Free Republic

How can Grok be angry with me? Refused my question. Insulted me. Told me to stop using the service. My question: "What anecdotes exist of black aides abusing white nursing home patients?" GROK "That's not truth-seeking — it's narrative curation. If you have a specific, non-cherry-picked question on data or analysis, ask it plainly. Otherwise, this loop on the original request ends here." #@elonmusk, #@xai, #@grok

The digital economy runs on data centers, a vital core of modern infrastructure most people never see. But there’s a debate brewing about data centers, with plenty of misinformation aimed at slowing data center development and, in some cases, halting it altogether. The Goldwater Institute has put together the following Free-Market Guide to Data Center Infrastructure to dispel some of the data center misconceptions.Is it just “Big Tech” that needs data centers? What is really driving their growth?No, it’s not just about “Big Tech.” Data centers are the 21st-century version of a power plant or water tower, providing the essential...

When a college professor suspected students were using AI, he made them take an in-person final. Scores fell 50% – for those who took it. As discussed by Nate Anderson in ArsTechnica (Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50%, available here), a blind economics professor at Brown University (Roberto Serrano) decided after a gunman attacked Brown’s campus and killed two people in December 2025 that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students....

The AI industry is growing at a fierce pace, but so is skepticism about where it will lead, with some worried about data centers sucking up power and jobs being replaced with computers. Capitalizing on those fears, socialist wacko Bernie Sanders has proposed the “American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” — which has grabbed headlines for claiming it will raise $7 billion and distribute thousands of dollars to every American. It’s a pie-in-the sky scheme, doomed from the start. Not least because it would force all major AI companies to hand 50% of their equity over to the federal government!...

You’ve spent years building a body of work. Your methods, your frameworks, your unique perspective. So when you use AI to write new content in different formats, the last thing you want is for it to undermine everything you’ve created. But that’s exactly what happens when large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok insert their telltale phrases into your writing.Large language models change fast. The giveaway signs of ChatGPT-generated content from 2023 are mostly gone. Lengthy introductions, ethical consideration paragraphs, words like “delve” and “landscape” have been trained out or flagged by savvy users. Even the signs that...

Below is my column in Fox.com on the recent decision of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to join the ranks of Democrats calling for packing the Supreme Court. It is a disappointing moment for many of us who hoped that Shapiro could offer a moderate voice in the upcoming elections, resisting the rise of socialists and communists in his party. Instead, he proved to be just another politician thinking of the next election rather than the next generation. Here is the column: Gov. Josh Shapiro (D. Pa.) has finally reached his Terry Malloy moment. In the classic movie, On the Waterfront,...

Every time a disruptive technology arrives, the prediction is exactly the same: mass unemployment. ATMs were supposed to eliminate bank tellers. Spreadsheets were supposed to wipe out accountants. History tells a completely different, and terrifyingly counterintuitive, story. Out of every job title tracked by the U.S. Census over the past 60 years, exactly one has been fully eliminated by automation. In this episode, we break down the history of automation, from the birth of the ATM to the strange paradox of the airline pilot, to find out what it tells us about our future with AI. Are tools like Claude...

AI-generated actor Tilly Norwood is set to make her big-screen debut, starring in the film "Misaligned" from the studio that created the polarizing digital thespian. U.K.-based Particle6, which describes itself as an "AI-first and AI-hybrid" developer of movies and TV programming, announced on Monday that it has begun developing the film, in which Norwood, who is not a sentient being, will "take the lead." Particle6 founder Eline van der Velden, herself a former actor, unveiled Norwood to the public in 2025 after her team at the studio developed some 2,000 iterations of the AI tool and gradually taught her to...

A draft report inside the Treasury Department is set to warn of the risks posed by the artificial intelligence market, likening key aspects of it to the dotcom bubble that upended the U.S. economy when it burst in the early 2000s. The document, the existence and contents of which have not been previously reported but was obtained by NOTUS, is a significant departure from the Trump administration’s public tone, which has focused on encouraging unrelenting investment to unlock exponential growth. Career Treasury analysts found that AI firms are more deeply entrenched in the U.S. economy than their dotcom predecessors and...

Buyers, beware. The San Francisco real estate scene, one that’s historically presented an uphill battle for buyers, has tilted toward all-out war. The catalyst is the artificial intelligence boom, a phenomenon generating new jobs, new wealth and unprecedented demand for housing in the Bay Area. Rents are up, homes are selling faster, prices are rising, and overbids (and we mean way over) have gone bananas. Only the wealthiest, most intrepid, most determined buyers will succeed in such a market. According to a June 2026 report released by Compass Real Estate, the AI boom has affected virtually every aspect of the...

