The Obtain: China’s producers’ viral second, and the way AI is altering creativity

Because the video was posted earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of TikTok customers have watched as a younger Chinese language man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a conventional tea set and speaks on to the digicam in accented English: “Let’s expose luxurious’s greatest secret.” 

He stands and lifts what seems to be like an Hermès Birkin bag, one of many world’s most unique and costly purses, earlier than gesturing towards the cabinets crammed with extra baggage behind him. “You acknowledge them: Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci—all crafted in our workshops.” He ends by urging viewers to purchase straight from his manufacturing facility.

Video “exposés” like this—the place a gross sales agent breaks down the fabric price of luxurious items, from purses to perfumes to home equipment—are all over the place on TikTok proper now. And whether or not or not their claims are true, these movies and their virality communicate to a brand new, severe push by Chinese language producers to attach straight with American shoppers. Learn the complete story.

—Caiwei Chen

How AI is interacting with our inventive human processes

The fast proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges round authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and artwork. However it additionally gives a very human drawback in narrative: How can we make sense of those machines, not simply use them?

Three new books look at what we achieve and lose after we let machines create, and pose the query: how do the phrases we select and tales we inform about expertise have an effect on the function we permit it to tackle (and even take over) in our inventive lives? Learn the complete story.

—Rebecca Ackermann