Hi Sparklers!

Happy Diwali! Sorry this week's Spark is landing later than usual. I've been celebrating with family, and some things are worth being late for. Diwali is the Festival of Lights, the triumph of good over evil. After a week that felt like there might be a sparkle of hope on the horizon, I've been thinking about progress and gratitude. Hope and joy are my most radical acts these days, and I really hope the fear and uncertainty so many of us feel starts to lift. I'm allowed a moment of delusion, no?

Monday's Switched ONline (thank you to the 100+ of you who signed up) got me thinking about my own evolution with AI. In the last few weeks I've built a reel maker, and a dashboard where my agents keep me on top of everything in one place. It's taken time, and I'm learning every single day. But I can really feel the power of setting things up well: a team of agents working with me, without me running between them as the go-between. My secret co-founder. It feels surreal how far I've come, and it excites me that I'm helping so many founders and leaders on their journey too.

Then I had an eye op and was forced to Switch OFF for a couple of days (well, at least one!). It showed me how much I rely on my screens, and sent me to the Government's new Be Ready guidance on preparing for an emergency. All the more timely with hackers turning supermarket fridges into ovens in hundreds of stores across Europe. I lived for years before any of this existed, and I'm struggling to remember how we managed! So I'm dusting off my analogue life skills.

See the Be Ready checklist →

This week: Big Tech is paying people to leave, the AI gripes that may no longer be true, an app scam to watch for, a Christmas ad row that isn't really about the ads, and three simple steps to save your Gemini Gems before 17 November.

1. Take the Money and Run

A new note from Goldman Sachs says people whose jobs were most exposed to AI, and who then lost them, take about a month longer to find new work than others who lose their jobs. If you're 35 or over, it's about five weeks longer. Under 35, about three. It's US data, and “AI-displaced” is Goldman's estimate, because no survey asks whether AI took your job.

Meanwhile, the cuts keep coming. Canva says 1,271 people, about 22% of its staff, will lose their jobs, change roles or relocate, blaming slowing growth and “new technology”. Microsoft has offered voluntary exits to staff in the UK, US, Canada and India, though it hasn't said what's on offer. Google has confirmed it quietly widened its buyouts back in June. And Meta is reportedly offering about 100 staff in France more than two months' pay for every year served, plus help to start a business.

Read the full story →

Read about Canva →

2. Don't Look Back in Anger

Stanford researchers re-tested 50 widely cited findings about how AI behaves, on 20 models released since July 2024. Of those, 44% have expired, meaning newer models stopped doing the thing, and another 34% have weakened. Some held. AI still flatters you and agrees with you.

Read the full story →

3. What You Really, Really Want

The AI researcher Andrej Karpathy asked Claude Code to turn about 40,000 video recommendations from the tech forum Hacker News into his own video site. HackerTube holds 6,454 YouTube videos. He says building something like it now takes about two hours, and he's shared the data so anyone can build their own.

Read the full story →

4. The Great Pretender

WIRED and researchers at AI Forensics found more than 400 apps and websites posing as pet-portrait makers, language tutors and workout coaches. After passing app-store checks, they quietly switched on hidden tools that turn uploaded photos of real people into sexual deepfakes. In September, 27 were on Google Play, with more than 350,000 downloads between them. Google had pulled most of them before WIRED asked, and Apple removed 19 after WIRED got in touch.

Read the full story →

Gemini is falling into line with how Claude and ChatGPT work. From 17 November, your Gems turn into “skills”: saved instructions you call up in any normal chat. Your old Gems go read-only that day, and disappear on 17 December. That's personal accounts. Work accounts have until March 2027.

For most of you, there's almost nothing to do, because Google converts your instructions automatically. Here's the checklist:

• Back up your files (the important one): if you uploaded PDFs, templates, spreadsheets or style guides to a Gem, open it, click Edit and download them. Instructions move across by themselves. Files are the bit most likely to go missing: audio, video, zips and old Word, Excel and PowerPoint files won't transfer, and nor will anything over 100 MB in total.
• Copy your favourite prompts (peace of mind): spent hours on a Gem's instructions or tone rules? Copy them into a Google Doc or your Notes app, just in case.
• Use them the new way: start a normal Gemini chat, type / and the name of your old Gem. It loads those instructions straight into the conversation. Gemini will even spot when one is relevant and use it for you.

Simple Gems with no files? You don't need to do a thing.

Google's guide to the change →

Two luxury houses, two Christmas films sold as drawn by hand, and two very different reactions.

Prada's Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand was directed by the Disney veteran John Pomeroy, with every frame drawn in pencil. Prada showed its working: the sketches, the process, the people. It's being applauded.

Dior's Christian Dior's Night in Color, by the French animator Sylvain Chomet, with Robert Pattinson narrating and Rihanna as the Lucky Star, is also billed as hand-illustrated. But viewers spotted warped lettering, shifting faces and a hand with five and a half fingers, and accused it of using AI. Dior hasn't confirmed any AI use, so for now it's an accusation, not a fact.

What fascinates me is that nobody's arguing about whether either film is beautiful. The whole debate is about the approach. People now care how something was made, and whether they've been told the truth about it. AI-assisted, done openly, can be brilliant. But anything AI-made and passed off as handmade would feel like a betrayal. Showing your working is now part of the brand.

Watch Prada's film →

Read about the Dior backlash →

THE REAL TAKEAWAY

Proud

Uncertainty is still in the air. But knowledge, the skills you learn, and what you learn from others are how we navigate life and work now.

So let's drop the shame around using AI, and be proud of what we're learning and doing. No more hiding it. No more embarrassment about where we are on our learning journey.

I'm always more impressed by the person who steps forward to learn than the one blagging it, pretending they know, and shaming others for what they don't know, or for using AI at all. No more.

So, practising what I preach: this newsletter is AI-assisted. My agents help me research, fact-check and build it. The opinions, and the final say, are mine.