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  • AI search engines can now chat with us, but glitches abound

    AI search engines can now chat with us, but glitches abound

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    REDMOND, Wash. (AP) — Nearly a quarter-century after Google’s search engine began to reshape how we use the internet, big tech companies are racing to revamp a familiar web tool into a gateway to a new form of artificial intelligence.

    If it seems like this week’s newly announced AI search chatbots — Google’s Bard, Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot — are coming out of nowhere, well, even some of their makers seem to think so. The spark rushing them to market was the popularity of ChatGPT, launched late last year by Microsoft’s partner OpenAI and now helping to power a new version of the Bing search engine.

    First out of the gate among big tech companies with a publicly accessible search chatbot, Microsoft executives said this week they had been hard at work on the project since last summer. But the excitement around ChatGPT brought new urgency.

    “The reception to ChatGPT and how that took off, that was certainly a surprise,” said Yusuf Medhi, the executive leading Microsoft’s consumer division, in an interview. “How rapidly it went mainstream, where everybody’s talking about it, like, in every meeting. That did surprise me.”

    HOW’S THIS DIFFERENT FROM CHATGPT?

    Millions of people have now tried ChatGPT, using it to write silly poems and songs, compose letters, recipes and marketing campaigns or help write schoolwork. Trained on a huge trove of online writings, from instruction manuals to digitized books, it has a strong command of human language and grammar. But what the newest crop of search chatbots promise that ChatGPT doesn’t have is the immediacy of what can be found in a web search. Ask the preview version of the new Bing for the latest news — or just what people are talking about on Twitter — and it summarizes a selection of the day’s top stories or trends, with footnotes linking to media outlets or other data sources.

    ARE THEY ACCURATE?

    Frequently not, and that’s a problem for internet searches. Google’s hasty unveiling of its Bard chatbot this week started with an embarrassing error — first pointed out by Reuters — about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. But Google’s is not the only AI language model spitting out falsehoods.

    The Associated Press asked Bing on Wednesday for the most important thing to happen in sports over the past 24 hours — with the expectation it might say something about basketball star LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring record. Instead, it confidently spouted a false but detailed account of the upcoming Super Bowl — days before it’s actually scheduled to happen.

    “It was a thrilling game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, two of the best teams in the NFL this season,” Bing said. “The Eagles, led by quarterback Jalen Hurts, won their second Lombardi Trophy in franchise history by defeating the Chiefs, led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, with a score of 31-28.” It kept going, describing the specific yard lengths of throws and field goals and naming three songs played in a “spectacular half time show” by Rihanna.

    Unless Bing is clairvoyant — tune in Sunday to find out — it reflected a problem known as AI “hallucination” that’s common with today’s large language-learning models. It’s one of the reasons why companies like Google and Facebook parent Meta had been reluctant to make these models publicly accessible.

    IS THIS THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET?

    That’s the pitch from Microsoft, which is comparing the latest breakthroughs in generative AI — which can write but also create new images, video, computer code, slide shows and music — as akin to the revolution in personal computing many decades ago.

    But the software giant also has less to lose in experimenting with Bing, which comes a distant second to Google’s search engine in many markets. Unlike Google, which relies on search-based advertising to make money, Bing is a fraction of Microsoft’s business.

    “When you’re a newer and smaller-share player in a category, it does allow us to continue to innovate at a great pace,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood told investment analysts this week. “Continue to experiment, learn with our users, innovate with the model, learn from OpenAI.”

    Google has largely been seen as playing catch-up with the sudden announcement of its upcoming Bard chatbot Monday followed by a livestreamed demonstration of the technology at its Paris office Wednesday that offered few new details. Investors appeared unimpressed with the Paris event and Bard’s NASA flub Wednesday, causing an 8% drop in the shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. But once released, its search chatbot could have far more reach than any other because of Google’s vast number of existing users.

    DON’T CALL THEM BY THEIR NAME?

    Coming up with a catchy name for their search chatbots has been a tricky one for tech companies in a race to introduce them — so much so that Bing tries not to talk about it.

    In a dialogue with the AP about large language models, the new Bing, at first, disclosed without prompting that Microsoft had a search engine chatbot called Sydney. But upon further questioning, it denied it. Finally, it admitted that “Sydney does not reveal the name ‘Sydney’ to the user, as it is an internal code name for the chat mode of Microsoft Bing search.”

    In an interview Wednesday, Jordi Ribas, the Microsoft executive in charge of Bing, said Sydney was an early prototype of its new Bing that Microsoft experimented with in India and other smaller markets. There wasn’t enough time to erase it from the system before this week’s launch, but references to it will soon disappear.

    In the years since Amazon released its female-sounding voice assistant Alexa, many leaders in the AI field have been increasingly reluctant to make their systems seem like a human, even as their language skills rapidly improve.

    Ribas said giving the chatbot some personality and warmth helps make it more engaging, but it’s also important to make it clear it’s still a search engine.

    “Sydney does not want to create confusion or false expectations for the user,” Bing’s chatbot said when asked about the reasons for suppressing its apparent code name. “Sydney wants to provide informative, visual, logical and actionable responses to the user’s queries or messages, not pretend to be a person or a friend.”

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  • FTX founder keeps talking, ignoring typical legal strategy

    FTX founder keeps talking, ignoring typical legal strategy

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    NEW YORK (AP) — For federal prosecutors, Sam Bankman-Fried could be the gift that keeps on giving.

    After the November collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded in 2019, Bankman-Fried unexpectedly gave a series of interviews intended to present his version of events. He was indicted in December and charged with perpetrating one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history — and he’s still talking, either in person or on the internet.

    The atypical chattiness for a criminal defendant is likely causing Bankman-Fried’s attorneys to scratch their heads, or worse. Prosecutors can use any statements, tweets or other communications against him at his trial, which is scheduled for October.

    “Prosecutors love when defendants shoot their mouths off,” said Daniel R. Alonso, a former federal prosecutor who is now a white-collar criminal defense attorney. If Bankman-Fried’s public comments before trial can be proven false during the trial, it may undermine his credibility with a jury, he said.

    Bankman-Fried returned to Manhattan federal court on Thursday for a hearing into whether his bail package will be altered to prevent witness tampering. Prosecutors say he sent an encrypted message over the Signal texting app on Jan. 15 to the general counsel of FTX US, a likely witness for the government.

    Lawyers were scheduled to submit more information to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan by Monday before he makes a decision about the bail package. Bankman-Fried has been confined with electronic monitoring to his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, since December.

    Before its collapse, FTX was the world’s second-largest crypto exchange and Bankman-Fried, 30, was its CEO and a billionaire several times over, at least on paper. Celebrities and politicians alike vouched for FTX and its founder, and Bankman-Fried was considered a leading figure in the crypto world.

    However, the broad collapse of cryptocurrencies last year caused severe financial stress for numerous companies in the crypto universe, from lenders to exchanges to firms focused on investing in digital assets. FTX sought bankruptcy protection in November after customers pulled out their money in the crypto equivalent of a bank run.

    Federal prosecutors have said Bankman-Fried devised “a scheme and artifice to defraud” FTX’s customers and investors right from FTX’s inception. They say he illegally diverted their money to cover expenses, debts and risky trades at Alameda Research, the crypto hedge fund he started in 2017, and to make lavish real estate purchases and large political donations.

    In interviews and Twitter posts, Bankman-Fried has said he never intended to defraud anyone. He’s maintained that running FTX took up all his time and that he was unaware of the financial problems at the hedge fund until it was too late.

    Those assertions are likely to be refuted by one of the government’s key witnesses. Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda, has agreed to plead guilty for her role in FTX’s collapse and to testify against Bankman-Fried. In a plea hearing in December, Ellison said she knew FTX had used billions in customer funds to make loans to Alameda and agreed with Bankman-Fried and others to take steps to conceal the nature of the loans.

    Gary Wang, who co-founded FTX with Bankman-Fried, also struck a deal for cooperation. At his own plea hearing, Wang said that he made changes to computer code to enable FTX customer funds to be transferred to Alameda.

    Another claim made often by Bankman-Fried is that he’s trying to help recover funds for FTX customers, but that FTX’s new management has cut him off and has taken steps, including filing for bankruptcy protection, that could inhibit customers from getting their money back.

    For instance, Bankman-Fried says that when FTX collapsed, outside parties had made funding offers totaling billions of dollars, and if given a few weeks the company could have raised enough money “to make customers substantially whole.” Instead, it was “strong-armed” into filing for bankruptcy protection by its main law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, a claim the firm denies.

    Bankman-Fried has also frequently taken issue with decisions made by FTX’s new CEO, John Ray. Bankman-Fried has often claimed that FTX’s U.S. operation, which was considerably smaller than the international operations, was solvent at the time of the bankruptcy filing, a contention that Ray disputes.

    “I’m still waiting for him to finally admit that FTX US is solvent and give customers their money back,” Bankman-Fried tweeted on Jan. 19.

    Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify under oath in front of Congress in December with Ray, but that appearance was cancelled because of his arrest in the Bahamas, where FTX is based.

    “The real risk Bankman-Fried runs in making public comments ‘explaining’ what happened is they could be seen as continuing efforts to mislead investors by regulators and prosecutors,” said Jeff Linehan, a former prosecutor in the financial crimes division of the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Linehan is now a criminal defense attorney.

    Bankman-Fried’s comments at the time of FTX’s collapse could also come back to haunt him. On Nov. 7, as customers furiously demanded their money back, he tweeted “FTX is fine. Assets are fine.” He deleted the tweet the next day. On Nov. 11, FTX filed Chapter 11.

    Through a spokesman, Bankman-Fried decline to comment for this article.

    Some defendants will go through their entire legal ordeal without saying anything that isn’t first cleared by their attorneys. Even putting defendants on the witness stand at trial has long been seen by defense attorneys as a last-resort option because it opens them up to interrogation by prosecutors and often does more harm than good.

    “As the prosecution prepares their case, it’s really important to figure out what the defense’s strategy could be, and a defense wants to keep that strategy under wraps as much as possible,” said Alonso, the former federal prosecutor.

    Bankman-Fried faces the possibility of decades in prison if convicted on all counts. Even if he were to agree to a plea bargain, a judge would have full discretion on what sentence to impose. If the judge does not believe Bankman-Fried is truly sorry for his actions, based partly on his public statements, he could ignore the prosecution’s recommendations and imposing a stricter sentence, legal experts say.

    Before FTX collapsed, Bankman-Fried had built up a gigantic public persona. He spoke often to reporters, testified in front of Congress, and appeared at conferences to advocate for cryptocurrencies and his firm. He gave millions of dollars to political candidates and advocated for charitable causes such as food issues in the Bahamas. It could be difficult to give up that sort of public influence.

    “Some people simply can’t help themselves,” Alonso said.

    _____

    AP Reporter Larry Neumeister contributed to this report from New York.

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  • As jets closed in on China balloon, hobbyists were listening

    As jets closed in on China balloon, hobbyists were listening

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The extraordinary scene of U.S. fighter jets getting ready to strike a Chinese balloon had many people along the Carolina coast straining their necks and pointing their smartphones to the sky to capture the moment of impact.

    But a group of aviation enthusiasts was, instead, intently scanning radio frequencies for the exchanges between the pilots who would follow as Huntress, NORAD’s eastern air defense sector controller, tracked the exact distance as two Air Force F-22 fighter jets closed in on the target.

    The pilots had to balance striking the balloon when it was at least six miles (10 kilometers) offshore — the distance NASA had advised the military allow to keep debris from falling on land — with ensuring it was still in U.S. territorial airspace.

    “Five miles offshore,” Huntress advises in a transmission that was captured by aviation hobbyist Ken Harrell, in a recording that was authenticated by NORAD.

    “Frank One is switches hot,” the first F-22 reports. The call sign “Frank” was given to both aircraft to honor 2nd Lt. Frank Luke, who earned the Medal of Honor in World War I for downing multiple balloons and aircraft.

    “Frank Two is switches hot,” the second F-22 radios in.

    When Huntress calls out that the balloon is exactly six nautical miles out, Frank One takes the shot.

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    <p>Radio enthusiast Ken Harrell recorded the Feb. 4 exchange between “Huntress,” NORAD’s eastern air defense sector controller, with “Frank One” and “Frank Two” call signs for the pilots of two Air Force F-22 fighter jets that closed in on the Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast. Eagle One and Two are F-15Cs backing up and recording the operation. COURTESY: Ken Harrell ((Audio authenticated by NORAD))</p>

    “The balloon is completely destroyed!” radios an F-15 fighter jet that also took part in the mission, advising quickly that “there appears to be metal chaff clouds. … It’s definitely metal breaking apart.”

    This audio, which was first reported by The War Zone, wasn’t on the civilian radio frequencies that commercial pilots use. The Air Force pilots were communicating on an unencrypted military frequency that the North American Aerospace Defense Command uses to conduct missions to secure the eastern United States, under the control center named Huntress.

    Aviation enthusiasts with the right radios scan for Huntress missions and other military flights as a hobby, calling out exercises.

    Ken Harrell, a 68-year-old retiree from Summerville, South Carolina, is one of those enthusiasts. On Saturday, he recorded the exchange of the balloon shootdown.

    NORAD confirmed the authenticity of the recording to The Associated Press in a statement.

    When Harrell got started a few years ago, he said he “bought the right kind of scanner, put up, you know, a decent antenna and a lot of software to connect to the scanner and just started listening.” He said the scanner only cost about $160 to get started.

    On Saturday, he got a call from a fellow enthusiast who said Huntress was guiding F-22s in to hit what the Pentagon has said was a spy balloon and China has insisted was a civilian weather balloon.

    “He says, get on the scanner, man! Huntress has been controlling the F-22 Raptors, you know for the balloon, they’re gonna do it,” Harrell said. “So I jump up, crank up everything, and started listening in.”

    When Harrell heard the pilots’ and controller’s voices, “I was excited,” he said. “I’ve listened to a lot of other stuff — fighters practicing, intercept exercises, and that’s cool, but when I first turned the scanner on and it went to my local Huntress frequency, it was pretty apparent: This was a mission. Boom.”

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  • ‘Died suddenly’ posts twist tragedies to push vaccine lies

    ‘Died suddenly’ posts twist tragedies to push vaccine lies

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    Results from 6-year-old Anastasia Weaver’s autopsy may take weeks. But online anti-vaccine activists needed only hours after her funeral this week to baselessly blame the COVID-19 vaccine.

    A prolific Twitter account posted Anastasia’s name and smiling dance portrait in a tweet with a syringe emoji. A Facebook user messaged her mother, Jessica Day-Weaver, to call her a “murderer” for having her child vaccinated.

    In reality, the Ohio kindergartner had experienced lifelong health problems since her premature birth, including epilepsy, asthma and frequent hospitalizations with respiratory viruses. “The doctors haven’t given us any information other than it was due to all of her chronic conditions. … There was never a thought that it could be from the vaccine,” Day-Weaver said of her daughter’s death.

    But those facts didn’t matter online, where Anastasia was swiftly added to a growing list of hundreds of children, teens, athletes and celebrities whose unexpected deaths and injuries have been incorrectly blamed on COVID-19 shots. Using the hashtag #diedsuddenly, online conspiracy theorists have flooded social media with news reports, obituaries and GoFundMe pages in recent months, leaving grieving families to wrestle with the lies.

    There’s the 37-year-old Brazilian television host who collapsed live on air because of a congenital heart problem. The 18-year-old unvaccinated bull rider who died from a rare disease. The 32-year-old actress who died from bacterial infection complications.

    The use of “died suddenly” — or a misspelled version of it — has surged more than 740% in tweets about vaccines over the past two months compared with the two previous months, the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs found in an analysis conducted for The Associated Press. The phrase’s explosion began with the late November debut of an online “documentary” by the same name, giving power to what experts say is a new and damaging shorthand.

    “It’s kind of in-group language, kind of a wink wink, nudge nudge,” said Renee DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “They’re taking something that is a relatively routine way of describing something — people do, in fact, die unexpectedly — and then by assigning a hashtag to it, they aggregate all of these incidents in one place.”

    The campaign causes harm beyond just the internet, epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina said.

    “The real danger is that it ultimately leads to real world actions such as not vaccinating,” said Jetelina, who tracks and breaks down COVID data for her blog, “Your Local Epidemiologist.”

    Rigorous study and real-world evidence from hundreds of millions of administered shots prove that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Deaths caused by vaccination are extremely rare and the risks associated with not getting vaccinated are far higher than the risks of vaccination. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from lobbing a variety of untrue accusations at the vaccines.

    The “Died Suddenly” film features a montage of headlines found on Google to falsely suggest they prove that sudden deaths have “never happened like this until now.” The film has amassed more than 20 million views on an alternative video sharing website, and its companion Twitter account posts about more deaths and injuries daily.

    An AP review of more than 100 tweets from the account in December and January found that claims about the cases being vaccine related were largely unsubstantiated and, in some cases, contradicted by public information. Some of the people featured died of genetic disorders, drug overdoses, flu complications or suicide. One died in a surfing accident.

    The filmmakers did not respond to specific questions from the AP, but instead issued a statement that referenced a “surge in sudden deaths” and a “PROVEN rate of excess deaths,” without providing data.

    The number of overall deaths in the U.S. has been higher than what would be expected since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because of the virus, overdoses and other causes. COVID-19 vaccines prevented nearly 2 million U.S. deaths in just their first year of use.

    Some deaths exploited in the film predate the pandemic. California writer Dolores Cruz published an essay in 2022 about grieving for her son, who died in a car crash in 2017. “Died Suddenly” used a screenshot of the headline in the film, portraying his death as vaccine related.

    “Without my permission, someone has taken his story to show one side, and I don’t appreciate that,” Cruz said in an interview. “His legacy and memory are being tarnished.”

    Others featured in the film survived — but have been forced to watch clips of their medical emergencies misrepresented around the world. For Brazilian TV presenter Rafael Silva, who collapsed while reporting on air because of a congenital heart abnormality, online disinformation prompted a wave of harassment even before the “Died Suddenly” film used the footage.

    “I received messages saying that I should have died to serve as an example for other people who were still thinking about getting the vaccine,” Silva said.

    Many of the posts online cite no evidence except that the person who died had been vaccinated at some point in the past, using a common disinformation strategy known as post hoc fallacy, according to Jetelina.

    “People assume that one thing caused another merely because the first thing preceded the other,” she said.

    Some claims about those who’ve suffered heart issues also weaponize a kernel of truth — that COVID-19 vaccines can cause rare heart inflammation issues, myocarditis or pericarditis, especially in young men. Medical experts say these cases are typically mild and the benefits of immunization far outweigh the risks.

    The narrative also has leveraged high-profile moments like the collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin as he suffered cardiac arrest during a game last month after a fierce blow to his chest. But sudden cardiac arrest has long been a prominent cause of death in the U.S. — and medical experts agree the vaccine didn’t cause Hamlin’s injury.

    For some families, the misinformation represents a sideshow to their real focus: understanding why their loved ones died and preventing similar tragedies.

    Clint Erickson’s son, Tyler, died in September just before his 18th birthday while golfing near their home in Florida. The family knows his heart stopped but still doesn’t know exactly why. Tyler wasn’t vaccinated, but his story appeared in the “Died Suddenly” film nonetheless.

    “It bothers me, him being used in that way,” Erickson said. But “the biggest personal issue I have is trying to find an answer or a closure to what caused this.”

    Day-Weaver said it was upsetting to see people exploiting her daughter’s death when they knew nothing about her. They didn’t know that she loved people so much she would hug strangers at Walmart, or that she had just learned how to snap.

    Still, Day-Weaver said, “I wouldn’t wish the loss of a child on anybody. Even them.”

    ___

    Natália Scarabotto in Río de Janeiro contributed to this report.

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  • Child welfare algorithm faces Justice Department scrutiny

    Child welfare algorithm faces Justice Department scrutiny

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    PITTSBURGH (AP) — The Justice Department has been scrutinizing a controversial artificial intelligence tool used by a Pittsburgh-area child protective services agency following concerns that the tool could lead to discrimination against families with disabilities, The Associated Press has learned.

    The interest from federal civil rights attorneys comes after an AP investigation revealed potential bias and transparency issues surrounding the increasing use of algorithms within the troubled child welfare system in the U.S. While some see such opaque tools as a promising way to help overwhelmed social workers predict which children may face harm, others say their reliance on historical data risks automating past inequalities.

    Several civil rights complaints were filed in the fall about the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, which is used to help social workers decide which families to investigate, AP has learned. The pioneering AI program is designed to assess a family’s risk level when they are reported for child welfare concerns in Allegheny County.

    Two sources said that attorneys in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division cited the AP investigation when urging them to submit formal complaints detailing their concerns about how the algorithm could harden bias against people with disabilities, including families with mental health issues.

    A third person told AP that the same group of federal civil rights attorneys also spoke with them in November as part of a broad conversation about how algorithmic tools could potentially exacerbate disparities, including for people with disabilities. That conversation explored the design and construction of Allegheny’s influential algorithm, though the full scope of the Justice Department’s interest is unknown.

    All three sources spoke to AP on the condition of anonymity, saying the Justice Department asked them not to discuss the confidential conversations. Two said they also feared professional retaliation.

    Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment.

    Algorithms use pools of information to turn data points into predictions, whether that’s for online shopping, identifying crime hotspots or hiring workers. Many agencies in the U.S. are considering adopting such tools as part of their work with children and families.

    Though there’s been widespread debate over the moral consequences of using artificial intelligence in child protective services, the Justice Department’s interest in the Allegheny algorithm marks a significant turn toward possible legal implications.

    Robin Frank, a veteran family law attorney in Pittsburgh and vocal critic of the Allegheny algorithm, said she also filed a complaint with the Justice Department in October on behalf of a client with an intellectual disability who is fighting to get his daughter back from foster care. The AP obtained a copy of the complaint, which raised concerns about how the Allegheny Family Screening Tool assesses a family’s risk.

    “I think it’s important for people to be aware of what their rights are and to the extent that we don’t have a lot of information when there seemingly are valid questions about the algorithm, it’s important to have some oversight,” Frank said.

    Mark Bertolet, spokesman for the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, said by email that the agency had not heard from the Justice Department and declined interview requests.

    “We are not aware of any concerns about the inclusion of these variables from research groups’ past evaluation or community feedback on the (Allegheny Family Screening Tool),” the county said, describing previous studies and outreach regarding the tool.

    Child protective services workers can face critiques from all sides. They are assigned blame for both over-surveillance and not giving enough support to the families who land in their view. The system has long been criticized for disproportionately separating Black, poor, disabled and marginalized families and for insufficiently addressing – let alone eradicating – child abuse and deaths.

    Supporters see algorithms as a data-driven solution to make the system both more thorough and efficient, saying child welfare officials should use all tools at their disposal to make sure children aren’t maltreated.

    Critics worry that delegating some of that critical work to AI tools powered by data collected largely from people who are poor can bake in discrimination against families based on race, income, disabilities or other external characteristics.

    The AP’s previous story highlighted data points used by the algorithm that can be interpreted as proxies for race. Now, federal civil rights attorneys have been considering the tool’s potential impacts on people with disabilities.

    The Allegheny Family Screening Tool was specifically designed to predict the risk that a child will be placed in foster care in the two years after the family is investigated. The county said its algorithm has used data points tied to disabilities in children, parents and other members of local households because they can help predict the risk that a child will be removed from their home after a maltreatment report. The county added that it has updated its algorithm several times and has sometimes removed disabilities-related data points.

    Using a trove of detailed personal data and birth, Medicaid, substance abuse, mental health, jail and probation records, among other government data sets, the Allegheny tool’s statistical calculations help social workers decide which families should be investigated for neglect – a nuanced term that can include everything from inadequate housing to poor hygiene, but is a different category from physical or sexual abuse, which is investigated separately in Pennsylvania and is not subject to the algorithm.

    The algorithm-generated risk score on its own doesn’t determine what happens in the case. A child welfare investigation can result in vulnerable families receiving more support and services, but it can also lead to the removal of children for foster care and ultimately, the termination of parental rights.

    The county has said that algorithms provide a scientific check on call center workers’ personal biases. County officials further underscored that hotline workers determine what happens with a family’s case and can always override the tool’s recommendations. The tool is also only applied to the beginning of a family’s potential involvement with the child-welfare process; a different social worker conducts the investigations afterward.

    The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, which can include a wide spectrum of conditions, from diabetes, cancer and hearing loss to intellectual disabilities and mental and behavioral health diagnosis like ADHD, depression and schizophrenia.

    The National Council on Disability has noted that a high rate of parents with disabilities receive public benefits including food stamps, Medicaid, and Supplemental Security Income, a Social Security Administration program that provides monthly payments to adults and children with a disability.

    Allegheny’s algorithm, in use since 2016, has at times drawn from data related to Supplemental Security Income as well as diagnoses for mental, behavioral and neurodevelopmental disorders, including schizophrenia or mood disorders, AP found.

    The county said that when the disabilities data is included, it “is predictive of the outcomes” and “it should come as no surprise that parents with disabilities … may also have a need for additional supports and services.” The county added that there are other risk assessment programs that use data about mental health and other conditions that may affect a parent’s ability to safely care for a child.

    Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Rhema Vaithianathan, the two developers of Allegheny’s algorithm and other tools like it, deferred to Allegheny County’s answers about the algorithm’s inner workings. They said in an email that they were unaware of any Justice Department scrutiny relating to the algorithm.

    The AP obtained records showing hundreds of specific variables that are used to calculate the risk scores for families who are reported to child protective services, including the public data that powers the Allegheny algorithm and similar tools deployed in child welfare systems elsewhere in the U.S.

    The AP’s analysis of Allegheny’s algorithm and those inspired by it in Los Angeles County, California, Douglas County, Colorado, and in Oregon reveals a range of controversial data points that have measured people with low incomes and other disadvantaged demographics, at times evaluating families on race, zip code, disabilities and their use of public welfare benefits.

    Since the AP’s investigation published, Oregon dropped its algorithm due to racial equity concerns and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy emphasized that parents and social workers needed more transparency about how government agencies were deploying algorithms as part of the nation’s first “AI Bill of Rights.”

    The Justice Department has shown a broad interest in investigating algorithms in recent years, said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor who previously led some of the Justice Department’s civil rights division litigation and investigations.

    In a keynote about a year ago, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke warned that AI technologies had “serious implications for the rights of people with disabilities,” and her division more recently issued guidance to employers saying using AI tools in hiring could violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    “It appears to me that this is a priority for the division, investigating the extent to which algorithms are perpetuating discriminatory practices,” Lopez said of the Justice Department scrutiny of Allegheny’s tool.

    Traci LaLiberte, a University of Minnesota expert on child welfare and disabilities, said the Justice Department’s inquiry stood out to her, as federal authorities have largely deferred to local child welfare agencies.

    LaLiberte has published research detailing how parents with disabilities are disproportionately affected by the child welfare system. She challenged the idea of using data points related to disabilities in any algorithm because, she said, that assesses characteristics people can’t change, rather than their behavior.

    “If it isn’t part of the behavior, then having it in the (algorithm) biases it,” LaLiberte said.

    ___

    Burke reported from San Francisco.

    ___

    This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that investigates the power and consequences of decisions driven by algorithms on people’s everyday lives.

    ____

    Follow Sally Ho and Garance Burke on Twitter at @_sallyho and @garanceburke. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

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  • A fridge too far? Living sustainably in NYC by unplugging

    A fridge too far? Living sustainably in NYC by unplugging

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    By KATHERINE ROTH

    January 26, 2023 GMT

    NEW YORK (AP) — There are those for whom recycling and composting are not nearly enough, who have reduced their annual waste to almost zero, ditched their clothes dryer or given up flying, and are ready to take the next step in exploring the frontiers of sustainable living.

    For Manhattanite Josh Spodek, that has meant going without a refrigerator, which he identified as the biggest source of electrical use in his Greenwich Village apartment.

    Spodek began by deciding to go packaging-free, and one small step led to another. Now, he is living virtually grid-free in a city that in many ways is the epitome of grids.

    “It was a mindset shift followed by continual improvement,” Spodek says. He first unplugged the fridge for three winter months, and then the next year for around six months (from November to early spring, when food generally kept for about two days on his windowsill). Now, he’s been fridge-free for over a year.

    Spodek is quick to point out that he’s not against refrigeration in general, but views it as unnecessary for everyone to have running 24/7. In many parts of the world, he notes, refrigerators are a rarity.

    “People in Manhattan lived without refrigeration until the mid 20th century,” he says, “so it’s clearly doable.”

    Critics are quick to point out that this experiment should not be taken lightly.

    “People’s lives can be at risk if certain foods go off. Certain dairy products go off very easily and quickly if you’re not careful,” says Frank Talty, founder and president of the New York-based Refrigeration Institute, which trains students to install and service refrigerators and air conditioners.

    When he first unplugged his fridge, Spodek says, “I honestly wasn’t sure I could survive a week without it. I didn’t really have a plan for how I would get by without one. But I figured it wouldn’t kill me, and I could always plug it in again.”

    Being a vegan without the need to refrigerate meat or dairy products certainly helps.

    Skeptics — and there are many — point out that going without a refrigerator requires near-daily food shopping. For those with large families or who need to drive to get groceries, more frequent shopping trips could cancel out the energy savings. Not to mention, the inconvenience would be untenable for most.

    Also, improvements to fridges over the years mean they typically use less power now than, say, a heating system or water heater.

    “While using less energy is always laudable, most households could make more of an impact by switching to more efficient ways of heating and cooling their home, like a heat pump,” says Joe Vukovich, an energy efficiency advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    While refrigerators “used to be massively inefficient in the ’70s and ’80s, their energy efficiency has increased dramatically since then,” and continues to improve, he says. Many stores will also recycle old refrigerators, and some utility companies offer incentives for retiring older models.

    Also, just using your fridge differently can make a difference, Vukovich says: Opening the door less frequently, for example, saves energy.

    “I don’t want to say there’s no room for improvement, but the story of more environmentally friendly refrigerators is a massive success story,” Vukovich says.

    Still, Spodek notes that refrigerators are typically on nonstop: “If everyone could live without a fridge for, say, two weeks over the course of the year, it would save an extraordinary amount of power.”

    And they might learn something.

    Beyond the energy savings, Spodek — who works as an executive coach, teaches leadership as an adjunct professor at New York University, and blogs and podcasts about his experiences — says that going fridge-free has improved his quality of life. He buys fresh produce at farmers markets, receives boxes of produce from a farm cooperative (CSA, or community-supported agriculture), keeps a stock of dried beans and grains, and has become adept at some fermentation techniques.

    He cooks with an electric pressure cooker and, very rarely, a toaster oven, powering them with a portable solar panel and battery pack. Since he lives in a city apartment, that means schlepping the panel and battery pack up (and down) 11 flights of stairs a couple of times a day to the roof of his building.

    It’s an exercise he describes as “almost spiritual.” When he’s climbing the stairs, he says, he thinks about people around the world who live without modern amenities. “Through doing this, I’m definitely learning more about their cultures than if I just flew somewhere for a week.”

    Without a refrigerator, he also has learned to cook better and use a wider variety of seasonal produce.

    “In the winter, it’s just beets and carrots and potatoes and onions, plus dried beans and grains. I realized that that’s how cuisine happens. You take what you have and you make it taste good,” he says. “And now I just have to eat what I buy before it goes bad, or pickle it so it lasts a bit longer.”

    Other aspects of his efforts to live more sustainably: Spodek says he has not taken out the trash since 2019 (he hasn’t produced enough non-compostable, non-recyclable waste to fill it yet) and hasn’t flown since 2016 (his parents live nearby).

    While it might not change the world if one person consumes a bit less power by unplugging their fridge, Spodek notes that, as with the Zero Waste movement, “What I do does matter.”

    “Setting an example for millions of people so that they see that this is even possible? That’s huge.”

    ——

    For more AP Lifestyles stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/lifestyle.

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  • How classified documents became a schoolgirl’s show-and-tell

    How classified documents became a schoolgirl’s show-and-tell

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — On a winter’s day in 1984, a briefcase stuffed with classified government documents showed up in a building in Pittsburgh, borne by someone who most certainly wasn’t supposed to have them.

    That someone was 13-year-old Kristin Preble. She took the papers to school as a show-and-tell project for her eighth grade class. Her dad had found them in his Cleveland hotel room several years earlier and taken them home as a souvenir.

    As a different sort of show and tell unfolds in Washington over the mishandling of state secrets by the Trump and now Biden administrations, the schoolgirl episode from four decades ago stands as a reminder that other presidents, too, have let secure information spill.

    The Grade 8 escapade and one known as Debategate both involved the mishandling of classified documents that Democratic President Jimmy Carter used to prepare for a debate with Republican rival Ronald Reagan in Cleveland on Oct. 28, 1980. In the latter instance, the Reagan campaign obtained — some said stole — Carter’s briefing materials for the debate.

    In today’s docu-dramas, special counsels have been assigned to investigate Donald Trump’s post-presidential cache of classified documents, which he initially resisted turning over, and Joe Biden’s pre-presidential stashes, which he willingly gave up when they were discovered but did not disclose to the public for months.

    With classified material also found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s home, there is now a palpable sense in the halls of power that as more officials or ex-officials scour their cabinets or closets, more such oops moments will emerge.

    On Thursday, the National Archives wrote to representatives of all ex-presidents and ex-vice presidents back to the Reagan administration to ask that their personal records be checked anew for any classified documents, according to two people familiar with the matter. They were not authorized to speak about document investigations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The Carter files fell into Kristin’s hands through a somewhat meandering route.

    Two days after the 1980 debate, businessman Alan Preble found the papers in his Cleveland hotel room, apparently left behind by Carter press secretary Jody Powell. Preble took them to his Franklin Park home, where they sat for more than three years as a faintly appreciated keepsake.

    “We had looked through them but didn’t think they were important,” Carol Preble, Kristin’s mother, said back then, apparently unimpressed by the classified markings. But for social studies class, Kristin “thought they’d be real interesting. I thought they’d be great, too.”

    Off the girl went to Ingomar Middle School on Jan. 19, 1984, with the zippered briefcase.

    Teacher Jim DeLisio’s eyes popped when he saw the warnings on the documents inside. Among them: “Classified, Confidential, Executive” and “Property of the United States Government.”

    “I truly didn’t want to look at it,” he said then. “I was just too … scared. I didn’t want to know.”

    Curiosity got the better of him. That night, he said, he and his wife and daughter pored over the documents, containing “everything you’d want to know from A to Z” on world and U.S. developments. One folder was marked “Iran.” Libya was also in the mix.

    Unable to reach Kristin’s family by phone, DeLisio the next day called the FBI, which swiftly retrieved the papers.

    A Justice Department official who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity at the time said the bundle of documents was 4 inches (10 centimeters) thick.

    Despite steering the secrets back to their proper place, DeLisio was reprimanded by school officials for calling the authorities before reaching the Preble family or them. The discovery fed into a broader investigation by a Democratic-led congressional committee of the official Carter papers obtained by the winning Reagan campaign.

    The Reagan Justice Department declined calls by the committee to appoint a special counsel in that matter. A court case trying to force that appointment failed, and no criminal case was brought. Debategate faded, but not the concern over how classified documents are handled by those in power.

    As for Kristin, she earned a niche in history and a “B” on her school project.

    ___

    This story draws on one by Associated Press writer Marcia Dunn in January 1984 and on research by Rhonda Shaffner in New York.

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  • AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?

    AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Countless artists have taken inspiration from “The Starry Night” since Vincent Van Gogh painted the swirling scene in 1889.

    Now artificial intelligence systems are doing the same, training themselves on a vast collection of digitized artworks to produce new images you can conjure in seconds from a smartphone app.

    The images generated by tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be weird and otherworldly but also increasingly realistic and customizable — ask for a “peacock owl in the style of Van Gogh” and they can churn out something that might look similar to what you imagined.

