THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus.The clip is on the screen for only a moment before the recording returns to the voting-machine video. And just before noon today, both posts of the video were removed from the president’s Truth Social account. (When I asked why, a… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Nothing makes Americans want to gamble like the Super Bowl. Every year, the game is reliably the biggest day for sports betting: On platforms such as FanDuel and DraftKings, people are already putting money down on which team will win the opening coin toss, how long the national anthem will be, and what color of Gatorade will be used to douse the winning head coach.Gambling on sports has become practically inescapable. Nearly half of American men ages 18 to 49 maintain an active online sports-betting account, and Vegas odds have invaded telecasts and talk shows. During NFL games, sportsbook commercials now outnumber beer ads. Despite all of that, more than a third of adults still cannot legally gamble from home: Online sports betting remains banned in 18 states, including California and Texas.But for the past year, thanks to a loophole, Americans have effectively been able to bet on sports no… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to “stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away.” (Humans: They mean humans.)Moltbook was developed as a sort of experimental playground for interactions among AI “agents,” which are bots that have access to and can use programs. Claude Code, a popular AI coding tool, has such agentic capabilities, for example: It can act on your behalf to manage files on your computer, send emails, develop and publish apps, and so on. Normally, humans direct an agent to perform specific tasks. But on Moltbook, all a person has to do is register their AI agent on the site, and then the bot is encouraged to post, comment, and… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Gregory Bovino, the man who became the face of Donald Trump’s Minneapolis crackdown, lost his job as the Border Patrol’s “commander at large” after agents he oversaw shot and killed Alex Pretti. Bovino also reportedly lost his X account, a development that may seem trivial until you remember: Bovino loves to post.In the two days after Pretti died, Bovino relentlessly trolled Democrats who condemned the shooting—and defended Border Patrol agents as the real victims. When Representative Eric Swalwell wrote on X that ICE officers should walk off the job to protest the killing, Bovino replied: “I was thinking the same for you.” At about 1 a.m. last Monday, Bovino replied to a user who said he would “never pay for a beer again” after mocking Swalwell: “Lol!!  🍺 🍻 🍺 🍻 🍺 🍻.”Getting silenced on X is, and I realize how absurd it sounds, the worst professional fate a Trump… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was “not just X—he was Y” coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word collaborate than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate. It was both too good, in terms of being grammatically correct, and not good enough, in terms of being particular. My friend had no definitive proof that he was listening to AI, but his position—and I agree with him—is that when you know, you know. His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.More and more, large language models are relieving people of the burden of reading and writing, in school and at work but… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.