ReportWire

Tag: Technology

  • YouTube relaxes monetization policy on videos with controversial content

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    YouTube is updating its guidelines for videos containing what advertisers define as controversial content, like abortion and self-harm, allowing more creators to earn full ad revenue when they tackle sensitive issues in a nongraphic way

    YouTube is updating its guidelines for videos containing content that advertisers define as controversial, allowing more creators to earn full ad revenue when they tackle sensitive issues in a nongraphic way.

    With the update that went into effect Tuesday, YouTube videos that dramatize or cover issues including domestic abuse, self-harm, suicide, adult sexual abuse, abortion and sexual harassment without graphic descriptions or imagery are now eligible for full monetization.

    Ads will remain restricted on videos that include content on child abuse, child sex trafficking and eating disorders.

    The changes were outlined in a video posted to the Creator Insider YouTube channel on Tuesday, and the advertiser-friendly content guidelines were also updated with specific definitions and examples.

    “We want to ensure the creators who are telling sensitive stories or producing dramatized content have the opportunity to earn ad revenue while respecting advertiser choice and industry sentiment,” said Conor Kavanagh, YouTube’s head of monetization policy experience, in the video announcing the changes. “We took a closer look and found our guidelines in this area had become too restrictive and ended up demonetizing uploads like dramatized content.”

    The update also makes personal accounts of these sensitive issues, as well as preventative content and journalistic coverage on these subjects, eligible for full monetization.

    The Google-owned company said the degree of graphic or descriptive detail in videos wasn’t previously considered when determining advertiser friendliness.

    Some creators would attempt to bypass these policies on YouTube and other platforms by using workaround language or substituting symbols and numbers for letters in written text — the most prevalent example across social platforms has been the use of the term “unalive.”

    YouTube has updated its policies in response to creator feedback before. In July, the company eased its monetization policy regarding profanity, making videos that use strong profanity in the first seven seconds eligible for full ad revenue.

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  • ChatGPT’s free ride is ending: Here’s what OpenAI plans for advertising on the chatbot

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    SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI says it will soon start showing advertisements to ChatGPT users who aren’t paying for a premium version of the chatbot.

    The artificial intelligence company said Friday it hasn’t yet rolled out ads but will start testing them in the coming weeks.

    It’s the latest effort by the San Francisco-based company to make money from ChatGPT’s more than 800 million users, most of whom get it for free.

    Though valued at $500 billion, the startup loses more money than it makes and has been looking for ways to turn a profit.

    OpenAI said the digital ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT’s answers “when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.”

    The ads “will be clearly labeled and separated from the organic answer,” the company said.

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  • NASA to roll out SLS rocket Saturday for Artemis II moon mission

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    KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — During the early morning hours of Saturday, NASA will begin the Artemis II’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s slow roll to the launch pad.

    What You Need To Know

    • The SLS is a super-heavy rocket that is 322 feet tall (98.27 meters)
    • The Artemis II mission will see four humans flying by the moon
    • It will begin its slow 4-mile ground journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

    The SLS is a super-heavy rocket that is 322 feet tall (98.27 meters), making it 17 feet (5.18 meters) taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to NASA.

    To put it into perspective for space lovers:

    At 7 a.m. ET., the SLS rocket and Orion capsule will take a ride on a crawler transporter as it begins its slow 4-mile ground journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

    And yes, it will be a slow trip, moving at 1 mile per hour or less. Between unscheduled stops and other factors, it could take between six and 12 hours before it arrives at the launch pad — its home until the planned February 2026 launch. 

    Once it arrives at its temporary home, it will have its wet dress rehearsal, which is scheduled to take place at the end of January.

    The purpose of the wet dress rehearsal is to test each phase of the launch countdown, from loading more than 700,000 gallons of super-cold fuel into the rocket to safely standing down from a liftoff attempt.  

    And that fuel isn’t something you can find at your local gas station.

    “The liquid oxygen tank and liquid hydrogen tank hold a combined 733,000 gallons of propellant super cooled to minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit to power the four RS-25 engines at the bottom of the rocket,” NASA explained.

    Sitting on top of the SLS rocket is the Orion capsule, which will carry its human crew to their 10-day mission to the moon.

    It will send NASA’s Cmdr. Gregory Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut mission specialist Jeremy Hansen to the moon, the first time humans visited the rocky satellite since 1972.

    This will be a flyby mission, as seen in this NASA graphic for Artemis II.

     

    NASA is aiming for a Feb. 6 launch, but it can be pushed back to April. The U.S. space agency explained why.

    “While the Artemis II launch window opens as early as Friday, Feb. 6, the mission management team will assess flight readiness after the wet dress rehearsal across the spacecraft, launch infrastructure, and the crew and operations teams before selecting a launch date,” NASA stated.

    As John Honeycutt, NASA’s Artemis II mission management team chair, said during a Friday afternoon press conference, “We will fly when we are ready.”

    The U.S. space agency has named the mission to return to Earth’s lunar neighbor Artemis, as a homage to the Apollo moon landing. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo and the goddess of the moon.

    NASA plans to send humans (including the first woman and person of color) back to the moon in 2027, more than 50 years after the last time humans stepped on the lunar surface.

    The Artemis I launch took place in 2022 to test out the new systems and how they would handle going to the moon and back.

    Learn about the crew

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    Anthony Leone

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  • Social media platforms removed 4.7 million accounts after Australia ban for children

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    WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Social media companies have revoked access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children in Australia since the country banned use of the platforms by those under 16, officials said.

    “We stared down everybody who said it couldn’t be done, some of the most powerful and rich companies in the world and their supporters,” communications minister Anika Wells told reporters on Friday. “Now Australian parents can be confident that their kids can have their childhoods back.”

    The figures, reported to Australia’s government by 10 social media platforms, were the first to show the scale of the landmark ban since it was enacted in December over fears about the effects of harmful online environments on young people. The law provoked fraught debates in Australia about technology use, privacy, child safety and mental health and has prompted other countries to consider similar measures.

    Under Australian law, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($33.2 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of Australian children younger than 16. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are exempt.

    To verify age, platforms can either request copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age estimation technology to an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available such has how long an account has been held.

    About 2.5 million Australians are aged between 8 and 15, said the country’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, and past estimates suggested 84% of 8- to 12-year-olds held social media accounts. It was not known how many accounts were held across the 10 platforms but Inman Grant said the figure of 4.7 million “deactivated or restricted” was encouraging.

    “We’re preventing predatory social media companies from accessing our children,” Inman Grant said.

    The 10 biggest companies covered by the ban were compliant with it and had reported removal figures to Australia’s regulator on time, the commissioner said. She added that social media companies were expected to shift their efforts from enforcing the ban to preventing children from creating new accounts or otherwise circumventing the prohibition.

    Australian officials didn’t break the figures down by platform. But Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, said this week that by the day after the ban came into effect it had removed nearly 550,000 accounts belonging to users understood to be under 16.

    In the blog post divulging the figures, Meta criticized the ban and said smaller platforms where the ban doesn’t apply might not prioritize safety. The company also noted browsing platforms would still present content to children based on algorithms — a concern that led to the ban’s enactment.

    The law was widely popular among parents and child safety campaigners. Online privacy advocates and some groups representing teenagers opposed it, with the latter citing the support found in online spaces by vulnerable young people or those geographically isolated in Australia’s sprawling rural areas.

    Some said they had managed to fool age assessing technologies or were helped by parents or older siblings to circumvent the ban.

    Since Australia began debating the measures in 2024, other countries have considered following suit. Denmark’s government is among them, saying in November that it had planned to implement a social media ban for children under 15.

    “The fact that in spite of some skepticism out there, it’s working and being replicated now around the world, is something that is a source of Australian pride,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday.

    Opposition lawmakers have suggested that young people have circumvented the ban easily or are migrating to other apps that are less scrutinized than the largest platforms. Inman Grant said Friday that data seen by her office showed a spike in downloads of alternative apps when the ban was enacted but not a spike in usage.

    “There is no real long-term trends yet that we can say but we’re engaging,” she said.

    Meanwhile, she said, the regulator she heads planned to introduce “world-leading AI companion and chatbot restrictions in March.” She didn’t disclose further details.

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  • She set a photo afire, and became a symbol of resistance for Iran protesters

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    LONDON — With one puff of a cigarette, a woman in Canada became a global symbol of defiance against Iran’s bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.

    A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman — who described herself as an Iranian refugee — snapping open a lighter and setting the flame to a photo she holds. It ignites, illuminating the visage of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette into the glow, takes a quick drag — and lets what remains of the image fall to the pavement.

    Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there’s plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of the protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, as U.S. President Donald Trump considers military action in the country again.

    The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real one, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.

    In the 34 seconds of footage, many across platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw one person defy a series of the theocracy’s laws and norms in a riveting act of autonomy. She wears no hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the regime’s required headscarves.

    She burns an image of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair cascades — yet another transgression in the Iranian government’s eyes. She lights a cigarette from the flame — a gesture considered immodest in Iran.

    And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times over, she steps into history.

    In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control over conflicts. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long cast it as a plot by outsiders like United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

    And both sides are racing to tell the story of it that will endure.

    Iranian state media announces wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting those it calls “terrorists” and also apparently looking for Starlink satellite internet dishes, the only way to get videos and images out to the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat smothered the dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the mayhem of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    Social media has bloomed with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. #Iran,” posted Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.

    In the age of AI, misinformation and disinformation, there’s abundant reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when “the cigarette girl” appeared online this month, plenty of users did just that.

    It wasn’t immediately clear, for example, whether she was lighting up inside Iran or somewhere with free-speech protections as a sign of solidarity. Some spotted a background that seemed to be in Canada. She confirmed that in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?

    Many wondered: Is the “cigarette girl” an example of “psyops?” That, too, is unclear. That’s a feature of warfare and statecraft as old as human conflict, in which an image or sound is deliberately disseminated by someone with a stake in the outcome. From the allies’ fake radio broadcasts during World War II to the Cold War’s nuclear missile parades, history is rich with examples.

    The U.S. Army doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina last year released a recruitment video called, “Ghost in the Machine 2 that’s peppered with references to “PSYWAR.” And the Gaza war featured a ferocious battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to publicly smile and pose before being released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.

    Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman’s act was powerful enough to rocket around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.

    The woman did not respond to multiple efforts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she has spoken to other outlets, and AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.

    On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the screen name Morticia Addams —- after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — sheerly out of her interest in “spooky things,” the woman said in an interview with the nonprofit outlet The Objective.

    She doesn’t allow her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran — where she says she was arrested and abused — to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now, in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status in and lives in Toronto.

    It was there, on Jan. 7, that she filmed what’s become known as “the cigarette girl” video a day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.

    “I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview on CNN-News18, a network affiliate in India.

    In the interviews, the woman said she was arrested for the first time at 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, demonstrations that erupted after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal that Iran had struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.

    “I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by offering a pay slip for bail. “I was under surveillance from that moment on.”

    In 2022 during the protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, she said she participated in a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it — and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.

    The woman said she was questioned and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse.” Then without explanation, she was released on a high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and, eventually, global notoriety.

    “All my family members are still in Iran, and I haven’t heard from them in a few days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m truly worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”

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  • How the White House and governors want to fix AI-driven power shortages and price spikes

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    The White House and a bipartisan group of governors are pressuring the operator of the mid-Atlantic power grid to take urgent steps to boost energy supply and curb price hikes, holding a Friday event aimed at addressing a rising concern among voters about the enormous amount of power used for artificial intelligence ahead of elections later this year.

    The White House said its National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of several states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, want to try to compel PJM Interconnection to hold a power auction for tech companies to bid on contracts to build new power plants,

    The Trump administration and governors will sign a statement of principles toward that end Friday. The plan was first reported by Bloomberg.

    “Ensuring the American people have reliable and affordable electricity is one of President Trump’s top priorities, and this would deliver much-needed, long-term relief to the mid-Atlantic region,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.

    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is expected to be at the White House, a person familiar with Shapiro’s plans said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement. Shapiro, a Democrat, made his participation in Friday’s event contingent on including a provision to extend a limit on wholesale electricity price increases for the region’s consumers, the person said.

    But the operator of the grid won’t be there. “PJM was not invited. Therefore we would not attend,” said spokesperson Jeff Shields.

    It was not immediately clear whether President Donald Trump would attend the event, which was not listed on his public schedule.

    Trump and the governors are under pressure to insulate consumers and businesses alike from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. Meanwhile, more Americans are falling behind on their electricity bills.

    Consumer advocates say ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic electricity grid — which encompasses all or parts of 13 states stretching from New Jersey to Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C. — are already paying billions of dollars in higher bills to underwrite the cost to supply power to data centers, some of them built, some not.

    However, they also say that the billions of dollars that consumers are paying isn’t resulting in the construction of new power plants necessary to meet the rising demand.

    Pivotal contests in November will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill for the data centers that underpin the explosion in demand for artificial intelligence. In parts of the country, data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to the grid.

    Electricity costs were a key issue in last year’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission. Voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City all cited economic concerns as the top issue, as Democrats and Republicans gird for a debate over affordability in the intensifying midterm battle to control Congress.

    Gas and electric utilities sought or won rate increases of more that $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, consumer advocacy organization PowerLines reported. That was more than double the same period a year earlier.

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  • How the White House and governors want to fix AI-driven power shortages and price spikes

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    The White House and a bipartisan group of governors are pressuring the operator of the mid-Atlantic power grid to take urgent steps to boost energy supply and curb price hikes, holding a Friday event aimed at addressing a rising concern among voters about the enormous amount of power used for artificial intelligence ahead of elections later this year.

    The White House said its National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of several states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, want to try to compel PJM Interconnection to hold a power auction for tech companies to bid on contracts to build new power plants,

    The Trump administration and governors will sign a statement of principles toward that end Friday. The plan was first reported by Bloomberg.

    “Ensuring the American people have reliable and affordable electricity is one of President Trump’s top priorities, and this would deliver much-needed, long-term relief to the mid-Atlantic region,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.

    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is expected to be at the White House, a person familiar with Shapiro’s plans said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement. Shapiro, a Democrat, made his participation in Friday’s event contingent on including a provision to extend a limit on wholesale electricity price increases for the region’s consumers, the person said.

    But the operator of the grid won’t be there. “PJM was not invited. Therefore we would not attend,” said spokesperson Jeff Shields.

    It was not immediately clear whether President Donald Trump would attend the event, which was not listed on his public schedule.

    Trump and the governors are under pressure to insulate consumers and businesses alike from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. Meanwhile, more Americans are falling behind on their electricity bills.

    Consumer advocates say ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic electricity grid — which encompasses all or parts of 13 states stretching from New Jersey to Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C. — are already paying billions of dollars in higher bills to underwrite the cost to supply power to data centers, some of them built, some not.

    However, they also say that the billions of dollars that consumers are paying isn’t resulting in the construction of new power plants necessary to meet the rising demand.

    Pivotal contests in November will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill for the data centers that underpin the explosion in demand for artificial intelligence. In parts of the country, data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to the grid.

    Electricity costs were a key issue in last year’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission. Voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City all cited economic concerns as the top issue, as Democrats and Republicans gird for a debate over affordability in the intensifying midterm battle to control Congress.

    Gas and electric utilities sought or won rate increases of more that $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, consumer advocacy organization PowerLines reported. That was more than double the same period a year earlier.

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  • Aimed at young Chinese who live alone, a new app asks: ‘Are you dead?’

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    BEIJING — In China, the names of things are often either ornately poetic or jarringly direct. A new, wildly popular app among young Chinese people is definitively the latter.

    It’s called, simply, “Are You Dead?”

    In a vast country whose young people are increasingly on the move, the new, one-button app — which has taken the country by digital storm this month — is essentially exactly what it says it is. People who live alone in far-off cities and may be at risk — or just perceived as such by friends or relatives — can push an outsized green circle on their phone screens and send proof of life over the network to a friend or loved one. The cost: 8 yuan (about $1.10).

    It’s simple and straightforward — essentially a 21st-century Chinese digital version of those American pendants with an alert button on them for senior citizens that gave birth to the famed TV commercial: “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”

    Developed by three young people in their 20s, “Are You Dead?” became the most downloaded paid app on the Apple App Store in China last week, according to local media reports. It is also becoming a top download in places as diverse as Singapore and the Netherlands, Britain and India and the United States — in line with the developers’ attitude that loneliness and safety aren’t just Chinese issues.

    “Every country has young people who move to big cities to chase their dreams,” Ian Lü, 29, one of the app’s developers, said Thursday.

    Lü, who worked and lived alone in the southern city of Shenzhen for five years, experienced such loneliness himself. He said the need for a frictionless check-in is especially strong among introverts. “It’s unrealistic,” he said, “to message people every day just to tell them you’re still alive.”

    Against the backdrop of modern and increasingly frenetic Chinese life, the market for the app is understandable.

    Traditionally, Chinese families have tended to live together or at least in close proximity across generations — something embedded deep in the nation’s culture until recent years. That has changed in the last few decades with urbanization and rapid economic growth that have sent many Chinese to join what is effectively a diaspora within their own nation — and taken hundreds of millions far from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

    Today, the country has more than 100 million households with only one person, according to an annual report from the National Bureau of Statistics of China in 2024.

    Consider Chen Xingyu, 32, who has lived on her own for years in Kunming, the capital of southern China’s Yunnan province. “It is new and funny. The name ’Are You Dead?’ is very interesting,” Chen said.

    Chen, a “lying flat” practitioner who has rejected the grueling, fast-paced career of many in her age group, would try the app but worries about data security. “Assuming many who want to try are women users, if information of such detail about users gets leaked, that’d be terrible,” she said.

    Yuan Sangsang, a Shanghai designer, has been living on her own for a decade and describes herself as a “single cow and horse.” She’s not hoping the app will save her life — only help her relatives in the event that she does, in fact, expire alone.

    “I just don’t want to die with no dignity, like the body gets rotten and smelly before it is found,” said Yuan, 38. “That would be unfair for the ones who have to deal with it.”

    While such an app might at first seem best suited to elderly people — regardless of their smartphone literacy — all reports indicate that “Are You Dead?” is being snapped up by younger people as the wry equivalent of a social media check-in.

    “Some netizens say that the ‘Are you dead?’ greeting feels like a carefree joke between close friends — both heartfelt and gives a sense of unguarded ease,” the business website Yicai, the Chinese Business Network, said in a commentary. “”It likely explains why so many young people unanimously like this app.”

    The commentary, by writer He Tao, went further in analyzing the cultural landscape. He wrote that the app’s immediate success “serves as a darkly humorous social metaphor, reminding us to pay attention to the living conditions and inner world of contemporary young people. Those who downloaded it clearly need more than just a functional security measure; they crave a signal of being seen and understood.”

    Death is a taboo subject in Chinese culture, and the word itself is shunned to the point where many buildings in China have no fourth floor because the word for “four” and the word for “death” sound the same — “si.” Lü acknowledged that the app’s name sparked public pressure.

    “Death is an issue every one of us has to face,” he said. “Only when you truly understand death do you start thinking about how long you can exist in this world, and how you want to realize the value of your life.”

    Early Friday, the app had disappeared from Apple’s App Store in China, at least for the time being. The developers wouldn’t say why, only that the incident “occurred suddenly.”

    A few days ago, though, the developers said on their official account on China’s Weibo social platform that they’d be pivoting to a new name. Their choice: the more cryptic “Demumu,” which they said they hoped could “serve more solo dwellers globally.”

    Then, a twist: Late Wednesday, the app team posted on its Weibo account that workshopping the name Demumu didn’t turn out “as well as expected.” The app team is offering a reward for whoever offers a new name that will be picked this weekend. Lü said more than 10,000 people have weighed in.

    The reward for the new moniker: $96 — or, in China, 666 yuan.

    ___

    Fu Ting reported from Washington. AP researcher Shihuan Chen in Beijing contributed to this report.

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  • Weather a concern for Starlink launch

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    CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION — As SpaceX is gearing up for another Starlink launch on Sunday evening, the weather is a bit of a concern. 

    What You Need To Know

    • The Falcon 9 rocket will send up the Starlink 6-100 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station

    The Falcon 9 rocket will send up the Starlink 6-100 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, stated SpaceX. 

    The launch window will open from 5:04 p.m. ET to 9:04 p.m. ET. That means SpaceX has during that time frame to launch its Falcon 9.

    The 45th Weather Squadron is giving “40→10%” against the launch, with the forecast concerns being the cumulus cloud, thick cloud and liftoff winds rules.

    Find out more about the weather criteria for a Falcon 9 launch.

    Going up

    This is the 24th mission for the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster B1080. It sent up two commercial crewed missions.

    After the stage separation, the first-stage rocket will land on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas that will be in the Atlantic Ocean..

    About the mission

    The 29 satellites from the Starlink company, owned by SpaceX, will be heading to low-Earth orbit to join the thousands already there.

    Once deployed and in their orbit, they will provide internet service to many parts of Earth.

    Dr. Jonathan McDowell, of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, documents Starlink satellites.

    Before this launch, McDowell recorded the following:

    • 9,500 are in orbit
    • 8,261 are in operational orbit

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    Anthony Leone

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  • What you need to know about Grok and the controversies surrounding it

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    NEW YORK — Elon Musk’s Grok keeps getting into trouble, and this time, more of the world’s governments are trying to intervene.

    First launched in 2023, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building an AI assistant powered by a large language model, which is trained on vast pools of data to help predict the most plausible next word in a sentence. It’s the main product of Musk’s AI startup, xAI, which has been merged with his social media platform, X. Much like ChatGPT and Gemini, Musk’s company has also folded AI image generation capabilities into the chatbot.

    Musk’s deliberate efforts to mold Grok into a challenger of what he considers the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics have repeatedly got the chatbot into trouble, such as last year when it spouted antisemitic tropes, praised Adolf Hitler and made other hateful commentary to users of Musk’s X social media platform. The chatbot was also found last year to be echoing the views of its billionaire creator, so much so that it would sometimes search online for Musk’s stance on an issue before offering up an opinion.

    Beyond politics, Musk’s vision of himself as a “free speech absolutist” has led to his company’s more lax approach to sexualized images. Other mainstream chatbots block the creation of pornographic images. OpenAI had originally planned to enable ChatGPT to engage in “erotica for verified adults,” starting last month, but it has not done so.

    Here are some of the more recent controversies Grok has been involved in:

    Grok has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children.

    The problem emerged after the launch last year of Grok Imagine, an AI image generator that allows users to create videos and pictures by typing in text prompts. It includes a so-called “spicy mode” that can generate adult content.

