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America’s next great riverfront park has just opened in Detroit. Covering 22 acres along the Detroit River, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park is the latest high-profile project to open in a troubled city now on a much-touted rebound. With an $80 million budget buying world class design from two highly regarded firms, it’s a major investment in the city’s public realm. And though a massive embezzlement scandal nearly derailed the project in 2024, the park is now open to the public. Designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Detroit’s new riverfront park is a multidimensional destination intended to draw people from across the region and the age spectrum. Its postcard highlights are specially designed animal-themed playgrounds, a cityscape-framing allée of cherry trees, a covered basketball pavilion designed by Adjaye Associates, and, most uniquely, a two-acre lagoon fed by the river that gives visitors the rare opportunity to come up close and touch the water. The project was led by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, a nonprofit established in 2003 to reconnect the city with a formerly industrial riverfront that had devolved into abandonment and contamination. In the decades since, the organization has invested more than $300 million building out riverfront parks, public spaces, and a nearly 5.5-mile continuous riverwalk along the water. The site of Ralph C. Wilson Park, just west of downtown, had been an underutilized green space for years but suffered by being cut off from its surroundings by a railyard and a derelict parking lot. Walking through the park a few weeks before its official opening, Detroit Riverfront Conservancy CEO Ryan Sullivan can’t help but marvel at the transformation. The formerly pancake-flat site had a short life as a public park before construction began in 2022, but the space was barely loved. Before that, it had been a rail turning yard and later the site of the printing press for the Detroit Free Press newspaper. Building this new park required laying at least 18 inches of clean dirt on top of what was less than pristine ground. “It was really a blank slate to reimagine what a park could be in this space,” Sullivan says. The $80 million park was primarily funded by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, established by the late Detroit native and businessman who was the longtime owner of the Buffalo Bills NFL team. A companion park, also funded by the foundation, is currently being built in Buffalo. “Mr. Wilson was a lifelong Detroiter and he loved the city,” says James Tighe, senior director of parks and trails at the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation. “The desire was to make sure that this was representative of the community, but also that it was a world-class destination for the city and for all the residents in the region to enjoy.” [Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy] A direct connection to water Dodging workers laying down sod and construction equipment hauling some of the roughly 900 trees planted in the park, Sullivan and Tighe lead me down a pathway leading to one of the park’s main highlights: a striking playground built around the bowl of an artificial hill. Wooden and metal playscapes inspired by Michigan wildlife, custom-designed by the renowned Danish playground designers Monstrum, rise on the hill’s rim and empty down into a central space. One of the structures, a giant bear holding up a metal tube slide, has become the de facto mascot of the park. Nearby, a splash pad area features mechanical waterworks that kids can use to pump and divert water down pathways and creek-like channels. Another playground, designed for young children, is a short meander away. “The playgrounds are something that we just lavished a lot of time and attention on,” says Michael Van Valkenburgh, who is for his work designing Brooklyn Bridge Park, Chicago’s converted railline park the 606, and the landscape around the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center. Van Valkenburgh says he’s had a soft spot for playground design since making it his focus in grad school. But he was also keen to make sure the park appealed to more than just kids. “We wanted the park to have things in it that the range of members of a family would need to have to go to the park and spend some serious time there,” he says. Working with the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, Van Valkenburgh’s firm engaged directly with 21 Detroiters throughout the design process to help shape the park and its offerings. Starting in 2018, these community members, known as the Community Action Team, worked directly with the designers and went on tours of notable parks in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. A clear takeaway from this involvement was the importance of the park as a waterfront experience. “People wanted to be around the water. They wanted more access to the water,” Sullivan says. “We live in one of the most water abundant places on planet Earth in terms of fresh water. Yet within the city of Detroit, there’s nowhere to actually touch and feel and interact with the water.” That inspired the idea of bringing river water directly into the park. Van Valkenburgh says the original concept was to create a kind of cove cut upstream from the river, where people could step into the water without fear of falling in and being pulled downstream. But water from the Detroit Rivertechnically a strait between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erieis beset by contamination from an active shipping channel and combined sewer overflows. Instead, the cove became a lagoon, with no direct human access to the river and a pump system that can be plugged up if contamination levels in the river become too high. Stepping onto the lagoon’s gravel beach, Sullivan points to the wildlife that hasalready made the lagoon and its small internal islands home. Geese pad by and cormorants can be seen poking their heads into the water nearby. Turtles, crawfish, and even a mink have been seen on site. “No confirmed fish sightings yet, but I’m waiting on that,” Sullivan says. The lagoon was given enough depth for any eventual fish populations to survive during winters, when the surface is likely to freeze over. Officials are hopeful this could one day create another recreational attraction in the park: ice skating. “That’s a future opportunity,” Sullivan says. [Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy] A park for all seasons For now, the park has plenty else to offer, including a large covered pavilion that holds two NBA-sized basketball courts and space for other programming, as well as a constructed hill that offers panoramic views upstream of the downtown skyline and downstream of the Ambassador Bridge and soon-to-open Gordie Howe International Bridge beyond. The hill also serves as space for winter sledding in a largely flat city. Making the park work in all seasons was a priority for the designers, and for the community. Van Valkenburgh, who grew up in upstate New York and remembers five foot snow storms, giving kids a place to experience the fun of a white winter was natural. But he also worked to make the park’s design celebrate the unofficial holiday of winter’s end. Cutting across much of the park is a long, straight walkway with views of downtown and the two bridges, and the designers chose to line this walkway with dozens of flowering cherry trees. “No matter how much you love winter, it sucks by the end. It just sucks. It’s like, enough. I love you, but I’m sick of you,” Van Valkenburgh says. “We wanted that explosion of spring.” One unfortunate but unavoidable element in the park is the existence of a hulking concrete ventilation tower near the center. It’s the above-ground infrastructure of a freight rail tunnel running under the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. Standing about five stories tall, it’s an awkward inclusion in an otherwise refined space. But in a way it does help connect the park to its surroundings. It heightens the fact that the park sits adjacent to a rails-to-trails conversion project called the Southwest Greenway, which also connects to the Joe Louis Greenway, a 27-mile loop of trails being built around the city. The park has one other scar. The park’s construction began in 2022 and was moving forward steadily until news broke in mid-2024 that the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy’s chief financial officer, William A. Smith, had embezzled more than $40 million from the organization over the previous 11 years. (In April, Smith was sentenced to 19 years in prison and ordered to pay roughly $48 million in restitution.) The revelation was a black eye for the Conservancy and threatened to derail the park project. But according to Tighe, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation was committed to seeing the project through. Within a week of the news, the foundation issued an emergency grant to the conservancy to ensure work continued on schedule for the October 2025 opening. “It was a long year,” Tighe says. With the park now complete, and an endowment created to supports its ongoing maintenance, the financial scare from the embezzlement may soon just be a bad memory. For most park visitors, walking just feet from the Detroit River or rushing down one of its slides, there will be no visual clue that all this had the potential of collapsing. “It’s really a miracle when you look around,” Sullivan says.
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E-Commerce
Amazon is well aware that youre spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for thatand we have to admit, its pretty helpful. Help me decide is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most interested in. Designed to cut down on shopper indecision and usher users straight to the checkout cart, the feature is a smart move for Amazon, and it might make holiday shopping a bit less tortuous for customers. As the worlds most popular online retail site continues to roll out new AI features, its serving as a proving ground for how AI is radically reshaping online shopping as we know it. How to use Amazon’s new “Help me decide” feature To try out Help me decide, you can either navigate to the Keep shopping for tab on the Amazon homepage, or just click on a bunch of related products until you see a black pop-up with a sparkle icon. From there, the tool will select the product that it deems best of your recently viewed based on customer reviews, your personal product criteria, and prices and return rates. Its selection includes an AI-generated summary of why you should commit to its choice, highlighting the most relevant product features and including one stand-out review of the item. At the bottom of the screen, you can also toggle to two other suggestions: one budget pick, on the lower end of the price spectrum, and one upgrade pick, if youre inclined to get spendy. “Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after youve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision, Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon, said in a press release. I gave the tool a try after spending the past several days window shopping for cat trees that are definitely outside my budget. True to its description, Help me decide picked a tree in the middle of the price range (still $99.98), describing it as the ultimate choice for your furry friends indoor adventure. The summary went on to describe the trees impressive 70-inch height, spacious hammock, and removable top perch that ensures easy cleaning. Despite the flowery language used in the AI summaries, I found the tool generally helpful and easy to use. How AI is changing online shopping The Help me decide add-on is the latest in a growing bevy of AI shopping features from Amazon. These include the companys AI shopping assistant, Rufus; an Interests feature that tracks personalized shopping categories; and AI-generated review highlights that give top notes on customer reactions to products. Over the past several months, brands including Ralph Lauren and Pinterest have invested in their own AI tools to drive online shopping. Walmart and Sams Club have partnered with OpenAI to allow customers to shop from within the chatbot. And the AI-powered app Daydream is purpose-built to help users find the perfect outfits. In a recent Adobe Analytics study on holiday shopping behaviors, the company shared that 2024 was the first time it noticed a measurable surge in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites before the holidays. Now, its expecting a major escalation of that trend, estimating that holiday AI traffic to retail sites will rise by 520% in 2025. AI is quietly rewiring the way we shopboth in subtle ways, like by improving product recommendations, and in more direct ways, like via AI chatbots that can literally shop on behalf of a user. It won’t be long until every part of the online shopping experience is guided, at least in some way, by a dedicated AI model.
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E-Commerce
The kinds of videos that do well on YouTube Shorts are depressingly predictable: cute cats, heated arguments, crazy stunts, and plenty of good old-fashioned shots of people suffering low-key injuries. The issue is that the real world produces only so many epic fails. And of the small number that do happen, even fewer are caught on video. Think of all the airplane passenger arguments and dropped wedding cakes that have gone untaped and unposted! Enter Sora. OpenAIs new video generator is hyperrealistic, and was clearly trained on billions of hours of short-form, vertical video. That makes it incredibly good at generating the kinds of short, grabby videos that pull in our attention and manipulate our emotions. How do I know? I used Sora to create an entirely fake YouTube channel, populated with AI-generated versions of the kinds of videos I see on YouTube Shorts and TikTok all the time. It took me about 30 minutes to build and it cost nothing. In less than a week, I have 21,400 views and counting. Lets dig in. Slop by the bucketful Getting access to OpenAIs Sora social network is hard. The platform launched as an invite-only app, and despite this hurdle quickly ballooned to more than 5 million active users. Its growing even faster than ChatGPT. Once youre into Sora, though, using Sora 2 (the actual video generation model behind it) is extremely easy. You just type in the concept for a video, and Sora 2 writes the script, generates about 11 seconds of very realistic vertical video, and even adds synchronized audio. The app struggles with beautiful, cinematic footage. In my early testing, Googles rival Veo 3.1which the tech behemoth launched to compete with Sora 2is much better at that. But where Sora 2 succeeds is in generating emotionally charged, short-form vertical videos. The model was likely built to drive the Sora social video network, and it shows. I decided to test the appeal of Sora 2s videos by moving them over to a traditional short-form video platform so they could compete in the real world against actual grabby, vertical clips. To that end, I opened up Sora 2 and started typing in ideas for emotionally heated videos at random. I quickly found that Sora 2 can work with either very detailed or very vague ideas. For one video, I used ChatGPT to write a detailed script for a complex scenario: a woman making a phone call in order to reconnect with her estranged mother. Sora 2s video nailed the task. From the subtle jump cuts to the swelling music (again, entirely AI-generated), its 11 seconds of surprisingly powerful micro-cinema. For other videos, I went much simpler, letting Sora 2 run with my basic prompt. The text two roommates have an argument, cellphone video yielded this: Entering A man mistakenly knocks over a giant, beautiful wedding cake and people are shocked, realistic cellphone video produced this gem, which is my favorite Sora video so far: In total, I created eight videos. Each one took about 60 seconds to generate. Using Sora 2 within the Sora app is currently free. Basically, the system generates AI slop by the bucketful. Your job is simply to give the model direction and scoop up its output. Cat fail arbitrage You can post your AI slop directly to Sora itself. But I wasnt content to stop there. Instead, I wanted to see how these videos would do in the real world. So I went over to YouTube and started uploading them to the platforms YouTube Shorts sectionbasically YouTubes clone of TikTok. Rather than starting a channel entirely from scratch, I used a neglected one where I had previously posted videos of my dog, Lance. It had no traffic to speak of, and only a handful of videos, mostly uploaded to share with friends and family members. The channel felt like an ideal blank slate; it wasnt entirely newI was worried that YouTube might flag and delete a fully new channel that started posting AI content right out of the gatebut hadnt been developed at all. I could thus test what would happen if an existing YouTuber suddenly started posting nothing but Soras delightful slop. I uploaded each of my new videos. Crucially, I didnt want to deceive anyone, so I left Soras prominent watermarks in place. I also fully disclosed that the videos are AI generated, using YouTubes Altered Content flag. It doesnt seem to have mattered. As I write this about a week later, my videos have already received 21,400 views. Poor little Lances best video had gotten only 2,600 views in the three years since I posted it. My top video from Sorathe one of the wedding cake fallingis at 12,000 views and counting. Containment is impossible AI-generated videos wouldnt be so much of a threat to the traditional social media landscape if they staye put. You could go to Sora for AI-generated fails, and TikTok or YouTube Shorts for the authentic ones. My experiment proves that this containment is unrealistic. Its shockingly easy to move videos from Sora to other vertical video platforms. And despite disclosures and watermarks, users seem to engage with the AI videos just as much as they would with real ones. Sora the social network is also a pared-down experience when it comes to running the Sora 2 model. In its new API, OpenAI provides developers with direct access to Sora 2, including customizable video lengths and aspect ratios. Videos generated through the API cost $0.10 per second. They have no distinguishable watermarks. It took me only about 20 minutes to code up an integration in Python, and I was creating fully automated AI slop for about $1 per video, at scale. All thats to say: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are about to be inundated with an unstoppable deluge of this stuff. YouTube tacitly admitted that when it introduced its Altered Content flag over a year ago. At the time, AI video was so janky and unusable that YouTubers were confused as to why anyone would need to disclose AI contents origins. Now we know. For consumers, the message is clear. From here on out, trust nothing that you see on vertical video apps. That amazing bottle flip or delightfully juicy neighbor fight clip may well have emerged not from real life, but from the endless slop bucket of Sora 2.
Category:
E-Commerce
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