Boiling frogs… (We can, therefore we must!)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/more-license-plate-reader-mission-creep-school-residency-verification-background

More License Plate Reader Mission Creep: School Residency Verification, Background Checks, and Noise Complaints

… Law enforcement's talking points—often scripted by the company itself trumpet their role in solving high-stakes crimes. But the data reveals a different story. What they're not saying is that ALPRs are also frequently used for extremely low-level investigations, such as verifying whether a student lives within a particular school zone. In some cases, police have even used this tech to conduct employment background checks and investigations into loud music complaints. Recently, a motorcyclist was even targeted  for simply holding a cell phone while riding.

The reach of this ALPR surveillance is amplified by the nature of the indiscriminate sharing these technologies encourage. Most agencies choose to share broadly, often as part of a nationwide pool, making it common for a single city's system to be searched hundreds of thousands of times each month. By analyzing these "network audit logs," privacy advocates and journalists have uncovered evidence of the technology being used to surveil protesters, abortion-seekers, immigrants, and even ethnic Roma populations. 

Isn’t it obvious?

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937028/military-ai-warfare-red-lines?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6ImpLWjdveFNldTIiLCJwIjoiL2FpLWFydGlmaWNpYWwtaW50ZWxsaWdlbmNlLzkzNzAyOC9taWxpdGFyeS1haS13YXJmYXJlLXJlZC1saW5lcyIsImV4cCI6MTc4MDIzMDU2OSwiaWF0IjoxNzc5Nzk4NTY5fQ.P9eUlF5lyJf3vyQeS1RDtAe2S6jPLgtexCBJV_W9bdw&utm_medium=gift-link

AI warfare is already here

Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon highlights the risks of autonomous warfare — but obscures just how close it is.

Making fake seem real. (Who do you sue?)

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/fake-journals-using-real-professors-names-ai-generated-papers-rcna265479

Fake academic journals are publishing AI-generated papers under real professors’ names

Online academic journals falsely attributed articles, likely written by AI, to several professors, who say the fiasco is a warning about the future of scientific knowledge.

I wonder what else it does?

https://www.bespacific.com/white-house-is-ordering-agencies-to-place-its-new-app-on-all-employees-government-phones/

White House is ordering agencies to place its new app on all employees’ government phones

Government Executive: “The White House recently unveiled a new app to give the public “unfiltered” access to “key priorities,” “historic moments” and “policy breakthroughs.” Now, it’s directing agencies to help install it on the government phones of federal employees.  The Trump administration launched the app, which promises to “[keep] you connected to President Donald J. Trump and his administration like never before,” in March.  The push to install the app on the devices of millions of government employees drew surprise from current and former federal officials, who called the move highly unusual and even dangerous.  In at least one agency, the automatic downloads will start next week in a move directed by the White House itself, according to internal communications obtained by Government Executive. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.   Earlier this week, agency chief information officers got orders from the federal CIO, Greg Barbaccia, to help the White House understand the mechanics of installing the app across all government-furnished mobile phones in the executive branch, according to an internal email obtained by Government Executive.  “The White House App gives all Americans direct access to White House live streams, breaking news alerts, new policy initiatives, social media posts, and more,” said Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson. “Government devices typically include pre-installed apps that provide value to government employees’ day-to-day work.”

The move is “dangerous,” Sonny Hashmi, a former longtime government IT executive, told Government Executive. Cybersecurity researchers warned about vulnerabilities in the app soon after it debuted, like how it shares the IP addresses, time zones and other data of users with third-party services. The app also raised initial concerns about its potential GPS tracking capability, but the White House has since removed that functionality…”

A Luddite by any other name…

https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.makeuseof.com/wikipedia-best-ai-writing-detection-guide/

Wikipedia may have built the best AI writing detection guide

… Wikipedia's Signs of AI Writing page started as an internal resource for volunteer editors. Since 2023, a group called WikiProject AI Cleanup has been reviewing new submissions for undisclosed AI-generated content. After combing through thousands of flagged articles, they cataloged the patterns they kept seeing in Wikipedia drafts and edits. The result is what Wikipedia says, that it's what the editors have observed, and it's more "signs" than "rules."

The page is worth a bookmark and a deep read. Instead of depending on AI writing detectors, it will help you spot-check writing behaviors. Those are the telltale giveaways of AI writing. As we all know, LLMs are just machines, and they are built on statistical probability, not on real storytelling skills.

As predicted, increasing volumes of AI generated content is poisoning the data LLMs feed on.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/ai-hallucinations-infiltrating-expert-entering-090000090.html

AI hallucinations are infiltrating expert work—and entering the permanent body of knowledge

… In a study published earlier this month in The Lancet, Topaz and his colleagues audited nearly 2.5 million biomedical papers and 97 million citations indexed on PubMed Central, the central repository used by clinicians and researchers worldwide. They found more than 4,000 fabricated references buried across nearly 3,000 papers. Not all the references were AI-generated, though Topaz said the steady rise in fake sourcing went “vertical” in 2024, shortly after AI tools in research entered more widespread use.

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.