Cookie Monster Met His AI Mandate and Lost His Job -- AI Brief October 24

Good day %%first_name%%. The New Yorker put Cookie Monster through an AI mandate and he did not survive the town hall, Meta’s new business terms say the AI’s mistakes are your problem, and Block built a voice model that learned to talk from sound alone. Also: ducks.

Cookie Monster Tries to Meet His AI Mandate The New Yorker

* What happened: In the New Yorker’s October 5 issue, Ysabel Yates wrote a Shouts & Murmurs humor piece in Cookie Monster’s voice. A new boss named Matt arrives to “implement technological solutions that improve productivity,” which Big Bird translates as: use AI for your cookie work now, or you’re fired. Cookie Monster tries it. The AI writes that cookies are “not about the taste,” then, told to be passionate, produces a line that makes him sound “like Matt on LinkedIn.” A recipe tells him to set the oven to 475 degrees, and when he points it out, the AI replies, “You’re right for calling that out.”

* Why it matters: It is satire, but the beats are the ones people report from real workplaces: a manager who can’t say what AI is for, a course and a free e-book of “50 A.I. Prompts” as the answer to everything, and a town hall about an “exciting A.I. revolution.” The joke about productivity is the sharpest one: Cookie Monster ends up spending more time fixing the AI’s cookie recipe, which is the cost a mandate never puts on the slide.

* What everyone’s saying: Anyone who has been told to get better “A.I. skills” by someone who has never done their job will recognize the whole piece, and the ending lands for the same reason: Cookie Monster is laid off along with his team, while Oscar the Grouch, who spent the town hall flattering the boss, becomes “Vice President of A.I. Integration.” His closing line is that he would never fire anyone himself, because he is “Cookie Monster, not actual monster.”

* My read between the lines: The piece never says AI is useless. Its target is a mandate with no measurement behind it: nobody checks whether the cookie content got better, only whether Cookie Monster used the tool. That is how real mandates work, and the person who adopts the language fastest, not the one who knows cookies, ends up with the title. If your company’s AI plan is a usage target and a prompt e-book, update your LinkedIn bio before Oscar does.

📖 Further reading: The Tools That Just Replaced 40% of Block's Workforce Are Free in Your Browser — my March piece, written in the middle of the layoff panic, on how the same AI tools companies use to cut headcount are the ones you can sign up for yourself.

Your boss wants you using AI. Fine. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack and connects to 3,000+ tools, so the reports, dashboards, code and campaigns land where your team already works, with no 475-degree surprises and no extra prompt e-book. Not a chatbot. A coworker. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

Meta’s New Contract Makes Its AI’s Mistakes Yours CIO

* What happened: CIO reports that Meta’s new commercial terms, set to take effect Friday, October 30, say that “AI features may make mistakes” and that customers “are solely responsible for and assume any and all risks associated with such AI features and any resulting content.” The terms also make business customers responsible for what their partners or contractors do, and they expand Meta’s rights to crawl pages associated with a customer’s products. The language is still a proposal Meta could change before it takes effect, and a Meta spokesperson told CIO the crawling terms apply only to its ads and business products and “do not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”

* Why it matters: If you run ads or a Page on Meta, you are the customer here, and a mistake in AI-generated content could be yours to pay for. Yesterday we covered Meta’s Muse shopping agent, so this is the same company pushing AI hard, and this is the paperwork that says who pays when it goes wrong.

* What everyone’s saying: Analysts quoted by CIO were not subtle. Frank Dickson of Dickson Research said the clause “turns accountability upside down,” and Aikido Security’s Mike Wilkes said it “makes no sense” that a charity asking for a picture of a dog would be liable for the model’s unsuitable result, since only Meta controls the model.

* My read between the lines: Meta’s defense on training is a word swap: the revised text dropped “train” and now says collection is for “developing and maintaining” products. Infotech’s Thomas Randall called the difference “a matter of how you pronounce tomato.” If you buy ads on Meta, have someone read the terms before the 30th, because the company wants the upside of shipping AI without the liability of having shipped it.

The Brief is free and always will be. If you want what sits behind the headline, members get the paywalled deep-dives plus the full archive, including the pieces on how to use these tools before somebody’s contract uses them on you. Become a member →

Block’s Dessa Learned t