Enterprises may be racing to adopt AI, but the challenges are coming into sharper focus as risks and real-world consequences surface.There are some weird, wild and very personal questions that businesses have to ask themselves — for instance, should customers be allowed to have deep or romantic relationships with company chatbots? What if you update your model and it erases someone’s digital companion? We’re also grappling today with broader questions about trust, security and AI. The internet has always been a place where people could deceive each other, but it has also historically been humans doing so. Now AI can generate overwhelming amounts of audio, video, images and text — accurate, inaccurate or twisted; real-seeming but entirely fabricated —  in the blink of an eye, and it can be spread by armies of bots. 

How is a human to tell reality from fiction? Well, a crisis means business opportunities, naturally, and people appear to be willing to engage more and even pay for digital spaces where they can trust their environment. So says PwC in a debut report on trust and safety in the digital landscape. On the depressing side, it seems entirely possible that the digital commons will end up bifurcated (or even more regionalized), with reliable information, content or art produced by actual humans, and highly moderated digital spaces available behind paywalls … and everything else awash in AI slop, brain rot and filth. However, we’re not quite there yet (I think?), and the internet has some staunch defenders still — don’t miss the piece below with the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare (one of the biggest defenders of the internet’s security, which just bolstered its position with the acquisition of enterprise AI cybersecurity start-up Pangea). The interview with Matthew Prince just may leave you slightly … optimistic? 

What else have we got for you today? Ongoing evidence that momentum around AI infrastructure and partnerships is a worldwide phenomenon. SK Telecom secured exclusive rights as OpenAI’s B2C partner in Korea and is rolling out a ChatGPT Plus promotion. Meanwhile, the U.K. is betting big on a new AI Growth Zone that is projected to draw £30 billion in investment and anchor Stargate UK’s next-generation AI hub alongside OpenAI and Nvidia. Enjoy your Friday read.