AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock Foundation. Last month, a company called the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database announced a new version of a product called Class-Shelf Plus. The software, which is used by school libraries to keep track of which books are in their catalog, added several new features including “AI-driven automation and…

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Why Is a Government Contractor Trying to Buy iPhone Hacking Tech From Us?

On January 24 we received a pretty unusual email. The sender, a procurement officer from government contractor Cirrus Systems, wanted to buy multiple licenses for Graykey, the iPhone and Android hacking technology widely used by U.S. law enforcement and agencies.  “Hello sales Team, I hope this email finds you well,” the email started. “I would…

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Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead

In October of 2023, Marc Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published the “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” arguing that human ingenuity has been stagnated and demoralized by regulation, and that the only viable path forward for society is the accelerated development and adoption of new technologies, and specifically artificial intelligence. …

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‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes

Meta employees are furious with the company’s newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness,” according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content…

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A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On

Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research…

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GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time

You can see the specific steps that a government agency is taking to comply with the Trump administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion on the agency’s GitHub, which shows it frantically deleting and editing various documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings across everything the agency touches.  18F is a much-hyped government agency…

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Podcast: OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli AI Is ‘An Insult to Life Itself’

Jason, Sam, and Emanuel talk about Miyazaki being turned into a meme, the guys suing OnlyFans after being surprised to learn they were not actually talking to models, and the depravity of “brainrot” AI. Articles discussed: Hayao Miyazaki, Who Said AI Is ‘Insult to Life Itself,” Reduced to AI-Generated Meme by OpenAIOnlyFans Sued After Two…

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Analyst: Custom AI Chips Market Can ‘Outgrow’ NVIDIA (NVDA)

We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks Everyone is Talking About These Days. In this article, we are going to take a look at where NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stands against other AI stocks everyone is talking about these days. President Donald Trump’s $500 billion investment plan to build AI infrastructure, Stargate, is making…

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