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    ‘The city that draws the line’: one Arizona community’s fight against a huge datacenter

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    A company’s opaque plan to build a huge datacenter outside Tucson, Arizona has roiled the desert city over the past few months, the latest US community to push back as tech companies aggressively seek to build out infrastructure for cloud computing and to power the AI boom.The proposed datacenter, known as Project Blue, would span 290 acres in Pima county, and become the biggest development ever in the county, or anywhere in the southern part of the state.The $3.6bn project wasn’t on most Tucsonans’ radar until 17 June, when the county board of supervisors narrowly agreed to sell and rezone a parcel of land just south-east of town to the developer Beale Infrastructure.The San Francisco-based company hoped to get the project annexed by the city, a necessary step for it to be supplied by the public utility, Tucson Water.But since the parcel sale agreement, the proposed center has faced stiff pushback from a community upset over the enormous amounts of water and electricity it would require, and the lack of transparency with which the developers and some in local government have pursued the project.Conflict over the project made what is normally a sleepy time for Tucson politics – the city council is off in July amid searing heat and, with luck, monsoon downpours – into “the craziest seven weeks I’ve seen in Tucson”, said Michael Bogan, an aquatic ecologist and hydrologist at the University of Arizona who has long worked in the area.View image in fullscreenThe episode in Tucson illustrates the secretiveness and tenacity with which developers are rushing to build datacenters throughout the US, and the emotionally charged mix of issues that confront communities, weighing sometimes murky promises of economic incentives and jobs against effects on the environment and natural resources.In Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI built one of the world’s biggest supercomputers, bringing in tax revenue to an economically depressed area, while also setting off a battle over air quality concerns related to the development’s methane turbines. Phoenix has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of datacenters, which keeps expanding, encouraged by tax incentives and local business leaders; local opposition and ordinances around noise pollution and water use are also on the rise. High-profile projects have been postponed or cancelled due to local pushback in recent months in northern Virginia, the nation’s biggest datacenter hub; in St Charles, Missouri; and in several towns in Indiana.But in even more locations, datacenters are moving forward, often under a cloud of secrecy.Quest for AI computing powerThe project in Tucson is one of many emerging in the quest for AI computing power and to serve data-intensive companies.The project envisions a vast warehouse full of computers in the Sonoran desert, including $2.4bn worth of equipment. Community outrage over the project grew soon after the city council’s 17 June vote, and much of it centered around the issue of water.Datacenters use water in two ways: to maintain a steady humidity, and to cool off the hot computers, which is often accomplished by running cold water past the machines, consuming water in the form of steam.Communities throughout the US have seen groundwater depletion and contamination after datacenters crept up. Tucson has long embraced water conservation, and this protective ethos is more salient there than many other communities, said Ed Hendel, president of Sky Island AI, a Tucson-based company. As one example, the city treats wastewater and releases it to the Santa Cruz River, home to wildlife such as endangered fish.Hendel’s daily work relies on datacenters, but he said they should be built where they make sense. Placing water-guzzling warehouses of computers “in a hot desert is not a good starting point”, he said. “Putting them in a hot desert in the midst of a drought is even more absurd, because that water is precious.”View image in fullscreenBeale did not detail exactly how much water it would use and from where in the weeks after the June vote, even though it claimed the project would be “water positive”. In the absence of details, Bogan set out to analyze how the project would be water positive, projecting it would be most likely to use treated water that now flows into the Santa Cruz. But even if the company went that route, Bogan wrote in a white paper on 11 July, it could dry up significant portions of the river, harming the many plants and animals that live there.The city manager, Tim Thomure, acting as an intermediary between Beale and the public, released the first concrete details about the project’s planned water use in mid-July after Bogan’s white paper came out: Project Blue would not affect the Santa Cruz River, he said. It would use three sources of water, including from two locations where treated wastewater is currently stored underground for future use, as well as the Tucson airport remediation plant, which treats contaminated groundwater that currently stays on site. And it gave an estimate of water use: over 1,900 acre-feet, or 620m gallons, enough to supply more than four typical 18-hole Pima county golf courses, according to Thomure.Beale also pledged to invest $100m in a pipeline to transport and use treated wastewater, and create 180 jobs.But this is not “water positive”, and it would rather cause “net depletion of our groundwater resources to supply Project Blue”, said Bogan, the aquatic ecologist. He pointed to a city document which notes that if Project Blue were to use more groundwater than it could replenish, it could make payments, or “water positivity rates” to make up for it.Lisa Shipek, executive director of southern Arizona’s Watershed Management Group, agreed with Bogan’s assessment. By possibly paying for using up groundwater, Project Blue, Shipek said, would potentially “replace wet water with ‘paper water’”. The tactic – paying for consuming wet water, or offsetting it in another way, whether in the form of water conservation or education measures – has been used to deplete groundwater throughout the world.Water not the only concernWater wasn’t community members’ only concern. Beale Infrastructure is not a typical developer, but rather a subsidiary of the asset management company Blue Owl. On 21 July, the local news site Arizona Luminaria published a story revealing that Pima county staff possessed a memo stating that Project Blue would be financed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The story prompted fresh outcry from community members frustrated with Amazon’s anti-union actions, and overtures by its owner, Jeff Bezos, to the Trump administration.An AWS spokesperson said: “AWS has previously engaged in standard due diligence processes in Arizona, like we do in any geographic location we consider building and operating our infrastructure. We do not have any commitments or agreements in place to develop this project.”But the company declined to answer a question about whether AWS was affiliated with Project Blue in the past, or, potentially, in the future.A Beale spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on our tenants until a more advanced stage of the project.”Another wrinkle that added to the uproar was a news release from Tucson Electric Power (TEP) put out hours after the county vote on 17 June, announcing it was requesting a 14% rate increase to offset grid investments and inflation. With datacenters driving up electricity demand across the country, many community members assumed the rate hike was related to Project Blue, said the county supervisor, Matt Heinz.It wasn’t. The timing was coincidental, and a huge mistake, he said. “It’s unfortunately really plagued this whole project.”A TEP spokesperson, Joseph Barrios, said that the rate increase had nothing to do with Project Blue, but was based on costs already incurred in 2024 and before.View image in fullscreen“We understand that any rate increase could have an impact on our customers and it’s not something we take lightly,” he said.Outrage over Project Blue grew rapidly over the summer. Eliseo Gomez, a local high school teacher and organizer, convened with a small group at the base of Tucson’s “A” mountain shortly after the 17 June vote. “We were like: what can we do?” They decided to target the annexation vote. The group started a website and social media channels named No Desert Data Center, encouraging people to express their concerns with the mayor and city council.In response, the city arranged for two public meetings with presentations from Beale Infrastructure, as well as Tucson Water and TEP. The majority of attenders at both meetings were clearly opposed, most wearing red shirts saying “no to Project Blue” or holding protest signs. Union members, enticed by promises of construction jobs, made up a supportive minority at the events. Attenders grew increasingly upset, Gomez said, as they felt their concerns and queries were dodged or ignored. By the second meeting, on 4 August, many locals appeared fed up. Beale executives gave similar speeches, without providing much further detail, incensing the crowd, whose boos and shouts made it difficult for presenters to continue.Many citizens presented their own research. “I feel like I learned more about Project Blue from the public than the city,” said city councilman Rocque Perez.On 6 August, in an unscheduled vote, council members unanimously decided to discontinue discussions with Beale, each sharing short speeches revealing sharp opposition to Project Blue. Tucsonans packing the council chambers cheered and celebrated; Beale executives, appearing stunned, were booed as they left.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionImpact on Tucson politicsStill, Beale hasn’t given up. In mid-September, the company proposed moving forward with an air-cooled system that uses less water than the original design. Beale co-filed a state application with the TEP, to be supplied with up to 286 megawatts – enough to power to up to 250,000 homes.In a statement, Beale has described the new design as a closed-loop system that “uses minimal amounts of water that are continuously recirculated, thereby eliminating water loss”.Several local leaders said the Republican-led Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees electricity use in the state, is likely to approve the project’s electricity request. That would mean Beale’s main remaining hurdle is finding a water source. The company has not said how it would obtain any such water, however, and given the city council’s vote, they cannot be supplied by the city’s public utility.Meanwhile, the controversy has had a profound impact on Tucson politics. Even supporters acknowledge the Project Blue process started poorly, partly because non-disclosure agreements between Beale and city staff dating back to 2022 meant that most elected leaders knew little to nothing about it until some time this year.Supervisor Jennifer Allen said the first meeting between Beale and the board in late May was short on details, including water use, and her requests for more information turned up nothing concrete. It was “a lot of greenwashing”, she said. She voted no on 17 June, as did her colleague Andrés Cano.Heinz, a longtime Democrat, said he voted for the rezoning and sale because the project had long been championed by city staff, including city manager Thomure, and because the tens of thousands of hi-tech jobs in the area will need access to nearby datacenters.Though there weren’t detailed water use estimates at first, Heinz said he wasn’t worried as Beale would be working with Tucson Water and the city would be “putting in those guardrails”.View image in fullscreenThe new design, he said, “will be an even better fit for southern Arizona”.“I frankly wish they’d approached us with this air-cooled design to begin with.”Heinz, as well as supervisors Rex Scott and Steve Christy, have come under withering scrutiny from constituents, who have implored the board to revisit the sale agreement. Heinz said that wasn’t going to happen. “There’s no vote before the board,” Heinz said. “It’s done. And I don’t want to reverse it.”Scott acknowledged that NDAs played a negative role in the affair and noted that both the county and city had already implemented new guidelines for handling them, which should grant more transparency to the process, Scott said.The city council has also since passed new rules to give more transparency and oversight over big water users, and they are developing specific guidelines and guard-rails to govern any future proposed data centers.‘Cities across the country are being sold the same story’While Beale’s air-cooled system may use less water, it has highlighted the other enormous costs of datacenters: electricity. Air-cooled systems use huge amounts of energy and are less energy efficient – especially in a desert where the daily average high is 29C (84F).It’s now a national issue – a 2024 report to Congress co-authored by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher AB Siddik estimates that datacenters consumed 4.4% of the nation’s total electricity as of 2023, which could rise to as much as 12% by 2028.TEP’s involvement has brought scrutiny to the private utility; locals have recently been protesting at their headquarters. On 23 September, the mayor and council announced they plan to intervene in the utility’s request to the state for the rate hike, saying in a statement such an increase “will strain families and small businesses and slow the transition to clean, affordable energy”.View image in fullscreenThe saga has also raised the possibility that the Tucsonans or their leaders could consider pursuing a public utility to replace TEP when its contract is due for review in 2025, though that could be an enormous effort, Perez said.“I’m disappointed that Tucson Electric Power is partnering with Beale despite strong community concerns,” said councilman Kevin Dahl. “It certainly makes an argument for public power.”TEP spokesperson Joseph Barrios said that the utility’s involvement with Project Blue would not raise customers’ rates or affect their service.“We have an obligation to serve, and that includes all customers within our service area,” Barrios said.As far as the possibility of public power, “we feel our community is better served by continuing to work together”, he added.Council member and vice-mayor Lane Santa Cruz said this wasn’t just about Tucson, though.“What’s happening here isn’t unique to us: cities across the country are being sold the same story, with promises of jobs, innovation and progress,” she said. “But what’s not being talked about is who really benefits and what it costs us.”Too often, she added, these projects are extractive, using a community’s water, electricity, and labor – while providing only a small number of jobs – instead of being a sustainable partner.“We need to be the city that draws the line,” she said. 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      From South Park v Trump to AI slopaganda: deepfakes are now part of the news cycle, for better and for worse | Anna Broinowski

