This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. After a judge called out a law firm for citing fake cases in court documents, the attorneys admitted to AI “hallucinating” the cases. In a court order filed last week, Wyoming District Judge Kelly Rankin demanded…
Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. Elizabeth Hernandez found out about the decade-old murder from a flurry of tips sent to her newsroom in August last year. The tips were all reacting to a YouTube video…
A government website created by the Trump administration to “track government waste” has been left unupdated with a default WordPress sample page that includes language about an imaginary architecture firm. “Waste.gov: Tracking government waste,” the tagline for the website, archived here, says. The rest of the webpage, however, is about an imaginary architecture firm called…
This week we discuss a new Microsoft study that finds using generative AI is “atrophying” people’s cognition and critical thinking skills, the right’s war on Wikipedia, and, in the subscriber’s section, the idea of posting against fascism. Articles discussed: Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”Wikipedia Prepares for ‘Increase in Threats’ to…
Videos that use AI generated voices of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are gaining a massive number of views on TikTok, showing that the platform is also suffering from the onslaught of AI-generated slop that has flooded every corner of the internet. According to Alexios Mantzarlis in his Faked Up newsletter, 400 videos from…
This article was produced with support from WIRED. Last year, a joint investigation revealed that a Florida-based data broker, Datastream Group, was selling highly sensitive location data that tracked United States military and intelligence personnel overseas. However, at the time, the origin of that data remained unknown. Now, a letter sent to US senator Ron Wyden’s office…
On Tuesday, a judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Disease Control, and Food and Drug Administration to restore several of the webpages they removed following President Trump’s executive order attacking diversity, equity and inclusion. The health agencies have until 11:59 p.m. on February 11 to restore the pages to how…
Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin has sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking about his company’s role in directing traffic to apps that use artificial intelligence to generate nonconsensual nude images. Specifically, Durbin’s letter cites 404 Media’s reporting about Crushmate, a so-called “nudify” app that has repeatedly…
The Wikimedia Foundation is building new tools that it hopes will help Wikipedia editors stay anonymous in part to avoid harassment and legal threats as Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation ramp up their attacks on people who edit Wikipedia. Some of the tactics have been pioneered by Wikimedia in countries with authoritarian governments and…
A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.” “[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving…