| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the rambling drivel of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. PSA: Right before we published this newsletter, Donald J. Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. He is now officially the first American president to become a felon. You can follow Tim O'Brien and Bloomberg Opinion on X for more updates. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming ... Here's a question: How soon would you be dead if you relied on Google's AI to run your daily life? I'm thinking a week, tops? Let's imagine what a day might look like, shall we? As you take your morning vitamins, next to your iron deficiency pill is a small rock. You swallow it with some water. Now time for some web surfing … American history is so cool! Did you know Barack Obama was America's first and only Muslim president? Or that 13 presidents went to the University of Wisconsin? Go Badgers! After that it's lunchtime, but your stomach hurts. Could that rock be stuck in your kidney somehow? A good way to pass a kidney stone is to drink two liters of urine. You then feel a little woozy, so you decide to get some fresh air and sunshine. You stare at the sun for 15 minutes — which is a "generally safe" period of time — and then head back inside. Soon enough it's pizza night. But the cheese isn't sticking to the sauce. So you grab 1/8 cup of Elmer's glue from the craft closet and just mix it in. It works! there's no cheese slippage, and the pie pairs perfectly with the carafe of slightly chilled urine you uncorked at lunch.
You couldn't pay me to do any of the above, but Business Insider's Katie Notopoulos can't say the same. Last week, she actually made (and ate) the glue pizza. While she didn't perish — no less an authority than Google's AI Overview says ingesting small amounts of glue will only cause minor stomach upset — the stunt highlights how unreliable and dangerous the search engine has become. As Parmy Olson says: Google CEO Sundar Pichai "has tinkered with one of the most successful and profitable technology products of all time and made it completely unreliable, even dangerous. The countdown has begun for when he takes it offline. The sooner he does, the better." Or, Chris Bryant says, we could just ... stop Googling things. Yes, "eat a small rock a day" is terrible health advice, but the habit of Googling every ailment, every problem we encounter, is also bad for the brain: "Looking stuff up on Google often results in us not being able to recall it later — either because our brains are conditioned to think we don't need to remember it, or because the internet, mobile phones and social media scatter our attention, or both," he writes. But even if we distance ourselves from Google's hallucinations, AI's underlying issues will remain and fester. Not only does the technology have a loose relationship with the truth, it contains layers of biases, many of which are engineered from the get-go. Consider ChatGPT's latest upgrade, the cringy, Scarlett Johansson-sounding chatbot that giggled at the antics of OpenAI's male researchers and swooned over their outfits. As Parmy says: "The world's leading AI builders are creating software that reinforces stereotypes about women. And there's a big reason why: There are simply too few of them involved."  Source: Glass.ai Just 122 of the 686 people at OpenAI whose job involves building AI systems are women. On the bright side, at least there's never a wait for the office bathroom! But for real, what are they thinking? And it's not just Sam Altman's company. Parmy says "image generators have made women appear more sexualized than men, while an investigative report by Bloomberg News found that Stable Diffusion, the open-source AI image maker, tended to forget women existed altogether." Did Amazon's sexist recruiting algorithm not teach us anything? On the off chance that these companies somehow manage to pull it together, there's real money to be made in AI. Just look at Nvidia. "When ChatGPT launched, the Santa Clara-based chipmaker was worth more than $2 trillion less than Apple. Now, only 18 months later, it has almost closed that gap," John Authers writes. And it's not just Big Tech that stands to benefit from AI. If we're fortunate, Daniel Moss says AI will help the middle class claw back some ground and plug holes in the baby bust. Either that, or glue pizza will cause the human race to go extinct. It's rare that you see me peddling wares around here, but this is a free newsletter. It's time I embrace capitalism, baby. And by that, I mean, let me shamelessly recommend some books that my colleagues have written. "What does it mean to be a Jew?" Noah Feldman — a Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg columnist — spent 544 pages answering that question in his new book, To Be a Jew Today. Kyla Scanlon — our short-video extraordinaire — dared to create an illustrated guide to the entire economy, titled, appropriately: In This Economy? Talk about multitasking! While I was busy supplying you with rambling drivel, they were writing entire tomes, the spines of which are destined to grace bookshelves for centuries to come. If anyone should be worthy of that achievement, it's Frank Barry. Instead of spending his pandemic playing Animal Crossing or baking sourdough, our columnist bought an RV and drove the old Lincoln Highway — the nation's first transcontinental route — from New York City to San Francisco. In his new book, Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy, he says he and his wife Laurel "found the largest vehicle we wanted to drive and the smallest one we wanted to live in: a 25-foot 2017 Winnebago with thirty thousand miles." In my completely unbiased opinion (Hi Frank! He sits two desks away) this tale of a cross-country journey is a must-read for anyone feeling down about the vibes in this country ahead of the election. In case you needed any more evidence that we're in for a nicotine-filled summer, Natalie Portman and Paul Mescal were spotted smoking cigs and giggling together on the streets of London this week. Meanwhile in New York, smoke shops say they've run out of Zyn, the synthetic nicotine pouches sold in little round cans. Although they're probably better for you than a cigarette, Lisa Jarvis says low-dose Zyns "could create a welcoming entrée into nicotine use for teens — the way wine coolers or spiked seltzers are often more appealing to teens and twentysomethings than neat scotch or gin martinis." Who knows what this chart will look like after The Great Nicotine Shortage of 2024:  Ever since Variety's Matt Donnelly sent this brain-melting tweet, I have been so curious about Francis Ford Coppola's new film Megalopolis. The movie, a decades-long passion project on which Coppola spent $120 million of his own money, is "an audacious mash-up of science fiction fantasy and Roman empire-inspired speculative fiction, combining wide-eyed optimism and unapologetic sexual hedonism," in the words of Jason Bailey. While all that may be true, Jason says it begs the question: "Why does the man who made the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, among the most acclaimed and commercially successful pictures of their respective eras, have to go into his own pocket? Is this man not owed?" At the end of the day, it comes down to Coppola's commercial track record, which hasn't included a big hit in more than two decades. The poker chips of crypto markets must be regulated. — Bloomberg's editorial board Even the NRA deserves First Amendment rights. — Stephen L. Carter The Fed's interest rate target is a miscalculation. — Bill Dudley UBS's CEO frontrunners get a big chance to impress. — Paul J. Davies Marco Rubio just turned into another Trump enabler. — Mary Ellen Klas The Hong Kong 47 case is testing China's tightening grip. — Karishma Vaswani The UK election has kicked off with an unresolved paradox. — Chaminda Jayanetti A new strategy for defending Ukraine starts with defining victory. — Marc Champion Salesforce is struggling in a major way. Babe, wake up, Texas just dropped a new hail description. Giving birth on a planet in crisis is not easy. Planned Parenthood is in cahoots with Raytheon. How that "All Eyes On Rafah" image went so viral. Debut fiction is hard to launch. Social media babies are adults now. The most important girl band on the planet. Baz Luhrmann is just another guy to Gen Z. POV: You're the last ninth grader without an iPhone. Those "are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups are a force for good. Notes: Please send Altoids Sours and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net. 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