roll of the finest masters of matrimony out there. They know how to make a wedding happen at 1,900 feet above sea level—helicopters, a cable car—and source a menu from a favorite brand, like, say, Petrossian caviar.

Listening: Paul Giamatti’s Paranormal Party

“How did we get from facial hair to the existential dread of the desert?” actor Paul Giamatti asked philosopher professor Stephen Asma in a recent and particularly discursive episode of their amusingly strange podcast, “Chinwag.” (They call their listeners Wagoners, in case you were wondering.) The show delights in the weird: shipwrecks, spirit trumpets, “Doctor Who”–based conspiracy theories, giant octopuses. At some point, you’ll realize it really wasn’t much of a stretch for Giamatti to play a strange and misfit professor in last year’s “The Holdovers.” 

With Giamatti as a co-host, “Chinwag” brings on plenty of famous guests. They too delight in the weird. Jesse Eisenberg recently made an appearance partly to shill for his new film “Sasquatch Sunset,” a silent film about a Bigfoot family. Elizabeth Banks has joined Giamatti and Asma, too, discussing life in Hollywood and the big fear dominating there these days: AI. Banks is refusing to take the worry too seriously—not until AI can reliably generate something like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which critics lauded for its peculiar absurdist humor. As Banks put it: “Is AI really going to come up with a dildo fight?”

Reading: Demand and Supply

Shortly after college, Hagan Walker spurned an engineering offer from Tesla and chose instead to head out on his own to establish a toy startup, Glo, in his native Mississippi (of all places!). A couple years passed, and just as Walker finally seemed to be getting someplace by winning a big “Sesame Street” deal for light-up Elmos, the pandemic struck—stranding the Elmos thousands of miles away in Ningbo, China, the world’s third-largest container port.

Walker had gotten caught up in what Peter Goodman, a veteran New York Times economics reporter, calls The Great Supply Chain Disruption. And Goodman makes Walker a central character in his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” using the young entrepreneur’s Elmo dilemma to illustrate the complexities—and inefficiencies—of how goods move across the planet. Goodman has a strong command of his book’s subject matter and a keen interest in its history. He traces the modern supply chain back to Henry Ford and to Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno—who developed the concept of “lean manufacturing” with its emphasis on limited warehouse stockpiles—and documents how the globe’s supply lines boomed in the Clinton era and after, becoming ever more interwoven.

Such increased globalization, Goodman suggests, forced us to accept a trade-off: “In exchange for our tacit assent in the often-unsavory terms of global capitalism, we gained convenience and reliability to a degree that was unimaginable mere decades ago.” Then the world’s flow of goods came to a crashing halt in 2020, leaving Walker worried about his ability to get his Elmos under Christmas trees. The crisis presented not just “a curious piece of recent history,” Goodman argues, “but a preview of the dysfunction that surely lies ahead if we fail to get the machine in order.”

Watching: Giant Shark, Deux-Deux, Deux-Deux, Deux-Deux 

It doesn’t take a film scholar to know that much of what streams on Netflix is derivative of whatever attracted a decent audience last year. (Hence we get the never-ending versions of European police procedurals set in the woods and featuring creepy murders.) But “Under Paris” takes that concept to a new level—very obviously planting the 1975 classic “Jaws” in the titular city’s catacombs. If that sounds absurd, it is, but it is so absurd as to be entertaining. 

Particularly gratifying is seeing the young environmentalist, who tries to “save” the killer giant shark—thereby putting all of Paris at risk—and ends up as its lunch. There are also the obligatory city officials, just as in “Jaws,” who are more concerned with not disrupting a coming tourist event than with keeping people safe. “Under Paris” isn’t a deep film, despite its name, but it is a lot of fun.—Martin Peers

Final Thought

Guys, as we’ve been telling you, the hoodie era is over.