> It is ironic that the two operations used American AI, rather than Chinese
models, to generate their content about American AI.
Why is that ironic?
They use OpenAI’s resources and models, and therefore cost them money and tie up computing resources, which are also aligned way better with American users than the Chinese models.
Obviously, they are also smart enough to hide their activity from OpenAI long enough to produce what they consider usable assets at scale, and they are able to exfiltrate them reliably, as OpenAI is showing in their own report how propaganda generated with ChatGPT on their own platform makes it into the wild with all their security measures failing.
Ironic is the last sentence.
> Industry, governments, civil society, and the public should remain alert for
similar attempts to scale these messages and foreign interference activities.
Oh, so I, as part of the civil society and public, need to be alert because your product is basically a national security risk as it allows hostile entities and foreign governments to reliably produce and exfiltrate propaganda assets that are then used against the, in this case, American public?
That is unacceptable.
How about we simply ban you from doing business until you put effective measures in place that prevent those entities from destroying our democracy and societies with ChatGPT-generated disinformation campaigns, so you wouldn’t have a reason to publish these public records of how OpenAI fails to deliver even the most basic protection from AI-generated influence campaigns to the public in the first place?
Why doesn’t AI have the same KYC regulations as banks?
You shouldn’t be able to open a bank account anonymously to finance terror, but foreign adversaries can open accounts with US AI companies, gaining access to frontier LLM models to drive influence campaigns built to damage the glue that holds our society together just like that?
No sense of responsibility on OpenAI’s part.
Oh look how smart we are here is a lengthy report to an important problem we fixed.
Fix the damn cause, your platform and product security, instead of applying bandaids and wanking each other off on company time for damage assessment reports like this.
The thing I liked most about the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 I had for a while was that I met a lot of interesting people because of it.
It broke like four times under warranty because the crease got gummed up with their glue strips in the summer or it got brittle when I travelled to Greenland because of the cold in the winter, it felt uncomfortable and often moved in the pocket you put it into in a way that would annoy you every time you sat down somewhere.
But once you pull it out, something magical happens. Foldables are still one of those items you will rarely see in the wild, and it peaks the curiosity of people in a way that will make them come over and ask questions.
You see them touch it really carefully and open it really, really slowly because they are afraid they might break it, and suddenly you have this magical, foldable screen right in front of you that turns this heavy slab into a form factor known by anyone who ever held a book in their life.
When it snaps open or shut with the satisfying noise and haptic feedback, it makes them genuinely happy and smile, and watching different people having the same experience over and over again is kind of satisfying and in a way justified the price for me alone.
I am sure the Apple foldable will have its downsides and is heavily overpriced, and if you buy it in the EU, you won’t be able to use half the features, but I am still going to get one because I will have a lot of joy watching people interact with new technology for the first time when I travel, and I love listening to how they think it could improve their life or how and for what they would get one themselves.
The cheapest DIY drone that is able to effectively carry and use a glass breaker is like 25 bucks in material.
Why would anyone carry a palm-size non-traceable drone with a glass breaker on campus you might ask. Are they going to break the cameras? Of course not, that’s highly illegal.
Students care deeply about the wellbeing of fellow students and professors, just like the University seems to care so much that they installed AI cameras for 1.3 mil USD. Safety first.
What if one of your fellow students crashes their car on campus and needs to be rescued in style? Evaluate explosion risk, decide to break glass with the drone from a safe distance, then quickly move in to cut the seat belt and extract the crashed driver.
Drones are cool tech, students at SDSU should experiment with them way more and establish their presence on campus. Maybe even make a nationwide university sport out of it. National Drone Rescue Championships anyone?
Nice try, FBI, but as I said, those drones are for smashing car windows in an emergency, not to damage government / private property.
Also, theoretically, unlike with a smoking car wreck, you would have basically unlimited chances to find the right angle for the lens if you tried.
Who’s going to stop you? The campus security drone defence squad?
Most likely, some middle-aged dude will try to angrily yell at it and hit it with a mop, miss it a few times, then yell some more, and it goes viral on TikTok. But doing crime is bad, so don’t ever destroy an AI camera.
I respect the work, but for most of the world, this paper is absolutely useless.
And the scientists don’t seem to be aware of this, because later on in the conclusion they talk about what other governments can learn from this, policy-wise.
The severe flaw in this logic, unless with other governments they mean state-wise within the US, is that it only looks at US Americans, who have a very own subset of unique variables you hardly see in other parts of the world and populations that do influence the outcome.
And the health education of the average American is rather poor, with over 60% of U.S. adults demonstrating inadequate health literacy in this study from 2025.
What surprises me here is the shortsighted conclusion.
How can you conclude this:
"Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realise the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."
Rather than, obviously, we have to deal with a highly health-uneducated overall population in the US, that is overall less resilient to mental distress, tends to look for quick fixes (pill popping) rather than eliminating the factors causing the need to take pills in the first place, and that is largely unable to develop strategies on their own to deal with temporarily forced isolation and has severe problems adapting to rapidly changing external factors and the mental load they put on the individual.
