Holy cow! (as opposed to a ‘Sacred cow.”)

https://www.bespacific.com/employees-religious-objection-to-using-ai-at-work/

Employees’ Religious Objection to Using AI at Work

Employees’ Religious Objection to Using AI at Work: “Pope Leo XIV’s lengthy encyclical  on AI sparked a larger public debate on AI regulation. But it also raised a fundamental question about what role religion and religious views should play in this debate — and in the use of AI generally. We are beginning to see employees invoking religious objection to the use of AI to be exempt from an employer’s directive for employees to use AI at work. Software engineer Erin Maus reportedly received  from her employer an “accommodation … and … permission … to avoid using workplace AI on religious grounds.” She is a Unitarian Universalist, according to the article. Maus requested not to use AI in her computer programming at work. Her employer granted her request as a religious accommodation…”

A “specialized” network makes it easier, but this could also be done with traffic cameras or even ring doorbells.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/insight/kremlin-cuts-putin-s-security-cameras-over-ai-espionage-fears/gm-GMEC1C4871?gemSnapshotKey=GMEC1C4871-snapshot-3&uxmode=ruby

Kremlin disables Putin’s security cameras amid AI espionage fears

Russian authorities shut down a specialised surveillance network used to protect President Vladimir Putin and top aides after intelligence reports suggested AI-enabled tools could be used to track and target them. The Financial Times, cited by multiple outlets, linked the move to alleged Israeli operations in Iran where hacked cameras and artificial intelligence were reportedly used to locate Iran’s supreme leader. The Kremlin acted to prevent similar vulnerabilities being exploited in Moscow, reflecting heightened security concerns amid Ukraine-related threats and global espionage tensions.

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/phone-airpod-smartwatch-trackers-to-license-plate-readers/

This Company Will Add Phone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to License Plate Readers

404 Media no paywall: “A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers. The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data…”

Of course that’s what they are after…

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/09/signal-uks-child-nude-block-threat-wont-protect-children/5252761

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

… Signal argues that the proposed technology could at some point be repurposed to enable state-sponsored surveillance of all citizens' comms, or used as a mass censorship tool.

Persuasive?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/08/writing-is-an-exercise-in-the-art-of-persuasion-if-we-use-ai-we-lose-the-art

Writing is an exercise in the art of persuasion. If we use AI we lose the art

A few weeks ago, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an academic in political science at Macquarie University, wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in which she reported on excessive use of AI chatbots by students to write their essays.

In it, she raised her concern that universities are qualifying lawyers, nurses, financial advisers, engineers and teachers who do not have the essential skills required to perform their roles. If that is the case, the societal consequences are obvious.

Not everybody in the university sector agrees, and the University of Western Sydney’s pro vice-chancellor for quality and integrity, Prof Cath Ellis, wrote an opinion piece in rebuttal.

There was a problem, though. Ellis’s piece itself was written by AI – which was not disclosed to the newspaper. Readers spotted the telltales of AI phraseology, and social media lit up with negative comments.

(Related)

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/08/ai-america-literacy

AI is masking America's "post-literate" workforce

Millions of working Americans struggle to read at a functional level — and artificial intelligence may be helping hide it.

Why it matters: Low literacy is quietly becoming a major economic drag, even as AI tools allow workers to complete tasks they may not fully understand.

• Experts warn that this can mask deeper skill gaps until workers are asked to make judgments, solve problems or evaluate AI-generated answers.

• Some researchers call this "cognitive surrender" — when people defer to AI outputs without fully evaluating them.

• That creates a workforce that looks productive on the surface but is vulnerable to disruption.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.bespacific.com/google-pinpoint-explained/

Google Pinpoint Explained

Wondertools: “Google’s Pinpoint is now open to everyone. It’s a surprisingly powerful free tool for making sense of giant piles of digital stuff. (Before June 3, it was restricted to journalists and academics). Read on to learn more about creative ways to use Pinpoint; its new AI features and their limitations; and how Pinpoint differs from NotebookLM.  How Pinpoint Works – Pinpoint lets you store and analyze hundreds of thousands of files so you can find tiny needles in gigantic digital haystacks.

• Pinpoint can transcribe hundreds of hours of audio and video.

• It also makes your handwritten text, scans, and PDFs searchable, like my enormous collection of scanned handwritten notes and whiteboards.

• Once Pinpoint processes your files you can search, summarize, and organize your collections.

• Pinpoint makes it easy to query, label, and extract data from hundreds or thousands of documents. It’s simple to use. No complex menus or commands…”

We will need some clear definitions rather quickly…

https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-ai-military-memo-autonomous-weapons

Trump signs memo putting ‘most advanced AI’ into military hands and banning vendors from pulling the plug

President Trump signed a national security presidential memorandum on Friday ordering the US military and intelligence agencies to accelerate their adoption of cutting-edge AI. The directive, NSPM-11, establishes a framework for “rapid onboarding of the most advanced AI models from multiple vendors.” It also bars any company from disabling, degrading, or modifying an AI system that warfighters depend on without prior government approval.

That vendor restriction is the most striking provision. It means an AI company cannot pull a deployed model from military use unilaterally, even if the company has safety concerns about how it is being used. The clause lands directly in the context of the Pentagon’s ongoing feud with Anthropic, which was blacklisted as a supply chain risk after refusing to allow its Claude models to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance.

Let the arguments begin!

https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/jetlaw/vol28/iss3/5/

When Robots Read Westlaw: Linking Inputs and Outputs in Generative AI Fair Use Analysis

Generative artificial intelligence has revealed a novel tension in copyright law: a two-stage act (input and output) of copying that traditional fair-use doctrine never squarely anticipated. In the input stage, vast swaths of copyrighted expression are reproduced and ingested to train large language models. In the output stage, those models generate works that may substitute for or dilute the market of the originals. Courts now face both stages. Their rulings diverge when they consider training and outputs together. In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., the courts characterized training uses as “highly transformative,” yet reached opposite conclusions on market harm because the evidentiary records differed. By contrast, in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, the fair-use defense failed outright: ROSS’s AI-generated outputs were found to compete directly with Thomson Reuters’s paid research tools. These cases confirm that transformation alone is not dispositive: the fourth statutory factor—whether outputs substitute for or erode the market for the original—can ultimately determine the outcome. This Note therefore advances an “input-output linkage” framework. It would enable courts to evaluate the permissibility of unlicensed training (input) by looking to the commercial purpose, functional use, and market effects of the resulting outputs. This framework helps explain why wholesale copying for training may qualify as fair use when outputs serve new, non-substitutive functions (as Kadrey intimates), yet fails when outputs compete with the original work or its derivatives (as in Thomson Reuters). Aligning fair use doctrine with copyright’s utilitarian goals in this way preserves incentives to create while also permitting socially valuable AI innovation. Still, adjudication alone cannot fully resolve the structural licensing challenges posed by generative AI. This Note argues that to supply ex-ante clarity and enable scalable markets for training data, targeted legislative or regulatory measures are needed. Such interventions would ensure that copyright law protects both creative labor and accommodates the need for training data.

I get the impression that being President is a side-hustle for Trump.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0605/donald-trump-presidency-private-wealth-ethics

In Trump’s second term, financial gain has become a defining feature

On matters of personal and family money, President Donald Trump appears to be playing by a different rulebook from other presidents – and even from his own first term in office. By his own admission, he feels little pressure to restrict family business dealings simply because of his role in government.

And then the government can make every citizen rich!

https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-wants-the-american-public-to-own-a-piece-of-openai-nobody-knows-how-that-would-work

Trump wants the American public to own a piece of OpenAI. Nobody knows how that would work.

… Two proposals, very different teeth

Altman’s version is voluntary. OpenAI’s April policy document proposed a “Public Wealth Fund” that would give every citizen a stake in AI-driven economic growth. Under this framing, OpenAI could donate equity to the government to seed the fund. The pitch positions the company as a willing participant, not a target.

