We start this week with Jason’s article about how everyone is apparently reverse-engineering everything. After the break, Joseph tells us about a big AI shakeup at consulting giant Accenture. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Jason discuss the Character[.]ai bankruptcy.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI⁠
• ⁠Accenture Tells Employees They Can Now Spend Only $29 on Claude Per Month⁠
• ⁠Character[.]ai Bankruptcy Is First AI Bubble Domino to Fall⁠

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss reverse engineering and some wild court docs.

SAM: I’m using my btb to shamelessly ask for sources: Have you ever started making a recipe you found online, and realized it was AI generated? 

I’m asking because I just saw that Etsy is banning certain kinds of AI slop, including AI-generated recipes and patterns. I honestly didn’t know you could buy and sell recipes on Etsy, but now I’m looking around the marketplace and seeing a lot of digital downloads of these huge bulk book sets with images that are clearly AI generated. I don’t know if the recipes inside are scraped from real books or generated wholesale, and might have to download a few and test them.