Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Challenges to Pelosi part of broader movement to replace the Democratic Party's old guard Rep. Nancy Pelosi, shown talking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 1, has not said whether she will seek another term in 2026. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Younger Democratic candidates are challenging older incumbents amid increasing frustration over the party's ineffective resistance to President Trump.

It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager--Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida--has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model's speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I'm losing my mind watching it. Jim Acosta, the former CNN personality who's conducting the interview, appears fully bought-in to the premise, adding to the surreality: He's playing it straight, even though the interactions are so bizarre. Acosta asks simple questions about Oliver's interests and how the teenager died.

Joaquin Oliver was 17 years old when he was shot in the hallway of his high school. An older teenager, expelled some months previously, had opened fire with a high-powered rifle on Valentine's Day in what became America's deadliest high school shooting. Seven years on, Joaquin says he thinks it's important to talk about what happened on that day in Parkland, Florida, "so that we can create a safer future for everyone". But sadly, what happened to Joaquin that day is that he died. The oddly metallic voice speaking to the ex-CNN journalist Jim Acosta in an interview on Substack this week was actually that of a digital ghost: an AI, trained on the teenager's old social media posts at the request of his parents, who are using it to bolster their campaign for tougher gun controls.

Jim Acosta and James Carville speculated whether President Trump will try to rig the 2026 midterms in his favor on "The Jim Acosta Show." Liberal journalist Jim Acosta "interviewed" the artificially animated avatar of deceased teenager Joaquin Oliver to promote a gun control message on Monday. Working with the gun control group Change the Ref, founded by Oliver's parents, Acosta had conversation on his Substack with an avatar created by the father of the son, who was killed in the Parkland high school shooting in 2018. He would have turned 25 on Monday. "I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence," Acosta asked.

The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of a real shooting event in a U.S. school. The game opens in an empty locker room. You hear distant gunfire, screams, harried footsteps, and the thudding of heavy furniture being overturned. The sense of disharmony is immediate: a familiar scene of youth and learning is grimly debased into one of peril. As the lockers surround you, their doors gaping, you feel caged: get me out of here. Moments later, as you enter the gymnasium, a two-minute countdown flashes on screen.

Counterspeech presents a viable alternative to banning or suspending users for hate speech while upholding freedom of expression. However, writing effective counterspeech is challenging for moderators/users. Hence, developing suggestion tools for writing counterspeech is the need of the hour. One critical challenge in developing such a tool is the lack of quality and diversity of the responses in the existing datasets. Hence, we introduce a new dataset - CrowdCounter containing 3,425 hate speech-counterspeech pairs spanning six different counterspeech types (empathy, humor, questioning, warning, shaming, contradiction), which is the first of its kind. The design of our annotation platform itself encourages annotators to write type-specific, non-redundant and high-quality counterspeech. We evaluate two frameworks for generating counterspeech responses - vanilla and type-controlled prompts - across four large language models. In terms of metrics, we evaluate the responses using relevance, diversity and quality. We observe that Flan-T5 is the best model in the vanilla framework across different models. Type-specific prompts enhance the relevance of the responses, although they might reduce the language quality. DialoGPT proves to be the best at following the instructions and generating the type-specific counterspeech accurately.

Social media enables activists to directly communicate with the public and provides a space for movement leaders, participants, bystanders, and opponents to collectively construct and contest narratives. Focusing on Twitter messages from social movements surrounding three issues in 2018-2019 (guns, immigration, and LGBTQ rights), we create a codebook, annotated dataset, and computational models to detect diagnostic (problem identification and attribution), prognostic (proposed solutions and tactics), and motivational (calls to action) framing strategies. We conduct an in-depth unsupervised linguistic analysis of each framing strategy, and uncover cross-movement similarities in associations between framing and linguistic features such as pronouns and deontic modal verbs. Finally, we compare framing strategies across issues and other social, cultural, and interactional contexts. For example, we show that diagnostic framing is more common in replies than original broadcast posts, and that social movement organizations focus much more on prognostic and motivational framing than journalists and ordinary citizens.

The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida's Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have lost their lives in incidents of gun violence across the US. Once you type in your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place an automated call from one of the six dead people in their own voice, urging for stronger gun control laws.

Families of gun violence victims are using artificial intelligence to recreate their loved ones' voices and taunt lawmakers who oppose gun control on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland massacre. The robocall messages are being sent to senators and House members who support the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment rights in a campaign that launched on Valentine's Day, Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin "Guac" Oliver died in the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, said the campaign run through The Shotline website is intended to spur Congress to ban the sale of guns like the AR-15 rifle. "We come from a place where gun violence is a problem, but you will never see a 19-year-old with an AR-15 getting into a school and shooting people," Manuel Oliver told the Associated Press in an interview. The Olivers, immigrants from Venezuela, became activists after Joaquin and 13 other students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were murdered by a 19-year-old killer with a rifle.

Joe Levy is working hard to help avoid another mass school shooting tragedy. He says his technology, designed to spot a gun using existing CCTV cameras, could make a critical difference in future life-or-death situations. Seventeen people died in 2018 when a 19-year-old student opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, USA. Fifteen died in the Columbine High School massacre, near Denver, Colorado, in 1999 when a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old shot fellow students. And 22 people died in May of this year when an 18-year-old rampaged through the Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas – one of the worst school shootings in US history.