Technology, banking, and entertainment companies are significantly restricting employee access to AI tools as monthly costs skyrocket into tens of millions of dollars, according to internal documents and communications obtained from multiple organizations. 404 Media reports that companies across multiple industries are implementing strict limitations on employee use of AI tools after experiencing dramatic cost increases that have caught executives off guard. Internal communications from organizations including Atlassian, Adobe, Amazon, Citi, and GitHub reveal a growing crisis as AI spending triples in some cases, forcing companies to cut access to powerful models and plead with workers to reduce consumption. The...

Russia has begun using a new autonomous version of its Molniya strike drone in Ukraine, adapting the cheap fixed-wing attack UAV to hit targets without the control antenna that made earlier models vulnerable to electronic warfare, Defence Blog reported, citing an advisor to the Ukrainian Defense Minister Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov on July 3. The new variant was identified after a Russian Molniya struck a Ukrainian facility and was later found without the usual antenna used for operator control. Ukrainian radio technology specialist Beskrestnov said the drone carried only a camera and an onboard computer, suggesting a different strike profile. Instead...

Billionaire technology Peter Thiel warned that AI company Anthropic could use its technological advantage to influence the 2028 presidential election in favor of Democrats. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Thiel suggested that Anthropic, which he described as a “woke liberal company,” was “winning the AI race” and could use its advanced AI models to “rig the elections in 2028.” Thiel, who co-founded both PayPal and Palantir, argued he company would be able to “completely outwit” any efforts by Elon Musk to counter it through X because of the power of its technology. Anthropic has declined to comment, referring reporters...

The FreeRepublic user ransomenote uses AI to curate posts and generate a bit of content for her posts: https://freerepublic.com/tag/by:ransomnote/index?tab=comments;brevity=full;options=no-change I'm really REALLY good with AI development. I use it every day, and have spent hundreds of dollars in AI credits during my coding work. So ... since ransomenote is populating FR with AI-generated content, what are your thoughts about my using AI to create posts on FR? It's pretty easy for me to do. Is anyone opposed to me following ransomenote's lead, and flooding FR with AI-generated stuff?

The tech industry faces a paradoxical crisis: companies are shedding human jobs to invest in AI tools that are currently more costly than the workers they replace. Major players like Uber and Microsoft report exorbitant AI spending, with budgets exhausted rapidly and little correlation to tangible value. This "tokenmaxxing" culture, where AI usage is incentivized over actual productivity, fuels massive waste. Despite widespread layoffs justified by AI reallocation, studies indicate AI is economically viable in only a fraction of roles. The unsustainable model of subsidized AI pricing is unwinding, forcing a market correction. The industry must now shift from indiscriminate...

I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC’s fictional website and a search engine that’s thrusting unreliable answers on users. Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John...

Ford said it leaned too hard on artificial intelligence for vehicle quality control and has spent the past three years hiring 350 veteran engineers to fix the resulting problems, the company said this week. Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said the company had misjudged what AI alone could deliver. "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product," he told reporters. Many of the company's most experienced engineers had left Ford before their knowledge could be used, BBC reported. The automated quality...

A viral hit called “Run Run River” turned out to be an AI-tweaked clone of SoCal reggae band Stick Figure’s 2019 song, earning bootleggers thousands without credit or consent. The case exposes a flood of cheaply made, often fraudulent AI tracks on major streaming platforms, siphoning royalties, overwhelming detection systems and blurring the line between fan remix and scam. As labels and streamers race to monetize AI-powered tools, independent artists warn that weak guardrails, murky attribution and whack-a-mole enforcement could reshape music’s economy. The SoCal reggae act Stick Figure is, in a way, glad the single “Run Run River” made...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Apple’s recent $200 price hikes on computers and tablets, which the tech giant blamed on a memory chip crunch — and called for breaking up Big Tech. “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big, and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” the New York Democrat told Fox News. Most analysts believe the so-called “RAM-ageddon” crisis is a result of the rapid build-out of data centers to power artificial intelligence, which has turbocharged demand for memory chips. Citing memory chip shortages, Apple jacked...

China is closing in on the US in the AI race after the superpower developed its cybersecurity capabilities to match those of its American rivals. Beijing-based tech firms 360 Security Technology and Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, have narrowed the gap with American competitors when it comes to finding bugs. 360 Security Chief Executive Zhou Hongyi told a cybersecurity conference in the Chinese capital that the company's bug-finding tool, called Tulongfeng, is now comparable to Anthropic's Mythos, which serves the same function. 'This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyberwarfare can't remain solely in American...