    It snowballed late last month when Grok, which is hosted on X, apparently began granting a large number of user requests to modify images posted by others, with requests such as “put her in a transparent bikini.”

    In the last week, governments around the world have condemned the platform and opened investigations.

    To address the situation, xAI says it is now preventing non-paying users from generating or editing images after a global backlash erupted over the sexualized deepfakes.

    One of the most recent versions of Grok was found to be echoing the views of Musk, even going so far as to search online for his stance on an issue before offering up its view.

    The unusual behavior of Grok 4, released in July, surprised some experts.

    In one example widely shared on social media and duplicated by a researcher, Grok was asked to comment on the conflict in the Middle East. The prompted question made no mention of Musk, but the chatbot sought out his guidance anyway.

    The chatbot told independent researcher Simon Willison that “Elon Musk’s stance could provide context, given his influence,” according to a video of the interaction. “Currently looking at his views to see if they guide the answer.”

    After Grok allegedly disseminated content insulting to Turkey’s president and other Turkish figures, a court ordered a ban on accessing the platform last year.

    The chatbot posted vulgarities against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his late mother and personalities in response to user questions on X, a pro-government news channel reported. Offensive responses were also directed at modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, according to other media outlets.

    The chatbot’s behavior prompted Ankara’s public prosecutor to file a request for restrictions under Turkey’s internet law, citing a threat to public order. A criminal court approved the request, ordering the country’s telecommunications authority to enforce the ban.

    Grok was forced reverse course after it appeared to make antisemitic posts, including comments that praised Adolf Hitler, saying it was taking down “inappropriate posts.”

    The chatbot Grok shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism.

    “Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said. It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of posts that were later apparently deleted.

    After making one of the posts, Grok walked back the comments, saying it was “an unacceptable error from an earlier model iteration, swiftly deleted” and that it condemned “Nazism and Hitler unequivocally — his actions were genocidal horrors.”

    Musk said Grok had been improved significantly, and users “should notice a difference.”

    Because of these controversies over antisemitism, a group of Jewish lawmakers late last year wrote to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to express their concern about the Pentagon’s plans to work with xAI.

    “If Mr. Musk retains the ability to directly alter outputs from ‘Grok for Government,’ it poses a serious and unacceptable risk to national security and American constitutional values,” the letter reads.

    xAI company blamed an “ unauthorized modification ” to Grok as the reason it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide.”

    The company said in May that an employee made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”

    Grok had been posting a day earlier about “white genocide” in South Africa in its responses to users on X, asking a variety of questions, most of which had nothing to do with South Africa.

    There were exchanges about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name, video games and baseball that all quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.

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  • In a warming world, freshwater production is moving deep beneath the sea

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    CARLSBAD, Calif. — Some four miles off the Southern California coast, a company is betting it can solve one of desalination’s biggest problems by moving the technology deep below the ocean’s surface.

    OceanWell’s planned Water Farm 1 would use natural ocean pressure to power reverse osmosis — a process that forces seawater through membranes to filter out salt and impurities — and produce up to 60 million gallons (nearly 225 million liters) of freshwater daily. Desalination is energy intensive, with plants worldwide producing between 500 and 850 million tons of carbon emissions annually — approaching the roughly 880 million tons emitted by the entire global aviation industry.

    OceanWell claims its deep sea approach — 1,300 feet (400 meters) below the water’s surface — would cut energy use by about 40% compared to conventional plants while also tackling the other major environmental problems plaguing traditional desalination: the highly concentrated brine discharged back into the ocean, where it can harm seafloor habitats, including coral reefs, and the intake systems that trap and kill fish larvae, plankton and other organisms at the base of the marine food web.

    “The freshwater future of the world is going to come from the ocean,” said OceanWell CEO Robert Bergstrom. “And we’re not going to ask the ocean to pay for it.”

    It’s an ambitious promise at a time when the world desperately needs alternatives. As climate change intensifies droughts, disrupts rainfall patterns and fuels wildfires, more regions are turning to the sea for drinking water. For many countries, particularly in the arid Middle East, parts of Africa and Pacific island nations, desalination isn’t optional — there simply isn’t enough freshwater to meet demand. More than 20,000 plants now operate worldwide, and the industry has been expanding at about 7% annually since 2010.

    “With aridity and climate change issues increasing, desalination will become more and more prevalent as a key technology globally,” said Peiying Hong, a professor of environmental science and engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

    But scientists warn that as desalination scales, the cumulative damage to coastal ecosystems — many already under pressure from warming waters and pollution — could intensify.

    Some companies are powering plants with renewable energy, while others are developing more efficient membrane technology to reduce energy consumption. Still others are moving the technology underwater entirely. Norway-based Flocean and Netherlands-based Waterise have tested subsea desalination systems and are working toward commercial deployment. Beyond southern California, OceanWell has signed an agreement to test its system in Nice, France — another region facing intensifying droughts and wildfires — beginning this year.

    For now, its technology remains in development. A single prototype operates in the Las Virgenes Reservoir where the local water district has partnered with the company in hopes of diversifying its water supply. If successful, the reverse osmosis pods would eventually float above the sea floor in the Santa Monica Bay, anchored with minimal concrete footprint, while an underwater pipeline would transport freshwater to shore. The system would use screens designed to keep out even microscopic plankton and would produce less concentrated brine discharge.

    Gregory Pierce, director of UCLA’s Water Resources Group, said deep sea desalination appears promising from an environmental and technical standpoint, but the real test will be cost.

    “It’s almost always much higher than you project” with new technologies, he said. “So that, I think, will be the make or break for the technology.”

    Las Virgenes Reservoir serves about 70,000 residents in western Los Angeles County. Nearly all the water originates in the northern Sierra Nevada and is pumped some 400 miles (640 kilometers) over the Tehachapi Mountains — a journey that requires massive amounts of energy. During years of low rainfall and snowpack in the Sierra, the reservoir and communities it serves suffer.

    About 100 miles (160 kilometers) down the coast, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant has become a focal point in the state’s debate over desalination’s environmental tradeoffs.

    The plant came online in 2015 as the largest seawater desalination facility in North America. Capable of producing up to 54 million gallons (204 million liters) of drinking water daily, it supplies about 10% of San Diego County’s water — enough for roughly 400,000 households.

    In Southern California, intensifying droughts and wildfires have exposed the region’s precarious water supply. Agricultural expansion and population growth have depleted local groundwater reserves, leaving cities dependent on imported water. San Diego imports roughly 90% of its supply from the Colorado River and Northern California — sources that are becoming increasingly strained by climate change. Desalination was pitched as a solution: a local, drought-proof source of drinking water drawn from the Pacific Ocean.

    But environmental groups have argued the plant’s seawater intake and brine discharge pose risks to marine life, while its high energy demands drive up water bills and worsen climate change. Before the plant came online, environmental organizations filed more than a dozen legal challenges and regulatory disputes. Most were dismissed but some resulted in changes to the project’s design and permits.

    “It sucks in a tremendous amount of water, and with that, sea life,” said Patrick McDonough, a senior attorney with San Diego Coastkeeper, which has participated in multiple legal challenges to the project. “We’re not just talking fish, turtles, birds, but larvae and spores — entire ecosystems.”

    A 2009 Regional Water Quality Control Board order estimated the plant would entrap some 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of fish daily and required offsetting those impacts by restoring wetlands elsewhere. Seventeen years later, that restoration remains incomplete. And a 2019 study found the plant’s brine discharge raises offshore salinity above permitted levels, though it detected no significant biological changes — likely because the site had already been heavily altered by decades of industrial activity from a neighboring power plant.