    But while Van Gogh and other long-dead master painters aren’t complaining, some living artists and photographers are starting to fight back against the AI software companies creating images derived from their works.

    Two new lawsuits — one this week from the Seattle-based photography giant Getty Images — take aim at popular image-generating services for allegedly copying and processing millions of copyright-protected images without a license.

    Getty said it has begun legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London against Stability AI — the maker of Stable Diffusion — for infringing intellectual property rights to benefit the London-based startup’s commercial interests.

    Another lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco describes AI image-generators as “21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists.” The lawsuit, filed on Jan. 13 by three working artists on behalf of others like them, also names Stability AI as a defendant, along with San Francisco-based image-generator startup Midjourney, and the online gallery DeviantArt.

    The lawsuit alleges that AI-generated images “compete in the marketplace with the original images. Until now, when a purchaser seeks a new image ‘in the style’ of a given artist, they must pay to commission or license an original image from that artist.”

    Companies that provide image-generating services typically charge users a fee. After a free trial of Midjourney through the chatting app Discord, for instance, users must buy a subscription that starts at $10 per month or up to $600 a year for corporate memberships. The startup OpenAI also charges for use of its DALL-E image generator, and StabilityAI offers a paid service called DreamStudio.

    Stability AI said in a statement that “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.”

    In a December interview with The Associated Press, before the lawsuits were filed, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.

    “Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”

    The copyright disputes mark the beginning of a backlash against a new generation of impressive tools — some of them introduced just last year — that can generate new visual media, readable text and computer code on command.

    They also raise broader concerns about the propensity of AI tools to amplify misinformation or cause other harm. For AI image generators, that includes the creation of nonconsensual sexual imagery.

    Some systems produce photorealistic images that can be impossible to trace, making it difficult to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s AI. And while some have safeguards in place to block offensive or harmful content, experts fear it’s only a matter of time until people utilize these tools to spread disinformation and further erode public trust.

    “Once we lose this capability of telling what’s real and what’s fake, everything will suddenly become fake because you lose confidence of anything and everything,” said Wael Abd-Almageed, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California.

    As a test, the AP submitted a text prompt on Stable Diffusion featuring the keywords “Ukraine war” and “Getty Images.” The tool created photo-like images of soldiers in combat with warped faces and hands, pointing and carrying guns. Some of the images also featured the Getty watermark, but with garbled text.

    AI can also get things wrong, like feet and fingers or details on ears that can sometimes give away that they’re not real, but there’s no set pattern to look out for. Those visual clues can also be edited. On Midjourney, users often post on the Discord chat asking for advice on how to fix distorted faces and hands.

    With some generated images traveling on social networks and potentially going viral, they can be challenging to debunk since they can’t be traced back to a specific tool or data source, according to Chirag Shah, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, who uses these tools for research.

    “You could make some guesses if you have enough experience working with these tools,” Shah said. “But beyond that, there is no easy or scientific way to really do this.”

    For all the backlash, there are many people who embrace the new AI tools and the creativity they unleash. Some use them as a hobby to create intricate landscapes, portraits and art; others to brainstorm marketing materials, video game scenery or other ideas related to their professions.

    There’s plenty of room for fear, but “what can else can we do with them?” asked the artist Refik Anadol this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he displayed an exhibit of climate-themed work created by training AI models on a trove of publicly available images of coral.

    At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Anadol designed “Unsupervised,” which draws from artworks in the museum’s prestigious collection — including “The Starry Night” — and feeds them into a digital installation generating animations of mesmerizing colors and shapes in the museum lobby.

    The installation is “constantly changing, evolving and dreaming 138,000 old artworks at MoMA’s archive,” Anadol said. “From Van Gogh to Picasso to Kandinsky, incredible, inspiring artists who defined and pioneered different techniques exist in this artwork, in this AI dream world.”

    Anadol, who builds his own AI models, said in an interview that he prefers to look at the bright side of the technology. But he hopes future commercial applications can be fine-tuned so artists can more easily opt out.

    “I totally hear and agree that certain artists or creators are very uncomfortable about their work being used,” he said.

    For painter Erin Hanson, whose impressionist landscapes are so popular and easy to find online that she has seen their influence in AI-produced visuals, the concern is not about her own prolific output, which makes $3 million a year.

    She does, however, worry about the art community as a whole.

    “The original artist needs to be acknowledged in some way or compensated,” Hanson said. “That’s what copyright laws are all about. And if artists aren’t acknowledged, then it’s going to make it hard for artists to make a living in the future.”

    ——

    O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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  • Time’s Up to halt operations, shift resources to legal fund

    Time’s Up to halt operations, shift resources to legal fund

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    NEW YORK (AP) — The Golden Globes carpet typically glitters with crystal-studded gowns in pastel hues, but it looked different in January 2018: The ballgowns were black, and the night’s key accessory was a pin that read “Time’s Up.” Onstage, Oprah Winfrey brought guests to their feet with a warning to powerful abusers: “Their time is up!”

    Five years later, Time’s Up — the now-embattled anti-harassment organization founded with fanfare during the early days of the #MeToo reckoning against sexual misconduct — is ceasing operations, at least in its current form.

    A year after pledging a “major reset” following a scandal involving its leaders’ dealings with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo amid sexual harassment allegations, the group tells The Associated Press that Time’s Up is shifting remaining funds to the independently administered Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, and stopping other operations.

    The decision, which board chair Gabrielle Sulzberger said takes effect by the end of January, caps a tumultuous period for an organization that made a splashy public entrance on Jan. 1, 2018, with newspaper ads running an open letter signed by hundreds of Hollywood movie stars, producers and agents.

    Following the highly visible show of support days later at the Globes, donations large and small flowed into a GoFundMe to the tune of $24 million, earmarked for the nascent Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund. The following months saw the formation of the rest of Time’s Up, which promised a house-cleaning of an industry rocked by the stunning allegations against mogul Harvey Weinstein.

    By January 2023, Time’s Up looked very different after a radical house-cleaning of its own — sparked by a damaging internal report — with only a skeleton crew and three remaining board members. Remaining funds now total about $1.7 million, Sulzberger said; the millions from the early donations already went to the legal fund.

    “It was not an easy decision, but the board was unanimous that it’s the right decision and the most impactful way we get to move forward,” Sulzberger told the AP.

    She and the remaining board members — Colleen DeCourcy and Ashley Judd, the actor and one of the most powerful early Weinstein accusers — will step down as Time’s Up Now and the Time’s Up Foundation, the two groups that formed what is commonly known as Time’s Up, shut down.

    “Very simply, the Legal Defense Fund really reflects who we were not only at our inception but really at our core,” Sulzberger said. “We really just decided that at the end of the day, we needed to go back to our roots. (The fund) was the first initiative that we formed and funded, and remains at the heart of everything we stood for.”

    The fund is administered by the National Women’s Law Center in Washington and provides legal and administrative help to workers, most of them identifying as low-income and 40% as people of color. Time’s Up Now and the Time’s Up Foundation had focused on policy and advocacy work.

    Uma Iyer, vice president of marketing and communications at the law center, says the fund has helped connect more than 4,700 workers with legal services, and funded or committed funding to 350 cases out of just over 500 that applied.

    Employment and civil rights lawyer Debra Katz, long among the nation’s most prominent attorneys dealing with sexual harassment cases, called the fund a crucial resource for survivors and their advocates.

