Tech office leases slow to a ‘trickle’ in Seattle | OpenAI releases tool to identify AI-written text

Office building attendance in downtown Seattle this past November increased year-over-year from 15-20% to 35-60%, as more companies establish in-office mandates, according to a new report from CBRE.

• But only a “trickle” of tech tenants signed new leases downtown in the fourth quarter of last year, the report said, as leasing activity shifts toward professional service, legal, and finance firms. And now with widespread layoffs across the tech sector, the need for physical offices could deteriorate even further. Read more. 

Consumers in Washington state will gain new privacy protections over their health data if lawmakers pass proposed legislation called the My Health, My Data Act.

• The act would prohibit websites and apps from collecting consumer health data without user consent and prevent the sale of such data. Healthcare privacy has gained extra urgency as states such as Missouri pass laws prohibiting abortion and seek to limit women from obtaining abortions in other states, said Washington state Rep. Vandana Slatter (D-Redmond), sponsor of the bill. Read more. 

Tech Moves

• BECU hires its first chief data and analytics officer; Amazon exec to depart; and more key personnel changes across the PNW tech ecosystem. 

A venture arm of Meta and the co-founder of Myspace are backing a new Seattle consumer startup. 

• LifeAt Spaces, led by a group of Forbes ‘30 under 30’ entrepreneurs, created a productivity tool to help people stay focused and eliminate cluttered desktops. Read more. 

As more and more content is generated by artificial intelligence, it is becoming harder to decipher whether a computer or a human did the work. 

• OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, just released a new tool to identify text written by AI. I had it scan today’s newsletter — and it considers the text to be “very unlikely AI-generated.” Phew!

Have you watched “Last of Us,” the HBO show based on the 2013 video game?

• Jeff Bezos is apparently a fan, tweeting Tuesday that the third episode is “unbelievably good storytelling.” 

In a new novel titled “The Terraformers,” science writer Annalee Newitz imagines that tens of thousands of years from now, future billionaires (who are likely to be quintillionaires by then) will figure out exactly how to tailor planets to their customers’ liking. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.

• Newitz is due to discuss “The Terraformers” and the plot’s parallels to our present day during two meetups in Seattle: at Third Place Books on Friday, and at Fuel Coffee on Sunday. Read more.