Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - The AI vote

It’s a jarring political ad: Images of a Chinese attack on Taiwan lead into scenes of looted banks and armed soldiers enforcing martial law in San Francisco. A narrator insinuates it’s all happening on US President Joe Biden’s watch. Those visuals in a Republican National Committee spot aren’t real and the scenarios are clearly fictional. But thanks to artificial intelligence, they look pretty real. Within days of the ad appearing online in April, Representative Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, introduced legislation to require disclosure of AI-produced content in political advertisements. “This is going too far,” she said. In the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, her bill is going nowhere. But it illustrates the degree to which AI’s rapid advance has put Washington on the back foot. And the 2024 election is less than 16 months away. —David E. Rovella

Biden on Wednesday championed diplomatic breakthroughs at this week’s NATO summit while seeking to bolster his reelection prospects. With Russia’s war on Ukraine still raging 17 months on, the president warned that the fate of democracy would be determined by decisions made by the US and its allies in the coming years. Before leaders arrived at the gathering in Lithuania, Turkey suggested it wouldn’t move forward with Sweden’s application to join the alliance. By the time it was over, Turkey had retreated and Sweden’s accession was back on track. 

If you see the lovely green tint to the ocean these days as a pleasant reminder of your last Caribbean vacation, don’t. It’s yet another sign of the increasingly calamitous effects of global warming. From monstrous Canadian wildfires to aridification and deadly floods like those that struck the US Northeast, the greening of the seas is another bad sign.

Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images 

Goldman Sachs has embraced a new gameplan to avoid a third straight quarter of disappointing investors come earnings day. Breaking with its own long-standing convention, the bank’s executives are actively downplaying expectations.

US inflation sharply cooled last month, which is good news for consumers, the markets and the Fed. The CPI rose 3% in June from a year ago, the slowest rate in more than two years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report probably isn’t enough to stop the Federal Reserve from going ahead with a well-signaled interest rate hike this month, but it raises doubts about whether more hikes will be forthcoming.

At 3% last month, consumer-price inflation is now just one-third of the level it reached a year ago. And the details for June were also better than expected, with key measures of underlying inflation coming in below forecasts. “June’s soft CPI report comes at a pivotal moment, when the Fed is close to end of its hiking cycle,” says Bloomberg Economics. “It’s not only base effects working in favor of cooling inflation—the softening economy is also playing a role.”

Sad pandas. Google’s Bard chatbot will answer a question about how many pandas live in zoos, but ensuring the response is well-sourced and based on evidence falls to thousands of overworked contractors. They can make as little as $14 an hour and labor with minimal training under frenzied deadlines. They are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom. 

When Lee Cheol Bin realized he’d probably never recover the 210 million won ($163,000) deposit on his rental in Seoul when the lease expires, the 29-year-old was gripped with anxiety. “I couldn’t sleep at night or focus on work,” says Lee, who had taken out a loan to cover a portion of the deposit. He’s not alone: There’s a “jeonse” crisis in South Korea, one with tragic consequences for a nation where the high cost of shelter means its households are among the most indebted in the world. Police have said that at least five tenants who’d lost money died by suicide this year.

• Pakistan secures final IMF approval for a $3 billion bailout.
• Why private equity is chasing plumbers and lumber yards.
• Bloomberg Opinion: Why Nasdaq had to kneecap the Big Six.
• Bloomberg Opinion: In the US, it’s still about the economy—stupid.
• Bloomberg Opinion: The company that may upend EVs and isn’t Tesla.
• Shopify is telling workers how much their pointless meetings cost.
• Golf courses, wave pools and Gucci: the Greenwich of Brazil has it all.

For the last few years, Flying Dress Photo’s photographers on the Greek island of Santorini spent their summers capturing the same image over and over: tourists posing against a backdrop of whitewashed houses and blue domes while donning luxurious satin gowns with ultra-long trains. At an average of eight flying-dress photo shoots a day, each priced upwards of €550 ($605) per hour per person, this one small business—whose entire model is based on delivering a single type of highly Instagrammable vacation photo—can bring in almost a half-million dollars in sales in just four months.

Flying Dress Photo averages eight flying-dress photo shoots a day in the high season, starting at $605 per hour. Source: Flying Dress Photo

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