Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
🛋️ A couch for only $20? Amazon sets prices for new online storefront
🖥️ Teen’s tragic death raises questions over AI companions
📱 A new messaging app for Gen Z
💬 Inuktut is now in Google Translate
COMMERCE
Amazon’s rival Temu-like storefront will sell couches for $20
Open this photo in gallery:Amazon’s ultra-low storefront will ship items directly from factories in China, rather than fulfillment centres.Staff/Reuters
In an attempt to compete against ultra-low-cost rivals Temu and Shein, Amazon is preparing to launch a storefront that will cap prices on some 700 items. The amount sellers can charge for jewelry will max out at US$8, US$13 for guitars and US$20 for sofas, according to a message from Amazon to merchants that was reported by The Information. Orders from the new storefront will ship directly from warehouses in China and will reach customers within nine to 11 days. It’s a drastic shift for Amazon, which has prioritized speedy delivery times. But consumers are willing to wait longer for their packages if it means cheaper prices. A survey from earlier this fall found that or more than half of Canadians are fine with shipping times longer than a week if it results in a better deal. Although everyone loves a deal, the quality of a couch that only costs $20 seems questionable. So be sure to watch the labels of these items carefully, the cheapest “sofa” on Temu’s Canadian storefront may only be $29 – but it’s inflatable.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Mother sues AI company after teen son’s suicide
A mother in Florida has filed a lawsuit against Character.AI and Google alleging that the chatbot encouraged her 14-year-old son to take his own life after he developed an obsessive relationship with it. The lawsuit argues that Character.AI intentionally designed the chatbot to be hyper-sexualized and knowingly targeted young users. Advances in generative AI have allowed for the creation of more sophisticated chatbots in which users can give their companions unique traits and personalities. For some teens, AI companions can be a source of support, but for others, it can lead to isolation. As my colleague Joe Castaldo has written, as lives become more entwined with chatbots, the effects and pitfalls of these relationships are not yet fully known.
CHAT
Meet Daze, the new messaging app wooing Gen Z
If you’ve ever felt like your texting style is constrained by the limits of blue and green bubbles, new messaging app Daze aims to give you a lot more freedom. A demo video shows how users can send text in a variety of fonts and colours, draw pictures, and insert images and post gifs on a whiteboard-style canvas like Instagram stories. The app, which is selling itself as the Gen Z alternative to iMessage and WhatsApp, is scheduled to launch in early November and already has 156,000 people on the waitlist.
LANGUAGE
Inuktut included in Google Translate
Open this photo in gallery:Inuktut is now available through Google’s translation service.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Inuktut is now included in Google Translate, marking the first time an Indigenous language spoken in Canada has been on the platform. Inuktut encompasses different dialects spoken by Inuit in Canada, Greenland and Alaska. The latest addition is part of a Google initiative to develop a single artificial intelligence language model to support 1,000 of the most spoken languages in the world. But in order to create a language model, there has to be enough online text data online to pull from. For example, Google looked at adding Cree, which is spoken by more than 86,000 people in Canada, but there were fewer websites in the language for the model to train on.
What else we’re reading this week:
Meta Shuts Down Accounts Tracking Private Jets Of Mark Zuckerberg And Elon Musk (Jalopnik)
Marissa Mayer: I am not a feminist. I am not neurodivergent. I am a software girl (WIRED)
Mexican TikTokers have code words to report on narco-violence without getting banned (Rest of World)
Soundbite
“The ‘beyond nicotine’ category accounts for such a tiny piece of their revenue that it’s basically impossible to imagine that being anything more than a token investment for them. And vapes and pouches are less than 20% of their revenue. It’s sort of a smokescreen for the fact that cigarettes are still their bread and butter”
— Luc Rinaldi, author of ROB Magazine’s cover piece Blowing Smoke, speaking on this week’s episode of the Lately podcast.
Adult Money
ASTRONOMY
Open this photo in gallery:I’m ready to take my stargazing to the next level with these.CELESTRON
Celestron binoculars, $137
Last week, I spent my days hiking down canyons and through Mars-like landscapes in Utah and my evenings stargazing in the state’s dark sky preserves, a distinction given to areas with minimal light pollution. I saw Saturn’s rings and moons through a high-powered telescope and the moon’s craters with binoculars. The trip made me want to pick up my own pair of binoculars, and these ones by Celestron have a large aperture designed for low light conditions and stargazing. Plus, they have soft, rubber eyecups that can be folded down for those of us who wear glasses.
Culture radar
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Open this photo in gallery:Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is among 20,000 artists who signed an open letter against AI companies violating copyright law.DENIS BALIBOUSE/Reuters
Artists sign open letter condemning AI companies for using licensed work to train models
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, actress Julianne Moore and 20,000 others who work in the arts have signed an open letter condemning the “unlicensed use of creative works” to develop AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Tech companies have argued that this practise is considered “fair use” under copyright law, but many publishers, record labels, authors and artists disagree and multiple lawsuits have been filed against AI companies. In fact, this week in an interview with the New York Times, a former OpenAI researcher who helped gather and organize large swaths of internet data said he believed the company was violating copyright law and quit in August.
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