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It’s been interesting to watch the current administration and its GOP backers contort themselves into logical pretzels to explain to Americans why their policies, which are clearly either steeped or tinged with racist elements, are not in fact racist. Immigration policies and practices that are conducted without such annoyances as due process are waved off as the mere enforcement of the law,...
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey just sent threatening letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, claiming their AI chatbots violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws. The crime? When asked to rank presidents on antisemitism, some of the AIs had the temerity to suggest Donald Trump might not be great on that front.
Yes, you read that right. A sitting state attorney general is using...
Bring your tech skills up to 21st-century snuff with the Modern Tech Skills Bundle. This 2,000+ class series combines subject areas that every aspiring tech pro needs to know to get ahead and stay ahead. Broken out into cybersecurity, AI and machine learning, and information technology and cloud computing, you’ll be able to zero in on specific courses for your current field and branch out into...
Like far too many states in the current Trump era, Oklahoma has also decided the Constitution is meaningless and that whatever the government wants, it can have. In this case, it means mandating every school classroom contain a Bible that must be “taught” from, as well as expanding the concept of “social studies” to include election and COVID conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his...
Have I mentioned lately that the U.S. no longer has functional federal consumer protection and corporate oversight thanks to Donald Trump? And how that should probably be more of a story across journalism?
Last fall you might recall that the FTC created a popular new rule that barred corporations from making it annoying or difficult to cancel subscriptions. This has been a problem online since...
I’ve been an MLB.TV evangelist for some time now. My deep love for the game of baseball has led me to subscribe to baseball’s streaming service, still probably the best in sports, for over a decade now. While the local blackouts are still a nuisance, I really do love the ability to stream almost any game live across my devices. But I really discovered one of the hidden gems of the service during...
It’s not every day you watch a company faceplant so theatrically in public, but Cloud Innovation’s latest stunt deserves a slow clap. Cloud Innovation, which you’d probably never heard of unless you’re neck-deep in African IP registry battles (stay tuned), just managed to make a legal play whose end result should be calling a lot more attention on its own legal actions and threats.
The move? They...
I recently sat through this hour-long interview between New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel. It was honestly a somewhat hypnotic experience for me. And on reflection, deeply disturbing.
Not because Thiel said anything overtly monstrous—quite the opposite. He was thoughtful, articulate, intellectually sophisticated. He demonstrated genuine insight into technological...
Grok Becomes ‘MechaHitler,’ Twitter Becomes X: How Centralized Tech Is Prone To Fascist Manipulation
This week, Elon Musk’s Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, responding with conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and for a brief period telling people to call it “MechaHitler.” The incident perfectly illustrates why Alex Komoroske’s manifesto about the dangers of centralized AI, which we ran less than a month ago, has been making waves. When a single person controls the dials on an...
Lawmakers seem to think they’re capable of solving every perceivable social media problem via legislation. Sometimes, the intents are pure but the execution is lacking. In many more cases — especially recently — the intent is to harm social media companies with legislation, all while pretending it’s about protecting “free speech” or the “children” or “stopping China” or whatever.
While this...