Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, despite his U.S. citizenship and Social Security card, was arrested on April 16 on an unfounded suspicion of him being an "unauthorized alien." Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept him in county jail for 30 hours "based on biometric confirmation of his identity"--an obvious mistake of facial recognition technology. Another U.S. citizen, Jensy Machado, was held at gunpoint and handcuffed by ICE agents. He was another victim of mistaken identity after someone else gave his home address on a deportation order.

The news: AI chatbots are filling junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers. More than 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge, according to a new report. Making money from junk: Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through a practice called "programmatic advertising." As a result, big brands end up paying for ad placements on sites that they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight. To take advantage, content farms have sprung up where low-paid humans use AI to churn out low-quality content to attract maximum ad revenue.

I agree with critics of the letter who say that worrying about future risks distracts us from the very real harms AI is already causing today. Biased systems are used to make decisions about people's lives that trap them in poverty or lead to wrongful arrests. Human content moderators have to sift through mountains of traumatizing AI-generated content for only $2 a day. Language AI models use so much computing power that they remain huge polluters. But the systems that are being rushed out today are going to cause a different kind of havoc altogether in the very near future.

In October, when Jamie Taylor's household monthly income fit within new state income limits after Missouri's 2021 expansion of Medicaid, she applied for health coverage. She received a rejection letter within days, stating that her earnings exceeded the acceptable limit. It was the latest blow in Taylor's ongoing campaign to get assistance from Missouri's safety net. Taylor, 41, has spent hours on the phone, enduring four-hour hold times and dropped calls. Time-sensitive documents were mailed to her home in Sikeston but by the time they arrived she had little time to act.

Through the pixel fuzz of a sputtering Zoom connection, it's hard to be sure if the eyes staring out from the laptop screen are human. Lars Buttler is a real person, but he is the CEO of AI Foundation, a company that makes fake ones: trainable, artificially intelligent agents that might one day take the place of a human personal assistant, a customer service representative, or you yourself (if you aspire to omnipresence or digital deathlessness). When Buttler appeared in a Zoom call last week, there was something strange about the light hitting his shaved head, and the stark white office behind him definitely wasn't part of the material world. His speech was awkward, with overlong pauses and canned jokes that fell on a silent audience, but video calls are like that, at least for now, while people adjust to working lives forced into the ether. His eyes seemed awake and alive in a way that the faces of the other participants in the Zoom call--venture capitalist, a tech founder, and an activist, all of them puppeted by artificial intelligence--were not.