For the past 40 years, Henry and Margaret Tanner have been crafting leather shoes by hand from their small workshop in Boca Raton, Florida. "No shortcuts, no cheap materials, just honest, top notch craftsmanship," Henry says in a YouTube advertisement for his business Tanner Shoes. Henry has been able to do all this despite his mangled, twisted hand. And poor Margaret only has three fingers, as you can see in this photo of the couple from their website. I discovered Tanner Shoes through a series of YouTube video ads. Having written about men's fashion for years, I was curious about these bespoke leather shoemakers.

It's been a busy month for Midjourney. This week, the generative AI startup released its sophisticated new video tool, V1, which lets users make short animated clips from images they generate or upload. The current version of Midjourney's AI video tool requires an image as a starting point; generating videos using text-only prompts is not supported. Midjourney did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Disney and Universal reiterated statements made by its executives about the lawsuit, including Disney's legal head Horacio Gutierrez alleging that Midjourney's output amounts to "piracy."

Relying on ChatGPT significantly affects critical thinking abilities, according to a new study. Researchers from MIT Media Lab, Wellesley College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design conducted a four-month study titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT" and found users of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's chatbot "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." This included the participants' decreased brain activity, a weaker sense of authorship, and inability to remember what they wrote -- which even continued when they weren't allowed to use an LLM. Anyone who uses ChatGPT for writing may have drawn similar conclusions; the point of using LLMs, after all, is to automate the work and outsource the critical thinking effort. But with this MIT study, there's now scientific evidence showing that relying on ChatGPT and other LLMs can impair memory and learning.

The BBC's legal threat has been made in a letter to Perplexity's boss Aravind Srinivas. The BBC also cited its research published earlier this year that found four popular AI chatbots - including Perplexity AI - were inaccurately summarising news stories, including some BBC content. Pointing to findings of significant issues with representation of BBC content in some Perplexity AI responses analysed, it said such output fell short of BBC Editorial Guidelines around the provision of impartial and accurate news. "It is therefore highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC's reputation with audiences - including UK licence fee payers who fund the BBC - and undermining their trust in the BBC," it added.

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss whether the US should join Israel's war on Iran, the tragic Minnesota assassinations and why US political violence is surging now, and the Supreme Court's unsurprising but willfully obtuse decision to uphold Tennessee's youth transgender care ban. Here are some notes and references from this week's show: Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman, and Dustin Volz for The Wall Street Journal (Exclusive): Israel Built Its Case for War With Iran on New Intelligence. The U.S. Didn't Buy It. Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times (Opinion): The Smart Way for Trump to End the Israel-Iran War Oren Cass for Understanding America (Substack): Is Israel the Ideal "America First" Ally? Warren P. Strobel, Alex Horton, and Abigail Hauslohner for the Washington Post: Navigating Iran crisis, Trump relies on experience over star power Amy Howe for SCOTUSblog: Court upholds Tennessee's ban on certain medical treatments for transgender minors Abbie VanSickle for The New York Times: Sotomayor Writes the Court'Abandons' Transgender Children to'Political Whims' Ella Lee for The Hill: Clarence Thomas urges courts to end deferring to'experts' on gender-affirming care Ian Millhiser for Vox: The Supreme Court's incoherent new attack on trans rights, explained Here are this week's chatters: Emily: A Family Matter by Claire Lynch; The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education by Justin Driver; A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland. John: Mary Cunningham for CBS News: Federal Reserve holds its benchmark interest rate steady at today's FOMC meeting; ABA Banking Journal: Fed's Powell says some areas of U.S. may be'uninsurable' in next decade David: Trip Gabriel for the New York Times: William Langewiesche, the'Steve McQueen of Journalism,' Dies at 70 For this week's Slate Plus bonus episode, Emily, John, and David discuss the exciting possibilities and likely limitations of using AI tools for historical research and writing.

"It's fun, easy, and beautiful," the company posted on X on Wednesday. This appears to be a dig at competing generative-AI video programs. Midjourney is still charging eight times more to produce a video than an image, and each job will produce four five-second videos. In a blog post on Midjourney's website, founder David Holz explained this and wrote that the prices will be hard to predict. The team will watch how V1 is used over the next month and adjust from there.

We did not proceed with the transaction to test Jessy's claims. While his casual attitude suggested he might have been a scammer, his ability to advertise on Meta and operate on Telegram highlights apparent loopholes that real gun dealers could exploit. When contacted, Meta told the BBC that the adverts we highlighted had been "automatically disabled in line with our policies", and that inclusion in its ad library "doesn't necessarily mean the ad is still live or visible". Telegram said that Jessy's account had been proactively removed for breaching its policies. A spokesperson added: "The sale of weapons is explicitly forbidden by Telegram's terms of service and is removed whenever discovered. Moderators empowered with custom AI and machine learning tools proactively monitor public parts of the platform and accept reports in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day, including the sale of weapons."

Sam Altman's comments are just the latest example of the leading figures in tech offering opinions on what their rivals are doing, with podcasts being a popular medium for these sometimes unflattering appraisals. On Joe Rogan's podcast in January, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg praised Apple's iPhone as "obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time." But he added the company had recently "been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things." However, that put down is as nothing compared to Mr Zuckerberg's stormy relationship with fellow tech titan Elon Musk, with the pair threatening to fight each other in a cage. Musk is also currently involved in a legal battle with Sam Altman over the founding of OpenAI.

Meta's Llama model has memorized Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone so well that it can reproduce verbatim excerpts from 42 percent of the book, according to a new study. Researchers from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University analyzed dozens of books from the now-infamous Books3 dataset, a collection of pirated books used to train Meta's Llama models. The study's authors say their findings could have major implications for AI companies facing similar lawsuits. Specifically, the study found that Llama 3.1 has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book so well that it can reproduce verbatim excerpts at least 50 percent of the time. Overall, Llama 3.1 could reproduce excerpts from 91 percent of the book, though not as consistently.

While AI could offer transformative benefits, without proper safeguards it could facilitate nuclear and biological threats and cause "potentially irreversible harms," a new report commissioned by California Governor Gavin Newsom has warned. "The opportunity to establish effective AI governance frameworks may not remain open indefinitely," says the report, which was published on June 17. Citing new evidence that AI can help users source nuclear-grade uranium and is on the cusp of letting novices create biological threats, it notes that the cost for inaction at this current moment could be "extremely high." The 53-page document stems from a working group established by Governor Newsom, in a state that has emerged as a central arena for AI legislation. With no comprehensive federal regulation on the horizon, state-level efforts to govern the technology have taken on outsized significance, particularly in California, which is home to many of the world's top AI companies.