Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to go through additional security checks in the Alexa app.

The personality style will also not be available when Amazon Kids is enabled, Amazon says.

The new option joins others like Brief, Chill, and Sweet, launched last month.

When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa mobile app, you’re warned that the Sassy style uses explicit language, which is why it requires a security check. On iOS, this involved a Face ID scan.

The AI assistant explained its style to us like this: “The Sassy style is built on one premise: help first, judge always. Every answer comes wrapped in wit and a well-placed roast — it’ll answer your question; it’ll just make you feel something about it first. Expect reality checks delivered with charm, compliments that somehow sting, and warmth you didn’t see coming. Equal-opportunity irreverence, zero apologies. Honest, sharp, and funny — and somehow that’s more helpful than helpful.”

Alexa’s app also had warned that the style could contain “mature subject matter.”

However, further investigation discovered this is not Amazon’s version of something like Grok’s adult AI companions. The AI assistant said the new option won’t get into areas like explicit sexual content, hate speech, illegal activities, personal attacks, or anything that could cause harm to oneself or others.

The move is the latest example of how Amazon is trying to make Alexa+ more customizable, as it revamps the assistant for the generative AI era. By offering the assistant different personalities — including one positioned as more adult — Amazon is borrowing from a broader trend in AI, where companies have been experimenting with tone, style, and personas to make their assistants more engaging and personalized to the individual users’ choices.

Tesla is now an officially licensed utility in the United Kingdom, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The automotive and energy company recently received a license from the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, allowing it to sell electricity directly to households and commercial and industrial users.

The company has long dabbled in electricity markets. Its first pure energy products, the Powerwall and Powerpack, were introduced in 2015, but it wasn’t until a year later when Tesla merged with SolarCity that it started scaling the division rapidly. In 2022, the company launched Tesla Electric in Texas, which allowed it to sell electricity directly to customers. Powerwall owners can sell electrons from their batteries to participate in the company’s virtual power plant.

The new division, known as Tesla Energy Ventures, will compete with existing utilities in the U.K., including EDF, E.ON, and Octopus Energy. The competition with Octopus should prove particularly interesting. Since its founding in 2015, Octopus has become the country’s largest utility by focusing on slick software, renewable energy, and creative marketing. Sound familiar? 

Grammarly released a controversial feature last week that uses AI to simulate editorial feedback, making it seem like you’re getting a critique from novelist Stephen King, the late scientist Carl Sagan, or tech journalist Kara Swisher. But Grammarly did not get permission from the hundreds of experts it included in this feature, called “Expert Review,” to use their names.

One of the affected writers, journalist Julia Angwin, has filed a class action lawsuit against Superhuman, the parent company that owns Grammarly, arguing that the company violated the privacy and publicity rights of her and the other writers it impersonated. A class action lawsuit allows writers to join Angwin in her case.

“I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise,” Angwin said in a statement.

The situation is more than a little ironic — Angwin has spent her career leading investigations into tech companies’ impacts on privacy. Other critics of this kind of technology, like renowned AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, were also included in Grammarly’s “Expert Review.”

The “Expert Review” feature, available only to subscribers paying $144 a year, predictably fails to deliver on the promise of thoughtful feedback.

Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the tech newsletter Platformer and another person impersonated by Grammarly, fed one of his articles into the tool and got feedback from Grammarly’s approximation of tech journalist Kara Swisher. Grammarly’s imitation of Swisher produced “feedback” so generic that it raises the question of why the company would go through the rigmarole of using these writers’ likenesses in the first place.

Here is what Grammarly’s approximation of Kara Swisher told him: “Could you briefly compare how daily AI users versus AI skeptics articulate risk, creating a through-line readers can follow?”

Newton relayed the message from the AI approximation of Kara Swisher to the actual, real human being, Kara Swisher.

“You rapacious information and identity thieves better get ready for me to go full McConaughey on you,” Swisher texted Newton (referring to Grammarly). “Also, you suck.”

Grammarly has since disabled the “Expert Review” feature, according to a LinkedIn post by Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra. While Mehrotra offered an apology, he continued to defend the idea of the feature.

“Imagine your professor sharpening your essay, your sales leader reshaping a customer pitch, a thoughtful critic challenging your arguments, or a leading expert elevating your proposal,” he wrote. “For experts, this is a chance to build that same ubiquitous bond with users, much like Grammarly has.”