Evelyn Reynolds

A biographer whose Pulitzer prize-winning book inspired the new movie Oppenheimer has expressed support for a US senator’s attempt to bar the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launches.“Humans must always maintain sole control over nuclear weapons,” Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, said in a statement reported by Politico.“This technology is too dangerous to gamble with. This bill will send a powerful signal to the world that the United States will never take the reckless step of automating our nuclear command and control.”In Washington on Thursday, Bird met Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator who is attempting to add the AI-nuclear provision to a major defense spending bill.Markey, Politico said, was a friend of Bird’s co-author, the late Tufts University professor Martin J Sherwin.A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Markey and Bird “shared their mutual concerns over the proliferation of artificial intelligence in national security and defense without guardrails, and the risks of using nuclear weapons in south Asia and elsewhere.“They also discussed ways to increase awareness of nuclear issues among the younger set.”J Robert Oppenheimer was the driving force behind US development of the atomic bomb, at the end of the second world war.Bird and Sherwin’s book is now the inspiration for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster starring Cillian Murphy in the title role.The movie opens in the US on Friday – in competition with Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the popular children’s doll.On Friday, Nolan told the Guardian: “International surveillance of nuclear weapons is possible because nuclear weapons are very difficult to build. Oppenheimer spent $2bn and used thousands of people across America to build those first bombs.“It’s reassuringly difficult to make nuclear weapons and so it’s relatively easy to spot when a country is doing that. I don’t believe any of that applies to AI.”Nolan also noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and AI experts now calling for such technology to be controlled.Nolan said he had “been interested to talk to some of the leading researchers in the AI field, and hear from them that they view this as their ‘Oppenheimer moment’. And they’re clearly looking to his story for some kind of guidance … as a cautionary tale in terms of what it says about the responsibility of somebody who’s putting this technology to the world, and what their responsibilities would be in terms of unintended consequences.”Bird and Sherwin’s biography, subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2008.Reviewing for the Guardian, James Buchan saluted the authors’ presentation of “the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer’s existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised.“It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.’” More

For decades, US politicians have been reluctant to get involved in the topic of UFOs and aliens.After a series of disclosures in recent months, however, Republicans and Democrats now appear to be lining up to inquire into the question of extraterrestrial life, as the world seems closer than ever to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.Next week, the House oversight committee will hold its first public hearing as part of its investigation into UFOs, weeks after a whistleblower former intelligence official went public with claims that the government has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles.David Grusch’s allegations about the government harboring alien craft – he has since suggested that the US has also encountered “malevolent” alien pilots – sparked the 26 July hearing, and beyond that, appear to have lit a fire under the Washington establishment.The Republican party has led the initial charge, with a series of claims about extraterrestrial life that, until recently, would have been seen as career-ending.Tim Burchett, the Republican congressman from Tennessee who is co-leading the UFO investigation, declared in early July that alien craft possess technology that could “turn us into a charcoal briquette”, while a Republican colleague suggested that extraterrestrial interlopers could actually be representatives of an ancient civilization.In a briefing on Thursday, Burchett said he and his co-investigator Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican member from Florida, had been “stonewalled” by federal officials when asking about UFOs, and prevented from accessing some “information to prove that they do exist”.“We’ve had a heck of a lot of pushback about this hearing. There are a lot of people who don’t want this to come to light,” he said.Burchett said the US had evidence of technology that “defies all of our laws of physics”, and angrily railed against a “cover-up” by military officials.He added: “We’re gonna get to the bottom of it, dadgummit. Whatever the truth may be. We’re done with the cover-up.”In recent days the government itself has joined the UFO discourse. A White House official claimed that aerial phenomena “have already had an impact on our training ranges”, while a bipartisan group of senators have proposed new legislation to collect and distribute documents on “unidentified anomalous phenomena”.The legitimization of UFO discussion has been propelled in part by claims from US military pilots of UFO encounters, along with leaked military videos showing inexplicable happenings in the sky.Following those revelations, in 2021 the Pentagon released a report on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the term some experts prefer, which found more than 140 instances of UAP encounters that could not be explained. Since then, politicians appear to have moved past some of the stigma around extraterrestrial life.