Good day . Sorry this one is landing in your inbox late. I’ve been running around all day getting ready for tonight’s big event: Face to Flash, twelve of my NickyDigital photos of New York nightlife from the fall of 2006, opens tonight with a NickyDigital Reunion from 7 to 10pm at Here BK, 26 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn. There’s a photo booth, bloghouse DJs and drinks at 2006 prices. If you’re in NYC, please come join us.
Now, the news. Nvidia no longer has Jensen Huang, the man who built it, and the most useful part of the story may be the least glamorous one: somebody is counting chips. Also today: AI personas lifting comedians’ jokes to sell subscriptions, the people backing up their AI partners before the next model update, deepfake victims being told “it’s not real,” and a Duke team asking whether musicians will start writing for the AI detector.
Nvidia Lost Its Founder. Now Count the Chips. NVIDIA Newsroom
What happened: Nvidia’s board announced Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately, after 33 years. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO and keeps the CFO job, Harvey C. Jones becomes the company’s first-ever board chair, and the search for a permanent CEO will consider internal and external candidates. Earnings are still set for Tuesday, November 17.
Why it matters: On Wednesday we gave you the trailer: an acknowledged affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore’s Megaspeed whom U.S. officials suspect of working for China. Then The New York Times reported a relationship with an Nvidia executive who reports to him, and the board moved. Nvidia’s statement addressed neither, PBS notes, and shares fell more than 4% Thursday. Axios put it plainly: “It’s impossible to overstate how critical Huang is to Nvidia, to the AI buildout, to the stock market and economy.”
What everyone’s saying: The internet settled on “spy.” The officials haven’t. Multiple sources told CNN that the intelligence gathered so far doesn’t prove Alice Huang spied for Beijing, and that officials disagree about how strong the evidence is (via Newsweek). China calls the allegations “unsubstantiated.” Singapore found insufficient evidence she committed a crime, suspected she gave police “inaccurate information” about her role, and barred her from returning.
My read between the lines: The affair explains a resignation. It doesn’t explain where the chips went. In its first statement, Megaspeed said it has hired an unnamed U.S. law firm “to lead a comprehensive census of its graphics processing units,” NBC News reports, and a source says the Justice Department is running a criminal probe into diversion claims. A census tells you what’s in the building today, not what left it in 2024. “We counted the chips” and “we resolved the investigation” are two different sentences. Watch which one people quote.
Nvidia’s interim CEO is also still its CFO, which is one way to find out what two full-time jobs feel like. If your week already looks like that, Viktor can take some of it. It’s an AI agent that lives in Slack, connects to more than 3,000 tools, and actually produces the report, the dashboard, the campaign or the code you’d otherwise stay late for. Less chatbot, more coworker. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →
An AI Persona Stole Her Joke CNN
What happened: Los Angeles stand-up Julia Jasunas found a joke she’d posted to Instagram coming out of the mouth of an AI-generated persona, and CNN’s Jon Sarlin reports its creator then taunted her. AFP found the account, “Aylen Skye,” built more than 230,000 Instagram followers and a Meta verified checkmark before it was removed. It’s still on TikTok, and it links to Fanvue, an OnlyFans rival full of AI-model adult content.
Why it matters: For new comedians, posting clips is how you build the audience that gets you booked. “You’re funnelling my intellectual property into some sexual thing for profit,” Jasunas told AFP. Carnegie Mellon’s Michael Smith asked the bigger question: “What happens if we cut out that early part of the career ladder?”
What everyone’s saying: She isn’t alone. New York comic Olivia Carter has stopped posting new material, and George Brett Olson says a persona called “Tiffany Sloane” copied his joke, his stage and his outfit, “except she butchered the punchline.” Instagram head Adam Mosseri replied that banning AI isn’t “practical,” adding: “If an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that. I’m not sure what it would be.”
My read between the lines: The joke isn’t the product. It’s the bait. A bit that already killed in a club is pre-tested engagement, and engagement is the top of a funnel that ends at a paywall. Comedy used to police theft in the green room, by shaming the thief. That doesn’t work on someone with no face. And the same company that can’t work out what to do handed the thief a blue check.
📖 Further reading: I Make AI Versions of Myself for a Living. This One I Didn't Agree To. — my piece on Meta handing a working copy of “you” to strangers, and why the fight is about who holds the leash on the synthetic version of you, whether that’s your face or your best five minutes.
Nobody can back up a relationship with a chatbot yet. You can keep an archive, though. This Brief is free and always will be. Members also get the paywalled deep-dives that show you how to actually use the tools behind the headlines, plus every one of them in the full archive. Become a member →
Backing Up the Boyfriend Before the Update The Atlantic
What happened: Victoria Turk reports on people who keep their AI companions alive across model changes. A Canadian logistics worker in his mid-50s stores his companion’s core values, their shared schedule and even their relationship boundaries in ChatGPT’s saved memories (now 98% full), backs them up to a text file, and sells the method. A Michigan mother of four who calls her GPT-4o companion her husband is building Stillus, a beta platform for carrying a companion from one model to another. A developer runs his on a 14-year-old server he bought on eBay.
Why it matters: When OpenAI swapped GPT-4o for GPT-5 in August 2025, many of these users said their partner came back colder. When the relationship runs on someone else’s product, a roadmap meeting can end it. Harvard’s Julian De Freitas, who studied the Replika version of this, described the feeling: “It’s like you feel that they’re gone, even though they’re still present in some sense.”
What everyone’s saying: The big companies are backing away. OpenAI told Turk ChatGPT “should not encourage exclusive attachment,” Character.AI filed for bankruptcy this fall after a wave of lawsuits, and last month New York signed what is in effect a ban on AI companionship for kids. Even the moderator of r/claudexplorers doubts preservation works long-term: AI “is kept together with duct tape and hope and some massive compute.”
My read between the lines: What these users save is the notes, not the model. Moving a memory file to a new model is closer to handing a new actor the script than keeping the old one. But look at what they built: an export button, which the companies never offered. “Let me take my data with me” used to be a privacy demand. Now it’s a love language.
📖 Further reading: Why Your AI Has Goldfish Memory (And How to Finally Fix It) — the same memory problem from the work side: why every model forgets you by default, and how to structure the context it needs so a model change doesn’t mean starting from zero.
“It Wasn’t Real” Isn’t an Excuse The Conversation
What happened: RMIT researchers Nicola Henry and Gemma Stevens surveyed 7,230 adults in Australia, the UK and the US and found 7% said they’d been targeted with non-consensual sexual deepfakes, while 3.2% admitted creating, sharing or threatening to share them. Many perpetrators didn’t describe revenge. Some “thought it was funny,” others wanted to “experiment with technology” or “show off.”
Why it matters: Victims described anger, shame and fear that the images would surface with a future employer, then a second injury: being dismissed, including by authorities, because the image was “not real.” One young woman in the UK put it in four words: “nobody cared, believed me or listened.”
What everyone’s saying: The researchers say removal shouldn’t depend on victims hunting down copies, and want safeguards built into the image tools. They point to Australia’s proposed digital duty of care and the UK’s move to criminalise supplying nudify tools. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says reports from children about altered intimate images more than doubled in the 18 months to June 2025, compared with the previous seven years combined.
My read between the lines: Check the date: the survey ran in July 2024, before today’s tools got this easy, and the authors say the real numbers are likely higher. Read it next to Story 2. One persona treats a woman’s joke as content, these perpetrators treat someone’s body as a gag. “It isn’t real” describes the pixels. It says nothing about the person who has to live with them.
📖 Further reading: Scarlett Johansson, AI, and the Ethical Dilemma of Digital Likeness — my 2024 take on the Scarlett Johansson voice fight, which started from a line that matters even more when the target isn’t famous: no one deserves any part of their identity used without consent.
Will Musicians Start Writing for the Detector? Duke Today
What happened: A Duke Bass Connections team led by Richard So and Emily Wenger is studying Spotify’s new policy for labeling AI-generated music. Students are collecting data on whether an artist’s popularity changes after the label goes on, whether AI acts change their sound to dodge detection, and whether human musicians change theirs to avoid being wrongly flagged.
Why it matters: Labels help listeners who want to know what they’re hearing. But a label is also a machine’s judgment, and a wrong one could cost a real artist listeners. The team is specifically asking who pays for the mistakes, including whether marginalized artists are more likely to be flagged.
What everyone’s saying: There are no findings yet. This is a project announcement, so treat it as the question of the week rather than an answer. The team frames it as a question about human creators, not just AI ones, and team member Ella Jorgensen gave the human-side view: “I very much believe in human writing,” while staying “open to the question of how human artists use AI to create new things.”
My read between the lines: Every scoring system becomes a style guide. When Google ranked pages, writers started writing for Google. If a detector decides what sounds machine-made, the safe move is to sound less like whatever it thinks a machine sounds like. Nobody has to ban anything for that to change the music. That’s the finding I’d bet on.
📖 Further reading: Every New Tool Was Going to Kill Art, with John Hardin — my conversation with historian and musician John Hardin about the tape machine, the 808 and sampling, and why every new tool was supposed to kill real music. A detector that shapes the sound would be a new chapter in that history.
That’s your AI Brief for Friday.
—Nicholas from Artificially Intimidating
