Heute ist zwar nicht Montag, aber dieser einen sanft begleitende Mix von Mira Vána geht auch an einem Donnerstagnachmittag außerordentlich gut, um dazu schon mal in ganz entspannte Wochenendstimmung zu kommen. So wie ich hier.

We covered the “SaaSpocalypse” last week — in which a pile of software-as-a-service companies were badly overvalued, this mini-bubble popped, and their stock prices went down. It was blamed on the magical power of AI, because companies will definitely replace all their enterprise software with vibe coding!

AI turns out to be a great all-purpose excuse for any business number going down. After the software companies went down, the market, which is usually on crack, went looking for something else to panic about. This is now called the “AI Scare Trade.”

Commercial real estate stocks took a big dip last Thursday 12 February — one day after the “SaaSpocalypse” — and they’re trying to blame AI: [FT, archive]

AI’s potential to replace a range of tasks in so-called knowledge sectors and lead to swaths of job cuts has also sparked concern among investors in property groups that demand for offices could fall.

AI will just replace all the workers and office rentals will vanish, OK?

The commercial real estate sector was overheated already in the late 2010s. The COVID pandemic lockdown hit in 2020. Massive work from home made all those office buildings look a bit surplus. The buildings haven’t really filled out since.

A lot of loans are coming due for these half-empty offices and factories. It’s surprising these overstretched companies kept stringing along the problems as long as 2026.

But now they can say it wasn’t just they had terrible business judgement. No, it’s the AI!

Who else could blame AI? Long distance trucking took a big dip on Thursday as well. [Financial Post, archive]

In this case, it was one tiny company called Algorhythm who claimed a fabulous advance in operational efficiency with AI:

its SemiCab platform in live customer deployments was helping its customers’ internal operations to scale freight volumes by 300% to 400% without a corresponding increase in operational headcount.

Algorhythm went up 12% and a pile of other trucking stocks went down. So who is Algorhythm? They used to make karaoke machines:

Algorhythm, which had a market capitalization of less than $5 million before Thursday, previously operated as The Singing Machine Company, Inc. — selling karaoke products — until rebranding in 2024 as an AI logistics firm. The company reported less than $2 million in sales for the quarter ended September 30, with a net loss totaling nearly $3 million for the period.

This tiny money-losing company knocked over the market with a press release with “AI” in it.

Who else? Wealth managers! Now that’s how to get the rich guys’ attention. Every billionaire has a massive service industry living off them. What if they could optimise those guys away too?

So Tuesday 10 February, Altruist put out a press release about an AI tax strategy planner. A pile of wealth management stocks promptly crashed on the news. This is one company announcing one product. But, again, it’s got AI in the name! [Telegraph]

Most of the stocks have recovered since, because this was an incredibly stupid overreaction. These businesses are not collapsing any time in the near future.

The market is jittery because the economy numbers might be up — even as it’s just a few large techs swapping the same $100 billion letter of intent with each other — but things clearly aren’t working very well and everyone’s feeling precarious. So anything can set them off.

The AI industry hype is that a chatbot can replace whole jobs tomorrow. And that’s not a thing a chatbot can do. But they can market it hard enough that someone believes it — and panics.

• Video — Podcast

Porn performer Siri Dahl’s personal information, including her full legal name and birthday, was publicly exposed earlier this month by xAI’s Grok chatbot. Almost instantly, harassers started opening Facebook accounts in her name and posting stolen porn clips with her real name on sites for leaking OnlyFans content. 

Dahl has used the name — a nod to her Scandinavian heritage — since the beginning of her career in the adult industry in 2012. Now, Grok is revealing her legal name and all personal information it can find to whoever happens to ask.

Dahl first noticed this happening last week, after a clip of the performer from a porn scene was making its rounds on X. The scene was incorrectly labelled, so someone on X replied, “Who is she? What is her name?” and tagged @grok to get an answer. 

Grok answered, “she appears to be Siri Dahl, an American adult film actress born on June 20, 1988. Her real name is Adrienne Esther Manlove.” Grok provided her personal information unprompted; the user likely only wanted information on what performer appeared in the clip.

This is the latest in a series of abuses inflicted by Grok, xAI, and its users. At the end of 2025, people used Grok to produce thousands of images of nonconsensual sexual content, including images depicting children. The problem was so widespread that the UK’s Ofcom and several attorneys general launched or demanded investigations into X and Grok, and police raided X’s offices in France as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse material on the platform. 

X strictly prohibits sharing other people’s personal information without their consent. “Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called ‘doxxing,’ is a breach of their privacy and can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected,” the platform’s terms of use state. But X’s own chatbot is doing it anyway. 

While there have been some close calls, up until now Dahl had managed to keep her personal information private. “I've been paying for data removal services for like, at least six years now,” Dahl said. She said she’s spent “easily” thousands of dollars on those services, which promise to delete personal and potentially dangerous information as it comes up. 

Grok is trained on X users’ posts, as well as data scraped from the wider internet. X’s website says “Grok was pre-trained by xAI on a variety of data from publicly available sources and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers.” Dahl said she doesn’t know where Grok originally got her legal name from. But now that it’s part of the system’s internal dataset, she feels like there’s no coming back; her days of pseudonymity are over.

‘The Most Dejected I’ve Ever Felt:’ Harassers Made Nude AI Images of Her, Then Started an OnlyFans

Kylie Brewer isn’t unaccustomed to harassment online. But when people started using Grok-generated nudes of her on an OnlyFans account, it reached another level.

404 MediaSamantha Cole

“Now that it's been crawled, it's everywhere. There are a ton of Facebook accounts that come up that are pretending to be me, using my real name,” Dahl said. “There are now porn leak sites that are posting porn of me using only my legal name, not even putting my stage name on it.”

Users are now asking Grok for the make and model of Dahl’s car, her address, and other dangerous personal information. While it hasn’t been able to accurately reply yet, she worries it’s only a matter of time.

But Dahl isn’t the only person affected by the fallout.

“I do everything that I can reasonably within my power to keep my legal name private, and my main motivation for doing that is to reduce any chance of my family getting harassed,” she said. “It's really common for people to look up private information, get parents' phone numbers and start calling and harassing the parents, things like that. I've been able to keep my family safe from that kind of thing for years.”

Now, Dahl is having to call her family and put defensive plans in place. 

In violating Dahl’s right to privacy, X’s Grok has destroyed Dahl’s ability to protect herself and her family online. Doxing her is not providing value to X users, as is ostensibly Grok’s goal. The original inquiry only wanted to know how to find more of her work, to which her stage name was the most useful answer.

“What would the motivation be for anyone to want to know my personal information, other than to harass and cause harm?” Dahl said.

In this ongoing discussion on “internet safety,” it is important to pay attention to who is being protected. Certainly not the users; the marginalized workers, or the young women. Not Dahl, or her family. 

While the right to privacy online continues to be debated, it’s important to remember that privacy exists not only for bad-actors and shady characters. Historically, marginalized populations benefit from internet anonymity the most.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Michael Kalus posted a photo: