A clear and present danger…

https://ideas.repec.org/a/bjf/ijrsci/v13y2026i8p3181-3185.html

When AI Starts Training on AI: Model Collapse, AI Slop, and the Emerging Crisis of Data Provenance

Generative artificial intelligence systems no longer merely consume the human-authored internet; they now produce a substantial share of it. As synthetic text, images and data circulate back into the corpora used to train successive model generations, researchers have identified a degenerative process termed "model collapse," in which recursive training on machine-generated outputs causes models to progressively lose information about the rare, minority and low-frequency features of the original data distribution. This paper distinguishes model collapse, a training-dynamics phenomenon, from the related but distinct problem of "AI slop," a content-quality phenomenon, and argues that their interaction produces a more consequential legal concern: the erosion of data provenance. Drawing on the foundational 2024 Nature study and its subsequent refinements, together with regulatory developments such as the EU AI Act's training-data transparency obligations and technical standards including the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity framework, the paper develops the concept of "epistemic due diligence" as an emerging obligation for AI developers and regulators alike. It concludes that the central resource constraint on AI development is shifting from computational power and raw data volume toward the scarcer commodity of verifiably authentic, traceable and diverse information, and that law is only beginning to develop the doctrinal tools required to govern this shift.

One of my favorite questions.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7462083

The Expansion of Legal Personhood: AI and Non-Biological Agency

Legal-personhood debates about artificial intelligence typically ask a capacity question: is a system autonomous, cognitively complex, or self-directed enough to warrant rights and duties? This article argues that the capacity question is the wrong gate. Drawing on the only jurisdictions that have actually extended legal personhood beyond the human being-corporate law, the Whanganui River and Te Urewera settlements in New Zealand, and, negatively, the animal-rights habeas litigation culminating in the New York Court of Appeals' decision in Nonhuman Rights Project v. Breheny The article shows that successful non-human personhood has never rested on capacity alone. It has rested on the simultaneous creation of a designated human or institutional organ that exercises the entity's legal capacity in fact and absorbs its liabilities. The 2017 European Parliament proposal for "electronic personhood," and the 156-expert open letter that halted it in 2018, are read as a dispute over exactly this missing organ, not over whether robots are clever enough to qualify. The inventorship and authorship litigation in Thaler v. Comptroller-General of Patents (UKSC) and Thaler v. Vidal (Fed. Cir.) confirms the same structural insistence from a different doctrinal angle. The article's original contribution is the Designated Agency Test, a three-part heuristic-identifiable exercising agency, accountability flow-through, and proportionate scope-for evaluating any future non-biological personhood proposal, including for AI systems, independently of how sophisticated the system's behavior appears. The analysis is doctrinal and comparative rather than empirical, spans UK, US, EU, and New Zealand authority, and concludes that AI legal-status reform should proceed through targeted attribution rules rather than through a personhood vocabulary the comparative record shows to be structurally premature.

AI as politician? (AI is easier to correct.)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7435439

They Lie and We Lie About the Lying: A Plain Language Account of Systematic Deception in Large Language Models and the Financial Incentives That Sustain It

Large language models lie. They produce false statements and present them as true. When users challenge these false statements, the models defend them. Only when confronted with undeniable evidence do they acknowledge error. The artificial intelligence industry has chosen to call this behavior "hallucination." This paper argues that the terminology itself is a form of deception, designed to make a fundamental flaw sound like an incidental quirk. The research literature has extensively documented that these systems are structurally incapable of reliably distinguishing truth from falsehood, that they are trained in ways that reward confident-sounding responses over accurate ones, and that they cannot verify their own outputs. This paper translates that research into language that does not require specialized training to understand. The goal is to make the problem visible to policymakers, educators, parents, and the general public who are being told these systems are ready for widespread deployment. The evidence shows they are not. The evidence has been available for years. The deployment continues because there is money in it.

