Slow Takes: One week in AI cover art

Slow Takes: One week in AI

Slow Takes: One week in AI

By: Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr
Listen for free

Slow Takes is the weekly Slow AI conversation. Every Monday, Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr talk through the week in AI, slowly and without the hype.

theslowai.substack.comSam Illingworth
Episodes
  • Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel

    Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel
    Jun 29 2026
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.For the first time, the government told an AI company to hold a model backThe US government has asked OpenAI to stagger the release of its next model, GPT-5.6, letting only a short list of trusted partners in first and approving access customer by customer. The request came from two federal agencies worried the model could be misused before it is properly security-tested. It is the first time Washington has preemptively told an American AI firm to restrict a launch, and it lands two weeks after Anthropic pulled Fable 5 under separate pressure. On the episode, Leor put the sharper point: public model launches may now be over, and a model the government waves through untested quietly signals it was not powerful enough to fear. Who gets to use these models is becoming a decision made over our heads.Meta paused a tool that was logging its own staff to train its AIMeta has paused the Model Capability Initiative, a programme that tracked employees’ keystrokes, mouse clicks and screen content to gather training data for its AI. More than 1,600 workers signed a petition against it, and the pause only came after Reuters and Wired reported that the collected data, including private conversations and full transcripts, had been left open to anyone inside the company. Zuckerberg told staff that AI learns from watching really smart people do things. The real truth is that these systems are built on human work that is rarely asked for and rarely paid.America’s second-largest school district lost its chief over a failed AI chatbotAlberto Carvalho, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, resigned after months on paid leave during a federal investigation. Part of it concerns ‘Ed’, an AI chatbot the district bought to support students and parents. LAUSD paid the developer, AllHere, $3m towards a $6m contract, despite the company having reportedly booked only around $11,000 in revenue, before it furloughed most of its staff and its founder was later charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and identity theft. When the rush to adopt AI outruns the dull work of due diligence, the children are the ones left relying on it.Nearly 400 local newspapers sued OpenAI and MicrosoftA coalition of almost 400 community and regional papers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in New York, alleging the companies scraped their articles, bypassed paywalls and reproduced near-verbatim excerpts in ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment. These are the small, already-gutted papers that cover town councils and local courts, a world away from the national giants of The New York Times case. The training data has to come from somewhere, and here is who paid for it: local reporters who were never asked.The good one: AI read a scroll that Vesuvius sealed two thousand years agoFor the first time, researchers have read a rolled Herculaneum scroll end to end without ever opening it. Charred and sealed when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it was scanned with high-resolution X-rays and read by machine-learning models trained to find ink on burnt papyrus, then checked column by column by human papyrologists. The text is a treatise on Stoic ethics, and one recovered line reads:“Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them.”This is the version that works, because the AI found the ink and people read the meaning.The first four stories are what happens when control over these tools slips to people who never asked us. The last one shows what changes when human experts keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is steering the machine before you trust where it takes you.Go slow. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    40 mins
  • Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?

    Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?
    Jun 22 2026
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.One in ten people now get their news from a chatbot they do not trustThe Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, a survey of around 100,000 people across 48 markets, found that one in ten now use an AI chatbot to get news each week, up from 7% a year ago and roughly three times higher among the under-25s. Only about one in five trust AI to get the news right. We are reaching for the tool faster than we believe in it.ChatGPT’s safety filters failed and it produced violent images nobody asked forA heads-up that this one is grim. The AI security firm Mindgard showed that a harmless viral ‘restore this photo’ prompt, tweaked slightly, pushes ChatGPT’s image generator into violent and sexualised content the user never requested. The filter reads the words you type; the picture the model can draw goes unchecked. OpenAI said it was fixed in early June, then Mindgard broke it again by changing a single word in the prompt.SpaceX bought Cursor for $60bn with stock minted days earlierDays after raising $85bn in the largest IPO in history, SpaceX agreed to buy the AI coding firm Cursor for $60bn, all in freshly minted stock. Cursor’s revenue has run from around $100m to $2bn inside a year, though as a private company the real figure cannot be pinned to within a billion. The likely play is to funnel Cursor’s users toward Musk’s own model, Grok.The first rung of the jobs ladder now demands a veteran’s judgementPwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, found AI-exposed entry-level roles increasingly ask for senior skills like judgement and leadership, while the wage premium for AI skills has reached 62%. Worth remembering that PwC sells the very upskilling its report recommends. If the first job already needs ten years of judgement, where is anyone meant to build it?The good one: botanists are using AI to race extinctionKew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, the work of more than 400 scientists across 40 countries, used AI to scan all 7.4 million of its digitised specimens, sometimes identifying species at risk better than specialists could. It found flowering times have shifted by about two and a half days a decade over the last century, and that two in five of the 70,000 species assessed are now threatened with extinction. The scientists are honest about the limits too: the model only knows what has been collected, and the least studied regions are often the most biodiverse. This is the version that works, because people check it.The first four are what happens when we trust the tool faster than anyone checks it. The last one shows what changes when people keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is checking the machine before you believe it.Go slow.Slow AI is where we build the judgement to know when to use our AI tools and when to leave them alone. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    44 mins
  • Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?

    Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?
    Jun 15 2026
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Anthropic released Fable 5 free for twelve days, then the US government pulled it offlineOn 9 June Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, its most capable public model, free on Pro and Max plans, alongside a gated sibling called Mythos 5. Three days later it was gone. Citing national security, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed an export-control directive ordering that both models be denied to any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic’s own overseas staff. Rather than filter by nationality, Anthropic took both offline for everyone. The stated trigger was a narrow jailbreak that let Fable 5 read source code and hunt for vulnerabilities. And it was the second time in a week the model’s fate was decided over users’ heads: days earlier, researchers found a line in its 319-page system card showing Anthropic had quietly weakened Fable 5 for some users without telling them, a choice it walked back after an outcry. Anthropic is complying while disagreeing, with no timeline to restore access. Opus, Sonnet and Haiku stay up.This is the week’s thread in its purest form: who gets to ask, and who decides. First Anthropic quietly chose to weaken its own model for some users without telling them. Then the government decided, in a single afternoon, that everyone on Pro and Max could not use a model they were already building on, over one potential jailbreak. The free-for-twelve-days launch became a three-day launch. Notice how little say any user had in either decision, and how fast a tool you lean on can be switched off above your head. Treat a free frontier model as borrowed, and build nothing you could not do without.On the live, the contradiction did the work. Anthropic’s launch article said Fable 5 beat GPT-5.5 on every benchmark. Its suspension article, days later, explained the danger away:“We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.”Both cannot be true. Either Fable was the leap they sold, or it was ordinary enough that the same jailbreak still runs on a rival left online. The government’s side carries the same doublethink: the Trump administration killed an AI safety-review structure a few hours before it was signed, then reached for that exact playbook to pull one company’s model. Reportedly it was Amazon, an Anthropic investor, that flagged the jailbreak in the first place. Read the two Anthropic articles back to back and decide which one you believe.Police in England and Wales told to stop using AI in court statementsPolice forces in England and Wales have been told to halt the use of AI in preparing court statements until proper safeguards are in place, after inaccurate outputs began contaminating legal proceedings. Alex Murray, head of the new Police.AI centre, said anything used in the justice system must reach a standard of accuracy that is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. In one case West Midlands Police used Microsoft Copilot output that invented a past incident involving Maccabi Tel Aviv, in a dossier supporting a football banning order. The police watchdog says AI-drafted submissions are behind a 24% rise in complaint reviews, some citing laws that do not exist.AI was switched on inside the justice system before anyone confirmed it could tell a real law from an invented one. The harm is concrete: fabricated detail feeding decisions that can take away someone’s liberty. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ is exactly the bar a system that guesses cannot clear, and the job of catching its mistakes lands on the people least able to. Good that someone stepped in. The worry is how far it had already spread.The rule was already there. On the live, Leor’s read was that this needed no new policy, only the one that exists to be followed: machine output checked by a human before it goes anywhere near a legal review. An unnamed Derbyshire officer is now under criminal investigation for allegedly fabricating evidence this way. The knock-on is its own problem. Once everyone knows AI can invent a witness statement, a guilty party can wave a genuine one away as a fake.A Florida man was wrongly arrested on a face-match 300 miles awayRobert Dillon, 52, from Fort Myers, was arrested at home and prosecuted for trying to lure a child at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, more than 300 miles away, a town he says he had never visited. A facial recognition system run by the Pinellas County Sheriff returned a 93% match. According to the lawsuit, officers ...
    Show More Show Less
    40 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet