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✍️ Correction

✍️ Correction

Crown Crew
August 22, 2023

☕ Good Morning!

Dream job alert: Lego wants to pay someone £21,000 a year to play with bricks all day and create amazing structures for them. And that isn’t even getting into the perks… Sounds like everything really is awesome.

Today’s reading time: 4 minutes.

TECH

AI’s new bestseller book

AI’s latest money grab... exploiting tragedy. Last week, Hawaii’s Maui island went up in flames. Hundreds dead, towns razed, lives ruined. A real horror show.

Days later, a book called “Fire and Fury” appeared on Amazon, supposedly documenting the disaster blow-by-blow from Aug 8-11 (even though it was published on Aug 10).

Red flag bonanza. The stated author, Dr. Miles Stones, does not appear to exist. His biography says that “I'd rather not say.”
Fiery Fiction. The book claims to chronicle events 1-3 days after they happened.
Cite your sources. The writing’s full of trivial mistakes and is repetitive af. Experts say it's clearly AI-generated misinfo published quickly to make a buck off tragedy.

Well, that escalated quickly. “Fire and Fury” is a perfect example of AI's effortless propensity for spreading misinformation: the book itself is a totally made up account of a current event, it was generated within just days of said tragedy, and it became evidence for conspiracy theories.

WORLD

Tour de headlines

OOO: If you think your Insta feed is full of everyone’s sand, sun, and fruity cocktail photos now, just wait: Travel is on track to become a $15.5 trillion industry by 2033, the World Travel & Tourism Council estimates. That would represent more than 11.6% of the global economy and a 50% jump from 2019.

NYTvGPT: The New York Times is considering a copyright suit against OpenAI that could be the biggest AI legal battle yet, Snacks reported. As trust in the tech wanes, companies are being more cautious about how they use it.

Re-boundless: China’s reopening — expected to net a huge economic rebound — has gone from meh to worse. Youth unemployment hit a record 21% in June, and US multinationals have reported hits to their China earnings.

ECONOMY

Inflation’s easing off faster than expected

Moodier than a 13-year-old... the economy right now.

Driving the news: The UK just got its updated inflation report card for July, and the results were... interesting. A week ago, the Office for National Statistics said that core inflation had held steady (meh), but was still very high (bad).

More a-peel-ing... Reworked data suggests core inflation (which excludes the volatile food and energy categories, but includes shelter) fell 0.1% which is a good sign for cooling inflation in general.

Sunny side up: Headline inflation also cracked in the month of July.
Upside down: Services inflation (think: rent, hotel costs) remained unchanged from the previous month.

Bottom line... Whether the mellower-than-expected data is (finally) a mark of progress towards the gov’s plan to cut inflation by ~5% this year or it's just gas prices not being as inflated... still TBD.

BY THE NUMBERS

⌚ £1 Billion. Worth of watches reported as stolen or missing in the last 12 months.

🚙 $30 million. Cost of the new Rolls-Royce Droptail. But don’t roll out your chequebooks just yet… only four of these will ever be made.

💼 16%. Increase in pay of executives at Britain’s biggest companies. Median pay for FTSE 100 CEOs increased 16% year on year to £3.9 million.

JUST CLICK IT

Crown recs

Watch: How a hypothetical human head transplant would work.
What is quantum entanglement (and why do scientists think it’s spooky)?
How unpaid internships hurt everyone.
Read: TikTok’s plan to take on Spotify and Apple Music.
You can buy an iconic red UK phone box for just £1.

GAMES

Three headlines and a lie

Three of these headlines are real and one is faker than the new size of Feel Good toilet paper. Can you spot the odd one out?

The owners of a sunflower field in England are pleading with visitors to stop stripping down to take nude photos in public view.
Maryland man buys 15 lottery tickets, wins 15 jackpots.
A Bradford grocery store now has the top podcast on Spotify.
Scientists just discovered a ‘strawberry-like’ antarctic invertebrate with 20 arms.