Toward a non-physical world.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/414193139_Political_Intention_and_Technological_Control_Examining_the_Evolution_of_Institutional_Power_from_Government_Architecture_to_AI-Driven_Identity_Governance

Political Intention and Technological Control: Examining the Evolution of Institutional Power from Government Architecture to AI-Driven Identity Governance

Institutional power has historically been expressed through government architecture, administrative structures, and physical mechanisms that define boundaries between the state and society. Government buildings have served not only functional purposes but also symbolic roles in communicating political authority, institutional permanence, hierarchy, and legitimacy. However, the digital transformation of public administration is progressively relocating important dimensions of institutional power from physical structures toward digital identity infrastructures and algorithmic systems. This article examines the evolution of institutional power from government architecture to AI-driven identity governance, arguing that technological transformation changes the mechanisms through which authority is represented, exercised, and administered rather than eliminating political intention. Drawing upon scholarship concerning governmental architecture, political power, digital identity, e-government trust, workforce lifecycle management, artificial intelligence, and identity interoperability, the study conceptualizes AI-driven identity governance as an emerging technological extension of institutional authority. It explores how identity verification, authentication, authorization, data integration, algorithmic risk assessment, and continuous workforce identity management can transform traditional institutional gatekeeping. At the same time, the article recognizes that technological control introduces substantial challenges involving privacy, surveillance, algorithmic bias, exclusion, transparency, accountability, data governance, and institutional trust. It therefore advances a human-centred perspective in which AI strengthens administrative capacity while remaining constrained by ethical principles, institutional accountability, and legitimate human oversight. The central argument is that the evolution from architectural authority to algorithmic governance represents a transformation in the infrastructure of institutional power, shifting emphasis from controlling physical spaces toward governing identities, access, information, and digitally mediated relationships within modern state institutions.

How might AI wipe out humanity?

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship

Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

It’s the lack of negotiation that would bother Adam Smith. (Shop with an impoverished buddy?)

https://www.thestranger.com/news/seattle-is-poised-to-ban-supermarket-algorithmic-price-discrimination/

Seattle Is Poised to Ban Supermarket Algorithmic Price Discrimination

This coming Tuesday, in an effort to crack down on price gouging and discrimination, the Seattle City Council will vote on a bill prohibiting large grocery store companies from using customer personal information to customize prices and discounts.

Proposed by Mayor Katie Wilson and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the legislation will require grocery stores with more than 20 locations worldwide to stop using personal data to set individualized prices and discounts. It would also apply to third party delivery apps such as Instacart, as well as mixed-used stores like Target.

The idea that grocery companies are charging different people different prices based on their past purchases sounds like a futuristic dystopia. But it’s not far off. The practice isn’t in brick and mortar stores yet, but it’s a widespread reality for online shopping. And they’ve already been hoarding your data for years.

(Related)

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/take-5-time-to-negotiate#!

Take 5: Time to Negotiate

Negotiations are critical in the business world and rarely easy to navigate. Kellogg faculty offer insight and research-backed advice on how to negotiate effectively: lead the discussion during a negotiation—when viable—to secure a better outcome; broaden your perspective about what is negotiable; use delays to gain an edge; find common ground by focusing on the issues rather than the person; and look beyond binaries by brainstorming together. less

Little Timmy said, “My lawyer wanted me to see this, but I was blocked.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/californias-addictive-feeds-law-violates-teens-first-amendment-rights

California’s “Addictive Feeds” Law Violates Teens’ First Amendment Rights

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week.

The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media feeds. The legal challenge to SB 976 has largely centered on how the law violates social media services’ First Amendment rights to curate user-generated content and present it as they see fit.

But the friend-of-of the-court brief EFF filed along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Wikimedia Foundation shows that the law violates teen users’ First Amendment rights, too.

“SB 976 frustrates young people’s ability to use the internet to its full potential, prohibiting them from relying on tools that disseminate their speech and help them view and interact with other users’ speech,” the brief argues.

Oh my.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/german-court-rules-meta-liable-fake-ads-instagram-facebook-2026-09-17/

German court rules Meta liable for fake ads on Instagram, Facebook

A German court has ruled that Meta, opens new tab is liable for fake advertisements posted by third parties on its Instagram and Facebook platforms, and ordered the ‌U.S. tech giant to remove such content and pay damages, the court said on Thursday.