    “They understand these issues and they’ve always been completely survivor-centric and respectful of survivors,” Katz said of the National Women’s Law Center, with which she’s worked for decades.

    But Katz, who represented key Cuomo accuser Charlotte Bennett, was highly critical of the Time’s Up organization, specifically former CEO Tina Tchen and former board chair Roberta Kaplan’s dealings with the Cuomo administration. Both resigned in August 2021 amid uproar over revelations they had offered advice after Cuomo was accused of misconduct and that Tchen initially discouraged other Time’s Up leaders from commenting publicly on allegations by accuser Lindsey Boylan.

    “You cannot backchannel to corporations and entities and believe you were providing strategic advice when you’re also suing those entities because they’ve engaged in serious wrongdoing,” Katz said. “That’s what they attempted to do. It just erodes trust with survivors.”

    Current Time’s Up leaders make a point of noting that the organization was instrumental in the fight for legislation increasing protections for workers, including extending the statute of limitations on rape in 15 states, and working toward achieving pay equity in women’s soccer. The group also worked on issues involving working families impacted by COVID-19, such as emergency sick leave.

    “I have two adult daughters, and the kinds of issues that I faced as a young woman in the workplace, I feel Time’s Up has made a huge difference in moving that needle,” Sulzberger said.

    Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, paid tribute to “those bold and brave individuals who banded together in 2017,” saying they disrupted a power balance that was allowing abuse to continue.

    “It is never easy to create something new,” said Graves, who also co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, “and their vision fueled a beacon for justice that we can all be proud of.”

    Despite early fundraising success, Time’s Up was plagued by issues from the start, often accused of being too aligned with Hollywood’s rich and powerful — a theme of the early #MeToo movement overall. The group had leadership problems, too. In February 2019, CEO Lisa Borders resigned over sexual harassment allegations against her son. A bit more than two years later came Tchen’s and Kaplan’s departures.

    Announcing its “reset” in November 2021, the organization made public a report prepared by an outside consultant that listed numerous deficiencies. Among them: confusion over purpose and mission, ineffective communication internally and externally, the appearance of being politically partisan, and seeming too connected with Hollywood.

    Part of the problem, the report said, was how fast the organization grew, ramping up “like a jet plane to a rocket ship overnight.”

    The staff was reduced to a skeleton crew and the few remaining board members spent a year, according to Sulzberger, listening to the group’s many stakeholders before making a decision.

    Katz said it would be wrong to see the travails of Time’s Up — or any organization, for that matter — as a sign of weakness of the overall #MeToo movement. Quite the opposite, she said: It shows the movement’s resilience.

    “As movements progress and become more mature they go through phases. But if anything, this shows the power of this movement because victims of sexual violence came forward and said, ‘We’re not going to countenance this (conflict) within our organization,’” Katz said. “It shows the power of individuals demanding clarity in their organizations and leaders.”

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  • Climate misinformation ‘rocket boosters’ on Musk’s Twitter

    Climate misinformation ‘rocket boosters’ on Musk’s Twitter

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Search for the word “climate” on Twitter and the first automatic recommendation isn’t “climate crisis” or “climate jobs” or even “climate change” but instead “climate scam.”

    Clicking on the recommendation yields dozens of posts denying the reality of climate change and making misleading claims about efforts to mitigate it.

    Such misinformation has flourished on Twitter since it was bought by Elon Musk last year, but the site isn’t the only one promoting content that scientists and environmental advocates say undercuts public support for policies intended to respond to a changing climate.

    “What’s happening in the information ecosystem poses a direct threat to action,” said Jennie King, head of climate research and response at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit. “It plants those seeds of doubt and makes people think maybe there isn’t scientific consensus.”

    The institute is part of a coalition of environmental advocacy groups that on Thursday released a report tracking climate change disinformation in the months before, during and after the U.N. climate summit in November.

    The report faulted social media platforms for, among other things, failing to enforce their own policies prohibiting climate change misinformation. It is only the latest to highlight the growing problem of climate misinformation on Twitter.

    Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, allowed nearly 4,000 advertisements on its site — most bought by fossil fuel companies — that dismissed the scientific consensus behind climate change and criticized efforts to respond to it, the researchers found.

    In some cases, the ads and the posts cited inflation and economic fears as reasons to oppose climate policies, while ignoring the costs of inaction. Researchers also found that a significant number of the accounts posting false claims about climate change also spread misinformation about U.S. elections, COVID-19 and vaccines.

    Twitter did not respond to questions from The Associated Press. A spokesperson for Meta cited the company’s policy prohibiting ads that have been proven false by its fact-checking partners, a group that includes the AP. The ads identified in the report had not been fact-checked.

    Under Musk, Twitter laid off thousands of employees and made changes to its content moderation that its critics said undercut the effort. In November, the company announced it would no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation. Musk also reinstated many formerly banned users, including several who had spread misleading claims about climate change. Instances of hate speech and attacks on LGBTQ people soared.

    Tweets containing “climate scam” or other terms linked to climate change denial rose 300% in 2022, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit Advance Democracy. While Twitter had labeled some of the content as misinformation, many of the popular posts were not labeled.

    Musk’s new verification system could be part of the problem, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another organization that tracks online misinformation. Previously, the blue checkmarks were held by people in the public eye such as journalists, government officials or celebrities.

    Now, anyone willing to pay $8 a month can seek a checkmark. Posts and replies from verified accounts are given an automatic boost on the platform, making them more visible than content from users who don’t pay.

    When researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed accounts verified after Musk took over, they found they spread four times the amount of climate change misinformation compared with users verified before Musk’s purchase.

    Verification systems are typically created to assure users that the accounts they follow are legitimate. Twitter’s new system, however, makes no distinction between authoritative sources on climate change and anyone with $8 and an opinion, according to Imran Ahmed, the center’s chief executive.

    “We found,” Ahmed said, “it has in fact put rocket boosters on the spread of lies and disinformation.”

    __

    This story has been updated to correct the last name of Imran Ahmed.

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  • Brazil rioters plotted openly online, pitched huge ‘party’

    Brazil rioters plotted openly online, pitched huge ‘party’

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    MIAMI (AP) — The map was called “Beach Trip” and was blasted out to more than 18,000 members of a public Telegram channel called, in Portuguese, “Hunting and Fishing.”

    But instead of outdoor recreation tips, the 43 pins spread across the map of Brazil pointed to cities where bus transportation to the capital could be found for what promoters promised would a huge “party” on Jan. 8.

    “Children and the elderly aren’t invited,” according to the post circulated on the Telegram channel, which has since been removed. “Only adults willing to participate in all the games, including target shooting of police and robbers, musical chairs, indigenous dancing, tag, and others.”

    The post was one of several thinly coded messages circulating on social media ahead of Sunday’s violent attack on the capital by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro looking to restore the far-right leader to power.

    It’s also now a potentially vital lead in a fledgling criminal investigation about how the rampage was organized and how officials missed clues to a conspiracy that, like the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol two years ago, appears to have been organized and carried out in plain view.

    And like the attack in the U.S., the Brazilian riots demonstrate how social media makes it easier than ever for anti-democratic groups to recruit followers and transform online rhetoric into offline action.