How can we teach the average American to be more resilient, have better health education so they can make better decisions and get them off so many pills?
I know. This study examined how remote work affects isolation and mental distress.
And therefore not the root cause of the underlying systemic problems.
But it is annoying to see smart people who should know and see the root of the problems, rather looking for grant money than for solutions.
It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions
and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering
the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”
I think that someone gets an overall tax rebate when they have children is a reasonable decision for a society to make.
But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.
Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?
It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.
Lots of things that are wrong are also imposed on parents. Not to say involuntarily childless people are to be blamed for anything, or that two wrongs make a right, but society is immensely misaligned against having children, and forced charity already exists in various forms whether you like it.
But honestly, developed countries not having children itself isn't that bad a thing. I feel that our existence and the hedonistic treadmill drains too many scarce resources, and population growth should not last long. On the other hand, it seems societies still gain productivity in spite of the slow population growth. There should be plenty of slack for everyone, so that middle-class parents don't feel like they are constantly in a deathmarch, and voluntarily childless people don't need to be pressured. There's an immense misallocation of resources that is hard to solve, and you end up seeing proposals like this.
I had a rather pleasant conversation with Mike Tyson on a flight a good while ago and asked him, “Mike, how did you deal with all this trash talk before you’re stepping into the ring?” And the man said, “You look at what they do with their hands, not at what they do with their mouths.”
I will tell you the same. Look at what Altman actually does to make the life of the "replaced because of AI workforce" a good life, not at his mouth.
Altman is a liar. It’s his profession. He hypes up the product in order to sell it to investors. Of course, he told everyone whose loyalty is to their shareholders and their own bonus payments that you will become exponentially more wealthy after replacing those pesky workers and their hard-fought rights with machines that never complain about working for too long or too hard and that he is selling such soulless Tinmen to the evil Fortune 500 witches at scale if they are interested.
You can’t trust the man on a single thing he says because his actions don’t line up with the words that leave his mouth. They never did.
Now he is lying again because he is unfortunately afraid of him and his family getting murdered, and AI can’t solve the problems he created by making the statement that AI will be able to do and replace most of the jobs employers pay humans for.
And now people actually see this, their friends and family members getting laid off by email, by AI or because of AI and suddenly their lives get exponentially worse instead of better.
Betting on AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people at currently zero overall value for humanity itself, because the base of this technology is flawed by design. Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a baked in feature. It’s like building on sand.
This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight, what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger
and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.
We will just add an "if it uses energy, we can shut it down" to the "if it bleeds, we can kill it".
> AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people.
That's not a law of nature, it's a consequence of the current system of laws, and only one of its problems among many others - this is important to understand because removing AI (an impossible task, but let's hallucinate), isn't going to fix the system.
> at currently zero overall value for humanity itself,
The value of AI is currently negative - the costs outweigh the benefits, but the reason for it is the rushed and economically reckless deployment. Again, that's not due to how AI has to be it's due to how we do it.
> This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight,
There are a lot of ways to "fight", the good ones don't involve getting physical or getting mad.
> what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.
Anger is a recipe for disasters. AI is here to stay, the cat is out of the bag, there's no way to put it back in, it's basic politics. Fixating on AI, instead of fixing our ways of using AI, is a major blunder.
The fix isn't as simple as "in the movies", it's outside of the mainstream but that space is a minefield too - there's a lot to learn before good choices can be made.
Don’t forget to give it the cheerful personality of Jamie Oliver afterwards to recommend you a death row meal that is nutritious and will make the experience more pleasant.
Why is that ironic?
They use OpenAI’s resources and models, and therefore cost them money and tie up computing resources, which are also aligned way better with American users than the Chinese models.
Obviously, they are also smart enough to hide their activity from OpenAI long enough to produce what they consider usable assets at scale, and they are able to exfiltrate them reliably, as OpenAI is showing in their own report how propaganda generated with ChatGPT on their own platform makes it into the wild with all their security measures failing.
Ironic is the last sentence.
> Industry, governments, civil society, and the public should remain alert for similar attempts to scale these messages and foreign interference activities.
Oh, so I, as part of the civil society and public, need to be alert because your product is basically a national security risk as it allows hostile entities and foreign governments to reliably produce and exfiltrate propaganda assets that are then used against the, in this case, American public?
That is unacceptable.
How about we simply ban you from doing business until you put effective measures in place that prevent those entities from destroying our democracy and societies with ChatGPT-generated disinformation campaigns, so you wouldn’t have a reason to publish these public records of how OpenAI fails to deliver even the most basic protection from AI-generated influence campaigns to the public in the first place?
Why doesn’t AI have the same KYC regulations as banks?
You shouldn’t be able to open a bank account anonymously to finance terror, but foreign adversaries can open accounts with US AI companies, gaining access to frontier LLM models to drive influence campaigns built to damage the glue that holds our society together just like that?
No sense of responsibility on OpenAI’s part. Oh look how smart we are here is a lengthy report to an important problem we fixed.
Fix the damn cause, your platform and product security, instead of applying bandaids and wanking each other off on company time for damage assessment reports like this.
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