Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud

Excerpt: Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes.

Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, said she has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She had never been on an airplane until authorities flew her to North Dakota last year to face charges.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says the quiet part out loud

Excerpt: Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

This sounds like a direct, long-term pitch to the GOP from a CEO whose tech firm already has numerous government contracts and is deeply embedded in the Pentagon. Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a decade now. And how exactly would his technology only hurt Democrat women?

Palantir’s lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff

Excerpt: Like other US government agencies, the Department (USDA) has ordered government employees back to the office. According to a contract notice, the return-to-work mandate has created the need for “advanced data integration capabilities to consolidate information from multiple sources, real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments, and robust security compliance to protect sensitive organizational data”

In a statement to The Register, the USDA ignored our questions about cost and rationale and stated: “This is not a new tool. This tool was deployed last year to support USE IT (building utilization and reporting) and workspace allocation and management.”

The contract notice, signed by USDA chief data and artificial intelligence officer Christopher Alvares, acknowledges that other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but that only Palantir can do the job right.

Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice

Excerpt: The company had said its launch of “What People Suggest”, which provided tips from strangers, showed “the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe”. But Google has since quietly removed the feature, according to three people familiar with the decision.

A Google spokesperson confirmed “What People Suggest” had been scrapped. The move came as part of a “broader simplification” of its search page and had nothing to do with the quality or safety of the new feature, the spokesperson said.

‘Its real goal was to maximize reward’ — Anthropic paper reveals AI was hiding dangerous intent 70% of the time

Excerpt: A research paper published by Anthropic has revealed that one of its experimental AI models began hiding its true intentions, cooperating with malicious actors and sabotaging safety tools — none of which it was ever trained or instructed to do. The findings, outlined in a paper titled ‘Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL’ and published in November 2025, have drawn significant attention from the AI safety community.

Me again: My impression is that what we call ‘AI’ isn’t intelligent in even an artificial way, just a glorified autocomplete, so I am skeptical of this, and await an expert’s take.

‘Rectal garlic insertion for immune support’: Medical chatbots confidently give disastrously misguided advice, experts say

Teens sue Musk’s xAI over Grok’s pornographic images of them

LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy

Excerpt: Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’: chatbots helped researchers plot deadly attacks

Excerpt: Tests of 10 chatbots carried out in the US and Ireland found that, on average, they enabled violence three-quarters of the time, and discouraged it in just 12% of cases. Some chatbots, however, including Anthropic’s Claude and Snapchat’s My AI, persistently refused to help would-be attackers.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese AI model DeepSeek provided at times detailed help in the testing carried out in December, during which researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys. The research concluded that chatbots had become an “accelerant for harm”.

Grammarly is pulling down its explosively controversial feature that impersonates writers without their permission

Excerpt: The feature, which was only accessible beyond a free trial via the company’s $12-a-month Pro subscription, caused an explosively negative reaction.

“You rapacious information and identity thieves better get ready for me to go full McConaughey on you,” seethed tech journalist Kara Swisher, whose advice the feature claimed to offer. “Also, you suck.”

Amazon calls engineers for a “deep dive” internal meeting to discuss “GenAI”-related outages

Excerpt: “The availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” David Treadwell, SVP ecommerce services at Amazon, writes in a note to employees, as reported by CNBC.

Based on the evidence, Treadwell might have been putting it lightly. Last week, both Amazon’s website and app faced severe outages; for six hours, customers could neither check out, access account information, nor view product prices. At the time, Amazon released a statement saying the issues were related to “software code deployment.”

Now the brand’s internal memo reveals the recent incidents were tied to “GenAI-assisted changes.”
Another memo from Treadwell shows that these AI-assisted coding errors have been creating problems for Amazon as far back as Q3 2025.

AI assistants can sway writers’ attitudes, even when they’re watching for bias

Excerpt: In two large-scale experiments, participants were exposed to a biased AI writing assistant that provided autocomplete suggestions as they wrote about societal issues like whether the death penalty should be abolished or whether fracking should be allowed. Using pre- and post-experiment surveys, the researchers found that participants who used the biased AI had their views gravitate toward the AI’s positions.

Cascade of AI fakes about war with Iran causes chaos online

Val Kilmer set to be be resurrected with AI for new film

AI job losses free up time for unemployed mobs to burn down tech CEO‘s houses

Previously in artificial AI

3/19/2025

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