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Happy Wednesday! The marquee results in the midterm elections last night were dramatic, and make no mistake, things will be different for AI now. Early reporting suggests investigating AI will be a priority for the new, Democratic-controlled Congress. Opposition to data centers is already being seen as a strength among winning candidates. If they pick up where they left off when they were a powerless minority, they may probe Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle over data centers, just for starters. 

And bear in mind, this was written on Tuesday night. Major change is in the air for the politics of AI, and no one can say with certainty what’s in store.

— Mike Pearl

→ Why utility commissioners matter
→ Is ChatGPT the second-largest search engine?
→ Anger over AI audiobooks

...and all the AI news we couldn’t fit here.

While you nurse your election-night hangover, consider some races that probably aren’t making headlines this morning, but have an outsized impact on AI: utility commissioner seats. As Politico wrote back on Oct. 31, there were 19 such seats up for grabs, and these are the officials that regulate energy prices and allocation, as utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion modernizing grids for AI data centers between now and 2030.

Last year in Georgia, Democrats pulled off two wins. In these midterms, Georgia Democrats’ hope was to win a third seat, and achieve their first majority in decades. Democrats were hoping to extend the Georgia strategy to Arizona. Meanwhile, Republicans in places like Louisiana and Alabama were trying to circumvent the data center controversy—doing things like promising to shield consumers from price hikes, and restructuring a commission after two incumbents were primaried. 

Want to see how it went? Results for red-state underdogs like Alabama Public Service Commission hopeful James Gordon would be a good place to look. If Gordon—the Democrat—somehow won his race, change may be in the air.

People who use ChatGPT “as Google” have been an obvious source of ChatGPT’s explosive growth for years—that is: searching for basic information. OpenAI has apparently quantified the relevant activities of this fuzzy group of users, according to a Big Technology report, and says it now owns an estimated 20% of Google’s search volume. If true, that would make it the world’s second-largest search engine. 

Speaking to Big Technology, ChatGPT product lead Adam Fry explains that he’s referring to “search-like queries,” or “basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for.” 

If you’d like to read a story where someone churns the artistic works of countless strangers into AI slop for profit, and then comes away from the whole thing kinda sympathetic, you’re in luck. The tale of the short-lived website AO3.life truly has it all. 

Perhaps you’ve already read about the fiction library Archive of Our Own (AO3) being taken offline last week for urgent maintenance expected to take a month. The shocked users of AO3 recently discovered that a sort of mirror site called AO3.life had popped up to fill the temporary void. Unfortunately, AO3.life was also churning work by the writers of AO3 into AI audiobooks, without authorization, on an opt-out basis, for profit. 

Naturally, the site’s users went ballistic on Reddit. But the creator of AO3.life, who is apparently a teen in India who goes by Ganesh, apologized profusely and convincingly, and genuinely sounded like a kid who had learned a valuable lesson. “I did it all by myself and the time/urgency made me feel really cool. It’s not everyday you have everyone talking about the site you made, but I’ll make sure it’s for something praiseworthy in the future,” they wrote.

AI-related stocks dropped after traders realized Democrats would soon be in charge of the U.S. legislature, but they soon seemed to realize Trump is still President.

Stock futures fall as Democrats win big in midterms with traders betting they slow data center buildout

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Here’s who is falling in line for Trump’s “Super Intelligence” loyalty test

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens

‘Our Risk, Their Reward’: Zohran Mamdani on AI and Data Centers

Washington Is Debating the Wrong AI Risk

Silicon Valley Promises AI Will Cure Disease. Drugmaker CEOs Aren’t Buying It.