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Brands are increasingly turning to AI-generated influencers to sell products on social media, and the practice is growing fast. These synthetic personas never sleep, never have a scandal, and never demand a pay raise. But they also never had a real experience with the product they're pitching, which raises genuine questions about trust and transparency with consumers.
On a very different frontier, a Ukrainian developer has built an acoustic mapping app that turns old Android phones into a crowd-sourced drone detection network. Thousands of networked microphones listen for the distinctive hum of Shahed drones, triangulating position and direction before they reach their targets. It is a striking example of civilian ingenuity meeting modern warfare.
And on the question of artificial intelligence tools, Wired is out with a guide to getting more from ChatGPT through smarter prompt engineering. The core insight is straightforward: the quality of what you get out depends heavily on the precision and context of what you put in. For most users, that gap between average and genuinely useful results comes down to just a few deliberate habits.
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