Silicon Valley's top CEOs have been noticeably silent after the Minneapolis shooting. Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of, a new documentary about the president's wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady's name. Silicon Valley's top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump.

Last night, X's "For You" algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. "This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!" he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX--footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company's Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating.

How could LLMs influence our democracy? We investigate LLMs' political leanings and the potential influence of LLMs on voters by conducting multiple experiments in a U.S. presidential election context. Through a voting simulation, we first demonstrate 18 open- and closed-weight LLMs' political preference for a Democratic nominee over a Republican nominee. We show how this leaning towards the Democratic nominee becomes more pronounced in instruction-tuned models compared to their base versions by analyzing their responses to candidate-policy related questions. We further explore the potential impact of LLMs on voter choice by conducting an experiment with 935 U.S. registered voters. During the experiments, participants interacted with LLMs (Claude-3, Llama-3, and GPT-4) over five exchanges. The experiment results show a shift in voter choices towards the Democratic nominee following LLM interaction, widening the voting margin from 0.7% to 4.6%, even though LLMs were not asked to persuade users to support the Democratic nominee during the discourse. This effect is larger than many previous studies on the persuasiveness of political campaigns, which have shown minimal effects in presidential elections. Many users also expressed a desire for further political interaction with LLMs. Which aspects of LLM interactions drove these shifts in voter choice requires further study. Lastly, we explore how a safety method can make LLMs more politically neutral, while raising the question of whether such neutrality is truly the path forward.

From Ronald Reagan in 1984 to Bob Dole in 1996 and even Hillary Clinton in 2016, candidate health has become a common theme across recent U.S. presidential campaigns. The issue is poised to take on added significance this fall. No matter who wins, the U.S. is set to inaugurate its oldest president by a wide margin. The Trump campaign and its surrogates have seized on Democratic nominee Joe Biden's age and have been painting him as mentally unfit for the presidency. Videos of Biden falling asleep during an interview, misspeaking about the dangers of "Joe Biden's America" and appearing lost during a campaign event have bolstered the belief, particularly among Trump supporters, that Biden is in cognitive decline.

A study has shed light on a new threat in the upcoming US presidential election – artificial intelligence. Experts have developed a text generating AI, dubbed'RoboTrump', to see if people can differentiate between the real US President's speech and a robot's. The team found that 60 percent of participants could not tell the difference and a majority of these individuals were Trump supporters. The study, developed by Lawsuit.org, Following the test, 43 percent of the participants said they were more concerned about the implications of AI-generated text on the 2020 election than prior to taking the quiz.

As has become an unwelcome tradition, as Friday wound down and the weekend was so close we could nearly taste it, breaking news hit. The biggest Friday night bombshell came in the form of an indictment of a Russian national engaged in a massive conspiracy to influence the upcoming midterm elections. With millions of dollars at her disposal, she and her co-conspirators have allegedly been engaging in a coordinated effort to use Americans' weaknesses and divisions against us, to amp up racial discord, and generally sow chaos and discontent. Of course, it wasn't like the week had been drama free up until that point. The fun, if you can call it that, began last Saturday, when Robert Mueller expert Garrett Graff explained what he expected to see next from the investigation into Russia's attack on the 2016 election.

A dating app set up to help supporters of President Donald Trump find each other in America's confusing dating landscape hit a snag on its first day in operation when a computer security specialist was able to download every piece of data on its servers. That included the first 1,600 users' photos and personal messages between people chatting online. Instead of disrupting the world of'DonaldDaters,' however, French security researcher Baptiste Robert blew the whistle publicly on Monday just hours after the product went live. 'You should not use this app,' he tweeted in a message to Trump fans. 'In 5 minutes, I managed to get: - the list of all the people registered - name - Photo - personal messages - token to steal their session.'

A new app aims to help supporters of President Trump meet and mingle. Dating as a supporter of President Donald Trump can apparently be challenging. Conservatives may encounter messages like "Trump supporters, swipe left" on Tinder and "If you voted for Trump, don't waste my time" on other popular dating apps. A 2016 survey from Tinder found that 71 percent of online daters consider political differences to be a dealbreaker. Enter Donald Daters, a new dating app that launched Monday for Apple and Android devices with the mission of helping Trump supporters meet and mingle on a platform free of any liberal backlash.

Supporters of President Donald Trump got another place to find love with the launch of a new website – Trump.dating. The website launched in February helps people find friends and partners. However, it allows only straight men. Gay men and women are barred from registering on the website. When signing up on the site, users are provided with two options -- "straight man" or "straight woman."

In the Trump era, the desire for great sex appears to have taken a back seat to fears about lousy pillow talk. According to internal data the dating service OkCupid provided, its millennial users overwhelmingly care more about their partners' politics than how good they are in bed. In the nation's capital, 70% of millennials would prefer romantic partners who shared their political opinions than their sexual proclivities. In Chicago, Portland, Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the majority of millennials are more invested in a partner's position on climate change than their preferred position in the "Kama Sutra". Last year, we learned that younger millennials are having astonishingly little sex to begin with.