Well, Then. (Another Exec. Order)

This came in Notifications on my tablet, which I only use as a book reader as it’s too old for updates of any sort. Anyway, I found the headline curious, so I read it, and here it is. I linked a news story at the end, too. We’ll discuss. Good Morning! 🌞

LAUNCHING THE GENESIS MISSION

Executive Orders

November 24, 2025

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.

This order launches the “Genesis Mission” as a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century. The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization. We will harness for the benefit of our Nation the revolution underway in computing, and build on decades of innovation in semiconductors and high-performance computing. The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.

Sec. 2. Establishment of the Genesis Mission. (a) There is hereby established the Genesis Mission (Mission), a national effort to accelerate the application of AI for transformative scientific discovery focused on pressing national challenges.

(b) The Secretary of Energy (Secretary) shall be responsible for implementing the Mission within DOE, consistent with the provisions of this order, including, as appropriate and authorized by law, setting priorities and ensuring that all DOE resources used for elements of the Mission are integrated into a secure, unified platform. The Secretary may designate a senior political appointee to oversee day-to-day operations of the Mission.

(c) The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) shall provide general leadership of the Mission, including coordination of participating executive departments and agencies (agencies) through the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and the issuance of guidance to ensure that the Mission is aligned with national objectives.

Sec. 3. Operation of the American Science and Security Platform. (a) The Secretary shall establish and operate the American Science and Security Platform (Platform) to serve as the infrastructure for the Mission with the purpose of providing, in an integrated manner and to the maximum extent practicable and consistent with law:

(i) high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI computing environments, capable of supporting large-scale model training, simulation, and inference;

(ii) AI modeling and analysis frameworks, including AI agents to explore design spaces, evaluate experimental outcomes, and automate workflows;

(iii) computational tools, including AI-enabled predictive models, simulation models, and design optimization tools;

(iv) domain-specific foundation models across the range of scientific domains covered;

(v) secure access to appropriate datasets, including proprietary, federally curated, and open scientific datasets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources, consistent with applicable law; applicable classification, privacy, and intellectual property protections; and Federal data-access and data-management standards; and

(vi) experimental and production tools to enable autonomous and AI-augmented experimentation and manufacturing in high-impact domains.

(b) The Secretary shall take necessary steps to ensure that the Platform is operated in a manner that meets security requirements consistent with its national security and competitiveness mission, including applicable classification, supply chain security, and Federal cybersecurity standards and best practices.

(c) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify Federal computing, storage, and networking resources available to support the Mission, including both DOE on-premises and cloud-based high-performance computing systems, and resources available through industry partners. The Secretary shall also identify any additional partnerships or infrastructure enhancements that could support the computational foundation for the Platform.

(d) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall:

(i) identify a set of initial data and model assets for use in the Mission, including digitization, standardization, metadata, and provenance tracking; and

(ii) develop a plan, with appropriate risk-based cybersecurity measures, for incorporating datasets from federally funded research, other agencies, academic institutions, and approved private-sector partners, as appropriate.

(e) Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed.

(f) Within 270 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall, consistent with applicable law and subject to available appropriations, seek to demonstrate an initial operating capability of the Platform for at least one of the national science and technology challenges identified pursuant to section 4 of this order.

Sec. 4. Identification of National Science and Technology Challenges. (a) Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify and submit to the APST a detailed list of at least 20 science and technology challenges of national importance that the Secretary assesses to have potential to be addressed through the Mission and that span priority domains consistent with National Science and Technology Memorandum 2 of September 23, 2025, including:

(i) advanced manufacturing;

(ii) biotechnology;

(iii) critical materials;

(iv) nuclear fission and fusion energy;

(v) quantum information science; and

(vi) semiconductors and microelectronics.

(b) Within 30 days of submission of the list described in subsection (a) of this section, the APST shall review the proposed list and, working with participating agency members of the NSTC, coordinate the development of an expanded list that can serve as the initial set of national science and technology challenges to be addressed by the Mission, including additional challenges proposed by participating agencies through the NSTC, subject to available appropriations.

(c) Following development of the expanded list described in subsection (b) of this section, agencies participating in the Mission shall use the Platform to advance research and development aligned with the national science and technology challenges identified in the expanded list, consistent with applicable law and their respective missions, and subject to available appropriations.

(d) On an annual basis thereafter, the Secretary shall review and update the list of challenges in consultation with the APST and the NSTC to reflect progress achieved, emerging national needs, and alignment with my Administration’s research and development priorities.

Sec. 5. Interagency Coordination and External Engagement. (a) The APST, through the NSTC, and with support from the Federal Chief Data Officer Council and the Chief AI Officer Council, shall convene relevant and interested agencies to:

(i) assist participating agencies in aligning, to the extent permitted by law, their AI-related programs, datasets, and research and development activities with the objectives of the Mission in their respective areas of expertise, while avoiding duplication of effort across the Federal Government and promoting interoperability;

(ii) identify data sources that may support the Mission’s aim;

(iii) develop a process and resourcing plan in coordination with participating agencies for integrating appropriate and available agency data and infrastructure into the Mission, to the extent permitted by law and subject to available appropriations, including methods under which all agencies contributing to the Mission are encouraged to implement appropriate risk-based security measures that reflect cybersecurity best practices;

(iv) launch coordinated funding opportunities or prize competitions across participating agencies, to the extent permitted by law and subject to available appropriations, to incentivize private-sector participation in AI-driven scientific research aligned with Mission objectives; and

(v) establish mechanisms to coordinate research and development funding opportunities and experimental resources across participating agencies, ensuring agencies can participate effectively in the Mission.

(b) The APST shall coordinate with relevant agencies in establishing, consistent with existing authorizing statutes and subject to available appropriations, competitive programs for research fellowships, internships, and apprenticeships focused on the application of AI to scientific domains identified as national challenges for the Mission, to include placement of program participants at DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities, with the purpose of providing access to the Platform and training in AI-enabled scientific discovery.

(c) The Secretary, in coordination with the APST and the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto, shall establish mechanisms for agency collaboration with external partners possessing advanced AI, data, or computing capabilities or scientific domain expertise, including through cooperative research and development agreements, user facility partnerships, or other appropriate arrangements with external entities to support and enhance the activities of the Mission, and shall ensure that such partnerships are structured to preserve the security of Federal research assets and maximize public benefit. To facilitate these collaborations, the Secretary shall:

(i) develop standardized partnership frameworks, including cooperative research and development or other appropriate agreements, and data-use and model‑sharing agreements;

(ii) establish clear policies for ownership, licensing, trade-secret protections, and commercialization of intellectual property developed under the Mission, including innovations arising from AI-directed experiments;

(iii) implement uniform and stringent data access and management processes and cybersecurity standards for non-Federal collaborators accessing datasets, models, and computing environments, including measures requiring compliance with classification, privacy, and export-control requirements, as well as other applicable laws; and

(iv) establish procedures to ensure the highest standards of vetting and authorization of users and collaborators seeking access to the resources of the Mission and associated research activities, including the Platform and associated Federal research resources.

(d) The APST, through the NSTC, shall, to the extent appropriate, identify opportunities for international scientific collaboration to support activities under the Mission.

Sec. 6. Evaluation and Reporting. (a) Within 1 year of the date of this order, and on an annual basis thereafter, the Secretary shall submit a report to the President, through the APST and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, describing:

(i) the Platform’s operational status and capabilities;

(ii) progress toward integration across DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research partners, including shared access to computing resources, data infrastructure, and research facilities;

(iii) the status of user engagement, including participation of student researchers and any related training;

(iv) updates on research efforts and outcomes achieved, including measurable scientific advances, publications, and prototype technologies;

(v) the scope and outcomes of public-private partnerships, including collaborative research projects and any technology transitions or commercialization activities; and

(vi) any identified needs or recommendations for authorities or interagency support to achieve the Mission’s objectives.

Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(d) The costs for publication of this order shall be borne by the Department of Energy.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,

November 24, 2025.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/11/launching-the-genesis-mission/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-executive-order-genesis-mission-ai-scientific-discovery-super-computer/

For Science!

Cosmos Magazine has changed its online presence, while still providing the informational and neat articles they’re known for. Here are a couple for this week.

Extinct Arctic rhino found in Canada

October 29, 2025 Evrim Yazgin Content Sub Type: Focus Topics:

Animals Palaeontology

A near complete fossil rhinoceros has been found on an Arctic Canadian island, making it the most northerly rhino species ever.

Epiatheracerium itjilik [eet-jee-look] is described for the first time in a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The “Arctic rhino” lived about 23 million years ago during the early Miocene epoch.

The new species was found in fossil-rich lake deposits in Haughton Crater on Devon Island which is part of the northern-most Canadian territory of Nunavut. Devon Island lies at a latitude of about 75°N, well within the Arctic Circle. It is also the largest uninhabited island in the world. (snip-MORE)

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Milestone image maps the Milky Way as it’s never been seen before

October 30, 2025 Imma Perfetto Content Sub Type: Focus Topics: Space

The largest low-frequency radio image of the Milky Way ever assembled has captured an unprecedented view of the galaxy, enabling astronomers to study the life stages of stars in new ways.

The data was captured by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.

“This low-frequency image allows us to unveil large astrophysical structures in our Galaxy that are difficult to image at higher frequencies,” says Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). “No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy.”

Hurley-Walker is principal investigator of one of the extensive surveys used to construct the image, the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey. (snip-MORE, and it’s interesting)

So Many

things that are just wrong about this; things to be said about him being full of BS; things to be said about him being full of himself; that he presents as if he is actually designing and building these; that he names them Optimus (from Optimus Prime, a hero in “Transformers”), and so on, and so on, and so on…

Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building

In a Tesla earnings call Wednesday, the world’s richest man pondered the future of his company’s Optimus robots—and his control over them.

Tesla might be an electric auto maker, but CEO Elon Musk has made clear that he thinks of it as much more: an innovator in artificial intelligence and software, a builder of world-shaking robots. He’s also argued that Tesla should be worth a lot more than it is today: up to $20 trillion, he posted in July, more than five times the current worth of Nvidia.

Musk has also made it clear that he wants to get paid, a lot. In November, Tesla shareholders will vote on the board’s proposal to pay the CEO a remarkable $1 trillion over the next decade. The deal would also increase Musk’s stake in Tesla from 13 percent to a quarter. But Musk would only get that big figure—and the extra control—if he hits a series of ambitious metrics, including 20 million vehicles delivered, 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation, and an $8.5 trillion valuation. And also, 1 million Optimus humanoid robots delivered.

On a call with investors on Wednesday, Musk locked on to that last point to make his most threatening argument for a gigantic payday yet. “My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” he said. “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”

Generally, Musk talks about Tesla’s Optimus project as more of a force for peace than war. He’s said that Optimus will upend the job market and free humanity from the drudgery of work. (“Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store,” he posted this week.) Elsewhere on the investor call Wednesday, he said that Tesla’s robots would “actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care.”

Optimus, he added, “will be an incredible surgeon, and imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon.” For Tesla, Optimus will be “an infinite money glitch,” Musk said, arguing that everyone will want a humanoid robot who can do their work for them.

At Tesla events—and at the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles—Optimus robots are usually seen doing service work: serving drinks and popcorn, or entertaining visitors by dancing or playing rock, paper, scissors. (Optimus participants in a 2024 Tesla event were later acknowledged to be not fully autonomous, but remotely operated by humans.)

Whether Optimus chooses to do laundry or battle, Tesla’s vision of a robotic future still seems a ways away. On Wednesday’s call, Musk dwelled on the challenge of building humanoid hands and forearms, seeming to confirm earlier reporting that the features were proving especially hard for Tesla engineers to hack. And while Tesla set internal goals to produce 5,000 Optimus units this year, The Information reported this month that the company scaled down those production plans over the summer. On Wednesday, Musk said Tesla would have a “production-intent prototype” ready by February or March. Full-scale production, he said, would start at the end of next year.

A Good Question, Or Betteridge’s Law?

There is a fine discussion about A.I., over on Barry’s blog. But this is a different sort of use.

Anthropic Has a Plan to Keep Its AI From Building a Nuclear Weapon. Will It Work?

Anthropic partnered with the US government to create a filter meant to block Claude from helping someone build a nuke. Experts are divided on whether its a necessary protection—or a protection at all.

At the end of August, the AI company Anthropic announced that its chatbot Claude wouldn’t help anyone build a nuclear weapon. According to Anthropic, it had partnered with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make sure Claude wouldn’t spill nuclear secrets.

The manufacture of nuclear weapons is both a precise science and a solved problem. A lot of the information about America’s most advanced nuclear weapons is Top Secret, but the original nuclear science is 80 years old. North Korea proved that a dedicated country with an interest in acquiring the bomb can do it, and it didn’t need a chatbot’s help.

How, exactly, did the US government work with an AI company to make sure a chatbot wasn’t spilling sensitive nuclear secrets? And also: Was there ever a danger of a chatbot helping someone build a nuke in the first place?

The answer to the first question is that it used Amazon. The answer to the second question is complicated.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Top Secret cloud services to government clients where they can store sensitive and classified information. The DOE already had several of these servers when it started to work with Anthropic. (snip-MORE on the page. It’s good-read it!)

Is It Me, Or Is This Creepy? I Don’t

get why this exists. If you don’t care to read the story, you can also listen, just click on through.

ON EDIT: As I read through, posted, then digested this, I still don’t like it, and am not sure how truly useful this could be. That said, someone somewhere may be able to help it learn to fulfill a need they have, and that would be a reason for this tech to exist, so my apologies for being that strident about it.

I Hate My Friend

The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

The AI-powered Friend pendant is now out in the world. If you live in the US or Canada, you can buy one for $129.

The smooth plastic disc is just under 2 inches in diameter; it looks and feels a little like a beefy Apple AirTag. Inside are some LEDs and a Bluetooth radio that connects you (through your iPhone) to a chatbot in the cloud that’s powered by Google’s Gemini 2.5 model. You can tap on the disc to ask your Friend questions as it dangles around your neck, and it responds to your voice prompts by sending you text messages through the companion app. You can reply to these messages with your voice or via text to keep the conversation going.

It also listens to whatever you’re doing as you move through the world, no tap required, and offers a running commentary on the interactions you have throughout your day. To perform that trick, the device has microphones that are always activated.

If the idea of a microphone-packed wearable that’s always listening to your conversations raises privacy concerns for you, just know that you’re not alone. If your experience is anything like ours, wearing the Friend will likely earn you the ire of everyone around you. Curiously, you might even end up being bullied by the chatbot itself. (snip-see the page for MORE, or to listen.)

From The Onion:

New Safety Features Coming To ChatGPT

Of Course It Is.

This is what I meant when I mentioned that while Google’s AI always volunteers information when I search, which info I do skim before I scroll down for the real search. I can well see people thinking they can depend upon the AI overviews of what they think they’re reading. Here’s the scoop:

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain

Emanuel Maiberg ·Jul 23, 2025 at 2:53 PM

Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing.

Essentially, the data shows that Google’s AI Overview feature introduced in 2023 replacing the “10 blue links” format that turned Google into the internet’s de facto traffic controller will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process. Instead, Google will feed people into a faulty AI-powered alternative that is prone to errors it presents with so much confidence, we won’t even be able to tell that they are errors.

Here’s what this looks like from the perspective of someone who makes a living finding, producing, and publishing what I hope is valuable information on the internet. On Monday I published a story about Spotify publishing AI-generated songs from dead artists without permission. I spent most of my day verifying that this was happening, finding examples, contacting Spotify and other companies responsible, and talking to the owner of a record label who was impacted by this. After the story was published, Spotify removed all the tracks I flagged and removed the user who was behind this malicious activity, which resulted in many more offending, AI-generated tracks falsely attributed to human artists being removed from Spotify and other streaming services.

Many thousands of people think this information is interesting or useful, so they read the story, and then we hopefully convert their attention to money via ads, but primarily by convincing them to pay for a subscription. Cynically aiming only to get as much traffic as we can isn’t a viable business strategy because it compromises the very credibility and trustworthiness that we think convinces people to pay for a subscription, but what traffic we do get is valuable because every person who comes to our website gives us the opportunity to make our case.

The Spotify story got decent traffic by our standards, and the number one traffic source for it so far has been Google, followed by Reddit, “direct” traffic (meaning people who come directly to our site), and Bluesky. It’s great that Google sent us a bunch of traffic for that, but we also know that it should have sent us a lot more, and that it did a disservice to its own users by not doing that.

We know it should have sent us more traffic because of what when you search for “AI music spotify” on Google, the first thing I see is a Google Snippet summarizing my article. But that summary isn’t from nor does it link to 404 Media, it’s a summary of and a link to a blog on a website called dig.watch that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. The blog doesn’t have a byline and reads like the endless stream of AI-generated summaries we saw when we created a fully automated AI aggregation site of 404 Media. Dig.watch itself links to another music blog, MusicTech, which is an aggregation of my story that links to it in the lede.

When I use Google’s “AI mode,” Google provides a bullet-pointed summary of my story, but instead of linking to it, it links to three other sites that aggregated it: TechRadar, Mixmag, and RouteNote.

Gaming search engine optimization in order to come up as the first result on Google regardless of merit has been a problem for as long as Google has been around. As the Pew research makes clear, AI Overview just ensures people will never click the link where the information they are looking for originates.

We reserve the right to whine about Google rewarding aggregation of our stories instead of sending the traffic to us, but the problem here is not what is happening to 404 Media, which we’ve built with the explicit goal of not living or dying by the whims of any internet platform we can’t control. The problem is that this is happening to every website on the internet, and if the people who actually produce the information that people are looking for are not getting traffic they will no longer be able to produce that information.

This ongoing “traffic apocalypse” has been the subject of many articles and opinion pieces saying that SEO strategies are dead because AI will take the ad dollar scraps media companies were fighting over. Tragically, what Google is doing to search is not only going to kill big media companies, but tons of small businesses as well.

Luckily for Google and the untold number of people who are being fed Snippets and AI summaries of our Spotify story, so far that information is at least correct. That is not guaranteed to be the case with other AI summaries. We love to mention that Google’s AI summaries told its users to eat glue whenever this subject comes up because it’s hilarious and perfectly encapsulates the problem, but it’s also an important example because it reveals an inherently faulty technology. More recently, AI Overview insisted that Dave Barry, a journalist who is very much alive, was dead.

The glue situation was viral and embarrassing for Google but the company still dominates search and it’s very hard for people to meaningfully resist its dominance given our limited attention spans and the fact that it is the default search option in most cases. AI overviews are still a problem but it’s impossible to keep this story in the news forever. Eventually Google shoves it down users’ throats and there’s not much they can do about it.

Google AI summaries told users to eat glue because it was pulling on a Reddit post that was telling another user, jokingly, to put glue on their pizza so the cheese doesn’t slide off. Google’s AI didn’t understand the context and served that answer up deadpan. This mechanism doesn’t only result in other similar errors, but is also possibly vulnerable to abuse.

In May, an artist named Eduardo Valdés-Hevia reached out to me when he discovered he accidentally fooled Google’s AI Overview to present a fictional theory he wrote for a creative project as if it was real.

“I work mostly in horror, and my art often plays around with unreality and uses scientific and medical terms I make up to heighten the realism along with the photoshopped images,” Valdés-Hevia told me. “Which makes a lot of people briefly think what I talk about might be real, and will lead some of them to google my made-up terms to make sure.”

In early May, Valdés-Hevia posted a creepy image and short blurb about “The fringe Parasitic Encephalization Theory,” which “claims our nervous system is a parasite that took over the body of the earliest vertebrate ancestor. It captures 20% of the body’s resources, while staying separate from the blood and being considered unique by the immune system.”

Someone who saw Valdés-Hevia post Googled “Parasitic Encephalization” and showed him that AI overview presented it as if it was a real thing.

Valdés-Hevia then decided to check if he could Google AI Overview to similarly present other made-up concepts as if they were real, and found that it was easy and fast. For example, Valdés-Hevia said that only two hours after he and members of his Discord to start posting about “AI Engorgement,” a fake “phenomenon where an AI model absorbs too much misinformation in its training data,” for Google AI Overview to start presenting it uncritically. It still does so at the time of writing, months later.

Other recent examples Valdés-Hevia flagged to me, like the fictional “Seraphim Shark” were at first presented as real by AI Overview, but has since been updated to say they are “likely” fictional. In some cases, Valdés-Hevia even managed to get AI Overview to conflate a real condition—Dracunculiasis, or guinea worm disease—with a fictional condition he invented, Dracunculus graviditatis, “a specialized parasite of the uterus.” Google

Valdés-Hevia told me he wanted to “test out the limits and how exploitable Google search has become. It’s also a natural extension of the message of my art, which is made to convince people briefly that my unreality is real as a vehicle for horror. Except in this case, I was trying to intentionally ‘trick’ the machine. And I thought it would be much, much harder than just some scattered social media posts and a couple hours.”

“Let’s say an antivaxx group organizes to spread some disinformation,” he said. “They just need to create a new term (let’s say a disease name caused by vaccines) that doesn’t have many hits on Google, coordinate to post about it in a few different places using scientific terms to make it feel real, and within a few hours, they could have Google itself laundering this misinformation into a ‘credible’ statement through their AI overview. Then, a good percentage of people looking for the term would come out thinking this is credible information. What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.”

I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.

The optimistic take is that Google Search, which has been the undisputed king of search for more than two decades, is now extremely vulnerable to disruption, as people in the tech world love to say. Predictably, most of that competition is now coming from other AI companies that thing they can build better products than AI overview and be the new, default, AI-powered search engine for the AI age. Alternatively, as people get tired of being fed AI-powered trash, perhaps there is room for a human-centered and human-powered search alternative, products that let people filter out AI results or doesn’t have an ads-based business model.

But It is also entirely possible and maybe predictable that we’ll continue to knowingly march towards an internet where drawing the line between what is and isn’t real is not profitable “at scale” and therefore not a consideration for most internet companies and users. Which doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. It is very, very consequential, and we are already knee deep in those consequences.

“People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites,” A Google spokesperson told me in an email. “This [Pew] study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.”

Update: This article has been updated with comment from Google. We’ve also updated our description of the Pew study to clarify one percent of Google searches resulted in users clicking the link to the source of the AI summary.

Yet More History, From the Saturday Evening Post-

No language alert!

From Closeted Citizens to Activists: High Tech Gays and the Fight for LGBTQ+ Equality in Silicon Valley

In the late 20th century, a gay social club became a major political force in the California tech industry, eventually influencing corporate policies as well as state and federal laws across the country.

Ryan Reft

In the 1980s, at a time when the federal government turned its back on the LGBTQ community, gay men and lesbians found an unlikely partner in their fight for equality: corporations.

In the face of the AIDS crisis, hostility toward LGBTQ employees forced the community to “turn from the state to business for protection, according to Margot Canaday’s Queer Career: Sexuality and Work Modern America.” Corporate America did more than federal or state governments in this regard, outpacing both the labor movement and the non-profit sector.

And it started in Silicon Valley.

While Silicon Valley was dominated by the kind of straight white men mocked in the HBO series of the same name, it also wasn’t the establishment. In these early days, for example, women made up a larger proportion of those working in computer programming. Nonconformity was seen as valuable rather than problematic. In 1987, Lotus became the “first highly visible, for-profit company” to provide same sex couples with partner benefits, according to Canaday.

Today, Silicon Valley dominates the public narrative and the economy. Granted, in our current moment, it seems paradoxical that the same industry that gave us social media platforms that often perpetuate misogyny and homophobia also served as an important battleground for the assertion of employment rights for LGBTQ workers. Yet it did, and it happened internally through employee resource groups and externally through advocacy groups.

One of the most prominent of these external advocacy organizations was the High Tech Gays (HTG). Formed in the living rooms of Silicon Valley’s San Jose in 1983, it began largely as a social group for the region’s LGTBQ tech workforce, but over time it served as an incubator for other organizations dedicated to LGBTQ political rights, inspiring members to start their own employee resource groups at their places of employment and organizing against anti-gay state referendums.

The 1980s and Silicon Valley

While San Francisco, has long been identified with LGBTQ activism, suburban Silicon Valley proved more conservative. “Even though I was ‘out’ with friends and family who knew me…I found myself being very reserved in expressing affection, talking in any depth about gay culture with them,” says Bob Correa, a California native, San Jose resident (1971-1986), and an early HTG member. “Even in the early ’80s there was a lot of prejudice back then, a heck of lot more than today,” adds his husband and one of HTG’s founders, Denny Carroll, in their 2018 interview.

*Denny Carroll and Bob Correa after donating the HTG collection to the San Jose State Martin Luther King Library (Photo courtesy of HTG, Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, San Jose State University)*

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Starry, Starry Night … & Happy Birthday, APOD!

APOD is 30 Years Old Today
Image Credit: Pixelization of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night by Dario Giannobile

Explanation: APOD is 30 years old today. In celebration, today’s picture uses past APODs as tiles arranged to create a single pixelated image that might remind you of one of the most well-known and evocative depictions of planet Earth’s night sky. In fact, this Starry Night consists of 1,836 individual images contributed to APOD over the last 5 years in a mosaic of 32,232 tiles. Today, APOD would like to offer a sincere thank you to our contributors, volunteers, and readers. Over the last 30 years your continuing efforts have allowed us to enjoy, inspire, and share a discovery of the cosmos.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html