Last month, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump announced that his campaign would accept donations in cryptocurrency. In the weeks that followed, the cybercrime detection firm Netcraft found dozens of scam websites seeking to target Trump supporters and swindle them out of their crypto, according to a report shared …
Read More »An AI Bot Is (Sort of) Running for Mayor in Wyoming
Victor Miller is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with an unusual campaign promise: If elected, he will not be calling the shots—an AI bot will. VIC, the Virtual Integrated Citizen, is a ChatGPT-based chatbot that Miller created. And Miller says the bot has better ideas—and a better grasp of …
Read More »There’s an AI Candidate Running for Parliament in the UK
As the United Kingdom heads toward its elections next month, the country is seeing its first instance of a new kind of politician: an AI candidate. AI Steve, an avatar of real-life Steven Endacott, a Brighton-based businessman, is running for Parliament as an Independent. Voters will be able to cast …
Read More »AI Tools Are Secretly Training on Real Images of Children
Over 170 images and personal details of children from Brazil have been repurposed by an open-source dataset without their knowledge or consent, and used to train AI, claims a new report from Human Rights Watch released Monday. The images have been scraped from content posted as recently as 2023 and …
Read More »A Former President’s Daughter Used X to Bombard South Africa With Conspiracy Theories
On March 9, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma, tweeted a video that purported to show former US president Donald Trump encouraging “all South Africans to vote for uMkhonto WeSizwe,” her father’s party, in the country’s May 29 elections. In another post, just days before the …
Read More »AI Election Project Methodology and Submission Information
Our AI Election Project Methodology and Other Notes: The instances listed must be found “in the wild.” This means we’re only going to include instances where generative AI is being used or found out in the world.This list is almost certainly an undercount. However many instances of generative AI journalists, …
Read More »2024 Is the Year of the Generative AI Election
Hi! I’m Vittoria Elliott. I’m a reporter on the WIRED Politics desk, and I’m taking over for Makena this week to talk about politicians rising from the dead in India and the rapper Eminem endorsing opposition parties in South Africa. These things haven’t really happened, obviously, but deepfakes created by …
Read More »Foreign Influence Campaigns Don’t Know How to Use AI Yet Either
Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that OpenAI identified and shut down between 2023 and 2024. In the report, OpenAI reveals …
Read More »Germany’s Far-Right Party Is Running Hateful Ads on Facebook and Instagram
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that the country’s nationalist far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), was potentially “extremist” and could warrant surveillance by the country’s intelligence apparatus. Campaign ads placed by AfD have been allowed to appear on Facebook and Instagram anyway, according to a new report from …
Read More »A Lawsuit Argues Meta Is Required by Law to Let You Control Your Own Feed
A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds. It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users …
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