What if AI makes all of us dumb?

Plus: An air conditioning paradox, lackluster luxury and more. Bloomberg This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a last-minute ticket to Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Agenda - AI is playing tricks on [your eyes](. - [Air conditioners]( are a Catch-22. - The [luxury biz]( is losing its luster. - Johor is not the new [Singapore]( … yet. The AI Era Yesterday a friend sent me [this TikTok]( with over 700,000 views, where someone snagged last-minute tickets to Taylor Swift’s MetLife show this weekend on Ticketmaster for only $17 each. “TAYLOR HERE WE COME,” the caption reads: If you go on StubHub, resale tickets for the same show are going for as much as 800 times that — $13,691, or the price of a 2017 used Toyota Camry. So how can it be that someone could find one for $17? If you pause the video on the ticket purchase page, you’ll see options for Sections 506 and 508. That sounds benign, until you realize that [MetLife]( Stadium doesn't have a Section 506 or 508. Although it seems the video wasn’t made with AI or anything fancy like that, it exposes the types of hyper-personalized, predatory scams that could proliferate online in our new era of artificial intelligence. It's no wonder why [Texas lawmakers want to ban bots]( from buying concert tickets. AI-generated videos are still in their [infantile stages](, but in a few years you could easily envision bots further exploiting demand [for human entertainment](. “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is still lacing up its boots. In a world where more content than ever is being generated artificially, [we’ll all need to become more skeptical about what we see online](,” Parmy Olson writes. AI-generated images can range from the harmless — see: [woman laughing alone with a salad]( — to the sinister: Yesterday, [a fabricated photo of the Pentagon]( exploding in a cloud of smoke went viral on Facebook and Twitter, propelled by [accounts that were verified]( under Elon Musk’s system for blue checkmarks. Despite the dangers, Adrian Wooldridge [remains hopeful](. He argues that AI — contrary to what the authors of [this new book]( believe — is “empowering regular workers by making it easier to find and present information” (even if some of that information is [Total Crap](). Regardless of where you stand on the whole “is AI going to ruin society” debate, there’s no denying that it’s here to stay. [ChatGPT, as a product, has blown every single marketing campaign in existence out of the water](. Less than a year after its public introduction, everyone knows what that “Chat-G... whatever” thing is — your mother, her best friend Shelly, Shelly’s six-year-old grandson … the list goes on. Tyler Cowen points out that the release of OpenAI’s chatbot was “more as an experiment than as part of a well-thought-out campaign.” And it’s evident in the name itself: “Many successful tech products have happy, shiny, memorable names: Instagram, Roblox, TikTok,” Tyler writes, and ChatGPT — which stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer — is none of those things. It’s technical and clunky, even. But still, it’s better than [HBO](. Despite all the iterations — GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4 — ChatGPT is intensely sticky, forever imprinted in our brains as a game-changer that gave way to a whole new era of machine-generated intelligent content. Of course, there’s a risk that all these bots and their falsehoods will make intelligent beings — humans (a generous assumption, I know) — do dumb stuff themselves. That’s Aaron Brown’s worry, at least. He looked at the dawn of AI through the lens of hedge funds, and reminds us that “replacing smart humans with dumb computers [clearly has more downside than upside for markets](.” Lionel Laurent, too, sees [the AI gold rush taking humanity to some dark places](. And by dark places, I mean a world in which our eyeball blueprints get encoded on the blockchain and sold on the dark web for money, which kinda sounds like the plot of that really old Shia LaBeouf movie, [Eagle Eye](. Lionel says a company called Worldcoin wants to use its rather freaky network of iris scans to make a “World ID.” If more “crypto bros get seduced by the wave of enthusiasm for all things AI-related,” he predicts that the technological use cases could get even more reckless. At that point, fake Taylor Swift tickets will be the least of our worries. Hot In Here We’re quickly approaching the time of year when everything smells and is sticky. You know what I’m talking about: The humid season when you have to make a pit-stop in the bathroom whenever you enter a building because your clothes are sticking to you like cling wrap. You have emergency paper towels in your purse, you strategically crossed the street to stay in the shade, and yet you still have an ungodly amount of sweat on your upper lip — a hereditary trait, according your mom — but all of this is fair game on a soggy New York City summer day. But it doesn’t matter if you’re in the Big Apple or Belize. Nobody enjoys extreme heat, which is probably why an additional 1 billion air conditioning units are going to be installed by the end of the decade. “For many, [owning an air conditioner has already become a matter of survival]( rather than comfort,” Lara Williams writes. But that creates a cycle that’s more satanic than Satan himself: “Air conditioners are a disaster for the planet, containing toxic coolants with greater warming potential than CO2 and drawing on precious energy resources. So more air conditioners means more potential warming, which means more air conditioners,” she explains. The only way to save the planet is to break the cycle — before we all drown in a pool of our own sweat, or worse. Telltale Charts Well, that was fast. Luxury stocks went from being [hot to not]( in a matter of months, thanks to wavering [US consumers who may have reached the end of their spending binge](. For the past three years, “Chinese regions yo-yoed between lockdowns and reopening,” Andrea Felsted writes, but “Americans, particularly young consumers who had discovered European luxury, kept spending.” Now that their credit cards are maxed out, there’s no longer an appetite for nylon Prada bags or Gucci slides. For many people, Singapore’s absurd [housing prices]( have become untenable, so they have no other choice but to commute into the city from Southern Malaysia. Johor is “often depicted as an arm of the island’s economy,” Dan Moss says, but [it needs a lot of work before it comes anywhere close to taking Singapore’s]( crown as a global money center. Further Listening "I described the marketing as a courtship, and the suitor was the gun conglomerate. They were trying to court these young kids because the market had become flooded with competition." Josh Koskoff Attorney for the Sandy Hook families in the Remington case Tim O’Brien looks into the legal landscape behind America's gun violence epidemic in [the latest episode]( of Crash Course, "[Sandy Hook and a Reckoning for Gunmakers](." Further Reading Asylum seekers are being blocked from doing what [the American economy]( needs them to do: work. — Bloomberg’s editorial board Nearly every teenager in the US is on social media. [Regulating it]( is easier said than done. — Lisa Jarvis It took 200 days and countless lives for [Bakhmut to fall](. Does Russia really call that a victory? — Leonid Bershidsky [AMLO is sending a message]( to Mexico’s second-richest man. — Juan Pablo Spinetto We have too many banks because [the people in charge]( don’t want to give up control. — Ed Hammond The UK has [a speeding scandal]( on its hands, and Rishi Sunak may take the hit. — Therese Raphael ICYMI China has [a new Covid wave](. [Ron DeSantis]( will launch his 2024 bid on Twitter. The Catholic clergy’s [sex abuse]( scandal gets worse. The White House [barrier crasher]( was arrested. [Sports]( are getting even more expensive. Kickers Country radio has [a lady problem](. The culprit behind New York’s [dinosaur destruction](. (h/t Ellen Kominers) [Chinchillas]( are blowing human minds. Pop culture [baby names]( are iconic. (h/t Jhodie Williams) [Florence Pugh](, Hollywood savior. Notes: Please send iris scans and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net. [Sign up here]( and follow us on [Instagram](, [TikTok](, [Twitter]( and [Facebook](. Follow Us You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. If a friend forwarded you this message, [sign up here]( to get it in your inbox. [Unsubscribe]( [Bloomberg.com]( [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( [Ad Choices](