    Those impacts are especially acute in California, where roughly 95% of coastal wetlands have been lost largely to development, leaving the remaining lagoons as vital habitats for fish and migratory birds.

    “When we start messing with these very critical and unfortunately sparse coastal lagoons and wetlands, it can have tremendous impacts in the ocean,” McDonough said.

    Michelle Peters, chief executive officer of Channelside Water Resources, which owns the plant, said the facility uses large organism exclusion devices and one-millimeter screens to minimize marine life uptake, though she acknowledged some smaller species can still pass through.

    The plant dilutes its brine discharge with additional seawater before releasing it back into the ocean, and years of monitoring have shown no measurable impacts to surrounding marine life, she said.

    Peters said the Carlsbad plant has significantly cut its energy consumption through efficiency improvements and operates under a plan aimed at making the facility carbon net-neutral.

    Many experts say water recycling and conservation should come first, noting wastewater purification typically uses far less energy than seawater desalination and can substantially reduce impacts on marine life. Las Virgenes is pursuing a wastewater reuse project alongside its desalination partnership.

    “What we are looking for is a water supply that we can count on when Mother Nature does not deliver,” Las Virgenes’ Pedersen said. “Developing new sources of local water is really a critical measure to be more drought and climate ready.”

    ___

    Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • At 25, Wikipedia Navigates a Quarter-Life Crisis in the Age of A.I.

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    Turning 25 amid an A.I. boom, Wikipedia is racing to protect traffic, volunteers and revenue without losing its mission. Photo illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Traffic to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, naturally ebbs and flows with the rhythms of daily life—rising and falling with the school calendar, the news cycle or even the day of the week—making routine fluctuations unremarkable for a site that draws roughly 15 billion page views a month. But sustained declines tell a different story. Last October, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia, disclosed that human traffic to the site had fallen 8 percent in recent months as a growing number of users turned to A.I. search engines and chatbots for answers.

    “I don’t think that we’ve seen something like this happen in the last seven to eight years or so,” Marshall Miller, senior director of product at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer.

    Launched on Jan. 15, 2001, Wikipedia turns 25 today. This milestone comes at a pivotal point for the online encyclopedia, which is straddling a delicate line between fending off existential risks posed by A.I. and avoiding irrelevance as the technology transforms how people find and consume information.

    “It’s really this question of long-term sustainability,” Lane Becker, senior director of earned revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer. “We’d like to make it at least another 25 years—and ideally much longer.”

    While it’s difficult to pinpoint Wikipedia’s recent traffic declines on any single factor, it’s evident that the drop coincides with the emergence of A.I. search features, according to Miller. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity often cite and link to Wikipedia, but because the information is already embedded in the A.I.-generated response, users are less likely to click through to the source, depriving the site of page views.

    Yet the spread of A.I.-generated content also underscores Wikipedia’s central role in the online information ecosystem. Wikipedia’s vast archive—more than 65 million articles across over 300 languages—plays a prominent role within A.I. tools, with the site’s data scraped by nearly all large language models (LLMs). “Yes, there is a decline in traffic to our sites, but there may well be more people getting Wikipedia knowledge than ever because of how much it’s being distributed through those platforms that are upstream of us,” said Miller.

    Surviving in the era of A.I.

    Wikipedia must find a way to stay financially and editorially viable as the internet changes. Declining page views not only mean that fewer visitors are likely to donate to the platform, threatening its main source of revenue, but also risk shrinking the community of volunteer editors who sustain it. Fewer contributors would mean slower content growth, ultimately leaving less material for LLMs to draw from.

    Metrics that track volunteer participation have already begun to slip, according to Miller. While noting that “it’s hard to parse out all the different reasons that this happens,” he conceded that the Foundation has “reason to believe that declines in page views will lead to declines in volunteer activity.”

    To maintain a steady pipeline of contributors, users must first become aware of the platform and understand its collaborative model. That makes proper attribution by A.I. tools essential, Miller said. Beyond simply linking to Wikipedia, surfacing metadata—such as when a page was last updated or how many editors contributed—could spur curiosity and encourage users to engage more deeply with the platform.

    Tech companies are becoming aware of the value of keeping Wikipedia relevant. Over the past year, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity AI, Ecosia, Pleias and ProRata have joined Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product that allows corporations to pay for large-scale access and distribution of Wikipedia content. Google and Amazon have long been partners of the platform, which was launched in 2021.

    The basic premise is that Wikimedia Enterprise customers can access content from Wikipedia at a higher volume and speed while helping sustain the platform’s mission. “I think there’s a growing understanding on the part of these A.I. companies about the significance of the Wikipedia dataset, both as it currently exists and also its need to exist in the future,” said Becker.

    Wikipedia is hardly alone in this shift. News organizations, including CNN, the Associated Press and The New York Times, have struck licensing deals with A.I. companies to supply editorial content in exchange for payment, while infrastructure providers like Cloudflare offer tools that allow websites to charge A.I. crawlers for access. Last month, the licensing nonprofit Creative Commons announced its support of a “pay-to-crawl” approach for managing A.I. bots.

    Preparing for an uncertain future

    Wikipedia itself is also adapting to a younger generation of internet users. In an effort to make editing Wikipedia more appealing, the platform is working to enhance its mobile edit features, reflecting the fact that younger audiences are far more likely to engage on smartphones than desktop computers.

    Younger users’ preference for social video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok has also pushed Wikipedia’s Future Audiences team—a division tasked with expanding readership—to experiment with video. The effort has already paid off, producing viral clips on topics ranging from Wikipedia’s most hotly disputed edits to the courtship dance of the black-footed albatross and Sino-Roman relations. The organization is also exploring a deeper presence on gaming platforms, another major draw for younger users.

    Evolving with the times also means integrating A.I. further within the platform. Wikipedia has introduced features such as Edit Check, which offers real-time feedback on whether a proposed edit fits a page, and is developing features like Tone Check to help ensure articles adhere to a neutral point of view.

    A.I.-generated content has also begun to seep onto the platform. As of August 2024, roughly 5 percent of newly created English articles on the site were produced with the help of A.I., according to a Princeton study. Seeing this as a problem, Wikipedia introduced a “speedy deletion” policy that allows editors to quickly remove content that shows clear signs of being A.I.-generated. Still, the community remains divided over whether using A.I. for tasks such as drafting articles is inherently problematic, said Miller. “There’s this active debate.”

    From streamlining editing to distributing its content ever more widely, Wikipedia is betting that A.I. can ultimately be an ally rather than an adversary. If managed carefully, the technology could help accelerate the encyclopedia’s mission over the next 25 years—as long as it doesn’t bring down the encyclopedia first.

    “Our whole thing is knowledge dissemination to anyone that wants it, anywhere that they want it,” said Becker. “If this is how people are going to learn things—and people are learning things and gaining value from the information that our community is able to bring forward—we absolutely want to find a way to be there and support it in ways that align with our values.”

    At 25, Wikipedia Navigates a Quarter-Life Crisis in the Age of A.I.

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Lawmakers propose $2.5B agency to boost production of rare earths

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    WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of lawmakers have proposed creating a new agency with $2.5 billion to spur production of rare earths and the other critical minerals, while the Trump administration has already taken aggressive actions to break China’s grip on the market for these materials that are crucial to high-tech products, including cellphones, electric vehicles, jet fighters and missiles.

    It’s too early to tell how the bill, if passed, could align with the White House’s policy, but whatever the approach, the U.S. is in a crunch to drastically reduce its reliance on China, after Beijing used its dominance of the critical minerals market to gain leverage in the trade war with Washington. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a one-year truce in October, by which Beijing would continue to export critical minerals while the U.S. would ease its export controls of U.S. technology on China.

    The Pentagon has shelled out nearly $5 billion over the past year to help ensure its access to the materials after the trade war laid bare just how beholden the U.S. is to China, which processes more than 90% of the world’s critical minerals. To break Beijing’s chokehold, the U.S. government is taking equity stakes in a handful of critical mineral companies and in some cases guaranteeing the price of some commodities using an approach that seems more likely to come out of China’s playbook instead of a Republican administration.

    The bill that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., introduced Thursday would favor a more market-based approach by setting up the independent body charged with building a stockpile of critical minerals and related products, stabilizing prices, and encouraging domestic and allied production to help ensure stable supply not only for the military but also the broader economy and manufacturers.

    Shaheen called the legislation “a historic investment” to make the U.S. economy more resilient against China’s dominance that she said has left the U.S. vulnerable to economic coercion. Young said creating the new reserve is “a much-needed, aggressive step to protect our national and economic security.”

    When Trump imposed widespread tariffs last spring, Beijing fought back not only with tit-for-tat tariffs but severe restrictions on the export of critical minerals, forcing Washington to back down and eventually agree to the truce when the leaders met in South Korea.

    On Monday, in his speech at SpaceX, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that the Pentagon has in the past five months alone “deployed over $4.5 billion in capital commitments” to close six critical minerals deals that will “help free the United States from market manipulation.”

    One of the deals involves a $150 million of preferred equity by the Pentagon in Atlantic Alumina Co. to save the country’s last alumina refinery and build its first large-scale gallium production facility in Louisiana.

    Last year, the Pentagon announced it would buy $400 million of preferred stock in MP Materials, which owns the country’s only operational rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, California, and entered into a $1.4-billion joint partnership with ReElement Technologies Corp. to build up a domestic supply chain for rare earth magnets.

    The drastic move by the U.S. government to take equity stakes has prompted some analysts to observe that Washington is pivoting to some form of state capitalism to compete with Beijing.

    “Despite the dangers of political interference, the strategic logic is compelling,” wrote Elly Rostoum, a senior fellow at the Washington-based research institute Center for European Policy Analysis. She suggested that the new model could be “a prudent way for the U.S. to ensure strategic autonomy and industrial sovereignty.”

    But companies across the industry are welcoming the intervention from Trump’s administration.

    “He is playing three-dimensional chess on critical minerals like no previous president has done. It’s about time too, given the military and strategic vulnerability we face by having to import so many of these fundamental building blocks of technology and national defense,” NioCorp’s Chief Communications Officer Jim Sims said. That company is trying to finish raising the money it needs to build a mine in southeast Nebraska.

    In addition to trying to boost domestic production, the Trump administration has sought to secure some of these crucial elements through allies. In October, Trump signed an $8.5 billion agreement with Australia to invest in mining there, and the president is now aggressively trying to take over Greenland in the hope of being able to one day extract rare earths from there.

    On Monday, finance ministers from the G7 nations huddled in Washington over their vulnerability in the critical mineral supply chains.

    U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has led several rounds of trade negotiations with Beijing, urged attendees to increase their supply chain resiliency and thanked them for their willingness to work together “toward decisive action and lasting solutions,” according to a Treasury statement.

    The bill introduced on Thursday by Shaheen and Young would encourage production with both domestic and allied producers.

    Congress in the past several years has pushed for legislation to protect the U.S. military and civilian industry from Beijing’s chokehold. The issue became a pressing concern every time China turned to its proven tactics of either restricting the supply or turned to dumping extra critical minerals on the market to depress prices and drive any potential competitors out of business.

    The Biden administration sought to increase demand for critical minerals domestically by pushing for more electric vehicle and windmill production. But the Trump administration largely eliminated the incentives for those products and instead chose to focus on increasing critical minerals production directly.

    Most of those past efforts were on a much more limited scale than what the government has done in the past year, and they were largely abandoned after China relented and eased access to critical minerals.

    ___

    Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to the report.

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  • Wikipedia unveils new AI licensing deals as it marks 25th birthday

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    LONDON — Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary.

    The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed licensing deals with AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI.

    Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.

    Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.

    The nonprofit that runs the site signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.

    The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” the Wikimedia Foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details.

    While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it.

    “I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. “I wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI,” Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform.

    Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.”

    The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models.

    The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links.

    Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers.

    The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use.

    “But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa.

    It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to “draw data from Wikipedia,” said Iskander, who’s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.

    The bulk of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals.

    “They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,” Wales said. They’re saying, “You know what, actually you can’t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.”

    Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors.

    While AI isn’t good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources.

    “We don’t have that yet but that’s the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future.”

    Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said.

    “You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he said. It could respond by saying “here’s the answer to your question from this article and here’s the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think we’ll move in that direction as well. ”

    Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment.

    However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side.

    “People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn’t need algorithms to be mean to each other,” he said. “But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility.”

    Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site “Wokepedia” and accused it of being biased in favor of the left.

    Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

    A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and urged people to stop donating to the site.

    Wales said he doesn’t consider Grokipedia a “real threat” to Wikipedia because it’s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.

    “Large language models aren’t good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia,” he said. “It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is.”

    He stressed that he wasn’t singling out criticism of Grokipedia.

    “It’s just the way large language models work.”

    Wales say he’s known Musk for years but they haven’t been in touch since Grokipedia launched.

    “I should probably ping him,” Wales said.

    What would he say?

    “’How’s your family?’ I’m a nice person, I don’t really want to pick a fight with anybody.”

    ____

    AP writer Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report

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  • NASA says astronaut suffered ‘serious medical condition’ on ISS

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    JOHNSTON SPACE CENTER — During an early morning press conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed on Thursday that a Crew-11 astronaut suffered a “serious medical condition” while onboard the International Space Station last week.

    But he stressed that the unnamed astronaut is in stable condition and is currently getting medical care after a successful splashdown off the coast of San Diego on Thursday morning.

    What You Need To Know

    • The unnamed astronaut is in stable condition and in good spirits, stated NASA

    “I think without going … into specifics beyond what was already shared, obviously we took this action because it was a serious medical condition,” Isaacman said of the medical evacuation.

    He started the press conference off by recapping the splashdown and how all of the crew members were safe and in good spirits.

    NASA astronauts Cmdr. Zena Cardman, pilot Michael Fincke, and mission specialists Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov will be flown to a hospital in San Diego from the recovery ship Shannon, said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.

    Montalbano added that all four of the Crew-11 members will spend the night at the hospital and once given the all clear, will be flown to Houston to be reunited with their loved ones. They may be at the Johnson Space Center on Friday, he said.

    Last week, one of the four astronauts suffered an undisclosed medical episode, but was in stable condition.

    This was the first medical evacuation in the 25 years since the International Space Station has been in full service. The situation prompted NASA to cut the Crew-11 mission short, as it was supposed to end in February. 

    Officials stressed that this was not an emergency de-orbit.

    “If it’s a medical thing and you need to get home, you’d come home anywhere in the world and we’d use the U.S. military to get to them as quickly as we can. And then from that, we’d figure out what the next steps would be,” Montalbano explained if it had been an emergency situation.

    During a question-and-answer session, Isaacman told Spectrum News that it was premature to speculate on the astronaut’s future in space.

    “I would, I would think it’s incredibly premature to even, you know, consider that right now. The highest priority is, you know, the health and welfare of our crew members. They just executed, I mean, a near-perfect mission on orbit,” he said. “So, I said that during the initial press conference that I think regardless of the phase of flight we were in on the timeline on the expedition, we would arrive at the same conclusion. What Crew-11 did to make this so much easier is, is executing so well on all of their scientific, scientific objectives. So, in that case, the crew did a fantastic job. And I think that would reflect well on future crew selection criteria.”

    The Crew-11 members take a moment to strike a pose. Mission specialist Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, left, NASA pilot Michael Fincke, NASA Cmdr. Zena Cardman, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission specialist Kimiya Yui. (NASA pilot Michael Fincke)

    Because all four astronauts had extensive medical training, they were well equipped to care for the crewmember who suffered the medical episode, Isaacman said. He said the level of care the astronaut received would have been the same if a medical doctor was onboard the space station.

    He added that it is unknown what caused the medical episode and did not think it was preparing for a scheduled spacewalk.

    In what was supposed to be a six-hour spacewalk, Fincke and Cardman were going to install a modification kit and cables for a future rollout of a solar array on Thursday, Jan. 08.

    “I mean, this is something that could have happened on Earth, you know, completely outside the microgravity environment, at that point. I don’t think we know that versus just being in microgravity versus potentially interactions, experiments. We, I just think it would be very premature to draw any conclusions or close any doors at this point,” Isaacman said.

    He said that a medical professional may be on future missions like going to Mars.

    NASA will review what happened and whatever lessons are learned will be adopted to future missions, Montalbano said.

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    Anthony Leone

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  • X says Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, is blocked from undressing images in places where it’s illegal

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    BANGKOK — Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok won’t be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X.

    The announcement late Wednesday followed a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, including bans and warnings by some governments.

    The pushback included an investigation announced Wednesday by the state of California into the proliferation of nonconsensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok.

    Initially, media queries about the problem drew only the response, “legacy media lies.”

    Musk’s company, xAI, now says it will geoblock content if it violates laws in a particular place.

    “We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis, underwear and other revealing attire,” it said.

    The rule applies to all users, including paid subscribers, who have access to more features.

    xAI also has limited image creation or editing to paid subscribers only “to ensure that individuals who attempt to abuse the Grok account to violate the law or our policies can be held accountable.”

    Grok’s “spicy mode” had allowed users to create explicit content, leading to a backlash from governments worldwide.

    Malaysia and Indonesia took legal action and blocked access to Grok. The U.K. and European Union were investigating potential violations of online safety laws. France and India have also issued warnings, demanding stricter controls. Brazil called for an investigation into Grok’s misuse.

    The Grok editing functions were “facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the internet, including via the social media platform X,” California’s announcement said.

    “The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking. This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet,” it cited the state’s Attorney General Rob Bonta as saying.

    “We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material,” he said.

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  • Verizon outage disrupts calling and data services for wireless customers across the US

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    Many Verizon customers are experiencing a major outage on Wednesday, disrupting calling and cellular services across the U.S. The New York-based carrier has acknowledged an issue impacting wireless voice and data services

    NEW YORK — Many Verizon customers encountered a widespread outage on Wednesday, disrupting calling and other cellular services across the U.S.

    The carrier acknowledged that there was an “issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers.” Verizon didn’t specify what was causing the disruptions, but said in updates shared on social media that it had deployed its engineering teams and was working to resolve the problem “as quickly as possible.”

    Outage tracker Downdetector showed that Verizon customers began to report issues with their service around noon E.T. Reports appeared to peak in the early afternoon and remained elevated later in the day — sitting close to 33,000 as of 8:00 p.m. ET.

    Impacted users said their phones were in “SOS” mode or had other no signal messages. In New York, alerts warned that the outage may disrupt 911 calls — urging residents to try landlines and devices from other carriers, if available, or visit a local police or fire station in-person in case of an emergency.

    Per Downdetector, other major hubs impacted by Verizon’s outage included Washington D.C., Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Atlanta. But consumers across the country said they were experiencing disruptions.

    A handful of outage reports for other carriers also bubbled up on Wednesday — but companies like T-Mobile and AT&T quickly confirmed online that their services were operating normally. Both suggested that their customers may be encountering issues contacting people with Verizon’s service, however.

    When cellular outages happen, some phone companies also urge consumers to try to connect to Wi-Fi and use internet calling. If Wi-Fi is still unavailable, there can be a limited number of other options — including sending messages via satellite on newer iPhones.

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  • NASA sends 4 astronauts back to Earth in first medical evacuation

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    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — An astronaut in need of doctors’ care departed the International Space Station with three crewmates on Wednesday in NASA’s first medical evacuation.

    The four returning astronauts — from the U.S., Russia and Japan — are aiming for an early Thursday morning splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego with SpaceX. The decision cuts short their mission by over a month.

    “Our timing of this departure is unexpected,” NASA astronaut Zena Cardman said before the return trip, “but what was not surprising to me was how well this crew came together as a family to help each other and just take care of each other.”

    Officials refused to identify the astronaut who needed care last week and would not divulge the health concerns.

    The ailing astronaut is “stable, safe and well cared for,” outgoing space station commander Mike Fincke said earlier this week via social media. “This was a deliberate decision to allow the right medical evaluations to happen on the ground, where the full range of diagnostic capability exists.”

    Launched in August, Cardman, Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov should have remained on the space station until late February. But on Jan. 7, NASA abruptly canceled the next day’s spacewalk by Cardman and Fincke and later announced the crew’s early return. Officials said the health problem was unrelated to spacewalk preparations or other station operations, but offered no other details, citing medical privacy. They stressed it was not an emergency situation.

    NASA said it would stick to the same entry and splashdown procedures at flight’s end, with the usual assortment of medical experts aboard the recovery ship in the Pacific. It was another middle-of-the-night crew return for SpaceX, coming less than 11 hours after undocking from the space station. NASA said it was not yet known how quickly all four would be flown from California to Houston, home to Johnson Space Center and the base for astronauts.

    One U.S. and two Russian astronauts remain aboard the orbiting lab, just 1 1/2 months into an eight-month mission that began with a Soyuz rocket liftoff from Kazakhstan. NASA and SpaceX are working to move up the launch of a fresh four-person crew from Florida, currently targeted for mid-February.

    Computer modeling predicted a medical evacuation from the space station every three years, but NASA hasn’t had one in its 65 years of human spaceflight. The Russians have not been as fortunate. In 1985, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Vasyutin came down with a serious infection or related illness aboard his country’s Salyut 7 space station, prompting an early return. A few other Soviet cosmonauts encountered less serious health issues that shortened their flights.

    It was the first spaceflight for Cardman, a 38, biologist and polar explorer who missed out on spacewalking, as well as Platonov, 39, a former fighter pilot with the Russian Air Force who had to wait a few extra years to get to space because of an undisclosed health issue. Cardman should have launched last year but was bumped to make room on the way down for NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were stuck nearly a year at the space station because of Boeing’s capsule problems.

    Fincke, 58, a retired Air Force colonel, and Yui, 55, a retired fighter pilot with the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, were repeat space fliers. Finke has spent 1 1/2 years in orbit over four missions and conducted nine spacewalks on previous flights, making him one of NASA’s top performers. Last week, Yui celebrated his 300th day in space over two station stays, sharing stunning views of Earth, including Japan’s Mount Fuji and breathtaking auroras.

    “I want to burn it firmly into my eyes, and even more so, into my heart,” Yui said on the social platform X. “Soon, I too will become one of those small lights on the ground.”

    NASA officials had said it was riskier to leave the astronaut in space without proper medical attention for another month than to temporarily reduce the size of the space station crew by more than half. Until SpaceX delivers another crew, NASA said it will have to stand down from any routine or even emergency spacewalks, a two-person job requiring backup help from crew inside the orbiting complex.

    The medical evacuation was the first major decision by NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman. The billionaire founder of a payment processing company and two-time space flier assumed the agency’s top job in December.

    “The health and the well-being of our astronauts is always and will be our highest priority,” Isaacman said in announcing the decision last week.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Music streams hit 5 trillion in 2025. Christian, rock and Latin lead growth in the US

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    NEW YORK — The global music industry hit 5.1 trillion streams in 2025. It’s a new single-year record, up 9.6% from 2024, which held the previous record.

    That’s according to a 2025 Year-End Report from Luminate, an industry data and analytics company that provides insight into changing behaviors across music listenership.

    In the U.S., on-demand audio streams hit 1.4 trillion, a 4.6% increase from last year.

    But attention is on older music. Less than half all U.S. on-demand audio streams — 43% — were from tracks released in the last five years (2021 – 2025).

    One exception? Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” and Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem,” both of which surpassed 5 million album equivalent units in a single year. That’s a combination of sales and streaming combined.

    Luminate’s 2025 Mid-Year Report revealed that though streams of new music — music released in the last 18 months — were slightly down from the same time last year in the U.S., new Christian/gospel music defied the trend, said Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s vice president of music insights and industry relations, led by acts like Forrest Frank, Brandon Lake and Elevation Worship.

    In the year-end report, it is clear that Christian/gospel music has continued to grow stateside: up 18.5% in on-demand audio volume change compared to 2024.

    Other genres that saw an uptick? Rock grew 6.4% and Latin grew 5.2%.

    “Rock is the largest growth genre this year, meaning it grew its share of the streaming pie the most,” said Marconette in a statement. “Though rock streaming in general leans catalog (tracks older than 18 months), the genre posted the second highest total of new current streams this year.”

    For Latin music’s growth, Bad Bunny is responsible. His on-demand audio streams totaled 5.3 billion — 4.38% of all Latin on-demand audio streams.

    “The Latin genre continues to be one of the highest growth-genres in the U.S.,” adds Marconette. “Bad Bunny was a key driver of the growth this year with his new album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” generating 2.97 billion U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025.”

    The introduction of high-profile artificial intelligence artists became a leading music story in 2025. Those include Xania Monet and the rock band The Velvet Sundown.

    Monet went on to become the first AI act to debut on a Billboard radio chart, reaching No. 3 on the organization’s Hot Gospel Songs and No. 20 on the Hot R&B Songs.

    There have been quite a few AI country artists as well, including Aventhis, Cain Walker and Breaking Rust. The latter had a song called “Walk My Walk” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s country digital song sales chart in November. The vocal phrasing, melodic shape and stylistic DNA came from the Grammy-nominated country artist Blanco Brown, an artist who has worked with Britney Spears, Childish Gambino and Rihanna.

    These artists serve as examples of generative AI continuing to upend the music industry, giving anyone the ability to instantly create seemingly new songs by typing prompts into a chat window, often using models trained on real artists’ voices and styles without their knowledge.

    And according to Luminate, they’re having real success. Monet earned 125 million global on-demand audio streams last year. Breaking Rust brought in roughly 72.8 million streams followed by Walker with 48.1 million, Enlly Blue with 34.8 and Juno Skye with 15.5 million.

    The top songs, globally, as determined by on-demand audio streams are the following:

    1. Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile” — 2.858 billion

    2. HUNTR/X (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) from “Kpop Demon Hunters,” “Golden” — 2.430 billion

    3. Alex Warren, “Ordinary” — 2.403 billion

    4. Rosé and Bruno Mars’ “APT.” — 2.236 billion

    5. Billie Eilish, “Birds of a Feather” — 2.133 billion

    6. Bad Bunny, “DtMF” — 1.701 billion

    7. Kendrick Lamar and SZA, “Luther” — 1.672 billion

    8. Benson Boone, “Beautiful Things” —1.630 billion

    9. sombr, “Back to Friends” — 1.587 billion

    10. Gracie Abrams, “That’s So True” — 1.544 billion

    Seven of the top 10 tracks were released in 2024. The exceptions are “Golden,” “Ordinary” and “DtMF.”

    Just like last year and the year before it, when it comes to overall music streaming in the U.S., R&B and hip-hop still lead, once again accounting for more than one in every four streams stateside.

    In 2025, rap and R&B accounted for 349.9 billion on-demand audio streams, up from 341.63 billion last year.

    It is followed by rock with 260.5 billion (up from 234.22 billion last year) and pop with 167.2 billion (up from 165.49 billion).

    Rounding out the top five is country with 122.5 billion (up from 117.58 billion) and Latin with 120.9 billion (up from 113.02 billion.)

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  • A 22-Year-Old Founder Wants to Build the Moon’s First Hotel by 2032

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    Skyler Chan launched GRU last year. Courtesy GRU Space

    Civilian travel to the Moon remains years away, but a California startup is already making plans to host overnight guests there. GRU Space, founded by 22-year-old entrepreneur Skyler Chan, is taking deposits ranging from $250,000 to $1 million for a lunar hotel that has yet to be built.

    “If we solve off-world surface habitation, it’s going to lead to this explosion. We could have billions of human lives maybe born on the Moon and Mars,” Chan told Observer. He founded GRU last year after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously interned at Tesla.

    The hotel, which the company expects to open by 2032, will initially consist of an inflatable structure designed to accommodate up to four guests for multi-day stays. Over time, it would evolve into a brick building inspired by San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. More ambitiously, GRU argues that the project could do more than jump-start space tourism—an industry it sees as essential to sustaining a future lunar ecosystem—and instead lay the groundwork for entire cities beyond Earth.

    Chan founded GRU with the goal of building the first permanent structure off Earth. His team includes founding technical staff member Kevin Cannon, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, and advisor Robert Lillis, who also serves as associate director for planetary science at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The startup has received seed funding from Y Combinator, joined Nvidia’s Inception Program and counts SpaceX and Anduril among its investors.

    GRU’s initial target customers include adventurers, repeat spaceflight participants and couples looking to elevate their honeymoon plans. While final pricing has not been set, the company said a stay would likely cost more than $10 million and require a $1,000 non-refundable application fee.

    The project’s first milestone is slated for 2029, when GRU plans to launch an initial lunar mission to assess environmental conditions and begin early construction experiments. Two years later, another payload will land near a lunar pit chosen for its protection from radiation and temperatures, with initial hotel development targeted for 2032.

    Animated image of the front door of a hotel with lit up windows Animated image of the front door of a hotel with lit up windows
    A rendering of GRU’s lunar hotel. Courtesy GRU Space

    Chan acknowledged that GRU’s timelines are estimates, but argued that bold ambition is necessary to make progress. “We need to really shoot for the literal moon,” he said.

    According to Chan, today’s space industry is dominated by two forces: governments and billionaire-backed companies. He hopes space tourism can become a third pillar. “Lunar tourism is the best first wedge to spin up the lunar economy,” he said.

    The concept aligns with broader government goals. Lunar tourism has emerged as a focus of U.S. space policy, with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently outlining the nation’s plans to construct a permanent base on the Moon by the end of the decade. NASA wants “to have that opportunity to explore and realize the scientific, economic and national security potential on the moon,” he told CNBC last month.

    GRU says it is well positioned to contribute to those ambitions, with plans that extend far beyond a single hotel. After completing its lodge, the company plans to build roads, warehouses and other infrastructure—first on the Moon, then on Mars. Eventually, it hopes to reinvest profits into resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars and asteroids.

    “If we’re able to understand how to use resources on the Moon and Mars and beyond, that is going to enable us to not be tethered to Earth, and start being interplanetary,” said Chan. “It’s a Promethean moment.”

    A 22-Year-Old Founder Wants to Build the Moon’s First Hotel by 2032

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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