While I was writing this issue, somebody on Bluesky added me to their list of AI slop. So, about that backlash.
The backlash is growing
On Saturday, the moderators of r/opensource posted new rules: "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource." Projects also have to be at least one year old, actively maintained and have multiple contributors, which shuts out solo developers with new projects. And non-English speakers are told to find a different community: "We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated." The rules set off a firestorm in the comments and spawned a rival sub, r/trueopensource.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1018217/reddit-opensource-ai-ban
That's overblown, but expected. Humans tend to become extra backwards if their lives change too fast. This is a nice example of this behavior.
Elvis Presley's rights holders are suing Anthropic, claiming it used 274 of his songs, including Can't Help Falling in Love, to train Claude. They want $150,000 per song, about $41 million. The Guardian calls it one of the first major legal challenges brought directly by an artist's estate against an AI developer. Interesting development, I expect more of this in the future. And rightly so.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/25/elvis-presley-anthropic-lawsuit-ai-models-music
On The RealReal, an item in your cart is held for 20 minutes, so nobody else can buy it. The Verge showed that Meta's Muse agent could simply re-add listings to the cart again and again. The RealReal now says it won't let AI agents hog its items. Interesting how shops are starting to change to block agents. I also expect more of this to be coming soon, now that agentic tools and assistants are becoming more mainstream.
https://www.theverge.com/news/1018713/meta-muse-agentic-shopping-ai-the-realreal
And Elon Musk released the first episode of an AI-generated Odyssey: seven minutes, made with Grok Imagine by the London-based Wonder Studios. Reviewers panned it. One called it "meaningless as a laptop screensaver." If the goal was to win over the skeptics, this wasn't it. But everybody who knows who Elon Musk is won't be surprised by this.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/27/reviewers-slate-musk-ai-grok-odyssey-film-nolan
Nobody checked
Western Australia paid Deloitte $166,000 for a feasibility study on merging three of its universities. The report already contained references made up by AI. Now the Guardian found sums that don't add up: $514 million plus $145 million came out as $399 million, a $260 million gap. Deloitte says it used generative AI to "support the collation of research, synthesis of information and editorial proofing," and had earlier dismissed the errors as "minor." The state wants its money back. It's not the first time: Deloitte already had to pay money back to Australia's federal government after using AI in a $440,000 report.
Looks like nobody checked the result :). Shame on you, Deloitte.
A cartoon as a safety feature
A week before the US midterms, ChatGPT will still make images "depicting election interference or that may discourage voting," as OpenAI puts it, but only as illustrations or cartoons. Any request for photorealism is ignored. OpenAI's head of elections, Josh Lawson, told CNET: "The problem with deepfakes isn't social commentary, it's deception. So our aim is to degrade the evidentiary value of an image, while preserving room for illustrations and social commentary."
That's an interesting story from a design perspective. I think the visual style can carry that. And I personally like the idea of making cartoons the visual language of faking things, which is inherently what cartoons do. One of the rare occasions where something good can be said about OpenAI.
Also worth a look
Claude in drug development
Anthropic published early results from partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. At Generate Biomedicines, a design proposed with Claude Code was about 70% shorter than the standard version, and in lab tests it let immune cells make roughly 10 times as many receptors. At Enveda, Claude reviewed 1,061 pages of manufacturing documents and caught all 11 issues human reviewers had found, plus seven they had missed. Anthropic says the work is early and mostly preclinical.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/early-progress-drug-development
Good news. (Yes, a lab grading itself again. This time I'll take it.)
Siri AI, just not here
Apple brought Siri AI to French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, with daily usage limits for some features. But "Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU," Apple writes, while it is "working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward."
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/siri-ai-is-available-in-more-languages-starting-today/
EU people getting nothing is sad :(
ManyAgents
ManyAgents runs a team of AI coding agents from one Mac window. An orchestrator splits your work across Claude Code and Codex agents, each in its own git worktree, a reviewer agent checks the results, and all the agents' questions land in one place. It uses the plans you already have and is free for 14 days.
I already have a setup like this, so probably not much changes for me. But I think this is an interesting approach to make the toll less, the one I wrote about last time. Let's see if it works.
If you've run into the backlash yourself, or you're part of it, I'd like to hear about it. Leave a comment here or reply on Bluesky.