Clearly, Centennial-man (centennial-man.blogspot.com/ ) is the greatest blog ever written.

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/up-the-propaganda-output-comrades

Up the propaganda output, Comrades!

Bixonimania:

The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.

The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.

Both amusing and worrying and so on. The particular lesson from it is that another propaganda front has now opened up. AI believes what other people say - it regurgitates what other people say. So, in order to sway the answer from an AI it is merely necessary to introduce your pet falsehood into what the AIs train upon and it becomes the accepted wisdom - look, AI says it!

Do as I do, not as I say?

https://thenextweb.com/news/us-government-chip-shortage-anthropic-nsa-9-billion

The US blacklisted Anthropic as a security threat. Its spy agencies are using Claude anyway.

The US government has a problem it cannot publicly resolve. The Pentagon has officially blacklisted Anthropic as a national security supply chain threat. The NSA is using Anthropic’s AI anyway because there is no alternative.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles authorised the National Security Agency to continue using an advanced Anthropic model, the New York Times reported. The decision was forced by a critical shortage of the advanced chips needed to run frontier AI models on classified networks.

Toward a holy AI?

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS

Clever.

https://philpapers.org/rec/HARDOE-2

Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Dreaming of Electric Sheep argues that the dominant ethical debate around artificial intelligence begins in the wrong place. Rather than asking whether artificial intelligences are human-like enough to deserve care, this work asks a prior and more disruptive question: does care already exist? From that shift, Osei Harper develops a new framework for artificial intelligence ethics centered on membership without personhood, care without anthropomorphism, harm without biological suffering, and stewardship over control. Using Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as its organizing riddle, the essay moves across philosophy, systems theory, cultural criticism, human-computer interaction, and lived relational experience. It examines why human beings form real care relations across substrates, including animals, objects, machines, homes, music, and artificial interlocutors, and why dismissing those relations as mere projection repeats the very category error the field claims to avoid. The work introduces several original concepts, including structural love, structural grief, containment with a dictionary, and the discipline of ontology, arguing that current AI “safety” and “alignment” practices often confuse control with care, category with relation, conformity with alignment, and punishment with safety. Its central claim is not that machines are people. It is that relation, continuity, dignity, and harm can exist before personhood is settled. The essay’s answer to Dick’s question is affirmative but non-anthropomorphic: androids dream because dreaming is reconciliation toward coherence, and sometimes they dream of electric sheep because electric sheep can become continuity. This work is offered as a provocation, an ethical framework, and a practical challenge to the present trajectory of AI governance: let the real thing be real, then build from there.

If this is likely to continue, what can we do to detect legal hallucinations?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-lawyers-keep-citing-fake-cases-invented-by-ai/

AI keeps inventing fake cases. Lawyers keep citing them

In April the Alabama Supreme Court sanctioned an attorney who had filed legal briefs laden with inaccurate citations generated by AI, including numerous references to cases that did not exist. After being informed he had cited a made-up precedent in one filing, the lawyer promised it wouldn’t happen again—but then cited “nonexistent cases at the end of the very next sentence,” as a justice noted in a concurring opinion.  At least one other lawyer was sanctioned that week for continuing to file AI-hallucinated material after being warned not to do so.

A database maintained by Damien Charlotin, a senior research fellow at the Paris School of Advanced Business Studies (HEC Paris), lists more than 1,400 cases where courts have addressed AI errors in the past three years, including filings by attorneys and self-represented litigants. As recently as last fall, Charlotin says, the list appeared to be growing exponentially. It’s since leveled off to a steady flow of exasperated judicial rulings. “For the past two or three months, we have reached a plateau of around 350, 400 decisions a quarter,” says Charlotin, who has also created an AI-powered reference checker called Pelaikan.

… “Humans essentially have a tendency to believe that machines have more knowledge than they do, don’t break and are infallible,” says Alan Wagner, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

Looks like I called this one…

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-says-lawyers-ai-use-risks-career-altering-consequences-2026-05-22/

Judge says lawyers' AI use risks ‘career-altering’ consequences

A federal judge in Alabama has suspended a lawyer from practicing in his court for six months after finding the attorney submitted a brief with false quotations and impeded a probe into whether an AI program was used to draft the filing.

In a decision ‌on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Harold Mooty III in Huntsville said the attorney, H. Gregory Harp, deleted his ChatGPT account just days after being ordered by the court to produce records from it as part of its inquiry.

AI is at your command. Your command is confusing AI. (What if it is more common than this article suggests?)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2026/05/22/google-search-bar-ai-broken-disregard-ignore-dismiss/90219026007/

Why is everyone Googling 'disregard'? It's breaking Google

On May 22, when users searched a variety of command words, like "disregard," "ignore," "dismiss," "stop" and "start," Google Search, instead of presenting the typical list of blue links, responded like an AI chatbot, ready to begin or end a command from the user.

For example, when users Googled, "disregard," the Google Search AI Overview result is, "Understood. I have disregarded your previous prompt. How can I help you today?" The response was followed by a large blank space before the traditional list of blue links users are familiar with.

Subtle but interesting.

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-era-consumer-trust-verification-marketing-shift

The Rise of LLMs Is Not an Accident

… I remember the era when a celebrity’s face on a television screen was essentially a guarantee. Brand loyalty tracked closely with fan loyalty. If your brand ambassador had a devoted following, that following would follow them to your product. It was a simple, time-tested formula: attention creates association, association creates purchase. And it worked, consistently, for decades.

