Jack Brewster

I’m looking for people tired of the ai slop and brain rot to be the first to try newsreeel.co, a gamified, interactive news app. It makes staying informed fun, easy and engaging. Sign up for the waitlist here: Newsreel.co

There is absolutely zero evidence the woman featured in the resurfaced news clip of suspected gunman Cole Allen is Second Lady Usha Vance. 1) At the time this footage was recorded, a February 2017 ABC7 segment from the "Aging into the Future" senior tech conference in Los Angeles, covered by reporter Lori Corbin, Vance was in Washington, D.C., clerking for the Supreme Court. She had no reason to be at an L.A. tech conference. 2) I ran the face through PimEyes, a reverse face-search tool, and it did not match Usha Vance. 3) The woman in the clip is also visibly not pregnant. In February 2017, Vance would have been several months along with her son Ewan Blaine Vance, who wasn't born until that June. Despite this, posts claiming the clip shows Vance have racked up millions of views, typically in posts claiming the attempted shooting was stage. The woman in the video has not been publicly identified.

New: Em-dashes on top Substack newsletters have surged nearly 6x since before ChatGPT. I analyzed 1,276 essays across 143 of Substack's top-ranked publications, every year from 2021 through April 2026. Read more here: substack.com/home/post/p-19…

@CorbinBolies It looks like they vibe coded it

SCOOP: I got internal photos/videos of McClatchy's Claude-powered "content scaling agent" tool roiling its newsrooms. It's an AI product executives made because "we need more stories and we need more inventory," and journalists "defiant" about using it "will fall behind." 1/6

Mamdani: "We know very well what we oppose. What are we for? That is a question we have to be able to answer. What are we fighting for? ... when you look back at the history books of our party, 100 years ago we had a very clear vision of what we were fighting for. It's sad that for too many Americans, when they want to look for ambition in the Democratic Party, then have to turn to a history book."

SlopFarm, backed by True Ventures, sells a dashboard for managing AI-generated Instagram pages at scale. Their homepage: "Everyone hates AI slop. We monetize it." Slop is a SaaS business now. Full investigation: dub.sh/t8HsSG9

Doublespeed, funded by a16z's Speedrun, runs 1,100 phones in a warehouse. $7,500/mo to "orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts." A hacker breached their backend and exposed 400+ TikTok accounts promoting products without disclosing them as ads.

I spent months investigating a venture-backed industry of fake AI influencers. The supply chain is wild. A thread on "Big Slop"

Move over AI slop. "Big Slop" is here... mediumismessage.substack.com/p/meet-big-slo…

I spent months reporting on the venture-backed industry that has popped up overnight to manufacture fake influencers, automate their posting, and scale them to millions of followers -- all while platforms look the other way.

A Buddhist monk named Yang Mun has 2.5 million Instagram followers posting silent morning meditations. He's made $300K+ since October.

Meanwhile? The AI political disinformation we all feared? Princeton researchers found cheap fakes outpaced AI-generated content 7 to 1 in election misinfo. The threat that actually scaled was commercial. mediumismessage.substack.com/p/meet-big-slo…

Doublespeed, backed by a16z's Speedrun accelerator, runs 1,100 phones in a warehouse to "mimic natural user interaction on physical devices." A hacker breached them and exposed 400+ TikTok accounts promoting products without disclosing ads.

NEW: I've been covering AI and misinformation for years — at Forbes, NewsGuard, and the Wall Street Journal. Two years ago I built my own AI propaganda machine for $105 and wrote about it for the WSJ. I assumed the threat was political. I was wrong. substack.com/home/post/p-19…