Gina Helfrich

OpenAI launch of video app Sora plagued by violent and racist images: ‘The guardrails are not real’ Misinformation researchers say lifelike scenes could obfuscate truth and lead to fraud, bullying and intimidation

I started a project earlier this year looking at generative AI as a national security risk. Now that Sora is being publicly tested, more media outlets will have to cover and debunk AI slop and disinformation: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

IT'S COOL TO HATE THE COMPUTER. I'VE BEEN HATING THE COMPUTER FOR DECADES.

Work really hard and one day this can be you (followed by graffiti of a headstone that says “RIP worked really hard” on it

happy sunday, remember that you are completely expendable to your employer and that when you die they will forget you ever existed within weeks and easily replace you

No lie.

Paramount Officially Acquiring The Free Press and Making Bari Weiss CBS News Editor in Chief: Report Paramount Skydance will be officially acquiring The Free Press and hiring its founder Bari Weiss as editor in chief of its CBS News division, with the deal to be announced this coming Monday, accordin...

Legacy media as we’ve known it is dead and what remains is either in active rebellion against the regime or running its PR. Know the difference and choose wisely.

Six years ago, almost to the day, Apple removing a similar app from the Hong Kong App Store was seen as such a breach that Tim Cook wrote an all staff email to defend it www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Microsoft Is Abandoning Windows 10. Hackers Are Celebrating. The company will stop supporting the OS on October 14. Advocacy groups warn this will leave up to 400 million computers vulnerable to hacks or in the dump.

An under-the-radar but huge story: in less than 2 weeks, Microsoft plans to end support for the Windows 10 operating system, which is currently used on 42% (!) of all PCs globally. Over 400 million computers will be vulnerable to hacks or destined for the dump if users don't pay up.

it fundamentally fucks our sense of things that the robot is good at language and bad at math and fact

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find th...

Missed this one over the summer. “When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer…This gap between perception and reality is striking…even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.”

lol. lmao even

Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees drop off the grid after leaving site As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald.

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Must read investigation.

“Now [with access to more federal databases] Ice can use this type of surveillance apparatus on anyone – not only anyone who is undocumented but anyone who this administration wants to criminalize and anyone who the administration wants to put under surveillance”

Really looking forward to this! Registration link below, and it will be livestreamed as well.

Come chat to our CTMF researchers at the Edinburgh Futures Institute this Doors Open Day!

Really looking forward to this! Registration link below and it will be livestreamed (and posted later).

This is a great reminder to reinstitute this at our house. I used to do this and then it all went out the window post baby.

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Brazilians protest in their thousands against granting Bolsonaro amnesty Huge crowds pack the streets to oppose endeavours to help ex-president escape jail

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

"his failed power grab, which included a plan to assassinate Lula, the vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin, and a supreme court judge."

On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans. The strike killed 3 male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel, which was in international waters. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!

This appears to be the 3rd lethal US strike in the Caribbean.

Once again, the specific "terrorist" entity targeted is not identified.

No legal justification is offered for this premeditated killing.

President Trump is asserting a license to kill outside of the law. 1/n

Kennedy’s Vaccine Panel Votes to Limit Access to Covid Shots

I cannot overstate how remarkable it is that under GOP rule, US federal health regulations have been captured by fringe crackpots who espouse views that the vast majority of the US public—and nearly 100% of health professionals—reject.

Gift link:

Luckily, Sinclair has a helpful database of all their stations, so you can see if they're operating in your area and respond accordingly.

sbgi.net/tv-stations/

7/ Which brings me back to Outlaw’s advice: don’t look to Europe to explain U.S. fascism, look to America’s own past. As a German, in turn, I wonder if Europeans too can learn from the Black antifascist tradition, which shows fascism takes root inside democracy when it rests on racial exclusion.

You're invited to sign this open letter

Can someone in the EU please sue them for making this opt-out?

Well, what do Germans know about creeping fascism anyway?

The union representing the musicians from Jimmy Kimmel’s band releases a statement calling the FCC’s pressure on Disney “state censorship.”

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

Jon Stewart: Authoritarian governments a threat, not comedy Comedian Jon Stewart says speculation about the future of comedy amid increased audience cultural sensitivity is ignoring a true and enduring threat: authoritarian governments around the world.

Jon Stewart in 2022: “Comedy doesn’t change the world, but it’s a bellwether... When a society feels under threat, comedians are who gets sent away first.”
apnews.com/article/bill...

At Least 15 Million YouTube Videos Have Been Snatched by AI Companies Creators have unknowingly fueled tools that may eventually make their work obsolete.

Tech companies have snatched millions of YouTube videos to train their AI models. Search The Atlantic’s new AI Watchdog tool to see if yours have been used:

This administration is responsible for the most blatant attacks on the free press in American history.

What will be left of the First Amendment when he’s done?

Kimmel.

Colbert.

Suits against the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and 60 Minutes.

Extorting settlements from CBS, ABC, and others.

Blocking the AP's access to the White House. 🧵