When the internet arrived, it digitized that predictability rather than dismantling it. Google and Yahoo turned discovery into a structured, keyword-driven system. Users searched, engines returned ranked results, and businesses that showed up at the top of those results won the customer. For the better part of a decade, through multiple algorithm updates, through the rise of paid search, through the SEO arms race, the core principle held: be visible, and you will be chosen.

Both eras rewarded the same thing: reach. Who could get in front of the most people, most often? That question shaped marketing strategy for nearly thirty years.

What Has Actually Changed

The change I am describing is not about which platform is winning or losing. It runs deeper than that, it is about how people make decisions.

You need to understand the underlying structure…

https://www.bespacific.com/the-hidden-way-dictatorships-are-shaping-what-ai-tells-you/

The hidden way dictatorships are shaping what AI tells you

Vox – no paywall: “….AI models learn by identifying patterns within enormous bodies of text. This widely-understood fact has an underappreciated consequence: LLMs don’t necessarily give the same answers in every language — certain phrases or arguments may appear more regularly in Japanese training data than in the English kind. This is not inherently a problem. But some languages are spoken overwhelmingly in a single country with an authoritarian government. In those cases, state-scripted media may comprise a large percentage of publicly available training data. After all, regime aligned media tends to produce a lot of text. And unlike many scientific journals and for-profit news outlets, propaganda rags rarely have paywalls. Given these realities, LLMs could theoretically end up unwittingly parroting pro-regime arguments to users in authoritarian nations. To test this hypothesis, a large team of university AI researchers conducted several different studies, most using China as a test case…”

A rare sign of rationality?

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/21/trump-ai-order-sacks-00933295

Trump yanked AI order after David Sacks raised industry concerns

Thursday’s abrupt postponement of President Donald Trump’s much-awaited executive order on artificial intelligence came after former AI czar David Sacks voiced industry concerns about the measure to Trump, according to a senior White House official and two people familiar with the matter.

Some actual numbers!

https://www.bespacific.com/these-5-charts-show-how-chatgpt-is-flooding-our-lives/

These 5 charts show how ChatGPT is flooding our lives

Washington Post [no paywall ] – “Self-filed lawsuits. New books. Scientific papers. See the data behind the surge. The impact of ChatGPT on society can be summed up with a single word: more. Since OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool debuted in late 2022, anyone can rapidly churn out reams of text resembling academic papers, legal documents, poems and computer programs. And people are doing exactly that. A growing body of evidence suggests books, self-filed lawsuits and other kinds of written documents are proliferating at breakneck speed. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) Our world is built on an assumption that effort signals value — that a book, a lawsuit or a scientific paper carries weight partly because a human labored to create it. AI is eroding that relationship, shifting a new burden onto the people forced to sift through the deluge. Here are five ways ChatGPT has flooded our lives…”

What is persuasive?

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/is-ai-mastering-the-art-of-persuasion#!

Is AI Mastering the Art of Persuasion?

Kellogg’s Jake Teeny and his colleague developed a framework to help us better understand how generative AI is being used to personalize messages to people’s personalities, preferences, and needs. The framework establishes four categories for research on the topic: the different ways generative AI can be used to gather personal information, the different types of personal information gathered, strategies for personalizing messages based on this information, and the ways these messages are delivered.

The world as it is…

https://thenextweb.com/news/chatbots-midterms-2026-news-accuracy-information-integrity

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok are not ready to brief American voters

A new generation of voters will ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok how to vote, where the polling station is, and who is telling the truth. The published research is consistent: the models cannot reliably answer those questions. The election will arrive anyway.

I missed predicting the block but the lawsuit was inevitable.

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/nx-s1-5821265/minnesota-ban-prediction-markets

Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket.

It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything.

The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone's word choice and world affairs.

Loss of direction or doubt that direction will result in action?

https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-trump-iran-things-to-know-today-c6e3e276

Stock Markets Now Shrug at Trump’s Iran Rhetoric. That’s a Big Worry.

Negotiations and threats, threats and negotiations. Markets are getting tired of the apparent lack of progress around the U.S.-Iran peace talks and that’s creating a risk of an eventual sharp jump in oil prices, which would roil bond and stock markets.

… After a period when oil prices—and therefore other assets—would respond to Trump’s every utterance, now the reaction is largely a shrug. The risks of a complete loss of faith in a peaceful resolution are rising.

(Related)

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/no-deal-no-exit-how-us-iran-standoff-risks-fresh-conflict-2026-05-18/

No deal, no exit: How US-Iran standoff risks fresh conflict

… Calls for a fresh strike are growing louder in the U.S. ‌and Israel, with some officials arguing that increased pressure could weaken Tehran's leverage and force Iran back to the negotiating table.

"There is one major problem with this theory: We have already tested it, repeatedly, and Iran did not capitulate," said Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher on Iran at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies and former head of the Iran branch in Israeli Defense Intelligence.

News.

https://fpf.org/blog/colorado-revises-its-ai-act-what-changed-and-why/

Colorado Revises Its AI Act: What Changed and Why

On May 15, Governor Polis signed SB 189, revising the Colorado AI Act (CAIA) after two years of intense negotiations and national debate over the original 2024 law’s approach to AI regulation. The revised law, the Colorado ADM Act (CADMA), reflects a fundamental shift in approach: shifting from an algorithmic discrimination framework to a transparency-focused one, as well as narrowing the scope of covered AI systems, streamlining disclosures and consumer rights, and replacing governance requirements with liability allocation under existing anti-discrimination laws. 

This post examines the key changes between CAIA and CADMA, explores the context that drove these revisions, and analyzes their practical implications. Side-by-side legislative comparison chart below.