Taylor Berman

I'm going to say what really matters: "Super intelligence" is a rare miss in Trump's sterling record of coming up with catchy new nicknames for stuff businessinsider.com/trump-ai…

🚨SCOOP🚨: I talked the guy who wrote the oddly horny song about for the viral toy pumpkin. He would like you to know that it is NOT AI, first of all. "Can I deny that I understood the double entendre when I wrote it? The answer is no, I can't." businessinsider.com/jabberin…

Oreogate is a hugely viral series of videos on Instagram of (allegedly) a mom group chat bickering over Oreos in lunches. But it’s really an ad for Suno, the generative AI music app. (Suno confirmed to me that this is a paid partnership - Oreo denied involvement). Where it gets more confusing is: did this even happen at all, or is it totally fiction? The creator initially responded to my request to talk about it, but didn’t want to get “into the specifics of the people/messages behind Oreogate”. But wouldn’t anger if it was real or fake, and then stopped responding. The account only started posting 3 weeks ago, and only posts videos tagged #sunopartner. No personal photos or any other content. Seems like it’s part of a new trend of fake “storytime” videos meant to be relatably enraging but are secretly ads. Kate Lindsay wrote about this for @milkkarten’s great newsletter recently. Here’s my story on it: businessinsider.com/oreogate…

Good luck to Meta on its new journey with the new settlement/time limits for teens. When Australia banned all social media for kids under 16, it was effective for like... 3 weeks (and then kids immediately got around it). My story: businessinsider.com/australi…

A few months ago, I started accidentally sending Tiktoks via DM to @maura, a professional acquaintance who was in my contacts list. Maura is lovely, but not someone I would ever intend to send Tiktoks about hormonal birth control to. For some reason, I kept accidentally sending more and more videos to her -- I had already apologized after the first (she understood because it happens to her, too). We had never DMd before, and I wasn't even sure what I was tapping wrong to make it happen. It seems like this happens to a lot of people. @pkafka keeps sending me random Tiktoks (although his are normal things, unlike my cursed fyp) by the same mistake. I wanted to do a sort of how-to article about how to prevent this, but it proved way more complicated. I couldn't ever fully replicate how I mistakenly did it in the first place, and discovered that the Tiktok UI is way weirder than I realized. I had notice that this mainly happened on videos with long captions where you have to tap to expand to read the whole thing. But that "more" button isn't anywhere close to the DMs. Eventually, I figured out if you LONG PRESS near the bottom of the screen, it opens a share/send menu, which still requires more taps/intention. BUT: if you are looking at a video in the search results feed (instead of the main fyp), you get a slightly different action when you long press the bottom of the screen -- it has a smaller action to instantly DM to 3 people (why those 3? still unclear to me!). Basically, I can't tell you how to stop this. I can wish you luck in not ruining your life over an accidental DM (thankfully, @maura has been very nice about this) businessinsider.com/tiktok-a…

A month ago, Instagram said it would ban videos pickup artists who film themselves using Meta glasses to talk to women on the street. I checked back in to see how it was going (not well!)