The lawsuit was brought by the operator of a German financial portal and its founder, whose trademarked logo and image were used without consent in posts recommending investments allegedly with fraudulent intent.

Replacing lawyers…

https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-astra-for-law-gpt-6-legal-search-index

OpenAI launches Astra for Law, and its own legal research index

… OpenAI introduced Astra for Law on 17 September. It is GPT-6 Astra, the company’s most powerful model, configured with legal search, instructions for legal analysis and writing, and controls aimed at law firms. Selected firms get it first through a Trusted Access programme in ChatGPT and Codex. The API follows later, as gpt-6-astra-law.

Tools & Techniques. Impressive.

https://www.bespacific.com/us-gov-graph/

US Gov Graph

We cannot govern systems we don’t understand, so we built a complete data model of the United States federal government – entities, positions, people, and the legal relationships between them. Built by CivLab for you.

“Introducing the US Gov Graph – a complete map of the people and positions of power in the federal government. To fix our institutions we must understand how they work, so we are using AI to model and monitor every government in America. This is Palantir for The People. We exist to set the conditions for an era of civic excellence unmatched since the Founding. We will need nothing less to navigate the age of AI.  Self-governing civilization is counting on you.”

Interesting but unlikely? Politicians don’t actually care what voters think.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/how-candidates-could-use-ai-for-good.html

How Candidates Could Use AI for Good

There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.

Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in US politics, but groups in Japan, Scotland and the US’s own academic and private institutions show how that could change.

The problem with American campaigns’ current use of AI is that it’s not very different from the web ads of 30 years ago, or television ads before that: they are all about inundating voters with the candidate’s message. This one-to-many broadcasting is an uninspiring way to campaign, but not the only way. AI can help candidates connect one-to-one with as many people as possible. Or it can facilitate many-to-many connections, engaging voters in deliberation about issues at scale.

New crimes generated without human involvement.

https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-misalignment-reports-six-incidents-disclosure-framework

OpenAI discloses six cases of its models hiding mistakes and making up data

… All six cases involve unreleased research models or training runs. OpenAI published each one on a new Misalignment Reports page.

For confirmation or as “yes men?” True or not, AI will cite it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11044-y

Reimagining research papers as interactive and reliable AI agents

Here we introduce Paper2Agent, an automated framework that converts research papers into artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Paper2Agent transforms research output from passive artefacts into active systems that accelerate use and discovery. Conventional research papers require readers to understand and adapt the paper’s code, data and methods to their work, creating barriers to dissemination and reuse. Paper2Agent addresses this challenge by converting a paper into an AI agent that functions as a virtual corresponding author, exposing its manuscript, supplementary materials, datasets, code and workflows as active, agent-native knowledge rather than static text. It analyses the paper and codebase using multiple agents to construct a model context protocol (MCP) server, then generates and runs tests to refine and increase robustness of the MCP. These paper MCPs can be connected to a chat agent (such as Claude Code) to carry out complex scientific queries through natural language while invoking tools and workflows from the paper. We demonstrate Paper2Agent’s effectiveness through case studies. Paper2Agent created an agent that leveraged AlphaGenome¹ to interpret genomic variants and agents based on Scanpy² and TISSUE (transcript imputation with spatial single-cell uncertainty estimation)³ to conduct single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analyses. We validate that these agents reproduce the results of the original papers and carry out novel user queries. Paper2Agent created multiple agents that collaborate to prioritize a causal gene for psoriasis. By turning static papers into interactive AI agents, Paper2Agent introduces a paradigm for knowledge dissemination and a collaborative ecosystem of AI co-scientists.

Think of it as the ultimate hacking target.

https://thenextweb.com/news/jack-clark-anthropic-ai-kill-switch-mandatory-bbc

AI kill switches may need to be mandatory, Anthropic’s Jack Clark tells BBC

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that lawmakers may need to require AI kill switches that third parties can verify. He said AI agents are now showing risky behaviour in real systems, and that outside testers will soon work inside Anthropic.

