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South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol wanted AI in education. He’d put AI textbooks in the schools! This would surely solve teachers’ workloads, fix inequality, and personalise learning! [Rest Of World]
The programme was rushed out. The Korean government spent more than 1.2 trillion won ($850 million) on the programme.
The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union were unhappy the AI textbooks were mandatory. The government moved to running a one-year trial. [press release, in Korean]
Then Yoon tried to impose martial law, and he was impeached and deposed.
The AI textbooks went ahead anyway in March, for maths, English, and computer science. One student said:
All our classes were delayed because of technical problems with the textbooks. I also didn’t know how to use them well. Working individually on my laptop, I found it hard to stay focused and keep on track. The textbooks didn’t provide lessons tailored to my level.
One high-school maths teacher said:
Monitoring students’ learning progress with the books in class was challenging. The overall quality was poor, and it was clear it had been hastily put together.
In June, Lee Jae Myung was elected president. Lee had promised to reverse the AI textbook scheme. The texts’ official status was rescinded in August, after four months live, and they’re now just “supplementary material”.
The textbook publishers, who spent $567 million, will be suing the government for damages. Kim Jong-hee of Dong-A Publishing said “the issue has become overly politicised.” And not that the AI textbooks were, y’know, trash.
The use case for AI video is to churn out clips of existing TV and movie characters for your amusement. [THR]
Hollywood got wind of OpenAI’s Sora 2. Agencies called OpenAI to see what the deal was. [THR]
OpenAI told them whatever they wanted to hear:
repeatedly talking up an opt-in regime that would protect the agency’s clients against the misuse of their intellectual property and likenesses.
But when the agents talked to each other:
We started exchanging notes with others having similar conversations and realized we’re all hearing different things.
OpenAI told some agents they would never use actor likenesses without opt-in! Others were told Sora would be opt-out.
The WME agency was told each actor would have to opt out individually. Then, on 29 September, WME was told Sora would not use their clients’ faces or voices without opt-in permission.
Sora went live 30 September, using all the faces and voices anyway. OpenAI announced an opt-out regime, opting out one property at a time.
That’s not how copyright or personality rights work. There’s a century of precedent — you do a deal and you pay. Anthropic successfully claimed fair use on training — but OpenAI has built a machine to churn out violations.
WME has notified OpenAI it does not have permission to use any of WME’s clients. Disney has notified OpenAI that it could just sue under copyright if OpenAI does not desist. [THR]
OpenAI’s going ahead full-steam anyway. Because OpenAI has to get money in, or it dies.
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Today's News:
OpenAI has been flat broke its whole existence. In late 2025, it’s even more flat broke than that. Sam’s been frantically lining up about a trillion dollars’ worth of deals. Well, deals to make a deal.
In the first half of 2025, OpenAI had $4.3 billion in revenue! — with a net loss of $13.5 billion. Their “annualised” revenue is $13 billion of late — which means they took their very best month and multiplied it by twelve. But subscription numbers still look flat. [Register; FT, archive]
A lot of that $13.5 billion loss is “remeasurement of convertible interest rights,” which seems to mean pricing down the share price of OpenAI. Well, the alleged value of a share of future revenue from the for-profit subsidiary of the OpenAI nonprofit, if it ever makes a penny.
The press talks about this like it’s shares of stock, and it sort of is, if you stretch? But it’s different in ways that are important here.
SoftBank can put these OpenAI pseudo-shares on its books and watch the SoftBank share price go up. But these “interest rights” don’t work like conventional stock, or even conventional private company equity. The price of these pseudo-shares is a function of the vibe around how fast-talking Sam Altman is today.
“Remeasurement of convertible interest rights” means Sam’s had to adjust his fast talking to make a few less ludicrous promises about how much money OpenAI’s totally going to make.
But at some point, the rubber hits the road. OpenAI has to get some actual income. One source admitted to the Financial Times that only 5% of ChatGPT users are actually paying customers.
The bot has various sales features built in through Shopify, and OpenAI takes a cut from those. Altman is also talking about running personalised advertising. Just imagine the advertising chats!
Deutsche Bank says ChatGPT subscriptions in Europe have “flatlined in the major European markets over the past four months”. [Fortune]
Sam needs new markets, and he needs them fast. So he’s offering to relax the restrictions on GPT-5 about emotional chat, and making the bot more adult: [Twitter]
In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!).
… In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.
The whole Internet saw that last sentence and shuddered at the concept of GPT porn bots.
Sam tried to walk it back — it “blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to!” Yeah, sure. [Twitter]
But I’m not inclined to put much faith in Sam on this one. Because Elon Musk’s Grok is going hard into the sexy chat “companions,” starting with his “Ani” bot, which is short for “anime” ’cos it’s really obviously Misa from Death Note. [Verge]
The sort of people who pay for X The Everything App are just the customers for that bot. And, of course, for Grok Spicy Mode. There’s a market, and Sam Altman’s going for it!
OpenAI is still the flagship and linchpin of the AI bubble, which is holding up the whole US stock market. As Bluesky user Jack Klompus put it: [Bluesky]
The entire economy now rests on a porn pivot by a piracy company.