Experts worry it will be used to further Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine agenda. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda.

The US Government Is Trying To Make Coal Cute. Trump complained that coal needed better PR. The original Coalie was just a lump of coal with eyes and nothing more. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Can a lump of coal ever be cute?

RFK's Overhauled Autism Committee Is Even Worse Than It Looks Kennedy has stacked another HHS panel with his fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism "by September." That didn't pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again--by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to "innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention" with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy's allies in the anti-vaccine movement.

Grok's Leering Pictures Are the Newest Version of an Old Problem Image-based abuse predates Elon Musk's latest sleazy bot, but AI is making it worse. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. There's a picture of myself that I had saved on my desktop for years; I suppose we could call it a caricature. A little more than a decade ago, someone on a Nazi messageboard pulled a photo of me from social media, then updated it with some antisemitic flair: a little cartoon rat sitting on my shoulder, a yellow pinned on its tiny body. Referencing what Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust is meant to be a humiliation; the goal isn't hard to figure out, given that the whole star patch thing is near-medieval in both its imagery and its aims.

Amid a scandal over nonconsensual sexual images, Musk says his AI chatbot is a force for "truth and beauty." Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In much of the world, Grok and its parent company both appear to be in serious trouble. After Grok, X's AI chatbot, has been used to generate sexualized and violent images of women and children, the social media company has faced a wave of backlash and censure, with new nationwide bans on accessing Grok in place and other consequences on the way. On Monday, the EU threatened to fine X under its broad Digital Services Act if it didn't act "quickly" to fix Grok, in the words of one regulator.

Activists sailed to Gaza to deliver aid, but were met with drone attacks and imprisonment. "All of this preparation, all of this work--it's actually come together and we're sailing east, finally," said Dane Hunter. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Earlier this fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world's attention.

Right now, a potential peril is at hand: the end of truth. The appointment of Bari Weiss, the former opinion writer who started the heterodox website, to lead venerable CBS News set the media world in a tizzy. Since she had no experience in television broadcast news operations, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, must have selected her for ideological and editorial reasons. Weiss had positioned herself as the scourge of supposedly woke and DEI-driven liberal media, presumably a stance that appealed to Ellison, the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter who put up much of the money that financed his son's recent takeover of Paramount. Weiss' first days at the network yielded worrisome signs.

Countries have fallen behind on emissions goals, but Hannah Ritchie looks at the numbers and sees real gains. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. It has been 10 years since countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, and emissions and temperatures continue to reach new highs, fueling unprecedented weather disasters around the globe. Meanwhile, the shift to clean energy is facing powerful headwinds in the United States, where climate policies are being reversed and support for clean energy is withdrawn. Yet, while the headlines paint a dismal picture of efforts to rein in climate change, the numbers often tell a different story. That is the assessment of data scientist Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor of the publication .

Age and gender biases are baked into what we see online, a large new study confirms. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In the 1970s, when researchers asked children to draw a scientist, 99 percent of them drew a man . As this experiment was repeated over 50 years, the number of women drawn increased, and within the past decade, more than half of girls will draw a woman when asked what a scientist looks like. Today, Google search results tend to agree with these children's drawings.

Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant.Mother Jones illustration; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma; Arthur Ogleznev/Unsplash; Logan Weaver/Unsplash In April 2024, the American police tech firm Axon, which leads the market for police body cameras, released a tool it billed as "revolutionary": Draft One, an AI-powered software package that would turn body camera footage and audio into intelligible police reports. Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant, providing more than 5,000 police departments across the country with a suite of cloud-based products to manage evidence collection and storage. Draft One, the AI tool, connects with the company's body cameras and evidence storage service to write police reports with little human intervention. At least 21 departments have experimented with the software. The use of artificial intelligence in generating police reports has been particularly troubling, according to civil rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, because of generative AI's propensity towards racial and gender bias, and its tendency to insert inaccuracies into texts--including wholesale inventions known by technologists as "hallucinations." "I can almost guarantee [AI] reports have been used in plea deals," a police captain wrote.