“I would be bummed if I suddenly started existing somewhere I wasn’t supposed to exist and everyone started killing me for it.”—Catherine Bonner to the New York Times regarding the ongoing Lanternfly War

“You can break your back, on the giant slide. You can even break your neck, on the giant slide. You can even bump your head, on the giant slide.”—Gmac Cash rapping about the dangerous giant slide in Detroit

“I look down at the face of my sleeping child and I vow: If this baby’s life is even one particle easier than mine was, I will burn this whole place down!”—Alexandra Petri in a satirical Washington Post Op-Ed regarding President Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt

—Amanda Hoover

Tech startup Sanas offers real-time accent removal for businesses. On its website, visitors can hear an Indian accent neutralized to be nondescript, a literal code switch. It “wants to make the world sound whiter,” SFGate argued. Meanwhile, FN Meka—a virtual, slur-slinging rapper who bears a striking resemblance to the deeply controversial rapper 6ix9ine—recently signed, and then quickly lost, a record deal with Capitol Records. Both are AI-powered projects that have been criticized as racist.

“There’s a long history of technology reinforcing racism,” Dylan Baker, a research engineer at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, told Morning Brew.

Sanas raised over $37 million in funding, including a $32 million Series A round. The founders, who met as Stanford undergrads, had a college friend who was harassed for his Central American accent during his job in a call center. That’s not an unusual experience: verbal abuse and racism are routine for workers in these jobs. But Sanas’s pitch deck isn’t just about protecting low-paid workers. It notes “accent differences have a profound impact on customer satisfaction,” but “nearshoring/reshoring” jobs can be more than twice as expensive. (The 2018 dark comedy Sorry to Bother You predicted the profitability of a white voice in call centers.)

But hiding accents with AI presents a dilemma. “It does sound like it would reinforce the idea that call center workers are second-class citizens who are only deserving of a harassment-free environment if they sound appropriately white,” Baker said.

While Sanas may seem like digital whiteface, FN Meka came under fire for a different offense: digital blackface. Created by “virtual label” Factory New in 2021, FN Meka is a green-haired virtual rapper whose lyrics are generated with AI, voiced by a Black artist who claims he was not paid for his work.

Public criticism mounted after the announcement, especially for FN Meka’s use of the N-word—his creators are not Black—and an Instagram post making light of police brutality. The nonprofit advocacy organization Industry Blackout called Capitol’s choice to support an “amalgamation of gross stereotypes” a “direct insult to the Black community” in an open letter. Capitol Records apologized and severed ties with the digital rapper.

It doesn’t take an industry expert to recognize the tone-deafness, but an expert might better explain why it happened at all. Andrew Barber, owner of media company Fake Shore Drive and Grammy board member, thought FN Meka was a terrible idea from the jump. But Barber predicts there are more AI-generated artists to come, and his explanation isn’t limited to the music industry.

“FN Meka might be gone, but you better believe that companies are looking for any way to cut corners to make more money with less hassle,” he said.

Though AI is heralded as the tech of the future, right now it’s raising questions about exploitation and racism in the present. Who gets cut out for the sake of profitability? And who gets to make a profit?

—Ashwin Rodrigues

The Olympics may never be the same. Not that they ever are, given its historic flux. The pandemic-delayed 2020 Olympics in Tokyo added five sports: baseball and softball, karate, skateboarding, sports climbing, and surfing. The upcoming 2024 Games in Paris have already done away with karate and baseball/softball. Only one addition was made—breaking, a sport better known by its pop bastardization: breakdancing.

It will debut in Paris not on a mat in a gym, but on a high-production dance floor with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. This won’t just be the Olympic debut of a sport. It will be the Olympic debut of a spectacle.

Breaking’s inclusion is the latest twist in the long, fluxed-up history of the Olympics. Badminton is an Olympic sport, but squash is not. Archery? Sure. Darts? Nah. Curling is in. But not bowling. For all its put-upon, carved-in-stone institutionalism, the Olympics can be nonsensically mercurial. Breaking’s debut will push Olympic eccentricity to its limits.

Ironically, alongside Olympic expansion is its crisis of contraction. The Olympics as a television program is in ratings freefall: NBC, which held the American broadcasting rights for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, said that the games averaged 15.6 million prime-time viewers per night, the lowest of any Olympics in a generation—Summer or Winter—and almost a 50 percent drop from the 2016 Rio Games. Night by night, Tokyo saw the nine smallest prime-time audiences since 1992.

And that audience is increasingly older (the median age of viewers for the 2020 Games was 58). That milquetoast appeal is reflected in the IOC’s top-tier sponsors, which included Allianz, Bridgestone, Deloitte, Intel, Omega, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, and Visa. All brands that scream middle-aged dad.

Plus, the Olympics isn’t exactly following socially conscious trends. A scathing 2021 analysis of Olympic sustainability found an overall ecological, economic, and social sustainability score of 48 on a scale of 100 across 16 Summer and Winter Games, with a marked decrease in the sustainability of the Games over time (it’s part of why youth-led campaigns to keep the Olympics out of their cities have gained traction). “Olympic Games from 1992 to 2008 have a mean sustainability score of 53 points, whereas those since Vancouver 2010 stand at only 39 points,” the analysis found.

This is the graying, grim landscape into which breaking—an intrinsically cool sport for which a 2012 semifinal has 93 million views on YouTube—will debut. It’s shepherded by Shawn Tay, the president of the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF). Tay, who is 65 and lives in Singapore, retired from ballroom dancing in 1994. He isn’t the obvious cultural ambassador for breaking’s Olympic moment, but the WDSF has been speaking the IOC’s language for decades.

The WDSF courted IOC power players and commissioned a PwC assessment on the sport’s marketing prospects. Now the organization is in charge of overseeing the qualification process that will winnow 80 athletes from around the world down to 32 Olympic breaking opportunities (an equal number for men and women) in Paris.

Tay compared his task to running a restaurant despite not knowing how to cook. “I will not be the one doing the cooking. But I’m doing the management,” he told Morning Brew. “And I’m helping the chef understand how a restaurant works—with discipline, timetables, and an approach of how to bring ideas to market.”

“A new generation of people can no longer watch a sport that goes up and down, up and down, in circles,” he said. “Spectators want to be stimulated. They want to feel that their bodies are reacting to what they’re seeing. People want more excitement. In the internet era, nobody sits and reads the newspaper for hours. They want quick information. It’s the same thing in sports: They want something quick. Breaking has that quality.” Continue reading this story on breaking’s Olympic dreams by Richard Morgan.

Julia Turshen is a chef and New York Times best-selling cookbook writer. Her latest cookbook, Simpy Julia, rethinks comfort food through a healthy lens (hello, lemon ricotta cupcakes). It was picked up by Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited an indie bookstore in Rhode Island (she joked that she thought it was a Julia Child book). When she’s not writing or thinking of new recipes, Turshen talks about food on her podcast, Keep Calm & Cook On. Need a Sunday night dinner upgrade? Sign up for Turshen’s online cooking classes every Sunday afternoon, where you can learn how to make rosemary gin spritzers and sesame chicken schnitzel.

What’s the best advice you ever received?

On a practical note, the best advice I’ve received as a lifelong freelancer is to think of every dollar I earn as fifty cents and to open a separate savings account and put half of every check I receive into it so I’m set for taxes and any other unexpected work expenses.

On a more emotional note, the best advice I’ve ever received is to ask for forgiveness, not permission.

What’s the most embarrassing song you’ll admit to liking publicly?

I have no shame about anything I like! But I guess the first to come to mind for this question is “Lean on Me,” which my spouse, Grace, says I sing very frequently...

What fictional person do you wish were real?

As someone who has gotten into powerlifting in the last few months, I would have to say Luisa Madrigal from Encanto.

What real person do you wish were fictional?

Mitch McConnell.

How would you explain TikTok to your great-grandparents?

An infinite number of miniature home movies that you can watch on a handheld device.

What always makes you laugh?

All of our pets, but especially our dog Winky, who is particularly comical.

If you were given a billboard in Times Square, what would you put on it?

Diet culture sucks. You are loveable.

—Interview by Sherry Qin

The future of drunk texting is here: Another brain-computer interface company became the first to implant their device into a patient in the US. Synchron beat Elon Musk’s Neuralink (among others) to implant chips into patients’ brains. Those implants allowed them to control digital devices via brain signals to help them text, shop, and more with no reported serious adverse effects after 12 months. [Emerging Tech Brew]

Kaboom cats: Nora chats with Elan Lee, game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens, a card game that became the most-backed project in Kickstarter history and has since sold over 11 million copies. Lee talks about how he and his co-founder turned a single piece of intellectual property into a multiplatform brand. [Business Casual]

Invisible finger syndrome: Be careful putting your phone face down on a table anywhere near the University of Florida. Researchers have developed a way to make screen-clicks on your phone through a table using electromagnetic interference from an antenna to mimic a touch from a finger. Maybe pick a password more complicated than 1-2-3-4! [IT Brew]

Don’t listen to Mark Zuckerberg (ever). Don’t move fast and break things. The MFABT ethos epitomized Facebook in the early days, and was a way to justify taking big, audacious swings regardless of collateral damage, which meant it…broke a lot of things. And when it comes to protecting your company’s assets, moving fast and breaking things is a really, really bad idea, experts say. [CFO Brew]

The best thing we read this week: The iconoclastic film studio A24 has bred superfans, dropped swag, and perfected a unique house style. It’s also teetering on the verge of self-parody, and New York Magazine’s in-depth look at the studio explains the hows and whys. Read it and then watch Bodies, Bodies, Bodies anyway. [New York Magazine]

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—Amanda Hoover