Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider:

There are really two separate issues at hand: Should users be allowed to make fetish content of any woman who is stupid enough (like me) to allow anyone to make cameos of her? And how do you stop people from making fetish content of purely AI-generated characters that aren’t cameos of real people? Does OpenAI want to stop that? Maybe OpenAI thinks it’s fine for people to make belly-flation or foot-fetish videos as long as they’re not of a real person.

For now, I keep going back to a thought I had early on while scrolling Sora: There’s hardly any women on here, and it’s no wonder why. Women innately understand the risk of letting anyone make videos with their faces — the likelihood of something being creepy is extremely high. These fetish videos are kind of goofy — I have to admit I even cracked up a little at the centaur one — but overall, it’s an icky and somewhat menacing feeling seeing a lot of them.

Eric Hal Schwarz, reporting for TechRadar:

Meta is closing the door on third-party AI assistants inside WhatsApp. Starting January 15, 2026, no general-purpose AI chatbot, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others, will be allowed to operate on the platform. The change is part of an update to WhatsApp’s Business API policy that bans developers of “large language models, generative AI platforms, or general-purpose AI assistants” from accessing the system.

In plain terms, Meta is locking down the world’s largest messaging app to ensure that the only chatbot you’ll find inside it is Meta AI.

Perhaps because I’m only a light user of WhatsApp, I had no idea that rival AI chatbots had accounts there. I just tried it with 1-800-ChatGPT and it seems pointless. It’s noticeably slower and uses an older model than just using the ChatGPT app. (You can also just place a regular phone call to 1-800-ChatGPT, which seems about as useful in today’s world as calling 555-FILM for Moviefone to get movie showtimes.)

OpenAI, on X, has taken the news in stride:

Meta changed its policies so 1-800-ChatGPT won’t work on WhatsApp after Jan 15, 2026.

Luckily we have an app, website, and browser you can use instead to access ChatGPT.

Via Kontra, who quips:

Why hasn’t the EU started an investigation of Apple already?!

At the bottom of their “Use Cases” page, SerpApi lists the following companies and organizations as customers (“They trust us. You are in good company. Join them.”):

• Airbnb
• Nvidia
• Meta
• Shopify
• Perplexity
• KPMG
• Ahrefs
• Grubhub
• Samsung
• AI21labs
• United Nations (!)
• Thomson Reuters
• BrightLocal
• Experian

From an August 21, 2025 report in The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, alas), however:

OpenAI also isn’t the only Google rival to use SerpApi data. SerpApi’s website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari — a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix.

Was Apple removed from the list because they’re no longer (or never were?) a customer, or because they remain a customer but don’t want to be listed?

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Eight years ago, SerpApi, a start-up in Austin, Texas, dived headlong into the byzantine world of using robots to “scrape” Google’s search algorithms, so it could collect information to help customers appear higher in search results.

Then OpenAI’s ChatGPT came along, kicking off an artificial intelligence revolution. As more tech companies began building A.I. chatbots to keep up, they needed large amounts of data to train their A.I. models — data that SerpApi had already gathered.

Practically overnight, a class of companies like SerpApi — known as “data scrapers” — found a new business selling data scraped from Google to companies looking to train their A.I. chatbots.

On Wednesday, the internet message board Reddit decided to fight the data scrapers. It filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claiming that four companies had illegally stolen its data by scraping Google search results in which Reddit content appeared.

I’d never heard of — or at least never noticed — SerpApi until a few weeks ago, when a good friend asked me if I’d ever looked into them. The entire premise of their business is crazy. SerpApi prints the crime right on the tin, describing their service as a “Google Search API” and “Scrape Google and other search engines from our fast, easy, and complete API.” What makes this so crazy is that Google doesn’t offer a search API. SerpApi is offering the Google search API that Google itself doesn’t offer, and charging companies money for it. Everyone, upon hearing the premise and nature of SerpApi, asks the same question: How is this legal? The answer is, it probably isn’t. But right on SerpApi’s home page they claim to offer customers a “U.S. Legal Shield”:

The crawling and parsing of public data is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We value freedom of speech tremendously. We assume scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is otherwise illegal. (Including but are not limited to: acts of cyber criminality, terrorism, pedopornography, denial of service attacks, and war crimes.)

My only surprise here is that it’s Reddit taking SerpApi (along with two similar companies, one from Lithuania and the other from Russia — the former Soviet states respect intellectual property about as much as China does) to court, not Google. Why Google hasn’t sued them yet, I don’t understand. Anyway, back to Isaac’s report for the Times:

Perplexity was one of those buyers, according to Reddit’s lawsuit. Perplexity had scraped Reddit data in the past without payment but agreed to stop after Reddit sent it a cease-and-desist order. Even so, citations to Reddit data in Perplexity search results jumped “fortyfold,” the lawsuit said. Reddit has spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-scraping systems over several years.

“Perplexity’s business model is effectively to take Reddit’s content from Google search results,” then feed it into an A.I. model and “call it a new product,” the lawsuit said.

Reddit said it had set a trap for Perplexity by creating a “test post” on its site that could “only be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet.” Within hours, Perplexity search results had surfaced the content of that test post, the lawsuit said.

Google, which is not a plaintiff in Reddit’s lawsuit, has tried and failed to stop SerpApi and other data scrapers, according to the lawsuit and previous reporting from The Information.

The people leading Perplexity aren’t just shifty — they’re stupid. That whole company just reeks of being a scam.

See also: Reddit’s PDF of their lawsuit, Reddit v. SerpApi.

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter:

The Savant, which originally had a Sept. 26 premiere date, was yanked in the weeks following the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk. Language on the landing page for the series has since vacillated from “Coming Soon” to “At a Later Date” to simply “2025.” As of this writing, the wording again reads, “At a Later Date.” (Lower down the same page it says, “Released: 2025” — likely an oversight.)

It’s odd the language has been tweaked several times over the course of the month. Altering wording on the app is a manual process, and since each new iterative phrase basically means the same as the last, why do it? Yes, “Soon” means soon and “Later” means later and “2025” literally means this calendar year, but it’s all close enough considering the shifting language was first noticed as summer turned to fall. To not premiere in 2025 feels like a death sentence for the series.

A spokesperson for Apple TV did not respond to The Hollywood Reporter’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for The Savant’s studio, Fifth Season, also declined comment.

Ominous vibe.