What's the Focus

Since August, Japan's second-hand bookshops have been getting mysterious bulk orders, and more than 50 tonnes of books have been shipped to the US. Booksellers suspect AI companies are behind it. We also look at why young Chinese workers are asking whether a Golden Week holiday counts if they have to work weekends to make up for it. Then Joseph Gordon-Levitt questions why AI creation Tilly Norwood is called an actress when nobody calls Donald Duck an actor. Plus the Shortlist, our weekly round-up of what to watch.

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Stanford researchers say the human brain may really be two separate organs pushed together by evolution, so maybe we have always been in two minds. Donald Trump's latest financial disclosure shows 1,156 securities trades in July alone, which raises the question of how far a president should be kept from his own investments. Back home, the Fisheries Department is trying to work out whether piranhas are living in Klau Dam in Raub, and the fish they need to check was thrown away. Richard Bradbury, Roshan Kanesan and Frankie Lim run through the week's stories in What's The Focus.

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For years the question was whether AI would take our jobs. Now there's a site called RentAHuman.ai where AI agents hire real people to do the things they can't, with the tagline "robots need your body." We also look at ZuckOff, an app that scans for Bluetooth signals to warn you when there might be a pair of smart glasses recording nearby, and ask whether you have a right to know when the person across the table is wearing a camera. Then we come home to take a look at Pulau Tioman, newly named Asia's quietest island, and whether it can stay quiet now that everybody knows.

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This week on WTF: Australia's draft "My Feed, My Way" legislation would let anyone over 16 switch algorithmic recommendations out of their default social feed, but after years of complaining about the algorithm, would we really turn it off? Then, the CEO of AI legal software firm Spellbook is asking his staff to stop polishing their ideas with AI and send him the rough version instead, raising the question of whether AI has made it harder to tell good writing from good thinking. And back home, a viral Threads post claims one company required CEO approval for a new 80-sen pen, which raises a bigger question about when saving money starts costing more than it saves.

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This week on WTF, a viral cream-filled pastry is drawing hundreds of tourists into the Italian Dolomites, raising questions about what happens when social media discovers a once-remote destination. Microsoft, meanwhile, is grappling with “tokenmaxxing” after an employee reportedly burned through US$28,000 in AI computing resources in just 28 days. And closer to home, Malaysia is being warned to prepare for a potentially powerful El Niño and temperatures approaching 40°C. Are we ready for what happens when online trends, AI excess and extreme weather collide with the real world?

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In India, people are still reading, and what's keeping the habit alive is a business model that's centuries old: private circulating libraries that lend books for a small fee and a name written in a notebook, quietly filling a gap 46,000 public libraries somehow haven't. We also look at the rise of the emotional workout such as grief cycling, rage yoga, angry weightlifting, and why the research on whether any of it actually works is genuinely split. And closer to home, a pre-war house was demolished inside George Town's protected UNESCO zone back in March, which raises an awkward question about what a World Heritage listing is actually worth. Though when much of the architecture in question is colonial, deciding what deserves saving turns out to be less straightforward than it looks.

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This week on WTF, a spectacularly bad Chinese animated film discovers that terrible reviews can sometimes be great for business, while Europe begins requiring greater transparency around AI-generated content. Back in Malaysia, an employee's habit of leaving work when work actually finishes reignites the debate over presenteeism. And finally, American scientists facing the loss of research funding turn to an unlikely solution: posting "uncensored marmot content" on OnlyFans, raising around US$100,000 in the process.

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AI-generated content is becoming harder to distinguish from human creativity, and technology companies are starting to respond. Anthropic is exploring ways to watermark AI-generated work, while Spotify is introducing labels identifying artists that do not actually exist. Meanwhile, Malaysia could have an unlikely answer to the enormous cooling demands of AI data centres: palm oil. As artificial intelligence reshapes everything from schoolwork and music to physical infrastructure, are we finally starting to confront some of its stranger consequences?

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Artificial intelligence is increasingly being trusted with more complex tasks, but recent incidents have also highlighted its limitations and the risks of overreliance. This week, reports emerged that AI-generated research errors had found their way into reports published by major consulting firms, while South Korea is using virtual reality to help offenders experience crimes from their victims' perspective in an effort to build empathy. Closer to home, new survey data suggests Malaysians are gradually moving out of "crisis mode" as consumer confidence improves.

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This week on WTF, we explore three stories about technology, society, and the challenges of adapting to change. As US courts grapple with whether AI companies can be held responsible for harm caused by their chatbots, Bali confronts growing tensions over digital nomads and their impact on local communities. Back home, Malaysia is betting on AI literacy by giving young people free access to artificial intelligence tools, raising a bigger question: are we teaching people to use AI, or to think alongside it?

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