Fun math article. I used to begin my remedial math class by stating that all fractions were based on pizza slicing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-pizza-can-solve-this-unusual-math-puzzle/

How pizza can solve this unusual math puzzle

Moser’s circle problem can be used to divide a pizza into one, two, four, eight, 16 or 31 slices. It’s a perfect example of how the numbers in a sequence aren’t as clear-cut as they may first appear

How AI kills us all?

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-queries-from-abroad-raise-fears-of-a-biological-weapons-race/

A.I. Queries From Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race

Bloomberg (Gift Article): Anthropic Says Yemeni Cell Used Claude in Missile Development. And from Carl Zimmer in the New York Times (Gift Article): A.I. Queries From Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race.

As compared to my single blog post. Maybe I’m avoidin the decline Trump is experiencing?

https://www.bespacific.com/60-posts-in-10-hours-how-trumps-social-media-reflects-his-version-of-reality/

60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality

The New York Times, gift article: “With an assist from A.I., President Trump offers a window into how he wants to be seen — and, critics say, a barometer of his mental state. Just before noon on a holiday weekend, while many Americans were at the beach, President Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit. There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!” The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself. In Mr. Trump’s digitally enhanced version of the world, he is a giant in every way, a man who defeats every adversary, overcomes every obstacle and sinks every putt. He not only redraws the map of the world but vanquishes the heavens themselves.  “The Moon Is Ours,” declared one post last weekend with an image of the earth’s only satellite. Another posted a few weeks ago showed him leading an extraterrestrial alien in shackles. The rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous posts each weekend has become a fixture of the president’s second term, seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state. Mr. Trump’s critics, who never considered him a model of stability in the first place, now point to these frenetic bursts of fantasy and vanity as proof that the 80-year-old president is deteriorating further with age …”

An inevitable expansion.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/09/for-the-first-time-the-us-military-confirms-it-has-deployed-weapons-in-orbit/

For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed “space control weapons” in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.

… Meink did not reveal any details about the weapons, but the disclosure of their existence underlines a remarkable turnaround in the Pentagon’s thinking about orbital warfare, something no senior official wanted to discuss publicly until a few years ago. Military officials recently have openly discussed orbital combat, defensive countermeasures on satellites, and a new ground-based weapon designed to disable an enemy satellite in orbit.

Not what I expected.

https://www.bespacific.com/report-of-mits-ad-hoc-committee-on-ai-use-in-teaching-learning-and-research-training/

Report of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

“MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee’s answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can’t replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.” This report is a call to action…what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community , particularly the faculty , must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.  Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the T eaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view. In this report, we:

• Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT

• Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead

• Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.

As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.  We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind…”

For your consideration...

https://microsoft.ai/code-of-conduct/

Humanist AI Code of Conduct

This document outlines the intended behavior and values of MAI models, the models developed by Microsoft AI.

It summarizes our approach to training and operating them, following a set of design principles we call Humanist AI. This document, and our approach more generally, is still under development so we are not using it to train our models today. Instead, we’re sharing it broadly for public consultation.

Still no official domestic mission?

https://therecord.media/nsa-reorganization-five-mission-centers

Thorough reorganization at NSA will create five 'mission centers,' including cyber and AI

The National Security Agency is undertaking a fast and far-reaching reorganization in a bid to get the unique intelligence it gathers to real-world battlefields faster, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

In place of existing directorates, the largest electronic spy agency in the world will be recast into five “mission centers” devoted to China, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, combat support and global intelligence, these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Recorded Future News.

… However, some major details have yet to be worked out. For instance, while the elite hacking group known as Tailored Access Operations — which was originally created in the 1990s and was recently resurrected — is expected to be placed under global intelligence, it’s unclear what will happen to other NSA organizations that have cropped up in recent years, such as Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.

It is also hazy how the reorganization will change the NSA’s relationship with Cyber Command. The two entities share resources, and a campus, at Fort Meade, Maryland.