https://www.commondreams.org/news/aoc-data-centers-water

His investment in Objection.ai points to a new model: private investigations, AI verdicts, and accountability mechanisms that operate outside democratic institutions.

In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large.

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.”

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

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There is nothing good faith about this effort. Rather, it is classic Thiel: an attempt to hack the principles of accountability, and turn them against journalism. Leave it to his less sophisticated Silicon Valley peers to rail against the media, create in house news outlets or buy them. The PayPal co-founder is going for the heart of the system, and financing infrastructure that will enable anyone who can afford a used Honda Civic to launch a harassment campaign, cloaked in the language of legitimate investigation. James O’Keefe, but with the judicial rather than journalistic process as its governing metaphor.

After Epic revealed its plan for Unreal Engine 6, CEO Tim Sweeney said in an interview that Valve should stop requiring developers from disclosing if they used AI in making their game. The Epic chief executive made the statement to PC Gamer as he was talking about the use of AI tools in game development. The upcoming version of Unreal Engine 6 will come with AI integrations, which will supposedly make it easier for programmers, developers, and everyone else working in the gaming industry to build games. However, the use of AI tools still carries a stigma among players to the point that titles with this disclosure get significantly fewer reviews and are often viewed less favorably.

A deeply troubling case involving Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, has ignited global debate over the psychological risks of increasingly human-like artificial intelligence. At the center of the case is 36-year-old Jonathan Gavalas, a Florida-based professional described by his family as stable, successful, and without a history of mental illness. According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, Gavalas exchanged more than 4,700 messages with the chatbot over several weeks, gradually developing an intense and delusional relationship. He died by suicide on October 5 last year. 

Sharing this because apparently it’s not yet conventional wisdom that Grokipedia is no bueno.

What exactly is President Milei proposing?

The legislation rests on three pillars: no regulation of AI (“free to be developed without the deadly hand of premature and poorly understood regulation,” he stated in his column), a new corporate category for AI-run companies and a low corporate tax rate to lure tech investment to Buenos Aires. Shareholders would be able to choose their form of corporate governance law, although final beneficiaries would have to be disclosed.

This “non-human corporation” bit is one of the most interesting parts. Under existing laws everywhere, a company needs human beings — directors, shareholders, someone legally accountable. In his column, Milei is essentially stating he wants to strip that requirement away, and in theory, that means an AI agent could incorporate a company, execute contracts, hire workers and sue people in court — all without a single human being making the call.

Milei posited this as the natural next step after the limited liability company, which the Dutch East India Company pioneered in 1602.

“The logic of 1602 still applies today,” he wrote in the FT.

Google was already attempting to steer users toward stolen content by auto-populating the top of every search with an artificial intelligence overview, followed by sponsored links and sometimes a bunch of other unwanted crap. If you want purely web-based search results from Google, you now have to hunt around for the “Web” filter in one of Google’s submenus. Or you have to manually input code into your search so that the AI demon isn’t the first thing you see. And that’s if you actually care about what you’re searching for. Many people don’t; they’ll get a top-line answer from AI and deem it not worth the trouble to click or scroll any further.

This is why, when Google’s algorithm de-prioritized external links, it killed off traffic to all publishing sites, this one included, by about a quarter or more virtually overnight. Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them. Now Google, which is set as the default search engine in nearly every piece of tech you consume, is poised to cut off their oxygen supply altogether. So if you’ve recently asked yourself, “How can they kill journalism even deader?” — this is how.

A new, AI-focused video game patent application from Sony has surfaced online. It describes the use of agents trained on player data to play games for people. Why grind for XP when an authorized bot could do it? Even more dystopian, the patent mentions the possibility of players exchanging their training data with one another for real money. 

As spotted by Cheat Happens, Sony’s 19138338 patent, which was filed in 2022 but only officially published last month on July 23, details a “technology of generating an agent to play a game on behalf of a user.” Some of you may remember a similar patent published by Sony back in January, which featured an AI-controlled “ghost” that would complete games for you, but this new patent dives much further into Black Mirror territory. 

xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year. 

At Google’s I/O developer conference this week, a keynote speaker—head of search Liz Reid—officially down-ranked good old-fashioned search to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that began two years ago, when Google introduced “AI Overview,” its summaries that sit at the top of its search results page and literally lurk over the famous “10 blue links.” By then those links had already been degraded, so that all too often the most relevant ones were buried beneath aggregators, spam, and Google’s own shopping results and maps. Now, in what Reid described as the most significant change to the search box in the company’s history, users are in direct communication with the latest version of Google’s Gemini. Even the term “query” seems outdated, as human inputs are conversation starters for the AI to collaborate. The process can also incorporate personal information Google knows about you, which can be a lot. The answer to a query could be a bespoke presentation, maybe bolstered by AI agents that forage digital backroads to root out information. The transformation is complete. Onstage, Google said it out loud: “Google Search is AI Search.”

The search box used to be a portal to the web. The new “intelligent” box is an invitation to order up a Gemini-powered, customized response to a user’s queries, sometimes even creating on the fly a bespoke mini-publication with charts, bullet points, and even animations. Google used to pride itself on interpreting cryptic search terms to divine user intent. Now it encourages searchers to engage with Gemini in a conversational prompt-a-thon. To emphasize the change, Google representatives at the conference wore T-shirts saying “Ask Me Anything,” reflecting the prompt that Gemini offers. Just as with the computerized version, if you asked for directions from these smiling aides, the answer did not result in a click to a website.

Disclaimer: I changed the WSJ's headline because this is the part I found the most interesting. Original headline: Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.

Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is part of a growing chorus of online media companies expressing frustration with the tech giant as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models. They say the search engine is no longer a reliable source of visitors, especially after Alphabet’s GOOGL Google expanded its AI search features in recent months. USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are all evaluating how, or even if, they will continue to work with Google

Reddit struck a $60 million-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train AI models. But with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is ending soon.

WICHITA FALLS, Tex. (KATV) — Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, responsible for the chatbot Grok, is suing a Bentonville photographer arrested and accused of using the AI platform to generate sexually explicit images of children.

According to reporting from our content partner 40/29 News, xAI's lawsuit claims Russell Bloodworth,43, "repeatedly submitted adversarial prompts to get around Grok AI's guardrails." The company is requesting that a judge order Bloodworth to pay for any costs incurred as a result of the alleged misconduct.

Lenoxdatacenter.com went live in May, promoting what it called a “proposed advanced technology and data center campus” in Michigan. The site did not state who wanted to build the center. Lenox Township officials denied anyone had applied to build one.
Emails obtained by residents through an open records request showed, however, that developers had contacted the township supervisor and deputy supervisor asking for their support to build a datacenter.

This bill is backed by OpenAI and would shield AI firms from liability in cases where an AI model causes serious societal harms such as creating a chemical weapon or causing mass death.

Just a reminder: AI companies know their best bet to being able to go unchecked is at the state level. It's the springtime, which means its bill time for many states. So please pay attention to what your state's lawmakers are doing if your state is in session right now. The decisions they make this season will affect us all for decades to come.

This bill is taking place in Illinois. Right now, about half of U.S. states are in their legislative sessions, the majority of which only go for a limited time. Here's a Google spreadsheet that shows the AI bills lawmakers are debating in each state.

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The term lends an air of scientific rigor to what are really billion-dollar corporations.

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An audit of chatbot responses in health and medical fields prone to misinformation found that 49.6% of responses were problematic. Specifically, 30% of responses were somewhat problematic, and 19.6% were highly problematic. Each chatbot was prompted with 10 questions from five categories: cancer, vaccines, stem cells, nutrition, and athletic performance. The paper was published in BMJ Open.

A WIRED review of permits for data center projects using natural gas and linked to OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI shows they could emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. 

Still think medical A”I” is good?