According to Tech Digest, Oracle’s stock plunged more than 10% in after-hours trading after reporting quarterly revenue of $16.06 billion, missing Wall Street’s $16.21 billion expectation. The company’s overall revenue grew 14%, but its AI-focused Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) unit saw a massive 68% surge in sales. In other news, new UK police figures for 2024 reveal Snapchat was the most-used platform in reported child sexual exploitation and abuse offences, with 11,912 crimes linked to it, far ahead of Meta’s WhatsApp and Instagram. Separately, McDonald’s Netherlands pulled a 45-second Christmas ad created entirely with generative AI from its YouTube channel on December 9, just three days after posting it on December 6, following a significant online backlash.
Oracle’s AI Paradox
Here’s the thing about Oracle’s numbers: they’re a perfect snapshot of the current AI hype cycle. A 68% explosion in your AI cloud business is the kind of growth investors dream of. It’s the headline every CEO wants. But it still wasn’t enough. The market is so hyper-focused on pure cloud infrastructure giants like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud that even stellar performance in a niche can get drowned out by a slight overall miss. It seems like the narrative has shifted from “show us you’re in the AI game” to “show us you can dominate it at scale, right now.” Oracle’s model has always been different—deeply tied to its legacy database software and enterprise contracts. That’s a strength for stability, but maybe a weakness when everyone is chasing the next pure-play AI infrastructure winner. The timing is brutal, too. When there are whispers of an “AI bubble,” any sign of weakness gets punished mercilessly.
Snapchat’s Dark Side
Look, the Snapchat stat is horrifying, but is it surprising? The platform’s entire design—ephemeral messages, a focus on private communication and stories—creates a perfect storm for this kind of abuse. It’s built for intimacy and trust among friends, which predators exploit. The sheer scale of the gap between Snapchat’s 11,912 offences and the next platforms (WhatsApp at 1,870) is staggering. It basically screams that the problem isn’t just “social media” in general, but the specific features and safeguards, or lack thereof, on individual apps. Meta gets (rightfully) hauled over the coals constantly for its societal impact, but this data suggests a far more acute crisis is happening on Snapchat. The company has to be asking itself some very hard questions about default privacy settings, reporting tools, and how it proactively scans for this content. A 26% year-on-year increase in online child exploitation offences is a societal emergency.
McDonald’s AI Backfire
So McDonald’s thought using generative AI for a quirky, “disastrous Christmas” ad was a clever idea. It backfired spectacularly, and they had to pull it. I think this is a fascinating moment. It’s not about the AI being poorly executed, technically. The ad probably looked fine. The backlash is about the *perception* of using AI for creative work, especially from a giant corporation, during a time of year centered on human connection and tradition. People are increasingly skeptical of AI-generated content—it feels cheap, inauthentic, and even cynical. Turning off comments on the YouTube video was the first red flag; they knew it might be controversial. It’s a lesson for every marketing team: the “how” of your ad’s creation now matters as much as the “what.” In an era where authenticity is currency, outsourcing your Christmas spirit to a machine might just be the ultimate fail.
