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Happy Monday! Last week’s official IPO filing from Anthropic seemed like it brought back AI optimism for a minute there, but simmering investor worries over debt, combined with a scary earnings call for Google, seem to have shifted the economic roller coaster back into “plunge” mode.

But the markets aren’t everything, and if you unwisely come to Gizmodo for investment advice, I’ve got bad news: most of today’s newsletter is about AI and hacking, AI and Apple gadgets, and AI and love. Sorry, finance folks!

→ AI and the Binance hack
→ Vibe coding your way to romance
→ How scalpers are snagging iPhone Duos

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

The news: The fallout from the $6.3 billion Binance hack overshadowed all tech news this weekend, but is it even an AI story? On one hand, common sense suggests AI was in the mix. “A.I. is undoubtedly turbocharging the ability of hackers to find and exploit subtle flaws in various parts of the crypto ecosystem,” Cornell economist and crypto expert Eswar Prasad told the New York Times in a story about the Binance hack. “The scale and scope of such attacks is likely to intensify.”

It speaks to an increasingly common type of AI prophecy of doom, preached by figures as prominent as Bill Gates. According to this thinking, the AI models that currently exist are the bringers of potential doom because too much power may already be in the hands of bad actors. 

The takeaway: As the dust slowly settles after this heist, we’re learning that AI may not have been central to pulling it off. AI may or may not have been used to find the core vulnerability by brute force, and may or may not have been part of the automation that helped quickly launder the funds. As Joshua Saxe, CTO of Abundant Security, told the Times, “North Korea had sophisticated threat actors that could have done this pre-A.I.” So let’s not get carried away. 

The news: We looked at two unsettling trend stories that both came out, fittingly, on Halloween. One in the Guardian is drawn from data showing that 39% of British singles—66% if they’re Gen Z—have used AI in their dating lives. Meanwhile, the New York Times explored the dating scene in the AI-saturated tech hothouse of San Francisco, where one matchmaker describes dealing with tech founders more used to using AI to make decisions than their own intuition. 

The takeaway: AI coding was already powering many of the most popular dating apps, and their core feature has always been search and discoverability driven by old-fashioned AI algorithms. Maybe whatever puts you in a chair across from another human being simply must be tolerated. It’s better than the alternative. 

The news: According to Bloomberg’s Apple scoop-getter Mark Gurman, customers—notably scalpers looking to gouge people on the secondary market—are using AI-powered bots to camp out at the “Buy” button on the Apple website. According to PBS NewsHour, an illegal version of this newly AI-powered process is now happening with concert tickets. 

The takeaway: It’s almost impossible to find an iPhone Duo right now unless you pay an inflated price on a site like eBay, where scalpers are supposedly getting people to pay twice the retail price. And keep in mind as well that the AI-driven memory shortage is associated with product delays and price hikes at Apple. 

Ternus reflected on Apple’s shaky recent history with AI in an interview with Wired.

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