Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley.

I'm Wired's director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer.

Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week,

including our scoop of how OpenAI just launched a social app dedicated completely to AI-generated videos.

I'm joined today by our senior culture editor, Manisha, Krishna.

Manisha, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Hi, Zoe.

Our first story is about the thing that I feel like our whole newsroom is talking about,

possibly the whole country is talking about. It's the government shut down. As of Wednesday this

week, the U.S. government has officially shut down, at least for now, and many federal workers are

being furloughed until the government reopens. Our colleague Victoria Elliott learned this week

that employees at the Small Business Administration, or SBA, received a template from HR with language for their

out-of-office email, and they were advised to blame Democrats. Of course they were. How explicit

was this template? Well, let me just read a little bit of it to you. So it says, quote,

I am out of office for the foreseeable future

because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal spending bill leading to our government

shutdown that is preventing the U.S. Small Business Administration from serving America's 36 million

small businesses. So pretty explicit, I guess is what I would say. Yeah. If I got that as an out of office, I'd be like, I'm not reading all that. Like, that's very wordy. It's petty. It's kind of funny, but it's also dark. It just feels like yet another example of how explicit the government is there's no semblance of even trying to like unite the country or the two parties anymore.

I know, like federal workers are supposed to be boring.

We're not supposed to be hearing these takes from them.

Yeah.

And one thing that Tori pointed out in the story was that this actually could violate the Hatch Act.

And that is a law that

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