Sunday, September 20, 2026

Scottie Pippen is promoting an AI-powered version of a basketball from 1991, and the pope got an anti-AI orb (This week in AI)

("Meet BALL, the AI character inspired by the championship ball Scottie Pippen preserved. Ask about the story, challenge its basketball knowledge, or discover what it could do for your audience.")



("Pope Leo XIV receives 'symbolic’ sphere in charity's push for AI to 'protect human dignity'...The sphere, based on an original design by Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti, contains four handwritten passages from Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas")








For over a century, new advances in science have fueled new worries about biological weapons, from the germ theory of disease to AI. Here’s my look at the risks—and what to do about them. Gift link: nyti.ms/4rdk6rJ

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— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) September 14, 2026 at 9:17 AM



("said Anthropic is not competing with pharmaceutical and biotech companies that bring drugs to market, and the company has set a boundary against running clinical trials for now")
















("New Mexico Dem governor nominee Haaland announces data center moratorium executive order if elected") ("About $18bn of loans tied to a data centre leased to Oracle in New Mexico slid into stressed territory on Friday, highlighting investors’ fear that increasing local backlash will derail the tech group’s massive AI infrastructure build-out")







("independent security researchers have used Anthropic’s Claude to break into OpenAI...Hacktron reported its findings to OpenAI, which gave the startup a $6,500 award")


ok look if Gemini hacks you that was a slow antelope situation

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— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 8:23 PM



80% of AI news at this point consists of a company announcing “we wrote a computer virus” then there’s something about the apocalypse or regulation, then the next news story is like “we wrote another computer virus.”

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce.com) September 16, 2026 at 8:03 PM



the thing with proposing agentic solutions is that one person's agentic solution is many many people's agentic problem

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— Tim Murphy (@timothypmurphy.bsky.social) September 15, 2026 at 7:59 AM






NEW: In what’s likely the biggest action against deepfake abuse websites so far, the Manhattan District Attorney has seized 12 domains hosting and sharing fake videos of celebrities. More than 1,200 people appeared across the site, with the owners and video creators under investigation

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— Matt Burgess (WIRED) (@mattburgess1.bsky.social) September 14, 2026 at 9:54 AM








While people around the U.S. are tearing down Flock cameras, one group of hackers went a step further: extracting the camera's software too. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Full investigation by @josephcox.bsky.social and @wired.com’s @dmehro.bsky.social here: www.404media.co/hackers-stol...

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— 404 Media (@404media.co) September 16, 2026 at 6:25 AM

























("The state currently only allows fully self-driving cars on the road for testing and research. In most self-driving deployments in Ohio, a human sits behind the wheel ready to take over")


NHTSA orders Tesla to prove its Cybercab is legal to sell, under oath

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— Electrek (@electrek.co) September 15, 2026 at 2:39 PM
("In plain terms, the agency is asking Tesla to defend a certification it suspects can’t be defended")










EXCLUSIVE: Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

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— 404 Media (@404media.co) September 14, 2026 at 7:26 AM
(My favorite commercial right now is for "fiduciary-grade AI")













(2/2) We need to imagine not a world without generative AI, but a world where the core training models that all publicly accessible LLMs rely on are maintained for free by one random furry from Nebraska.

— David J Prokopetz (@prokopetz.bsky.social) September 17, 2026 at 3:36 PM








(NYT: "A report by Anthropic last week on the misuse of A.I. said that “a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen,” where the Houthis have their stronghold, used Claude for “a sustained effort to develop guided weapons.” Despite Anthropic’s safeguards, the company said, the cell proceeded as far as the test firing of a guided rocket.")(Anthropic: "Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them....These actors carried out a sustained effort to develop guided weapons, including using Claude to design guidance software. We do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device; but they did test-fire a guided rocket. This field test appears to have failed: within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.")







ABC







NEW: We spent months investigating a little-known media startup called Brown Brothers Media, which buys legit news sites and turns them into AI-powered zombie content farms What blew my mind was its traffic -- it appears to be getting more readers than NPR or CBS News futurism.com/artificial-i...

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— jon christian (@jonchristian.net) September 17, 2026 at 8:00 AM



Hallucinating AI robots wrote an article in one of the largest English papers in the world saying I quit writing to become a gardener. I did not! Instead, I wrote about them. Read on: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/i-wandered...

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— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior.bsky.social) September 15, 2026 at 7:34 AM



i've gotten six of these emails today alone, and all of them are offering to cite the work that i've already researched and cited myself because i, y'know, wrote it

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— Molly White (@molly.wiki) September 11, 2026 at 8:42 PM



Anyone can upload AI slop music to anyone's Spotify page. We tested it, and it's trivial to do: www.404media.co/spotify-ai-m...

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— Jason Koebler (@jasonkoebler.bsky.social) September 17, 2026 at 7:42 AM

















(And from 2023, "is apologizing for past comments on talk radio and podcasts after a video resurfaced Sunday on social media in which she suggests the 75 per cent of the public who received a vaccine fell for the "charms of a tyrant," specifically referencing Adolf Hitler.")























For the love of god please fix the AI generated noise graphic the numbers are everywhere

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— Candy (@rockcandy87.bsky.social) September 17, 2026 at 4:48 PM