Pics du jour

🛬 Spirit Airlines is officially bankrupt. The debt-laden discount airline filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, following four years of consistent financial losses and a failed merger attempt with JetBlue. Spirit will still be in the sky, however: the airline will continue flying as normal during the bankruptcy process – which it expects to exit sometime in Q1 2025 – and will also continue to honor all tickets, credits, and loyalty points. The airline’s shares have fallen 90+% so far this year, and will soon be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange due to the bankruptcy filing.

🪙☝️ A live look at MicroStrategy Inc. The enterprise software maker, which updated its corporate strategy four years ago to include buying bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, recently acquired another $4.6 billion worth of the cryptocurrency, in its largest-ever single purchase. MicroStrategy is now the world’s largest institutional holder of bitcoin, with 331,200 coins purchased at an aggregate price of ~$16.5 billion – well below their current value of ~$30 billion. The company’s not-so-micro strategy has proven popular with investors; its stock is up ~460% year-to-date (for reference: bitcoin is up ~105% YTD).

🤖📜 In a blind test, readers prefer AI-generated poems to classics like Shakespeare. University of Pittsburgh researchers used ChatGPT 3.5 to generate poems in the style of famous authors like William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and more. They then gathered ~700 “non-expert poetry readers” to read a mixture of AI-generated and authentic poems and rate them across 14 qualities, from rhythm to imagery. Researchers found people who weren’t clued in about the poems’ origins gave higher ratings, on average, to those written by ChatGPT across every single category outside of “originality.”

Take the test yourself and see if you can spot the difference.