Cathie Wood falls for AI slop despite heavy OpenAI, Tempus bets

Cathie Wood, the Ark Invest CEO who heralded AI as “the most transformative technology in history” while investing millions of dollars in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, was seemingly duped this week into wishing an AI-generated child happy birthday.

Wood has previously denounced claims that AI is a “bubble,” and spent $16.2 million on Tempus AI stock last month. 

However, despite this, she was unable to spot “AI-slop” in the wild.

Wood sent birthday wishes to “Ava,” after seeing an image of the “girl” celebrating her fifth birthday with her father.

The accompanying caption reads, “I am all she has since her mom passed,” before encouraging users to wish her a happy birthday. 

Read more: Founder of ‘AI-slop’ game Catly has NFT history

Wood posted, “I can tell that you are full of joy and hope for an amazing life that will help transform the world. May God bless you and your Dad in a way that would make your Mom proud.”

The image’s warm colouring, blurred background, uncanny features, and baity caption all suggest it was made with an AI image generator. Additionally, the picture was uploaded by a self-proclaimed “visual artist” whose feed is a mixture of engagement bait and AI-generated pencil sketches. 

It eventually received multiple community notice disclaimers. The first warned, “This is a spam account using AI and other people’s pictures to gain attention and solicit purchases.”

The second, rather boldly, claimed, “We know the OP is a liar because they posted two different sobriety periods and they try to use rehab for sympathy points.”

Cathie Wood thinks BTC is going to $1.5M

Wood oversees a $7.8 billion exchange-traded fund and millions more across various investment vessels.

Figure AI and OpenAI represent 5.86% and 4.17% of Ark Invest’s $325 million venture fund holdings, respectively.

The fund has a median market cap of $2 billion, and allocates 7.43% of its holdings to SpaceX. 

Wood is also a big backer of crypto, and has significant investments in Coinbase. She once predicted that the price of bitcoin would hit $1.5 million by 2030.