“There’s a sort of critical mass building now,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence (MoD).“And I think even though it’s easy to portray some of the politicians as mavericks, the fact that Republicans and Democrats are lining up, are united in their stance on this … I think we have crossed a line.”Grusch will appear at the hearing on Wednesday, along with David Fravor, a former navy commander who reported seeing a strange object in the sky while on a training mission in 2004, and Ryan Graves, a retired navy pilot who in 2021 told the 60 Minutes news show he had seen unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”.As Burchett has investigated the accuracy of Grusch’s claims, he has begun to make some bold declarations of his own. On the Event Horizon podcast, Burchett was asked if had seen “compelling evidence” that the US was seeing things in the sky “that might not be of this earth”.“Oh, 100%. 100%. No question,” he said.Burchett went on to claim that the US has been hiding evidence of UFOs since 1947, and speculated that the extraterrestrial craft could be dangerous.“If they’re out there, they’re out there, and if they have this kind of technology, then they could turn us into a charcoal briquette,” Burchett said.“And if they can travel light years or at the speeds that we’ve seen, and physics as we know it, fly underwater, don’t show a heat trail, things like that, then we are vastly out of our league.”He is not alone.Days earlier, Mike Gallagher, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, hypothesized that UFO encounters “could actually be an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here and is suddenly showing itself”.Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who, along with Democrats including Kirsten Gillibrand, has maintained a longtime interest in UAPs, has weighed in, as has the Donald Trump disciple Josh Hawley, who claims the US has “downplayed” the number of UFO sightings “for a long, long time”.On Thursday, Luna, the co-lead of the oversight committee investigation, echoed Hawley’s statements, alleging that “the Pentagon and the Department of the Air Force” had been particularly uncooperative.“When I take at face value the numerous roadblocks that we’ve been presented with, it leads me to believe that they are indeed hiding information,” she said.“I look forward to bringing this topic to light, and finding out the truth of what is really out there.”It is doubtful that the hearing on Wednesday will prove conclusively whether or not aliens exist. It is also unlikely the public will find out whether aliens, with their charcoal-briquette capable weaponry, have visited Earth.But still, the desire of politicians, of both sides, to wade into UFO discourse suggests that a corner has been turned, and Pope suggested Republicans’ and Democrats’ willingness to investigate could mean they are beginning to believe.“I think these politicians are doing it because they either know, or more likely strongly suspect that some of this is true,” Pope said.“I don’t think you would go all in – and they are going all in on this – if they weren’t pretty darn sure of themselves. Because the egg on the face if this all turns out to be drones – it would be staggering.” More

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed sufficient evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has amassed enough evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.The copied data from the Dominion Voting System machines, which is used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged.Though Coffee county is outside the jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, folding a potential computer trespass charge into a wider racketeering case would allow prosecutors to also seek an indictment for what the Trump operatives did there, the people said.A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, while prosecutors at the federal level are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.A special grand jury in Atlanta that heard evidence for roughly seven months recommended charges for more than a dozen people, including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews, though Willis will have to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.The grand jury that could decide whether to return an indictment against Trump was seated on 11 July. The selection process was attended by Willis and two prosecutors known to be on the Trump investigation: her deputy district attorney, Will Wooten, and special prosecutor Nathan Wade.Charges stemming from the Trump investigation are expected to come between the final week of July and the first two weeks of August, the Guardian has previously reported, after Willis told her team to shift to remote work during that period because of security concerns.The district attorney originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who acted as fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end. More

The US political journalist Ryan Grim broke the news of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh before his 2018 supreme court justice confirmation, and he was among the first to report on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s initial ascent to Congress.Still, to some, he remains known as the guy who got into a fight at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Jesse Watters, who debuted Tuesday as host of the coveted 8pm Fox News slot made available by Tucker Carlson’s firing.And Grim is OK with that, he said on Thursday, reiterating in an interview with the Guardian that the fisticuffs resulted from his standing up for a colleague whom Watters had previously targeted with an ambush-style, on-camera confrontation.“He’s a classic bully,” Grim said when asked to reflect on the highly publicized scuffle that broke out when – while recording video on a cellphone – he approached Watters to ask about his treatment of Amanda Terkel. “He’s a ‘dish it and can’t take it’ type of bully.“So I don’t mind at all.”At least in some national media circles, Watters’s selection as Fox News’s heir to the primetime broadcasting window once helmed by Carlson provided the occasion to revisit the altercation with Grim.The fight’s prelude dated back to 2009, when Terkel – in her role as then managing editor of ThinkProgress.org – authored a blog criticizing remarks that the star Fox News anchor at the time, Bill O’Reilly, had made about a young woman who was raped and murdered. O’Reilly had also just accepted an invitation to speak at a fundraiser for a rape survivors’ support group.Soon, O’Reilly responded by sending Watters, who served as his producer and comedy-sidekick of sorts, to conduct an ambush interview of Terkel while she vacationed in Virginia. Terkel later asserted that she felt harassed, describing how Watters followed her down the street shouting questions and asking why she had inflicted “pain and suffering” on rape victims as well as their families.Terkel and Grim were working together at HuffPost on the night of the White House dinner in 2016, which they and Watters attended. There, while filming on his cellphone, Grim asked Watters to apologize to Terkel over the episode in Virginia.Watters said he wouldn’t apologize but would greet her if she was brought to him.“She said some nasty shit, though,” Watters said on Grim’s video. “I had to call her out. I had to call her out.“I ambushed her ‘cause O’Reilly told me to get her, ‘cause she said some really bad shit. I know you’re getting video of this. She denigrated some victims, so we had to call her out. That’s what we do.”Grim mockingly replied: “That’s chivalrous of you. So in your chivalry … [you] went out to the middle of Virginia and cornered her.”At that point, Watters struck an incredulous tone as he asked whether Grim was “videotaping” him and told him to go away. Watters then grabbed the phone and threw it, and suddenly “there were a lot of fists flying,” Grim recalled.Bystanders separated the two tuxedo-clad men fairly quickly, but the fracas landed in the news after witnesses provided accounts to various outlets.Grim recalled that Watters went for his phone when he realized he had admitted on the record that “he had chased Terkel all the way out into deep Virginia at the behest of Bill O’Reilly”.“I think that’s the kind of admission that he is fine to make in private but didn’t realize he had accidentally made in public,” Grim said.Grim added that one of the highlights of the fight’s aftermath saw Shepard Smith – then another star anchor on the Republican-friendly Fox News – reach out with an offer of an exclusive interview.“I think that’s a signal that there are, or have been, elements even inside Fox that don’t approve of the direction that it was having,” Grim said.Grim continued that he “kind of like[s]” Watters as the face of Fox’s primetime coverage, “because he’s such a frat boy”.“It’s much harder for that wing of the Republican party to hide behind some salt-of-the-earth vision of itself when the face of it is, like, the lead crown in the frat.”Fox News and Watters have been asked for comment. Neither immediately responded to Grim’s remarks.Grim is now the Intercept’s Washington bureau chief.Watters’s promotion at Fox came after the network struck a $787.5m settlement agreement with Dominion Voting Systems to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about electoral fraud causing the former president’s defeat in the 2020 election.Fox has said the firing of Carlson, which opened the door for Watters’s primetime hosting gig, was unrelated to the settlement. Carlson has not commented.Meanwhile, O’Reilly was forced to resign from Fox in 2017 after a series of settlements involving him or the company that stemmed from harassment charges against him. More

On Tuesday, Donald Trump said he had received a letter suggesting he was about to be indicted by special counsel Jack Smith in connection with the criminal investigation into the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021. It would be his third criminal indictment.
Jonathan Freedland asks Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, if the pile of indictments could grow too large even for Trump – and his voters. Plus: who is Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia? If Republicans do decide Trump is too badly damaged, might they turn to him?

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Donald Trump faced a deadline of midnight on Thursday to say if he would appear before a Washington grand jury convened by the special counsel Jack Smith to consider federal charges over his election subversion and incitement of the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Late on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter, the Guardian reported that prosecutors had assembled evidence to charge Trump with three crimes.They were: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and an unusual statute that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights.Obstruction of an official proceeding is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Conspiracy to defraud the United States carries a maximum five-year sentence. The civil rights charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.By Thursday afternoon, all indications were that Trump would not agree to testify.Indictments regarding Trump’s attempted election subversion are expected soon – not only at the federal level but also in Fulton county, Georgia, where a grand jury to consider charges was recently formed. Elsewhere, this week brought charges against 16 people in a “false electors” scheme in Michigan, another battleground state.On Thursday morning, meanwhile, Politico reported that Trump had extracted a promise from the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, to hold votes on expunging Trump’s two impeachments.Trump was impeached first for withholding military aid in an attempt to extract political dirt from Ukraine, then for inciting the Capitol attack. In both cases, Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal at trial.Trump reportedly got the promise of an expungement vote, which Politico said McCarthy “made reflexively to save his own skin”, after the speaker provoked outrage from Trump allies by declining to endorse the former president in the Republican presidential primary for the 2024 election, citing an obligation to remain neutral.An expungement vote would be purely symbolic. It also would not be guaranteed to succeed. Republicans control the House by a very slim majority. Two sitting GOP congressmen, David Valadao of California and Dan Newhouse of Washington state, voted to impeach Trump over the Capitol riot. Republicans in swing districts, particularly in heavily Democratic north-eastern states, already face uphill fights to keep their seats.Speaking to reporters on Thursday, McCarthy denied making a promise, saying “There’s no deal” with Trump, but added: “I’ve been very clear from long before – when I voted against impeachments – that [Democrats] put them in for purely political purposes. I support expungement but there’s no deal out there.”In polling averages for the Republican primary, Trump leads by about 30 points. He has maintained that lead even while facing 34 criminal charges in New York, over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels; 37 federal charges over his retention of classified documents; the prospect of state and federal indictments over his election subversion; a $5m fine after being held liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll; and ongoing investigations of his business affairs.Denying all wrongdoing, Trump has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges.Nonetheless, polling regarding a notional general election shows him in a close race with Joe Biden. Earlier this week, Miles Taylor, who was a US homeland security official when in 2018 he wrote a famous anonymous New York Times column warning of Trump’s unfitness for office, told the Guardian Trump could yet return to the White House.“There’s been a number of polls that show the ex-president beating Joe Biden by several points,” Taylor said. “It would be hubris to say, ‘Oh, no, we would beat him again a second time.’ Actually, I don’t think that. If the election was held today, I think Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden, and that really concerns me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTaylor also pointed to the supine nature of the Republican party, saying McCarthy, the House speaker, “thought Trump was a buffoon and a danger and I’m sure Kevin still thinks that privately” but is unwilling, or unable, to move in any way against him.Taylor said: “Those people publicly, because they’re afraid, are still supporting the man. That collective anonymity is putting us in pretty seriously great danger.”Trump revealed on Tuesday that Smith had told him he faced potential charges. According to the New York Times, since then Trump has consulted with Washington allies including McCarthy and the New Yorker Elise Stefanik, chair of the Republican House conference and a staunch supporter who many observers think is eyeing selection as Trump’s running mate next year.Trump’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis, this week mildly criticised Trump for his inaction on 6 January 2021, as the Capitol was attacked, but also said charges against the former president over his election subversion would not “be good for the country”.Court dates are set to clash with the Republican primary calendar. Trump faces three civil trials in New York, one to begin in October and two in January.In the criminal cases, Smith, the special counsel, has asked for trial over the classified documents charges to begin later this year. In the hush-money case, the trial is scheduled for March – in the thick of the Republican primary. Lawyers for Trump are attempting to delay both trials until after the general election next year, when Trump or another Republican president could order all cases dropped.On Thursday, Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican elections lawyer, told the Washington Post the US was “in as precarious a situation as we’ve ever been”.“I don’t know what the chances are of things really going off the rails,” Ginsberg said, “but no question that there is a toxic mix unprecedented in the American experiment.” More

Jason Aldean is a country music star and a big fan of law and order. He loves the law so much, in fact, that he’s willing to take it into his own hands.If you come to his (imaginary) small town and disrespect a cop or engage in any sort of protest, you will regret it.Such is the theme of Aldean’s new song, Try That in a Small Town, which is all about how the singer and his pals will aggressively deal with unseemly behaviour on their turf. A sample extract: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face … Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road. / Around here, we take care of our own …”A little later in the song Aldean elaborates further on what might happen if lines are crossed. “Got a gun that my grandad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up. / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck.” He is, it would appear, referencing a conspiracy theory that the government is going to confiscate Americans’ guns to impose martial law.Try That in a Small Town was released in May but when the music video came out last Friday it generated immediate controversy. The video leaves little doubt as to what Aldean is trying to communicate: it intersperses footage of him singing in front of Maury county courthouse in Tennessee – the site of the lynching of a Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927 – with footage from protests, looting and civil unrest. Small towns are wholesome, the message is. Full of “good ol’ boys” who were “raised up right”. Cities, meanwhile, are hotbeds of violence … and diversity.That last bit isn’t spelled out – it’s not like Aldean yells “I’m a massive racist!” in the middle of the track – but the dog whistles are difficult to ignore. The song has been called “a modern lynching song” by detractors and the video was pulled from Country Music Television (CMT) on Monday. (While CMT has confirmed the video was taken off rotation, it hasn’t put out a statement as to why.) Fellow country star Sheryl Crow has also voiced her disapproval. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence,” Crow tweeted on Tuesday. She further noted that Aldean should know better, “having survived a mass shooting”. Crow was referencing the shooting at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017: the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern US history. Aldean was performing and got out unscathed. He was lucky. Sixty people were killed and 867 injured. Those people weren’t killed and injured by a Black Lives Matter protester. They were killed by Stephen Paddock, an angry white man from Iowa.Try That in a Small Town has generated a lot of criticism, but it also has fervent supporters. Including, of course, GOP lawmakers. “I am shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs,” the South Dakota Republican governor, Kristi Noem, posted in a video on Twitter on Wednesday. The Tennessee house GOP leader, William Lamberth, similarly tweeted: “Loved this song since it was released and will continue to fight every day to spread small town values … Give it a listen. The woke mob will hate you for liking this song.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, also didn’t miss the chance to stoke a little culture war. “The Left is now more concerned about Jason Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals,” she tweeted.Aldean, for his part, is furious at insinuations there is anything racist in his song about shooting outsiders who come to his little country town.“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song,” Aldean tweeted on Wednesday, “and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.”If Aldean isn’t trying to make a point about the Black Lives Matter protests, what is Try That in a Small Town about then? Community, apparently. “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,’” Aldean wrote on Instagram when he launched the video. “It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost.”Perhaps you’re wondering which quaint small town Aldean grew up in. The answer is: he didn’t. Aldean is from Macon, Georgia – a city with a population of about 153,000 people. Now he lives in Nashville, a city with a population of approximately 700,000. The small town he’s singing about is a product of his imagination.But that’s conservatives for you. Last month Nikki Haley tweeted about how much better the US used to be back in the days before marginalized people had rights. “Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country,” she tweeted.Was the past really that easy for the former South Carolina governor? By her own admission things have got a hell of a lot better for people who, like her, aren’t 100% white. “Years ago I was disqualified from a pageant because they didn’t know whether to put me in the white category or the black,” she wrote on Facebook in 2012. “I was neither. Tonight I watched my daughter get first place in her school pageant. God has an amazing way of bringing things full circle.” God also has an amazing away of depriving people like Haley of self-awareness.Aldean’s song doesn’t just epitomize manufactured rightwing nostalgia, it also encapsulates rightwing paranoia. People on the right are obsessed with the idea that big cities are violent hotbeds of crime where you risk your life every time you nip out for a pint of milk. In reality, however, big cities tend to be safer than small towns. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania, for example, found the risk of death from an injury was more than 20% higher in rural small towns than in larger cities. “Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths in the US” one of the researchers told NBC News at the time.The pandemic, to be fair, saw a rise in violent crimes in cities. But even still, you’ve got a better chance of living a long, healthy life in a city. A 2021 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on mortality data from 1999 to 2019 found people living in rural areas die at higher rates than those living in urban areas. That’s because they have less access to healthcare and are more likely to live in poverty.So what’s next for Aldean? Well, I’ve got some good news for all the Republican lawmakers screeching about how unfair it is that Aldean has been cancelled by the woke mob: he’s going to be fine. Indeed, he’s going to be more than fine. Country music (and America) has a way of opening its arms to people accused of racism and making them feel right at home. Just look at Morgan Wallen, for example. In February 2021 TMZ published a video of the musician drunkenly yelling the N-word during a conversation with a friend. He was shunned from polite society for a few months but made a rapid comeback. He won album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2022. His song Last Night is currently in its 14th week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. If it sticks there a little longer he’ll beat the 19-week record currently held by Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, featuring Billy Ray Cyrus.While people on the right may be railing about Aldean being “cancelled”, the sad truth is that this will probably help his career. He’ll go on Fox News and yell about wokeness. He’ll wallow in his imagined victimhood. His song will probably be played in rallies for the next Republican nominee for president. Aldean hasn’t been cancelled or silenced – his message has been amplified. More

Every election presents an opportunity for disinformation to find its way into the public discourse. But as the 2024 US presidential race begins to take shape, the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technology threatens to give propagandists powerful new tools to ply their trade.Generative AI models that are able to create unique content from simple prompts are already being deployed for political purposes, taking disinformation campaigns into strange new places. Campaigns have circulated fake images and audio targeting other candidates, including an AI-generated campaign ad attacking Joe Biden and deepfake videos mimicking real-life news footage.The Guardian spoke with Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a university program that researches the abuses of information technology, about how the latest developments in AI influence campaigns and how society is catching up to a new, artificially created reality.Concern around AI and its potential for disinformation has been around for a while. What has changed that makes this threat more urgent?When people became aware of deepfakes – which usually refers to machine-generated video of an event that did not happen – a few years ago there was concern that adversarial actors would use these types of video to disrupt elections. Perhaps they would make video of a candidate, perhaps they would make video of some sort of disaster. But it didn’t really happen. The technology captured public attention, but it wasn’t very widely democratized. And so it didn’t primarily manifest in the political conversation, but instead in the realm of much more mundane but really individually harmful things, like revenge porn.There’s been two major developments in the last six months. First is the rise of ChatGPT, which is generated text. It became available to a mass market and people began to realize how easy it was to use these types of text-based tools. At the same time, text-to-still image tools became globally available. Today, anybody can use Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to create photorealistic images of things that don’t really exist in the world. The combination of these two things, in addition to the concerns that a lot of people feel around the 2024 elections, has really captured public attention once again.Why did the political use of deepfakes not materialize?The challenge with using video in a political environment is that you really have to nail the substance of the content. There are a lot of tells in video, a lot of ways in which you can determine whether it’s generated. On top of that, when a video is truly sensational, a lot of people look at it and factcheck it and respond to it. You might call it a natural immune response.Text and images, however, have the potential for higher actual impact in an election scenario because they can be more subtle and longer lasting. Elections require months of campaigning during which people formulate an opinion. It’s not something where you’re going to change the entire public mind with a video and have that be the most impactful communication of the election.How do you think large language models can change political propaganda?I want to caveat that describing what is tactically possible is not the same thing as me saying the sky is falling. I’m not a doomer about this technology. But I do think that we should understand generative AI in the context of what it makes possible. It increases the number of people who can create political propaganda or content. It decreases the cost to do it. That’s not to say necessarily that they will, and so I think we want to maintain that differentiation between this is the tactic that a new technology enables versus that this is going to swing an election.As far as the question of what’s possible, in terms of behaviors, you’ll see things like automation. You might remember back in 2015 there were all these fears about bots. You had a lot of people using automation to try to make their point of view look more popular – making it look like a whole lot of people think this thing, when in reality it’s six guys and their 5,000 bots. For a while Twitter wasn’t doing anything to stop that, but it was fairly easy to detect. A lot of the accounts would be saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, because it was expensive and time consuming to generate a unique message for each of your fake accounts. But with generative AI it is now effortless to generate highly personalized content and to automate its dissemination.And then finally, in terms of content, it’s really just that the messages are more credible and persuasive.That seems tied to another aspect you’ve written about, that the sheer amount of content that can be generated, including misleading or inaccurate content, has a muddying effect on information and trust.It’s the scale that makes it really different. People have always been able to create propaganda, and I think it’s very important to emphasize that. There is an entire industry of people whose job it is to create messages for campaigns and then figure out how to get them out into the world. We’ve just changed the speed and the scale and the cost to do that. It’s just an evolution in propaganda.When we think about what’s new and what’s different here, the same thing goes for images. When Photoshop emerged, the public at first was very uncomfortable with Photoshopped images, and gradually became more comfortable with it. The public acclimated to the idea that Photoshop existed and that not everything that you see with your eyes is a thing that necessarily is as it seems – the idea that the woman that you see on the magazine cover probably does not actually look like that. Where we’ve gone with generative AI is the fabrication of a complete unreality, where nothing about the image is what it seems but it looks photorealistic.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNow anybody can make it look like the pope is wearing Balenciaga.Exactly.In the US, it seems like meaningful federal regulation is pretty far away if it’s going to come at all. Absent of that, what are some of the sort of short-term ways to mitigate these risks?First is the education piece. There was a very large education component when deepfakes became popular – media covered them and people began to get the sense that we were entering a world in which a video might not be what it seems.But it’s unreasonable to expect every person engaging with somebody on a social media platform to figure out if the person they’re talking to is real. Platforms will have to take steps to more carefully identify if automation is in play.On the image front, social media platforms, as well as generative AI companies, are starting to come together to try and determine what kind of watermarking might be useful so that platforms and others can determine computationally whether an image is generated.Some companies, like OpenAI, have policies around generating misinformation or the use of ChatGPT for political ends. How effective do you see those policies being?It’s a question of access. For any technology, you can try to put guardrails on your proprietary version of that technology and you can argue you’ve made a values-based decision to not allow your products to generate particular types of content. On the flip side, though, there are models that are open source and anyone can go and get access to them. Some of the things that are being done with some of the open source models and image generation are deeply harmful, but once the model is open sourced, the ability to control its use is much more limited.And it’s a very big debate right now in the field. You don’t want to necessarily create regulations that lock in and protect particular corporate actors. At the same time, there is a recognition that open-source models are out there in the world already. The question becomes how the platforms that are going to serve as the dissemination pathways for this stuff think about their role and their policies in what they amplify and curate.What’s the media or the public getting wrong about AI and disinformation?One of the real challenges is that people are going to believe what they see if it conforms to what they want to believe. In a world of unreality in which you can create that content that fulfills that need, one of the real challenges is whether media literacy efforts actually solve any of the problems. Or will we move further into divergent realities – where people are going to continue to hold the belief in something that they’ve seen on the internet as long as it tells them what they want. Larger offline challenges around partisanship and trust are reflected in, and exacerbated by, new technologies that enable this kind of content to propagate online. More