Free Republic

OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams. And it's more likely to refuse requests from women than men when prompted to produce information likely to be censored by AI safety mechanisms. The reason, according to researchers affiliated with Harvard University, is that the model's guardrails incorporate biases that shape its responses based on contextual information about the user. Computer scientists Victoria R. Li, Yida Chen, and Naomi Saphra explain how they came to that conclusion in a recent...

The lawmakers said their investigation seeks to examine how the nonprofit responds to bad actors in order to restore its credibility as a neutral arbiter of information, and what actions are taken to hold the bad actors accountable. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee and one of its subcommittees on Wednesday announced an investigation into allegations of an organized effort to skew U.S. public opinion on sensitive topics by manipulating Wikipedia articles.Wikipedia is a nonpartisan nonprofit that allows the public to edit encyclopedic articles, but the website's editing team is supposed to review information and remove material that is not...

A Texas-based wealth management firm has apologised for a clerical error that gave the appearance it took a massive short position on shares in Donald Trump’s social media company just before Saturday’s assassination attempt. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing by Austin Private Wealth dated July 12 showed the firm had shorted 12 million shares in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (DJT) via a put option, sparking frenzied conspiracy theories after the unusual trade was highlighted by a number of social media users.

ChatGPT gave a 16-year-old California boy a “step-by-step playbook” on how to kill himself before he did so earlier this year — even advising the teen on the type of knots he could use for hanging and offering to write a suicide note for him, new court papers allege. At every turn, the chatbot affirmed and even encouraged Adam Raine’s suicidal intentions — at one point praising his plan as “beautiful,” according to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court against ChatGPT parent company OpenAI. On April 11, 2025, the day that Raine killed himself, the teenager sent a...

A 17-year-old handed just $100 to ChatGPT and let the AI run a stock portfolio for one month. The results stunned finance watchers, with gains far beyond major Wall Street benchmarks. =============================================================== In late June 2025, 17-year-old Nathan Smith from rural Oklahoma gave ChatGPT control over a $100 stock portfolio. Four weeks later, the results shocked many: a 23.8% gain—far above the Russell 2000 (+3.9%) and biotech ETF XBI (+3.5%) during the same period. Smith shared his experiment on Reddit, and it quickly spread across tech and finance communities, with coverage from Decrypt, Futurism, and others. Smith is quick to...

Fraudsters in Ghana are deliberately targeting British women in online scams as retribution for colonialism, a report has claimed. Accra, Ghana’s capital, is a hub for gangs of cyber criminals, known as Sakawa Boys, who pose as white men on Facebook to manipulate affluent Western women into entering a relationship.

The shine may be coming off AI, a tech charlatan that has brought no major benefits for organizations including telcos and has had some worrying effects. Offloading cognitive effort to ChatGPT or a similar application is extremely bad for the brain. Who knew? It should have been obvious to anyone who's realized that lounging around all day is bad for the body, or that no one became good at anything by not doing it. But it took two separate research projects, one by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University and the other by MIT, to establish that overreliance on generative artificial...

Sting's former Police bandmates are suing the frontman for millions of pounds in missing royalties. The singer, 73, was handed a High Court writ by the group's guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland. The 'substantial' damages claim comes after many years of bitter legal disputes. A source told The Sun: 'This has been coming for quite some time. Lawyers tried repeatedly to reach an out-of-court settlement but hit a stalemate. 'Andy and Stewart decided there was no alternative than court so pressed the button. They say they are owed millions in lost royalties.' London's High Court lists the legal...

It was one of those. It was either in Nantucket or the Vineyard, and invited Epstein to go, and I believe that’s when he met Prince Andrew’.” This mention of Lady Rothschild is not in the least surprising, since we’ve known for some time that she was also the one who introduced Epstein to lawyer Alan Dershowitz:

White liberal woman films herself at drive throughs asking businesses if they cooperate with ICE and report their illegal employees She tells them she will only give her business to companies who won’t report illegals I have no words to describe how insane these people are

@EdwinLandy It was an appropriation made by Trump unlawfully. The money was supposed to go to Intel's performance of grant objectives, but instead of that, Trump changed it that they just have to give up stock for the money. Grants are not free money. They are a special kind of contact. Anyway, there is no legal authority behind his actions, so he'll handle it however he wants until someone successfully challenges him.

