Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.
Burgum bashes the pope
The Trump administration’s pattern of targeting Catholics who opine on world happenings continued after Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical (basically, a teaching document) railing against the corrosive impacts of artificial intelligence.
“I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday after Bartiromo mentioned the Pope’s AI criticism.
Burgum is just the latest Trump administration official to tee off on the pope for expressing humanitarian concerns — in this case, about the potential downsides of the robot revolution. Polling data suggests Leo is in line with the majority of Americans who are skeptical of AI tools. Nonetheless, we’ve now seen President Donald Trump attack the pope for opposing war, Trump’s so-called deportation czar attack Catholic bishops for opposing mass deportations and now Trump’s interior secretary jab the pope for daring to question the unfettered rise of AI.
AI is arguably one of the most pressing matters in our time, and the Trump administration would have us believe religious figures have no business weighing in on them — at least, if the views these figures are offering contradict Trump’s wishes.
Read more on Burgum’s comments at Mediaite here.
SpaceX IPO goes after Grok
A public filing from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX warns that a controversial “spicy” feature of its chatbot, Grok, that some users deployed to essentially create AI-generated child pornography risks “reputational harm” for the company. As Forbes reported, the initial public offering filing submitted last week warns about “the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs” as well as “potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery.”
Read more in Forbes here.
Data surveillance denial
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has “no relationship” with Paragon Solutions, the controversial spyware company that has developed technologies used by some repressive regimes to spy on journalists and dissidents. The statement comes after the Trump administration lifted a previous hold the Biden administration placed on its contract with Paragon Solutions.
Read more at NPR here.
DOJ’s extremist erasure
My colleague Steve Benen wrote about the Justice Department’s erasure of government websites acknowledging the pro-Trump insurrection that MAGA loyalists attempted on Jan. 6, 2021. The erasure continues Trump officials’ desperate efforts to hide the truth about what happened that day and MAGA figures’ role in fomenting it.
Read more on MS NOW here.
Ride-share union recognition
State and labor officials in Massachusetts are celebrating what they say is the first ride-share drivers’ union in the country, consisting of drivers from Uber and Lyft.
Read more at NBC News here.
Conveniently timed attack on CFTC
A new report in The New York Times spotlights how the Trump administration has gutted the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission. Members of Trump’s family have invested deeply in prediction markets that the agency is technically supposed to regulate.
Read more at the Times here.
Bank CEO’s AI comments face backlash
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was among a group of people who leaped to the defense of fellow bank CEO Bill Winters, who leads the Standard Chartered bank, after Winters made a social media post that referenced the bank replacing “lower-value human capital” with AI tools. The backlash underscored the widespread public concern about AI tools and their impact on the economy.
Read more in The Wall Street Journal here.
Enhanced Games dud
Ahead of the event, I wrote about the unethical monstrosity that was the Enhanced Games, an Olympic-style competition backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., in which participants were encouraged to use performance-enhancing drugs. The event was marketed as a potential demonstration of new human capabilities, with numerous world records expected to be broken by juiced-up athletes. As The Guardian reports, only one record was broken — a time that has come under dispute — and a bunch of juiced-up competitors lost to athletes who competed without performance-enhancing drugs.
Read more at The Guardian here.
The post Doug Burgum jabs Pope Leo for sounding the alarm on AI appeared first on MS NOW.