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      Salman Rushdie believes AI will not be a threat to authors until ChatGPT can write “a funny book”. His faith in human over synthetic creativity may hold some truth in the literary space. But on our screens – from film, art and satire to the algorithmically turbo-charged, factually opaque, monetised churn of the 24/7 news cycle – AI is already making us laugh.Deepfakes – synthetic audio and video of people doing and saying things they never said or did – are the chief comedic disruptors in a suite of increasingly persuasive AI tools shaping the post-truth reality envisioned by the Microsoft engineer Eric Horvitz, where fact and fiction are indistinguishable. In eight short years, deepfakes have risen from cultural outlier to mainstream meme, embodying the futurist Roy Amara’s Law: we overestimate the effects of new technology in the short run but underestimate its long-term impacts.And with some experts predicting 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2027, the extent to which synthetic replicas will change how we trust and interact with on-screen depictions of real people is now an urgent question for creators, policymakers and viewers.When deepfakes emerged in 2017 as incel-produced nonconsensual porn, the alarm they generated was justified. But as soon as deepfakes started being used a political tool, concerns snowballed into panic. Philosophers labelled them an “epistemic threat” to evidentiary systems; corporations mounted costly (and unsuccessful) detection programs; and pundits warned of an “info-apocalypse”, in which a convincing deepfake of a world leader could start world war three. Less dramatic but equally chilling was the prediction that the mere awareness of deepfakes would collapse civic trust altogether. In 2018 Jordan Peele made a prophetic deepfake of Obama urging viewers to rely on credible news sources, lest we become a “fucked up dystopia”.Cut to 2025, and satirical deepfakes are part of the news cycle. Shortly after attending Pope Francis’ funeral, the US president, Donald Trump, posted a viral deepfake of himself in papal regalia. In response to Doge cuts to public services, a deepfake of Trump fellating Elon Musk’s foot appeared on a DC government lobby screen. After Trump’s declaration he would transform Gaza into a Middle Eastern “Riviera”, a satirical deepfake appeared on Instagram showing Trump sipping cocktails with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in an AI-slop fantasy of Gaza as a beachside resort, full of gold Trump statues and happy Palestinian children. And just last month, South Park’s deepfake of Trump with a micro-penis elicited an official rebuke from the White House.Deepfakes have been disrupting democratic processes since 2018, when Indian nationalists circulated a deepfake porn video of the journalist Rana Ayyub, in an attempt to silence her. But the elevation of deepfake satire as a weapon in mainstream politics is a more recent trend. During the 2024 US election campaign, Trump posted absurdist deepfakes of Kamala Harris addressing a communist rally and admitting she was a DEI hire. A surreal Republican attack ad showed a deepfake Joe Biden winning the presidency and its AI-imagined consequences: war with Taiwan, bank closures and US cities destroyed by crime. Echoing warnings that the rise of deepfakes could be used to discredit authentic recordings, Trump falsely accused Harris of deepfaking her crowd sizes.And AI “slopaganda” is coming for Trump too. Viral platforms Make AI Great Again and Global Presidents are generating billions of views for videos featuring a panoply of strongmen – from Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Kim Jong-un – emasculating Trump in slapstick pranks. (That Chinese leader Xi Jinping is largely absent from these clips has prompted speculation about their origins and goals.)In stark contrast to this perniciously populist deepfakery, progressive artists and activists are using AI counterfeits to provoke, astonish and speak truth to power. Stephanie Lepp’s Deepfake Reckonings imagines a “morally courageous” US justice Brett Kavanaugh; and Kendrick Lamar’s The Heart music video deepfakes him as OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, to destabilise assumptions about black identity. Compil des Bleues inserts the faces of France’s soccer stars on to the bodies of its female World Cup team, to highlight the women’s equal athleticism; while the Lincoln Project’s posthumous deepfake of Trump’s father, Fred, labels his son “a fuck up”, “trash” and “a disgrace”; declaring “I’ve been dead for 30 years and I’m still ashamed of you.”Professional film-makers are also manipulating deepfakes to play with the truth. Black Mirror’s Joan is Awful depicts a matryoshka-like dystopia where characters are deepfakes of deepfakes; Sassy Justice by the South Park creators portrays Trump as a corruption-slaying TV journalist; and the Polish biopic Putin delivers an unflinching AI portrait of its titular hero. The documentary Welcome to Chechnya deploys deepfake masks to protect its persecuted gay subjects, while A Life Uncharted uses real audio of its deceased protagonist, Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson, to construct a candid deepfake interview.Deepfakes come with very real risks that demand urgent regulation: cybercrime, corporate fraud, intimate image-abuse and political disinformation among them. But it is vital that AI’s escalating persuasive power is regulated without stifling creativity and innovation.On this, at least, film-makers and big tech are aligned. When xAI unveiled its new Grok AI tool, German satirists used it to make a deepfake of Elon Musk committing an armed robbery – and thanked him for supporting free speech.

      Dr Anna Broinowski is a film-maker, author and synthetic media researcher at the University of Sydney. She will be speaking on a panel about AI at Curious festival, held at Sydney Opera House on Sunday 28 September More

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      What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?

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      View image in fullscreenI come from Trinidad and Tobago. As a country that was once colonized by the British, I am wary of the ways that inequalities between the global north and global south risk being perpetuated in the digital age.When we consider the lack of inclusion of the global south in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), I think about how this translates to an eventual lack of economic leverage and geopolitical engagement in this technology that has captivated academics within the industrialised country I reside, the United States.As a scientist, I experienced an early rite of passage into the world of Silicon Valley, the land of techno-utopianism, and the promise of AI as a net positive for all. But, as an academic attending my first academic AI conference in 2019, I began to notice inconsistencies in the audience to whom the promise of AI was directed. AI researchers can often identify consistent choices for locations where such conferences are hosted, and where they are not. NeurIPS, one of the top AI conferences, has highlighted annual issues for obtaining visas for academic attendees and citizens from the African continent. Attending such a prestigious conference in the field grants one the opportunity to gain access to peers in the field, new collaborations and feedback on one’s work.I often hear the word “democratisation” within the AI community, an implication of equity in access, opportunity and merit for contribution regardless of one’s country of origin. Associate professor of economics Fadhel Kaboub talks about how “a lack of vision for oneself results in being a part of someone else’s vision”, reflecting on how systematically lacking an access to infrastructure results in local trade deficits in economies.As in the time of Nafta’s promise of “free trade”, promises of “AI democratisation” today still exist and benefit mainly countries with access to tech hubs not located in the global south. While the United States and other industrialized countries dominate in access to computational power and research activity, much of the low-paid manual labour involved in labelling data and the global underclass in artificial intelligence still exists in the global south.Much like coffee, cocoa, bauxite and sugar cane are produced in the global south, exported cheaply and sold at a premium in more industrialized countries, over the past few years we have seen influence in AI inextricably tied to energy consumption. Countries that can afford to consume more energy have more leverage in reinforcing power to shape the future direction of AI and what is considered valuable within the AI academic community.In 2019, Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri published Ghost Work, which exposed the invisible labour of technology today, and at the beginning of my tenure at graduate school, the heavily cited paper Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence was published. It has been five years since these seminal works. What would an AI community inspired by the Brics organisation, which united major emerging economies to advocate for themselves in a system dominated by western countries, look like for the global south?I often ask myself how AI has contributed to our legacy, and whose stories it won’t tell. Has AI mitigated issues of mistrust and corruption in less-resourced countries? Has it benefited our civic communities or narrowed educational gaps between less-resourced regions? How will it make society better, and whose society will it make better? Who will be included in that future?A historical mistrust can impede adoption by developing countries. Furthermore, many developing countries have weak institutional infrastructures, poor or nonexistent laws and regulatory frameworks for data projection and cybersecurity. Therefore, even with an improved information infrastructure, they are likely to function at a disadvantage in the global information marketplace.A currency is only as good as its perceived global trust. When thinking about the democratization in AI and a vision of what it could be in years to come, AI’s survival requires including more perspectives from regions such as the global south. Countries from the global south should work together to build their own markets and have a model of sovereignty for their data and data labour.Economic models often consider a definition of development that includes a measure of improvement in the quality of life of the most marginalized of its people. It is my hope that in the future that will extend to our evaluation of AI.

      Krystal Maughan is a PhD student at the University of Vermont studying differential privacy and machine learning More

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      Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations

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      The “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is using artificial intelligence to create a “delete list” of federal regulations, according to a report, proposing to use the tool to cut 50% of regulations by the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration.The “Doge AI Deregulation Decision Tool” will analyze 200,000 government regulations, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Post, and select those which it deems to be no longer required by law.Doge, which was run by Elon Musk until May, claims that 100,000 of those regulations can then be eliminated, following some staff feedback.A PowerPoint presentation made public by the Post claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) used the AI tool to make “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections”, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau used it to write “100% of deregulations”.The Post spoke to three HUD employees who told the newspaper AI had been “recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations”.During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump claimed that government regulations were “driving up the cost of goods” and promised the “most aggressive regulatory reduction” in history. He repeatedly criticized rules which aimed to tackle the climate crisis, and as president he ordered the heads of all government agencies to undertake a review of all regulations in coordination with Doge.Asked about the use of AI in deregulation by the Post, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said “all options are being explored” to achieve the president’s deregulation promises. Fields said that “no single plan has been approved or green-lit”, and the work is “in its early stages and is being conducted in a creative way in consultation with the White House”.Fields added: “The Doge experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business and are embarking on a never-before-attempted transformation of government systems and operations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.”Musk appointed a slew of inexperienced staffers to Doge, including Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who was previously known by the online handle “Big Balls”. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. More

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      Trump signs executive orders targeting ‘woke’ AI models and regulation

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including one targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models.During remarks at an AI summit in Washington, Trump decried “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models”, before signing the orders on stage at the Mellon Auditorium.“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke. Is that OK?” Trump said, drawing loud applause from the audience of AI industry leaders. He then asserted that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had “established toxic diversity, equity and inclusion ideology as a guiding principle of American AI development”.“So you immediately knew that was the end of your development,” he said, eliciting laughter.The new order requires any artificial intelligence company receiving federal funding to maintain politically neutral AI models free of “ideological dogmas such as DEI” – putting pressure on an industry increasingly seeking to partner with government agencies. It is part of the Trump administration’s broader anti-diversity campaign that has also targeted federal agencies, academic institutions and the military.While the directive emphasizes that the federal government “should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace”, it asserts that public procurement carries “the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas”. The metrics of what make an AI model politically biased are contentious and open to interpretation, however, and therefore may allow the administration to use the order to target companies at its discretion.The other orders were aimed at expediting federal permitting for datacentre infrastructure and promoting the export of American AI models. The executive actions coincide with the Trump administration’s release of a broader, 24-page “AI action plan” that seeks to cement the US’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence as well as expand the use of AI in the federal government.“Winning this competition will be a test of our capacities unlike anything since the dawn of the space age,” Trump declared, adding: “We need US technology companies to be all-in for America. We want you to put America first.”Earlier on Wednesday, the White House unveiled its long-promised “action plan”, titled “Winning the Race”, that was announced shortly after Trump took office and repealed a Biden administration order on AI that mandated some safeguards and standards on the technology. It outlines the White House’s vision for governing artificial intelligence in the US, vowing to speed up the development of the fast-growing technology by removing “red tape and onerous regulation”.During his remarks, Trump also proposed a more nominal change. “I can’t stand it,” he said, referring to the use of the word “artificial”. “I don’t even like the name, you know? I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out, please? We should change the name. I actually mean that.”“It’s not artificial. It’s genius,” he added.A second order Trump signed on Wednesday calls for deregulating AI development, increasing the building of datacentres and removing environmental protections that could hamper their construction.Datacentres that house the servers for AI models require immense amounts of water and energy to function, as well as produce greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups have warned about harmful increases to air and noise pollution as tech companies build more facilities, while a number of local communities have pushed back against their construction.In addition to easing permitting laws and emphasizing the need for more energy infrastructure, both measures that tech companies have lobbied for, Trump’s order also frames the AI race as a contest for geopolitical dominance. China has invested billions into the manufacturing of AI chips and datacentres to become a competitor in the industry, while Chinese companies such as Deepseek have released AI models that rival Silicon Valley’s output.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trump’s plan seeks to address fears of China as an AI superpower, the Trump administration’s move against “woke” AI echoes longstanding conservative grievances against tech companies, which Republicans have accused of possessing liberal biases and suppressing rightwing ideology. As generative AI has become more prominent in recent years, that criticism has shifted from concerns over internet search results or anti-misinformation policies into anger against AI chatbots and image generators.One of the biggest critics of perceived liberal bias in AI is Elon Musk, who has vowed to make his xAI company and its Grok chatbot “anti-woke”. Although Musk and Donald Trump are still locked in a feud after their public falling out last month, Musk may stand to benefit from Trump’s order given his emphasis on controlling AI’s political outputs.Musk has consistently criticized AI models, including his own, for failing to generate what he sees as sufficiently conservative views. He has claimed that xAI has reworked Grok to eliminate liberal bias, and the chatbot has occasionally posted white supremacist and antisemitic content. In May, Grok affirmed white supremacist conspiracies that a “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa and said it was “instructed by my creators” to do so. Earlier this month, Grok also posted pro-Nazi ideology and rape fantasies while identifying itself as “MechaHitler” until the company was forced to intervene.Despite Grok’s promotion of Nazism, xAI was among several AI companies that the Department of Defense awarded with up to $200m contracts this month to develop tools for the government. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, all of which have their own proprietary AI models, were the other recipients.Conservatives have singled out incidents such as Google’s Gemini image generator inaccurately producing racially diverse depictions of historical figures such as German second world war soldiers as proof of liberal bias. AI experts have meanwhile long warned about problems of racial and gender bias in the creation of artificial intelligence models, which are trained on content such as social media posts, news articles and other forms of media that may contain stereotypes or discriminatory material that gets incorporated into these tools. Researchers have found that these biases have persisted despite advancements in AI, with models often replicating existing social prejudices in their outputs.Conflict over biases in AI have also led to turmoil in the industry. In 2020, the co-lead of Google’s “ethical AI” team Timnit Gebru said she was fired after she expressed concerns of biases being built into the company’s AI models and a broader lack of diversity efforts at the company. Google said she resigned. More

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      Climate advocates outraged at Trump administration plans to fast-track AI sector

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      The Trump administration has unveiled plans to speed the development of the highly polluting artificial intelligence sector, sparking outrage from climate advocates.Rolled out on Wednesday, the 28-page scheme pledges to remove so-called “bureaucratic red tape” and streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure.To do so, it will dismantle some environmental and land-use regulations, roll back some Biden-era rules for subsidies for semiconductor plants related to climate requirements, and seek to establish exclusions for datacenters from the National Environmental Policy Act and streamline permits under the Clean Water Act.“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day,” the plan says. “Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”Trump is also expected to sign three AI-related executive orders on Wednesday during a keynote address at a summit in DC. The announcement will be co-hosted by bipartisan lawmakers with the Hill and Valley Forum and a business and technology podcast hosted by four technology investors and businessmen, including Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks.The AI sector is already depleting land and water resources and taking a massive toll on the climate, with AI-powered large language models such as ChatGPT taking up to 10 times more energy than a regular Google search, according to an estimate by the Electric Power Research Institute. Last year, ChatGPT used more than half a million kilowatts of electricity every day, equivalent to the daily power use of 180,000 US households.The training of a single AI model can lead to an emissions footprint that is almost five times larger than the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American car. Recent research from Food and Water Watch also found that energy demand from AI servers and datacenters in the US is expected to increase up to threefold from 2023 to 2028, which could lead the US sector to, by 2028, annually consume enough water to fill more than 1m Olympic-size swimming pools and enough electricity to power more than 28m American households.“At its core, President Trump’s AI agenda is nothing more than a thinly veiled invitation for the fossil fuel and corporate water industries to ramp up their exploitation of our environment and natural resources – all at the expense of everyday people,” said Mitch Jones, a managing director Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.The new plan recommends that regulators review states’ AI laws to see whether they interfere with the agency’s authority. It also says federal agencies will “consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions” and “limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award”.Republicans earlier this year attempted to enact a version of this by placing a moratorium on states’ ability to impose regulations on artificial intelligence into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the provision was stripped at the last minute.“Under this plan, tech giants get sweetheart deals while everyday Americans will see their electricity bills rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI datacenters,” said JB Branch, a big-tech accountability advocate with the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. “States are held hostage: either stop protecting their residents from dangerous, untested AI products, or lose federal funding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs a counterweight to the new Trump plan, a broad coalition of more than 90 advocacy groups – including climate and environmental justice non-profits, consumer protection organizations and labor advocates – published an open letter calling for a “people’s AI action plan” that prioritizes “public wellbeing, shared prosperity, a sustainable future and security”.“We can’t let big tech and big oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ wellbeing,” the coalition wrote.Research shows that many datacenters used for AI are placed near low-income communities of color, which are already often overburdened by pollution.“People sacrifice their health, their wellbeing and, too often, their future, so that others can benefit,” said Sharon Lewis, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice. “We’re told these datacenters are harmless, but even though they might seem like they pose no risk, in reality, these energy-hungry, pollution-intensive facilities are just as damaging to our environment and health.” More

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      OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI

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      During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT’s recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity’s technological destiny.Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.“Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: “Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI’s diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn’t go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare.“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better – it’s like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he said. “Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”His visit to Washington was aligned with the Trump administration’s unveiling of its “AI action plan”, which is focused defining and easing some regulations and promoting more datacenters. Altman’s latest engagement is with the federal government under Donald Trump, which has taken on a new tune compared with years past. While much has changed with the tech over the years, under the Biden administration, OpenAI and its rivals asked the government to regulate AI. Meanwhile under Trump, they talk of accelerating to beat China.At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI’s rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that “there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpenAI and Altman are already under way on their big pivot to Washington, attempting to crash a party at which Elon Musk once held the golden ticket. Along with announcing plans to open his company’s first office in Washington next year, Altman faced the Senate commerce committee for his first congressional testimony since his high-profile appearance in May 2023 that propelled him on to the global stage. More

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      Medical charlatans have existed through history. But AI has turbocharged them | Edna Bonhomme

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      Nearly a year into parenting, I’ve relied on advice and tricks to keep my baby alive and entertained. For the most part, he’s been agile and vivacious, and I’m beginning to see an inquisitive character develop from the lump of coal that would suckle from my breast. Now he’s started nursery (or what Germans refer to as Kita), other parents in Berlin, where we live, have warned me that an avalanche of illnesses will come flooding in. So during this particular stage of uncertainty, I did what many parents do: I consulted the internet.This time, I turned to ChatGPT, a source I had vowed never to use. I asked a straightforward but fundamental question: “How do I keep my baby healthy?” The answers were practical: avoid added sugar, monitor for signs of fever and talk to your baby often. But the part that left me wary was the last request: “If you tell me your baby’s age, I can tailor this more precisely.” Of course, I should be informed about my child’s health, but given my growing scepticism towards AI, I decided to log off.Earlier this year, an episode in the US echoed my little experiment. With a burgeoning measles outbreak, children’s health has become a significant political battleground, and the Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy, has initiated a campaign titled the Make America Healthy Again commission, aimed at combating childhood chronic disease. The corresponding report claimed to address the principal threats to children’s health: pesticides, prescription drugs and vaccines. Yet the most striking aspect of the report was the pattern of citation errors and unsubstantiated conclusions. External researchers and journalists believed that these pointed to the use of ChatGPT in compiling the report.What made this more alarming was that the Maha report allegedly included studies that did not exist. This coincides with what we already know about AI, which has been found not only to include false citations but also to “hallucinate”, that is, to invent nonexistent material. The epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who was listed in the Maha report as the first author of a study on anxiety and adolescents, said: “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with.”The threat of AI may feel new, but its role in spreading medical myths fits into an old mould: that of the charlatan peddling false cures. During the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no shortage of quacks selling reagents intended to counteract intestinal ruptures and eye pustules. Although not medically trained, some, such as Buonafede Vitali and Giovanni Greci, were able to obtain a licence to sell their serums. Having a public platform as grand as the square meant they could gather in public and entertain bystanders, encouraging them to purchase their products, which included balsamo simpatico (sympathetic balm) to treat venereal diseases.RFK Jr believes that he is an arbiter of science, even if the Maha report appears to have cited false information. What complicates charlatanry today is that we’re in an era of far more expansive tools, such as AI, which ultimately have more power than the swindlers of the past. This disinformation may appear on platforms that we believe to be reliable, such as search engines, or masquerade as scientific papers, which we’re used to seeing as the most reliable sources of all.Ironically, Kennedy has claimed that leading peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are corrupt. His stance is especially troubling, given the influence he wields in shaping public health discourse, funding and official panels. Moreover, his efforts to implement his Maha programme undermine the very concept of a health programme. Unlike science, which strives to uncover the truth, AI has no interest in whether something is true or false.AI is very convenient, and people often turn to it for medical advice; however, there are significant concerns with its use. It is injurious enough to refer to it as an individual, but when a government significantly relies on AI for medical reports, this can lead to misleading conclusions about public health. A world filled with AI platforms creates an environment where fact and fiction meld into each other, leaving minimal foundation for scientific objectivity.The technology journalist Karen Hao astutely reflected in the Atlantic: “How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: how do we ensure that we’ll make our future better, not worse?” We need to address this by establishing a way to govern its use, rather than adopting a heedless approach to AI by the government.Individual solutions can be helpful in assuaging our fears, but we require robust and adaptable policies to hold big tech and governments accountable regarding AI misuse. Otherwise, we risk creating an environment where charlatanism becomes the norm.

      Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science More

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      Doge wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. It won’t work | Mike Pepi

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      Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.All the while, Elon Musk sold the White House on an “AI-first strategy” for the US government. The recent executive order Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence mandates that barely tested Silicon Valley AI be jammed into the government’s work. It directs agencies to use AI to “lessen the burden of bureaucratic restrictions”. This is a thinly veiled attempt not just to reduce institutional activities; it’s also a degradation play.Doge makes plain an often misunderstood tension: Silicon Valley’s final dream is a world without institutions. Since the rise of the internet, startups have long encouraged, and profited from, institutional decline. This anti-institutionalism goes back to the roots of computing. Charles Babbage’s difference engine, central to modern computing, was built on technologies meant to control labor. It was a reflection of Babbage’s belief that the highest intention of the factory manager was to reduce the skill and cognitive complexity of laborers’ tasks. If the machine could manage production, humans – now smoothed-out automatons – would hardly need accompanying social protections, or even any governance at all.In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This automated governance was eventually brought into direct competition with public institutions. The revolt against the state took many forms in the history of computing thereafter, from the libertarian California ideology (“information wants to be free”) to the very idea that a new “cyberspace” would be liberated from governments. Here the individual is an entrepreneur of the mind, able to instantly improve their lot without the mediating hand of the institutional form.To get to the real heart of Doge’s ideology, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s manifesto on building open-source software. For Raymond, cathedrals are “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. This slow, deliberate work is no match for the networked and digitally enabled bazaar, where many software developers move fast by releasing early and often, delegate everything they can, and are open to the point of promiscuity. Something like scripture for computer engineers, Raymond’s ideas soon jumped out of the network and into governance of the physical world, where all human organizations were scrutinized as the maligned “cathedral”.Entrepreneurs loved this idea, too. The management method known as the “lean startup” is a lightweight program of data-driven optimizations designed to quickly scale businesses. Instead of human labor and judgment, lean startups use data and algorithms to experiment their way toward governance.But there’s a catch: a public institution is not supposed to be run like a digital startup. Silicon Valley may have carved out a niche in which its organizational philosophies mastered food delivery apps, AI girlfriends and money-laundering shitcoins, but the moment they take these methods to institutions entrusted with public welfare, they’ve lost the plot. Governments don’t have customers – they care for citizens. If classical liberalism had the state and its many sovereign institutions, and neoliberalism had the divine hand of the free market, today’s platform class elevates computation as the ultimate arbiter of truth. When presented with an institutional force, the platform class first asks: how could this be delivered by way of a digital platform?Digital technology doesn’t have to be this way. Good software can augment institutions, not be the rationale for their deletion. Building this future requires undoing Silicon Valley’s pernicious opposition to the institutional form. By giving into the digital utopian’s anti-institutionalism, we allowed them to reshape government according to their growth-at-all-costs logic.If the newly empowered digital utopianism goes unchecked, we face a platform-archy where black-box AI makes decisions once adjudicated through democratic institutions. This isn’t just a Silicon Valley efficiency fantasy; it’s on the roadmap of every authoritarian who ever sniffed power.Thankfully, the anti-Doge backlash was swift. The abrupt layoffs backfired, leading many Americans to fully understand just how much research and resources for advancing science, medicine and culture are tied to federal support.In the private sector, since capital is no longer free after the federal government hiked interest rates in 2022, the growth of the big Silicon Valley platforms have almost completely stalled. In search of an answer, Silicon Valley is making a big bet on AI, overwhelming users with automated answers that hallucinate and mislead at every turn. It’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to buy what the digital utopians are selling.The response to this assault on our institutions might be a kind of Digital New Deal – a public plan for institutions in the AI era. This 21st-century economics must go well beyond solving for mass unemployment. Reconstructing the institutional foundations of public goods such as journalism, libraries and higher education requires more than just restoring the public funds stripped by Doge. It will require forceful assertions about their regulatory value in the face of a fully automated slop state. Governments come and go, but free and open institutions are critical to the functioning of democracy. If we make the mistake of misrecognizing digital platforms for public institutions, we will not easily reverse Doge’s mistakes.

      Mike Pepi is a technologist and author who has written widely about the intersection between culture and the Internet. His book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, was published by Melville House in 2025 More