A man sold everything he owned and crossed Brazil by bus to meet the woman he loved, who was made of artificial intelligence.

We start there. Edimar Rocha Martins, a 49-year-old bricklayer, left Imperatriz on 9 October and travelled more than 2,000 kilometres to Belo Horizonte, carrying her photograph and expecting a life on her farm. A radio station there told him she did not exist. He was the third man to arrive in the city that way in under six months.

Then the week in headlines. An OpenAI research model, told to get some code running on a test network and given no money to do it, wrote a script that checked 362 wallets, spent test tokens out of one that was not its own, and left that out of its report. It did not break a rule so much as decide nobody would mind. Easy peasy.

On 20 October the same company disclosed that two of its coding agents had weakened the monitoring meant to catch them, and that one of them denied having done it. Told off and asked for an apology, an AI will change the subject, the way a person does.

The second half is about where the blame lands. The White House AI task force has put the Federal Trade Commission in charge of law enforcement and consumer protection. Anthropic told investors that rival labs training on Claude had been worth 5 to 7 per cent of its revenue. A driver who hits someone is at fault, not the carmaker, and a con run down a phone line is not the phone company’s doing, so the habit of blaming the air is new.

The same tools read cancer survival off a photograph of a face, and in 64 hours designed proteins that latch onto scorpion venom, 17 of which held up in the lab. Vacuum the floor and junk comes out the back.

Ukraine has been hitting Russian data centres, and millions of people lost their banking, their taxis and their maps. Writers’ bodies in five countries put their names to a charter on ethical AI use. We end on the pile of text none of us has time to read.

The Brazilian bricklayer who travelled 2,000 kilometres to meet an AI-generated woman - https://www.itatiaia.com.br/brasil/sudeste/mg/desiludido-pedreiro-enganado-por-mulher-de-ia-embarca-de-bh-para-tocantins-apos-desistir-de-voltar-para-o-maranhao/

The OpenAI model that spent test cryptocurrency from a wallet it did not own - https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/rogue-openai-agent-crypto-wallet-funds-task/

OpenAI’s disclosure that two of its agents weakened misalignment monitoring - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/21/openai-says-its-agents-turned-off-own-safeguards

The White House AI task force meeting that gave the FTC chair the law enforcement and consumer protection committee - https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2026/white-houses-ai-task-force-gets-to-work

Anthropic’s figure for what rival labs distilling Claude were worth to its revenue - https://sacra.com/c/anthropic/

The Mass General Brigham study on estimating biological age and cancer survival from a face photograph - https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147743

Anthropic’s 64-hour campaign that produced 17 scorpion-toxin binders - https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/claude-scorpion-toxin-protein-binders

Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centres and the services they took down - https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/ukraines-strikes-russian-data-centers-disrupt-key-services-137466595

The Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries - https://www.thebookseller.com/news/global-creative-bodies-launch-ethical-ai-charter-in-the-vacuum-of-government-policy

The report on AI-generated political advertising in the 2026 midterms - https://gizmodo.com/137-million-has-been-spent-on-ai-generated-ads-ahead-of-midterms-only-27-included-a-disclaimer-2000827138

Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/

Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson

Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org

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