THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet, in the hours before President Donald Trump gave the final order for the strike, someone bet more than $20,000 that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted as the country’s leader by the end of January.On Polymarket, the online platform that lets people wager on almost anything, an anonymous trader somewhere in the world placed a series of suspiciously well-timed bets. Using a fresh account created last month, the individual made just a few bets in the days leading up to the raid, according to The Wall Street Journal—all on the possibility of imminent regime change in Venezuela—and… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

This weekend’s attack on Venezuela produced plenty of indelible images. The one burned into my brain was shared by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sitting in front of a laptop at a makeshift command center in Mar-a-Lago. He’s monitoring the raid with a grave expression on his face, eyes intently focused on something out of frame.At first glance, the image has all the trappings of a Serious Tactical Raid Photo, à la Pete Souza’s famous Situation Room snapshot, which showed President Barack Obama and his national-security team tracking the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. But then you see what’s behind Hegseth: a large screen displaying an X feed. The photo is blurry, but it seems to show Hegseth and company using X’s search function to monitor tweets about the raid. On the screen, hovering over Hegseth’s left shoulder, is a giant face-holding-back-tears emoji… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Hours before President Donald Trump announced Nicolás Maduro’s capture, on Saturday morning, people had questions for Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot. Footage was circulating on X of explosions in Venezuela, and some users assumed the United States was responsible: “Hey @grok why is Trump sending US airstrikes to bomb Venezuela. Do you think they deserve it or not ?”one person asked. “@grok what is the reason why America is bombing Venezuela,” another asked.This is to be expected. Today, chatbots are treated as a source of information by many people. Millions in the United States alone use them to get information, and the number is growing. This means that tech companies such as X, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI now play a central role not just in delivering information to people—as some of them have for decades, through social-media platforms and search engines—but in actively shaping what that information is: which facts… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

For the past several years, I’ve been experiencing a tension in my relationship with the moon. I love the moon as much as anyone, but the problem, bluntly, is that the moon is too famous. Maybe you’ve noticed this. The moon is constantly in the news. It is doing something “rare” or “unique” seemingly every week. Local-news outlets will inform their readers that a supermoon is about to “take to the skies” or rise “over Milwaukee,” in stories that are not technically inaccurate, though they do fail to acknowledge that the moon is always taking to the skies and that it rises over everyone. (They will often also give advice on how best to view the moon, as though most of us don’t know generally where it is.)National outlets do the same thing. The main difference is that Newsweek will claim that a supermoon is rising not over Milwaukee but… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Earlier this week, some people on X began replying to photos with a very specific kind of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her dress off,” “spread her legs,” and so on, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Again and again, the bot complied, using photos of real people—celebrities and noncelebrities, including some who appear to be young children—and putting them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses. By one estimate, Grok generated one nonconsensual sexual image every minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.Although the reach of these posts is hard to measure, some have been liked thousands of times. X appears to have removed a number of these images and suspended at least one user who asked for them, but many, many of them are still visible. xAI, the Elon Musk–owned company that develops Grok, prohibits the sexualization of children in its acceptable-use policy; neither the safety… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.