Sanders’ version is not voluntary. The senator announced plans for the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies, paid in shares rather than cash. The government would manage the resulting fund, use its voting shares to secure board representation, and block decisions it deems harmful. The bill targets firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The legislation is widely considered unlikely to pass, but it has shifted the boundaries of what Washington is willing to discuss.

Another “sounds good on paper” idea.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/californias-ab-412-still-demands-developers-do-impossible

California’s AB 412 Still Demands Developers Do The Impossible

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

… A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training. 

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. 

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public. 

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status. 

No sure I follow the logic.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/elon-musk-tries-again-to-escape-ftc-audits-of-x-data-handling/

Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling

… According to Musk, the FTC should stop its monitoring because Twitter no longer exists, as X was merged into xAI, and then xAI was folded into SpaceX. Musk also argues that since none of the leadership or engineers responsible for the two-factor authentication error remain at the company, and “X has since built a world-class privacy and data-protection program” that protects consumers, the FTC doesn’t have to intervene anymore.

Soon he entire network will belong to AI.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/ai-worm.html

AI Worm

Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.

The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into.

This is the closest to John Brunner’s original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I’ve seen.

Not the first industry I thought of…

https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-bubble-surreal-toilet-industry-toto

The AI Bubble Has Become So Surreal That It’s Now Propping Up the Toilet Industry

With AI company valuations screaming into the trillions of dollars, it can be hard to find the pulse of the AI boom. So to put it in terms the average person might relate to, let’s just say AI hype has gotten so ridiculous that it’s now propping up the Japanese toilet industry.

Absurd as that might sound, it’s now financial reality in our AI-obsessed world economy. According to Bloomberg, the Japanese company Toto Ltd — arguably the most famous smart toilet brand for US consumers — now expects more than half of its total capex in the coming years to revolve around AI.

Tools & Techniques. (For your amusement)

https://www.bespacific.com/deflock-an-open-source-project-mapping-license-plate-readers/

DeFlock An open-source project mapping license plate readers.

DeFlock: “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points. These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn’t require a warrant…”

Time to re-think your investment choices?

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-ai-hype-cycle-will-slow-down-whats-next-decides-the-winners

The AI hype cycle will slow down. What’s next decides the winners

Artificial Intelligence is entering the late stage of its hype cycle.

Not a collapse. A correction.

For the past two years, AI has dominated venture capital flows, with capital pouring into the sector at unprecedented scale and startups multiplying rapidly as funding concentrates around AI-driven businesses.

What began as acceleration has now started to show the early signs of saturation. The expectations built into the market are beginning to exceed the returns being delivered.

The hype is beginning to fade.

This is the predictable arc of every major innovation cycle. From railroads to the internet, transformative technologies move through a familiar pattern: rapid enthusiasm, inflated expectations, and an eventual reset where economic reality reasserts itself. AI is following the same trajectory.

What is different this time is speed.

Entire market cycles are compressing into a fraction of their historical duration. Adoption, investment, and saturation are happening simultaneously.

As that happens, companies built primarily on narrative rather than durable value creation will come under pressure. Funding will tighten, valuations will reset, and some of today’s most visible players will not survive the transition.

This phase is the beginning of AI’s real test.

But this way Trump isn’t in charge…

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/03/openai-white-house-ai-safety-rules-00948478

OpenAI diverges from White House on AI safety rules

A new OpenAI proposal for regulating advanced artificial intelligence systems splits from President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on at least two key points, with the tech giant now working to nudge the White House and Congress toward its preferred approach to governing AI.

In a new policy paper, OpenAI calls on the federal government to require mandatory evaluations of advanced AI models for potential risks, but places the responsibility for overseeing that process on civilian agencies.

