Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools; The Atlantic, July 31, 2026

 Matteo Wong, The Atlantic; Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools

"Before it allowed people to create fake imagery, Google Earth was a unique resource for researchers, journalists, and intelligence officials, particularly those studying armed conflict and natural disasters. Satellite and aerial imagery can be used to monitor crop failure or deforestation, the creation of mass graves, and the results of bombing campaigns. Especially in conflict zones and other areas that are hard for people to reach, satellite imagery is a go-to method for establishing some sort of ground truth. After Google Earth rolled out the AI feature, though, one investigative reporter wrote on LinkedIn that the tool could be used to easily and rapidly create images of drone strikes that look “very close to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and other war-torn conflict zones.” And instead of requiring malicious actors to find a screenshot and then get around some AI model’s safeguards, Google rolled everything needed for a misinformation farm into one smooth user interface. It took me all of four seconds to generate a rendering of a Trump Hotel on the Gaza Strip."

Pentagon reveals hundreds of new Iran war casualties; Task & Purpose, July 26, 2026

 MATT WHITE, PATTY NIEBERG, NICHOLAS SLAYTON , Task & Purpose; Pentagon reveals hundreds of new Iran war casualties

More than 600 troops have been wounded in the Iran war, officials disclosed Saturday, almost 200 more than previously known.

"The Pentagon revealed Saturday that more than 600 troops have been injured or killed in the conflict with Iran, a casualty total more than 200 higher than previously revealed publicly. The new figures were released as part of an apparent overhaul of the Defense Department’s official casualty reporting system, which now splits the war, for the first time, into two time periods. 

The new figures bring the current total of U.S. troops wounded in the war to 624, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS. As of Friday, DCAS listed the number of troops injured in the conflict at 420."

ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims; The New York Times, July 22, 2026

 Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims

"A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.

The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”

The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care.

The bot’s safety features — which are designed to encourage users with health questions to see a professional and to end conversations when there are clear signs of a medical crisis — did not work reliably, the suit further says."

As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution; The New York Times, June 2, 2026

 Siobhan Roberts, The New York Times ; As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution

"Among the potential threats that the Leiden Declaration authors articulate are accuracy and reliability: Journal editors are already complaining about a flood of plausible seeming A.I.- generated papers and proofs that have turned out to be incorrect, and in ways that are difficult for mathematicians to discern.

Perhaps most pointedly, the authors raise the question of whether the many A.I. companies tackling mathematics — major players such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, or start-ups such as Harmonic, Math, Inc. and Axiom Math — are keeping the field’s best interests in mind. “Technology companies’ involvement in research,” they write, “raises the risk that research questions are prioritized and incentivized because of their amenability to A.I. methods and models, rather than their deeper significance to understanding.” In turn, they point out, this disadvantages researchers who choose not to use the technology, and those who do not have access to it.

For Rodrigo Ochigame, a historian and anthropologist of computing and artificial intelligence at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and one of the statement’s authors, the latest OpenAI proof illustrates why this sort of collective reckoning in the discipline is necessary. “The story follows the same pattern as many other announcements by commercial A.I. developers,” Dr. Ochigame said. “The A.I. model is proprietary and unavailable to anyone outside the company. We get a flashy promotional video, while basic information needed to assess the scientific meaning of the result is kept secret. The company disclosed nothing about the methods, human-written prompts, training data, or computational resources consumed.”"

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources; Ars Technica, September 12, 2025

 BENJ EDWARDS, Ars Technica ; Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources

"On Friday, CBC News reported that a major education reform document prepared for the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador contains at least 15 fabricated citations that academics suspect were generated by an AI language model—despite the same report calling for "ethical" AI use in schools.

"A Vision for the Future: Transforming and Modernizing Education," released August 28, serves as a 10-year roadmap for modernizing the province's public schools and post-secondary institutions. The 418-page document took 18 months to complete and was unveiled by co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial University's Faculty of Education, alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis...

The irony runs deep

The presence of potentially AI-generated fake citations becomes especially awkward given that one of the report's 110 recommendations specifically states the provincial government should "provide learners and educators with essential AI knowledge, including ethics, data privacy, and responsible technology use."

Sarah Martin, a Memorial political science professor who spent days reviewing the document, discovered multiple fabricated citations. "Around the references I cannot find, I can't imagine another explanation," she told CBC. "You're like, 'This has to be right, this can't not be.' This is a citation in a very important document for educational policy.""

Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the ‘good cop’ of the Internet; The Washington Post, April 6, 2018

Noam Cohen, The Washington Post; Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the ‘good cop’ of the Internet

"Although it is hard to argue today that the Internet lacks for self-expression, what with self-publishing tools such as Twitter, Facebook and, yes, YouTube at the ready, it still betrays its roots as a passive, non-collaborative medium. What you create with those easy-to-use publishing tools is automatically licensed for use by for-profit companies, which retain a copy, and the emphasis is on personal expression, not collaboration. There is no YouTube community, but rather a Wild West where harassment and fever-dream conspiracies use up much of the oxygen. (The woman who shot three people at YouTube’s headquartersbefore killing herself on Tuesday was a prolific producer of videos, including ones that accused YouTube of a conspiracy to censor her work and deny her advertising revenue.)

Wikipedia, with its millions of articles created by hundreds of thousands of editors, is the exception. In the past 15 years, Wikipedia has built a system of collaboration and governance that, although hardly perfect, has been robust enough to endure these polarized times."