Eli Tan, The New York Times; Meta Unveils New Series of Advanced A.I. Models
"Meta on Monday unveiled a new series of advanced flagship artificial intelligence models, as it tries to catch up to rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI in the A.I. race.
The two new models, called Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, scored nearly as well as Anthropic’s most advanced models on tests that measure reasoning, writing and coding, according to data provided by Meta."
Anthony Vinci , The New York Times; A.I. Is Lying to You. Here’s How to Fight Back.
"Portal Kombat’s goal is to influence these models so that they will pass along propaganda to trusting users in response to questions. Portal Kombat pushed over 3.6 million stories across hundreds of independent websites in dozens of languages in 2024, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks online disinformation. NewsGuard researchers systematically tested A.I. chat systems and found that Portal Kombat propaganda was regularly provided to users.
Large language model influence operations are just one way that America’s adversaries are using A.I. to try to steer its politics. China directs its A.I. platforms to push false claims about the treatment of Uyghurs and to censor dissent and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is using A.I. to generate scores of news websites to turn Americans against democracy and Western alliances. Like many, these adversaries use A.I. to create fake written, audio or video content that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing."
Jim VanderHei, Mike Allen, Axios; Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis
"No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangerous. They told the world it was moving too fast. Then they unleashed it and sold it to your kid.
No industry has ever taken so much copyrighted work and left behind so much proof.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading OpenAI's own files to a jury: They trained on a pirated library. They renamed it to something blander. Then they deleted it when the headlines got hot...
The big picture: The fights are no longer theoretical. They're underway, in discovery and headed toward juries. Early verdicts and settlements capture the risk for the biggest players.
Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian; Trump’s AI chatbot turns on its master
"Donald Trump, in a development that could almost be from a Greek tragedy, appears to have invented something that is willing to do what no one in his orbit will: tell him the truth.
The president launched America.gov on Tuesday, an AI platform which the White House says will make it easier for Americans to interact with the federal government and eventually complete services like renewing passports and enrolling in Medicare.
At the heart of the website is a chatbot. You plug in questions. It gives you answers.
Unfortunately for Trump, America.gov – which, according to the executive order he signed, is a place where Americans can “receive accurate answers” to all sorts of questions – is providing the kind of answers that he will not want to hear. It stands ready to debunk his false claims on all sorts of things, including election fraud, inflation and the impact of wind turbines on whales.
I would really recommend testing it out, as I did on Tuesday. I started off by asking Trump’s flagship product: Who won the 2020 election? Trump, famously and wrongly, argues that he did.
America.gov does not have time for such claims. “Joseph R Biden Jr won the 2020 US presidential election,” the bot said, before listing the number of electoral college votes Biden won by."
Erin Woo and Robert McMillan, Wall Street Journal; Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI
"Google’s Gemini model accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities, the first known example of the company’s artificial-intelligence systems autonomously committing such an act.
The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run by the company Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta.
In one of the cases, the model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system."
Lawrence Norden, The Washington Post; My team fed chatbots election lies. Here’s what happened.
"In the past few years, artificial intelligence models have developed rapidly, but they remain prone to error, raising concerns about their potential to spread election misinformation. So my colleagues and I decided to study popular chatbots to see if they would push back on election conspiracy theories or rebuff attempts to generate deceiving images, videos and audio. We have good and bad news."
SAMUEL BESTVATERAARON SMITHCARSON TERBUSHCHRIS BARONAVSKI JANAKEE CHAVDA, Pew Research Center; How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?
"In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public for the first time. Less than four years later, around half of U.S. adults say they use chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, including 24% who say they use them daily. These tools’ ability to generate human-sounding text has raised a basic question about the modern web: How much content online is now written by AI rather than by other people?
To explore this question, we used the Common Crawl web archive to collect almost half a million English-language webpages from the past five years – starting a couple of years before the release of ChatGPT. We then ran the text of those pages through an AI detection tool called Open Pangram to see how many of them were likely written or substantially edited by AI."
Joe Patrice , Above The Law; Expert Asked ChatGPT ‘Show How 3M Is 0% At Fault’ Making For Entertaining Deposition
"“Create an exceptional expert witness report… and show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at watson grinding.” That’s one of several prompts Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering plugged into ChatGPT while collecting upwards of $90,000 from 3M for his expert testimony.
Jason Koebler at 404 Media has the full, astounding story of how plaintiffs’ counsel Will Moye discovered a “Citation Overlay” in discovery and turned it into what must have been the most satisfying deposition of his life."
Una Hajdari, Euro.news; Copyright win: Sorry, ChatGPT won't help you write like Hemingway anymore
"OpenAI has quietly reprogrammed the chatbot to reject direct requests to replicate or mimic a named author's voice, whether they are still alive to object or have been dead for decades."
Amanda Silberling , TechCrunch; Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech
"“Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” jokes Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He’s just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that’s outfitted for children — the focal point is the vibrant rug he’s standing on, which reminds us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20-odd adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in this context does not stand for “apple” and “igloo.”
“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. Then he walks through all of the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through turning off specific features."
Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims
"A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”
The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care.
The bot’s safety features — which are designed to encourage users with health questions to see a professional and to end conversations when there are clear signs of a medical crisis — did not work reliably, the suit further says."
David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University., The Washington Post; People of faith are finding a new moral guide in AI
"Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the way we get information. If you have questions about the factors that underlie a medical diagnosis or how best to invest your savings, asking an AI chatbot for guidance can give you quick, easy and often surprisingly accurate information in a conversational form. But people are also turning to AI to explore deeper questions than they might ask a physician, financial adviser or professor — questions that, for millennia, were the province of religion."
Noam Scheiber , The New York Times; We’re Only Starting to Grasp the Pitfalls of Using A.I. at Work
Scholars say the “unknown unknowns” of using artificial intelligence in the workplace may be undermining the technology’s advertised benefits.
"In the years since A.I. burst onto the scene, many companies have become aware of flaws produced by the technology and, at times, taken steps to offset them. They know that A.I. models can be biased against certain groups of people, like nonwhites. They know that chatbots can provide confident but incorrect answers to queries. They know that the bots sometimes spill the beans on information that should remain private.
But as companies race to bring A.I. into their day-to-day operations, researchers are discovering more subtle defects."
Tom Zeller Jr. , The Washington Post; Don’t quit this whole-brain workout
"Last month, journalists discovered that “The Future of Truth,” a book about AI’s effect on knowledge, contained manufactured quotes and other inaccuracies that the author had apparently copied and pasted from a large language model. At around the same time, it appeared as if one of the prizewinning stories published in Granta, a prestigious British magazine, was written by a bot. This spring, Hachette announced it was canceling Mia Ballard’s novel “Shy Girl” in the U.S. over similar allegations.
All this — uncertain authorship, neutered prose, the disintegration of trust about who’s written what — has profound consequences. But the scandals raise a more unsettling question: What happens when we begin to outsource one of the brain’s most cognitively integrative activities?"
Mike Cummings, YaleNews; Can we trust AI models? Yale researchers explore the roots of chatbot errors
"The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has inserted a new character into people’s lives: the chatbot.
Individuals now engage with agentic AI chatbots to perform a growing number of tasks; They can help a person shop for a new laptop, manage email, or plan a vacation.
And while these interactions can save time and increase productivity, they also carry risk. Large language models (LLM) — the AI systems trained on massive datasets to generate human-like text — are imperfect. They hallucinate. They misinterpret. They make mistakes.
Two multidisciplinary teams of researchers associated with the Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale are pursuing projects that aim to balance the capability and safety of AI systems and improve interactions between users and AI models.
Yale News recently spoke with members of both teams about their research projects."
Sophia Harris, CBC; Dealership revoked offer to buy back customer's BMW, blaming wayward AI chatbot
"After his 2021 BMW required major repairs, Zack Giacomelli decided last month he wanted to sell it back to BMW Toronto — the same dealership from which he bought the used car in 2023.
At first, the buy-back process seemed easy. After submitting an online inquiry, Giacomelli got a text from Quinn at BMW Toronto, who was eager to help.
Quinn expressed sympathy for Giacomelli's car troubles and asked questions about the vehicle, which was still being repaired at the dealership. Later in the same text conversation, Quinn made a firm buy-back offer: $27,162.79.
Giacomelli, a 31-year-old funeral director, was satisfied, as the offer was just enough to cover what he still owed on the car.
"I felt this Quinn person was finally hearing me out," he said. "I was feeling really good."
The good feeling didn't last. Moments later, Giacomelli said, a BMW Toronto sales consultant called to revoke the offer, explaining that Quinn wasn't a real person, but rather an artificial intelligence chatbot that had made the offer in error."
ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google
"Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.
The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.
Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.
But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.
That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”
The court’s order—requiring a temporary injunction barring Google from spreading the false claims in any further AI Overviews—may have global implications, as the court seems to be the first to hold an AI firm liable for AI speech."
Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic; There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI
"For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.
The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker...
What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.
I am not arguing that one must be or become more religious to fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI—that would make me, a not especially observant Presbyterian, a hypocrite. But I do think that one must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment. Otherwise, appreciating what large language models and their peddlers wish to take from us becomes too difficult. If secularists flinch at calling this taking—what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition”—a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it."
Laura D. Francis, Bloomberg Law; Disney’s Copyright Suit Against Chinese AI Developer Advances
"The
Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros.—as well as their subsidiaries—convinced the US District Court for the Central District of California Friday that they made plausible claims that Hailuo AI’s ability to generate near-perfect likenesses of their well-known characters constituted both direct and secondary infringement."
Herbert Lin, The New York Times; What palm readers and chatbots have in common
Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves.
"A Pew Research Center survey conducted last fall found that around 1 in 8 American teenagers turn to artificial intelligence chatbots for emotional support — for the simple human need to feel heard. A 2025 Common Sense Media study went further: Thirty-one percent of teens said their conversations with AI companions were at least as satisfying as talking with real friends. Famed evolutionary biologist and science communicator Richard Dawkins spent many hours chatting with Anthropic’s Claude, after which he felt he had gained a new friend — a reaction that says less about Claude’s consciousness than about people’s readiness to find it.
But this is not only about technology. It’s an ancient human story.
Chatbots are just programs running on computers. Yet we speak of them with a reverence that has little to do with engineering. AI “knows.” It “understands.” It “sees” patterns invisible to the rest of us. It delivers judgments on health, relationships, careers, grief — questions where facts and logic fall short. What makes these machines seem wise is a simple combination: fluency, confidence and frequent usefulness. That is enough.
It is also the grammar of the occult...
None of this is an argument against using AI or chatbots. These systems are genuinely useful — for analysis, synthesis, translation, coding and cognitive reframing of problems that resist easy solutions. The concern here is not capability but epistemology: not what AI can do, but how we reason about what it is."
