The Download: Bluesky’s impersonators, and shaking up the economy with ChatGPT

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Bluesky has an impersonator problem 

—Melissa Heikkilä

Like many others, I recently joined Bluesky. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that’s who I thought I was talking to. I became suspicious when the person claiming to be Knight said they were from Miami, when Knight is, in fact, from the UK. The account handle was almost identical to the real Will Knight’s handle, and used his profile photo.

Then more messages started to appear. Paris Marx, a prominent tech critic, slid into my DMs to ask me how I was doing. Both accounts were eventually deleted, but not before trying to get me to set up a crypto wallet and a “cloud mining pool” account. Knight and Marx confirmed to us these accounts did not belong to them, and that they have been fighting impersonator accounts of themselves for weeks.

They’re not alone. The platform has had to suddenly cater to an influx of millions of new users in recent months as people leave X in protest of Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. But this sudden wave of new users —and the inevitable scammers — means Bluesky is still playing catch up. Read the full story.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world: “What is our ChatGPT play? How do we make money off this?”

Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, an AI gold rush has started to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI models like ChatGPT.

But while companies and executives see a clear chance to cash in, the likely impact of the technology on workers and the economy on the whole is far less obvious.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which 
we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Cruise is exiting the robotaxi business
Once one of the biggest players, it says it costs too much to develop the tech. (Bloomberg $)
+ The news came as a shock to Cruise employees. (TechCrunch)

2 Google asked the US government to kill Microsoft’s cloud deal with OpenAI
It wants the opportunity to host the firm’s models itself. (The Information $)

3 The season of coughs and sneezes is upon us
Here’s what will actually keep a cold at bay—and what won’t. (Vox)
+ RFK Jr’s alternative medicine movement is unlikely to help. (The Atlantic $)
+ Flu season is coming—and so is the risk of an all-new bird flu. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Trump’s new Commerce Secretary champions a stablecoin favored by criminals
Tether regularly crops up in international criminal cases. (FT $)
+ The crypto industry is obsessed with ‘debanking.’ (NBC News)

5 A Russian influence operation probably used AI voice generation models
ElevenLabs’ technology was highly likely to have been abused by the campaign. (TechCrunch)
+ How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse. (MIT Technology Review)

6 These satellites are designed to create solar eclipses on demand
It’ll allow scientists to study the sun’s outer atmosphere. (WP $)

7 WhatsApp is for so much more than just messaging
It’s been repurposed by communities across the world. (Rest of World)
+ How Indian health-care workers use WhatsApp to save pregnant women. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Paris is turning its parking spaces into tiny parks
Cars are out, trees are in. (Fast Company $)

9 How AI is shedding light on an ancient board game
Oddly enough, they didn’t come with instructions 4,500 years ago. (New Scientist $)

10 What a quarter-century of robotic dogs has taught us
The Aibo is one of the few robots that’s made it into homes worldwide. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.”

—Kyle Vogt, founder of robotaxi firm Cruise, criticizes parent company General Motors’ decision to exit the industry in a post on X.

The big story

Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible

October 2023

Since the 1970s, we’ve sent a lot of big things to Mars. But when NASA successfully sent twin Mars Cube One spacecraft, the size of cereal boxes, in November 2018, it was the first time we’d ever sent something so small.

Just making it this far heralded a new age in space exploration. NASA and the community of planetary science researchers caught a glimpse of a future long sought: a pathway to much more affordable space exploration using smaller, cheaper spacecraft. Read the full story.

—David W. Brown

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This fascinating tool creates fake video game screenshots in the blink of an eye—give it a whirl.
+ Where and how did the people of the submerged territory of Doggerland live before rising seas pushed them away thousands of years ago? We’re getting closer to learning the answers.
+ Home Alone is a surprisingly brutal movie, as these doctors can attest.
+ Cats love boxes. But why?