“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future. I negotiated this Deal with Lip-Bu Tan, the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company,” wrote Trump on Truth Social. “The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars. This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL. Building leading edge Semiconductors and Chips, which is what INTEL does, is fundamental to...

Wired and Business Insider have deleted articles that had been supposedly written by a freelance journalist named Margaux Blanchard – after allegations emerged that they were actually penned by an AI bot and were filled with apparent fabrications. Several other US and UK publications have published – and some have paid for – articles from Blanchard on everything from feature stories on couples getting married on video games to a personal essay on having her first child at 45. But the alleged ruse fell apart when Blanchard emailed a pitch to Dispatch editor Jacob Furedi about “Gravemont, a decommissioned mining...

President Trump suggested Friday that he may once again extend the deadline for TikTok’s parent company to divest from the popular video-sharing app or face a U.S. ban. For months, Trump has sought to strike a deal to keep TikTok available in the U.S., pushing back the deadline three separate times. The latest extension is set to expire Sept. 17. “We have American buyers,” he told reporters Friday. “And I haven’t spoken to [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] about it. At the right time, when we’re set, I’ll do it. In the meantime, until the complexity of things work out, we...

Counter-Strike changed first-person shooters forever with its deliberate team-based combat. Twenty-five years after the game’s official release, one of its college creators reflects.Late one night in his dorm room, Minh Le, a computer science major, was having a hard time concentrating on his studies.Le was a whiz with computers and had little trouble with the material at Simon Fraser University, a public research school just outside Vancouver, British Columbia. But a video game he had designed in his spare time was earning Le and his co-creator more than $20,000 every month from advertising.More than 100,000 players at a time —...

Companies are betting on AI—yet nearly all enterprise pilots are stuck at the starting line. The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints...

You've probably seen words like 'skibidi', 'lewk' and 'tradwife' used by younger generations all over social media platforms. Now these popularised words are among 6,000 new entries to the online edition of the Cambridge Dictionary, according to its publisher Cambridge University Press on Monday (Aug 18). For instance, based on Cambridge's definition, 'lewk' (a stylised spelling of 'look') refers to a "particular style, fashion or outfit", especially one that is "unusual and impressive". The dictionary's sample sentence reads: "Your lewk is giving Barbie." There's also 'skibidi', which is from the popular Skibidi Toilet series on YouTube. For the uninitiated, the...

Most of the time, you don't want to be a Debbie Downer on the current trends. The pro-freedom side of the political spectrum is currently on a winning streak with President Trump at the helm, and it's becoming more than amusing to say, “Yes, we voted for this.” However, you also must be clear-eyed about emerging threats on the horizon, and thus, we need to consider the serious issue of the dangerous combination of the incredibly biased Wikipedia and A.I.It only makes sense to cast a wary eye toward A.I. systems and Wikipedia, and they're teaming up to compound the...

French president Emmanuel Macron has claimed the lawsuit he and his wife have filed against right-wing American influencer Candace Owens was put forward to 'defend his honour.' Since last year, 36-year-old Owens has espoused a crackpot theory to her four million YouTube subscribers that Macron's 72-year-old wife Brigitte was born a man. Owens launched a podcast series called Becoming Brigitte, in which she delves into the conspiracy. She claims that Brigitte was born under the name 'Jean-Michel Trogneux.' Her actions led Macron and his wife to file a lawsuit in the US against Owens in July, claiming that they had...

Ford’s $30,000 electric pickup aims to reinvent its future, but its past may weigh it down. Last week, under the blistering heat of an August day at a Ford plant in Louisville, Ky., Ford CEO Jim Farley, a self-proclaimed lifelong petrol head, announced a $30,000 electric pickup truck slated for release in 2027. Farley pitched it as a new “Model T moment,” a breakthrough meant to reinvent how cars and trucks are assembled. The company hopes the move will help Ford remain a profitable U.S. automaker despite rising tariffs, softening EV demand, higher labor costs, and a political climate that...