And they don’t see this as an indication that their profession is doomed?

https://www.bespacific.com/law-professors-prefer-ai-over-peer-answers/

Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers

Reuters: “Law professors overwhelmingly preferred answers drafted by AI over ones written by fellow professors, a new Stanford Law School study found, suggesting that the technology is capable of legal reasoning and that law students may benefit from AI ‌tutoring. Professors from 14 U.S. law schools developed a list of 40 questions representative of those first-year contracts students ask during faculty office hours. The professors wrote answers to the questions, and researchers had two AI platforms — Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and NotebookLM — also answer them. The same professors blindly judged the short answers head-to-head and chose the AI-generated ones as most beneficial to students 75% of the time. The AI platforms performed just as well as the professor rated most highly in the study. “We were frankly surprised by the magnitude of the results,” lead researcher and Stanford law professor Julian Nyarko said in an article on Stanford’s website  about the study. “These weren’t just simple questions with obvious answers.” The study comes as law schools and the legal profession grapple with how to incorporate rapidly evolving AI into teaching and law practice. Earlier studies have found that AI can pass the bar exam, earn A+ law school grades, ‌and effectively grade law school exams …”

Can you think of any other businesses that are equally vulnerable to an AI takeover?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/06/02/thrive-holdings-to-bet-1-billion-on-ai-powered-accounting-roll-up/

Thrive Holdings To Bet $1 Billion On AI-Powered Accounting Roll-Up

In Thrive Holdings’ live-fire testing ground, self-improving AI models are achieving up to 98% data-entry accuracy, offering a blueprint for the automation of professional services.

Is this the only field where the practitioners have an opinion?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/science/ai-mathematics-leiden-declaration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.v6n1.vQ52ZDoCvFBV&smid=url-share

As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution

Recently there are signs that some branches of higher mathematics, among the most rarefied realms of human achievement, are vulnerable to a shake-up by artificial intelligence. Mathematicians, in turn, have been thinking about how to respond.

On Tuesday, a group of 16 mathematicians, in consultation with colleagues and math organizations worldwide, published the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It aims to “frame the conversation about future directions,” said Dame Ursula Martin, one of the authors, and a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford.

These are not the droids you are looking for…

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-presidential-records-act-2676990330/

Trump's own library says his DMs don't exist. A federal court disagrees.

The newly operational Trump Presidential Library claims it cannot turn up a single Twitter direct message sent by Donald Trump during his first term in office — a striking claim given that court records confirm such messages exist.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Washington Post at 12:01 a.m. on January 20, 2025 — exactly five years after the end of Trump's first term — the library stated it had been "unable to locate any records" related to any direct message sent from Trump's @realDonaldTrump or @POTUS accounts. The request covered the entirety of his first administration, during which Trump sent more than 25,000 public tweets.

The no-records response stands in direct contradiction to evidence produced in federal court, the newspaper reported. During special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Twitter complied with a warrant and handed over at least 32 direct messages sent to or from the @realDonaldTrump account between October 2020 and January 2021. A Twitter attorney confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that "there are confidential communications" in the account.

Altering reality for fun and profit?

https://www.bespacific.com/won-the-civil-war-now-banning-books-about-why-civil-war-was-fought/

The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought

LitHub – Tom Zoellner on the Antebellum Precedent of Trump-Era Censorship: “In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest. I wrote about this censorious mania to preserve the fiction of “happy and contented slaves” in a recent book about the important role played by enslaved people in achieving their own freedom. It was published in September under the title The Road Was Full of Thorns. I could not have dreamed that my book itself would be censored—by the U.S. Government, the side that supposedly won the Civil War. Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard.

A little background. In May of 2025, a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Order 3431 entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the superintendents of national parks and monuments to “review property for inappropriate content” and scrub their facilities of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.” The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument  no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor.  The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed. My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore…

A strong clue to what happened might be found in a letter that went out to regional Park Service directors on November 25, 2025 asking for a review of “all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners” to make sure they were in accord with the administration’s ideological goals. “Items identified as non-compliant with this order must be removed from sale immediately,” said the memo, signed by comptroller Jessica Bowron. A leaked database of inspections shows that officials at Yosemite National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, among other places, had singled out books in the bookstore for review. At the latter place, an anonymous official wrote that “out of an abundance of caution,” books such as The 1619 Project, which details the origins of American slavery, would be targeted for removal. This was their decision, not that of the Interior Department…”