How 2024 made Elon Musk the world’s most powerful unelected man

Hello, and welcome to Techscape. I’ve been pondering screen-time and isolation after I suffered through a recent bout of Covid. Even a few days of seclusion coupled with lengthy, uninterrupted spates of staring at screens were enough to return me to the state of mind in which I spent most of 2020. I hope all of you reading have a wonderful winter and new year, filled with the opposite of that experience: family, friends, and cheery, in-person parties.Today in Techscape: We look back at the biggest tech story of 2024, Elon Musk, and at the Amazon workers strike in the US

ChatGPT search tool vulnerable to manipulation and deception, tests show

OpenAI’s ChatGPT search tool may be open to manipulation using hidden content, and can return malicious code from websites it searches, a Guardian investigation has found.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.OpenAI has made the search product available to paying customers and is encouraging users to make it their default search tool

Musk’s conflicts of interest as Trump adviser could benefit him, experts warn

Elon Musk’s position as Donald Trump’s co-chair of an advisory panel tasked with proposing huge cuts in spending and regulations has sparked criticism from legal experts and watchdogs who warn of conflicts of interest that could benefit the tech billionaire and other Trump backers.The fledgling panel has a sweeping mandate that Musk, the world’s richest man, proposed to Trump during the campaign as the tech mogul was pumping about $250m into a Pac to help Trump win the presidency.Soon after he won, Trump announced the panel’s creation, and Musk revealed it has an eye-popping goal of slashing $2tn in federal spending, or about 30% of the annual budget, which watchdogs and analysts say is unlikely without axing popular programs that benefit the public.The panel, dubbed the “department of government efficiency” (or Doge), is co-chaired by billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and is just getting going, but critics are raising alarms about potential conflicts of interest posed by Musk businesses including SpaceX, Tesla and X.Musk’s enterprises have billions of dollars in federal contracts with agencies such as the defense department and include some, like X and Tesla, that have been investigated and fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission

How far do Elon Musk and Reform UK share a political vision?

The get-together last week of Elon Musk, Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s treasurer, Nick Candy, was not just a gathering of Donald Trump fans. It was a meeting of minds.Immigration, culture wars and shrinking the public sector all feature highly on their political agendas, developed under the umbrella of Trump’s Maga vision.“We only have one more chance left to save the west and we can do great things together,” said Farage afterwards.It also revived speculation that Musk could donate as much as $100m (£80m) to Reform, even if there are signs that such a move may actually be opposed by voters

‘We’re figuring out cool ways of storytelling’: how TikTok is changing the way we watch musicals

When Jorge Rivera-Herrans released part of Epic: the Musical last Christmas, he managed to push Taylor Swift off the top of the US iTunes album charts. So there is a lot at stake when the final instalment of his musical retelling of the Odyssey is released on Christmas Day.Rivera-Herrans’s project has already been an extraordinary success, with more monthly listeners on Spotify (1.6m) than veterans such as Morrissey, Liam Gallagher, or the Sex Pistols, and 119m plays on the platform in the past 28 days alone.“I wanted to have sword fights and the ocean, and I wanted to have gods and monsters, and spells and love and lust and revenge,” he told the Observer

The god illusion: why the pope is so popular as a deepfake image

For the pope, it was the wrong kind of madonna.The pop legend, she of the 80’s anthem Like a Prayer, has stirred controversy in recent weeks by posting deepfake images on social media which show the pontiff embracing her. It has fanned the flames of a debate which is already raging over the creation of AI art in which Pope Francis plays a symbolic, and unwilling, role.The head of the Catholic church is used to being the subject of AI-generated fakery. One of the defining images of the AI boom was Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket