Trump’s ‘Smart Wall’ of A.I. Cameras Is Watching the Border, and More Than a Million People; The New York Times, October 22, 2026

 Bora Erden and Nicholas Nehamas, The New York Times; Trump’s ‘Smart Wall’ of A.I. Cameras Is Watching the Border, and More Than a Million People

"For decades, Republicans and Democrats agreed that a “smart wall” of surveillance cameras and other high-tech equipment would be a potent tool to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the southern border.

Now, the smart wall has arrived — and it is more powerful than many could have imagined.

Already, more than one million people in the United States and Mexico live in areas along the border where they can be seen by A.I.-powered surveillance towers, a New York Times analysis found. At least four million more live within view of an older generation of cameras that the government plans to retrofit with A.I. technology.

And the Trump administration has secured more than $1 billion to build 1,500 new A.I. towers. The goal is full coverage along the U.S. border with Mexico, and there are plans to install towers near Canada, as well as in coastal areas and in Puerto Rico.

But a rising public backlash against A.I. and growing anxiety over mass surveillance have left some communities with an uncomfortable question: Is the potential loss of privacy worth it?"

Glenrock Woman Says Converse County Library Fired Her Over Daughter's Facebook Post; Cowboy State Daily, October 23, 2026

Clair McFarland, Cowboy State Daily; Glenrock Woman Says Converse County Library Fired Her Over Daughter's Facebook Post

"Saying she was fired because her daughter made a Facebook post out of concern for her severe working conditions, a former Glenrock librarian is suing the Converse County Library and its director.

Erin Wolfley’s lawsuit complaint, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming, says Converse County Library Director Mary Lin Maner, as well as the library board and leadership, violated the First Amendment."

Deciding with fake images: More candidates are using AI in political ads to get your vote; NBC NEWS, October 23, 2026

 Anagilmara Vílchez, NBC; Deciding with fake images: More candidates are using AI in political ads to get your vote

At least 220 ads — mostly Republican — generated or enhanced with artificial intelligence have circulated in the lead-up to the midterms, at a cost of almost $137 million.

"Evette is not the only one whose image was manipulated in the lead-up to the midterm elections. The Wesleyan Media Project, a group of experts that tracks political propaganda in campaigns, identified at least 220 ads produced or enhanced with artificial intelligence by candidates or political action committees this election cycle. They cost just under $137 million.

It’s a significant leap in the use of this technology compared to 2024, when the investment in AI was less than $50,000 during the presidential election. As of May of this year, the money spent on these AI ads was already $20 million."

Supreme Court recusals stop music case in its tracks, strike warning note; NPR, October 21, 2026

 Carrie Johnson, NPR; Supreme Court recusals stop music case in its tracks, strike warning note

"No quorum, because four of the nine justices recused themselves. The court did not explain why Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson stepped away from the case.

But the watchdog group Fix the Court has an idea: All four of those justices have book deals with Penguin Random House, part of a German conglomerate that's a party in the music copyright case.

"When you have a financial stake in a party or your finances could somehow be impacted by the outcome of a case, under federal law and the Supreme Court code of conduct, the justices are supposed to recuse," said Gabe Roth, who leads Fix the Court...

Three years ago, the Supreme Court published a code of conduct. But the long and short of it is, the justices largely police themselves.

Blackman, the law professor, said Congress should pass legislation to address the book royalties issue...

Tim Kappel is a lawyer for the songwriter in the case the court declined to hear. In a written statement, Kappel said the recusal speaks to the broad impact of copyright law and the expansive definition of what it means to be an artist."

Publisher cuts ties with Quebec author accused of AI use in award-winning novel; CBC, October 21, 2026

 Annabelle Olivier , CBC; Publisher cuts ties with Quebec author accused of AI use in award-winning novel

Thélyson Orélien had denied AI use, admitted to past plagiarism

"Montreal publishing house Éditions du Boréal announced Wednesday it is ending its professional relationship with Thélyson Orélien — a Haitian-born, Quebec-based author. 

In a news release, the publisher said new information, confirmed over the course of recent days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process of Orélien's novel, C’était ça ou mourir, published earlier this year."

What Hundreds of Focus Groups With Trump Voters Revealed; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, October 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Annie Galvin and Jack McCordick

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; What Hundreds of Focus Groups With Trump Voters Revealed

[Ezra Klein] "What changes in politics — or what have you watched change in politics — as it has become more, in your language here, vibe oriented?

[Sarah Longwell] "I think it’s the big difference between news seekers and news receivers.

We used to live in a world where you spent time with the news, and it was a specific time. You sat down at the breakfast table, and you read a newspaper. You watched the evening news. You made time for the news.

I just think that the news receiver means: I didn’t sit down to find something out. Information just washed over me, and there was no mechanism to verify it. I didn’t really sit and spend time with it and ask: Is this true? Does it even matter to me? It just hit me for a second.

It just flashes over them. So they wake up with an opinion without any idea of how it was formed."

Meta quietly delays controversial update that critics say will allow website scraping; Fast Company, October 23, 2026

 SARAH FIELDING, Fast Company; Meta quietly delays controversial update that critics say will allow website scraping

"Earlier this month, Meta Platforms announced controversial new commercial terms of use for business accounts that critics said would give the social media giant broad authority to crawl and scrape web content associated with those accounts.

The new commercial terms—met by strong outrage from news publishers that produce online content and rely on Meta’s platforms for distribution—were set to go into effect on Friday, October 30.

Now, without any notice, Meta has pushed back the date of the change by three weeks to Friday, November 20. The delay comes one day after a major trade group for news publishers sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that the forthcoming terms be withdrawn.

Despite the delayed date, the controversial language in the updated terms appeared to still be intact as of Friday...

On Thursday, October 22, the News/Media Alliance, which represents over 2,000 publications, wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg demanding that the company withdraw the updated commercial terms of use before they go into effect. 

The letter points to concerns that Meta will use publishers’ own content to compete with them, while giving them minimal ability to use Meta’s services and block ad crawlers. It further states that the new terms of use “grant Meta the right to exploit, without prior permission or fair compensation, journalism”

“These harms threaten the financial viability of the free press,” the letter, signed by News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey, further states.

It continues: “Once Meta has copied publishers’ content and built it into its products, the harm will be practically impossible to undo.”

The Myth of Safe AI; The Atlantic, October 22, 2026

 Matteo Wong , The Atlantic; The Myth of Safe AI

Silicon Valley promises to make AI benevolent. That may be technically impossible.

"Three months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI published what would prove to be a prescient blog outlining the firm’s approach to ensuring that its AI models would be safe and beneficent. This goal, known as “alignment”—as in, aligning AI with human values—is nebulous, grand, and perhaps the AI industry’s most foundational promise. The notion is right there in OpenAI’s mission statement to ensure AI “benefits all of humanity” and listed as one of Anthropic’s “primary” goals.

Yet even in the summer of 2022, OpenAI was admitting a sort of defeat: “There is currently no known indefinitely scalable solution to the alignment problem,” three of its researchers wrote in that same blog post, adding that developing one “is likely very difficult.”

If the goal of keeping AI beneficial to mankind sounds rather vague, it is. Four years later, the alignment problem remains unsolved, and for that matter, there isn’t consensus about what the problem even is. Meanwhile, AI bots are autonomously hacking sovereign nations. And sending fake murder tips to police hotlines. And creating aliases to launch phishing campaigns. OpenAI and Anthropic still can’t really tell you what an aligned AI model looks like. But anybody can tell you it doesn’t look like this.

The most influential AI executives and investors in the world fundamentally disagree about the nature of the technology and, more pragmatically, how to make their products safe."

Isaac Newton’s remarkable year — and the plagiarism accusations that followed; Nature, September 7, 2026

 Andrew Robinson, Nature; Isaac Newton’s remarkable year — and the plagiarism accusations that followed

"Another controversy was Newton’s famous clash with polymath Robert Hooke, who was also a key figure in the Royal Society in London. At issue was who had first discovered the inverse-square law of gravitation, which states that gravity’s force decreases with the square of distance. Hooke wanted acknowledgement of his relevant efforts in the preface to Principia Mathematica, but Newton refused, telling astronomer Edmond Halley — who was supervising the book’s publication — that he would rather suppress publication of its third volume than give Hooke any credit.

As the authors discuss in a lengthy chapter, Newton had originally told Halley that he would be willing to acknowledge Hooke’s assistance in book III of Principia. But then Hooke lashed out at Newton at the 1686 meeting of the Royal Society, and “once confronted with the charge of plagiarism, whatever goodwill Newton possessed vanished”."

Writers get some plagiarism protection with new AI-cloaking tool; AV Club, October 20, 2026

 Dennis Perkins  , AV Club; Writers get some plagiarism protection with new AI-cloaking tool

"With writers everywhere understandably pissed that voracious AI tools are increasingly stealing their original works to train other AI tools, the Writers Guild of America East has some welcome relief. According to a WGAE press release today, all guild members will have access to Cloak, a patent-pending new software which will prevent most AI engines from “ingesting” their content. 

According to the Guild, writers can use Cloak to submit work to producers, agents, actors, and other actual humans who might want to read it, while ensuring no AI snooping agents can pilfer their hard work for nefarious, tech bro, copyright-dodging purposes."

Hundreds Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement, Rejecting Class Action Payouts; Publishers Weekly, October 21, 2026

 Ed Nawotka , Publishers Weekly; Hundreds Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement, Rejecting Class Action Payouts

"Nearly 300 authors filed copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms on October 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books and, more recently, on physical books it bought and scanned without a license.

Rather than join a class action suit, in which a few named plaintiffs sue on behalf of everyone, each author is pursuing an individual claim...

Plaintiffs range in prominence: Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries; Reyna Grande, a memoirist; Mark Spragg, a novelist; Rachel Nuwer, a journalist; Silvia Foti, author of The Nazi’s Granddaughter; and Minxin Pei, a scholar on China.

All of the authors signed up through ClaimsHero, a platform that partnered with Freedman Normand Friedland and Stris & Maher last fall to recruit authors to opt out of the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement and sue on their own. The new suits arrive as the first cases from that effort approach trial.

Suits brought by Chicken Soup for the Soul, by academic publisher Cognella and by Cambronne, the company of journalist John Carreyrou, are among the related cases against Meta scheduled for jury trials beginning May 3, 2027."