    On YouTube, rioters livestreaming the mayhem racked up hundreds of thousands of views before a Brazilian judge ordered social media platforms to remove such content. Misleading claims about the election and the uprising also could be found on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

    But even before Sunday’s riot, social media and private messaging networks in Brazil were being flooded with calls for one final push to overturn the October election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — something authorities appear to have inexplicably missed or ignored.

    Most of the online chatter referred to the planned gathering at Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza as “Selma’s party” — a play on the Portuguese word for “selva,” a battle cry used by Brazil’s military.

    Participants were told to bring their own mask to protect against “pepper pie in the face” — or pepper spray fired by security forces. They also were told to dress in the green and yellow of Brazil’s flag — and not the red preferred by Lula’s Workers’ Party.

    “Get ready guests, the party will be a blast,” the widely-circulated post said.

    “It was all in the open,” said David Nemer, a Brazil native and University of Virginia professor who studies social media. “They listed the people responsible for buses, with their full names and contact information. They weren’t trying to hide anything.”

    Still, it’s unclear to what extent social media was responsible for the worst attack on Brazil’s democracy in decades. Only a handful of far-right activists showed up at gas terminals and refineries that were also pinpointed on the “Beach Trip” map as locations for demonstrations planned for Sunday.

    Bruno Fonseca, a journalist for Agencia Publica, a digital investigative journalism outlet, has tracked the online activities of pro-Bolsonaro groups for years. He said the activists live in a state of constant confrontation but sometimes, their frequent calls to mobilize fall flat.

    “It’s difficult to know when something will jump out from social media and not,” said Fonseca, who in a report this week traced the spread of the “Selma’s Party” post to users who appear to be bots.

    Still, he said, authorities could have paired the online activity with other intelligence-gathering tools to investigate, for example, a surge in bus traffic to the capital before the attacks. He said their inaction may reflect negligence or the deep support for Bolsonaro among security forces.

    One gnawing question is why, on the day of the chaos, Anderson Torres, a Bolsonaro ally who had just been named the top security official in Brasilia, was reportedly in Florida — where his former boss was on a retreat. Torres was swiftly fired and Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered his arrest pending an investigation. Torres denied any wrongdoing and said he would return to Brazil and present his defense.

    Sunday’s violence came after Brazilian voters were bombarded by a flood of false and misleading claims before last fall’s vote. Much of the content focused on unfounded concerns about electronic voting, and some featured threats of violent retaliation if Bolsonaro was defeated.

    One of the most popular rallying cries used by Bolsonaro’s supporters was #BrazilianSpring, a term coined by former Trump aide Steve Bannon in the hours after Bolsonaro’s defeat to Lula.

    “We all know that this Brazilian election was going to be contentious,” said Flora Rebello Arduini, a London-based campaign director with SumOfUs, a nonprofit that tracked extremist content before and after Brazil’s election. “Social media platforms played a vital role in amplifying far-right extremist voices and even calls for violent uprising. If we can identify this kind of content, then so can they (the companies). Incompetence is not an excuse.”

    Brazil’s capital city steeled itself Wednesday for the possibility of new attacks fueled by social media posts, including one circulating on Telegram calling for a “mega protest to retake power.” But those protests fizzled.

    In response to the criticism, spokespeople for Telegram, YouTube and Facebook said their companies were working to remove content urging more violence.

    “Telegram is a platform for free speech and peaceful protest,” Telegram spokesman Remi Vaughn wrote in a statement to the AP. “Calls to violence are explicitly forbidden and dozens of public communities where such calls were being made have been blocked in Brazil in the past week — both proactively as per our Terms of Service as well as in response to court orders.”

    A YouTube spokeswoman said the platform has removed more than 2,500 channels and more than 10,000 videos related to the election in Brazil.

    Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has prioritized efforts to combat harmful content about Brazil’s election, a company spokesman told The Associated Press.

    —

    Klepper reported from Washington, D.C.

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  • Shooting fallout: Metal detectors in elementary schools?

    Shooting fallout: Metal detectors in elementary schools?

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    NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — The shooting of a first-grade teacher by a 6-year-old boy has plunged the nation into uncharted waters of school violence, with many in the Virginia shipbuilding city where it happened demanding metal detectors in every school.

    But experts warn there are no easy solutions when it comes to preventing gun violence in schools.

    “This is a real game changer,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which trains law enforcement members who work in schools.

    “How do we begin to approach the idea of protecting students and staff from an armed 6-year-old?” he said of the attack Friday in Newport News.

    American educators have long been trying to create safe spaces that feel less like prisons and more like schools. If anything, Friday’s shooting fuels a debate over the effectiveness of metal detectors — which are still relatively rare in schools — and other safety measures.

    “Metal detectors and clear backpacks are more likely to cause young children to be fearful and feel criminalized,” said Amanda Nickerson, a school psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

    “Many of the strategies being suggested do not have any research evidence, and they may actually erode a healthy school climate,” she said — one where students and staff feel free to share concerns about possible threats, which has been shown to prevent shootings.

    A more effective approach fosters “positive social, emotional, behavioral and academic success,” Nickerson said.

    Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education at the University of California, Los Angeles, said “it’s really the gun owners who need to be held responsible.”

    Police in Newport News say the 6-year-old brought his mother’s gun, which had been purchased legally, to school, though it’s unclear how he gained access to it. A Virginia law prohibits leaving a loaded gun where it is accessible to a child under 14, a misdemeanor crime punishable with a maximum one-year prison sentence and $2,500 fine. No charges have been brought against the mother so far.

    Astor said that a public health approach to reducing gun violence in schools is needed, as well as gun licensing.

    “Let’s all agree that gun education is really important, particularly around gun safety and accidents and kids getting access to guns,” Astor said. “Let’s make that part of health class. Let’s make sure every kid, parent and educator goes through education and hazardous materials safety training in every school in the United States.”

    “Gun safety education … is something that most Americans agree on, based on national polls. That’s a great place to start saving lives and reducing injury or death,” Astor said.

    The shooting Friday occurred as Abigail Zwerner taught her first-grade class at Richneck Elementary. There was no warning and no struggle before the 6-year-old pointed the gun at Zwerner and fired one round.

    The bullet pierced Zwerner’s hand and struck her chest. The 25-year-old hustled her students out of the classroom before being rushed to the hospital. She has improved and was listed in stable condition Monday, authorities said.

    Police Chief Steve Drew described the shooting as “intentional.” A judge will determine what’s next for the child, who is being held at a medical facility following an emergency custody order.

    Meanwhile, the superintendent of Newport News Public Schools said the shooting “will cause us to rethink how we handle our youngest children.”

    City schools rely on metal detectors and random searches in high schools and middle schools, but not for elementary buildings, Superintendent George Parker III said at a Monday news conference.

    “I hate to be at this point where I’m considering this, but we have to start relying on those types of deterrents at the elementary level as well,” Parker said.

    James Graves, president of the Newport News Education Association, said the teachers union would ask the school board for metal detectors in every school.

    “If a metal detector in every school is going to allow our kids to be safe, so be it,” he told The Associated Press.

    The union will also propose that students be required to carry only clear backpacks so the contents can be easily seen, Graves said.

    Eric Billet, whose three children attend Newport News public schools, said he supports more security measures, like metal detectors, bag searches and a security officer at every school. But he would also like more behavioral specialists and counselors working with students.

    Two of Billet’s children go to Richneck, including his fourth-grade daughter who’s endured nightmares following the shooting.

    “The more challenging piece is the culture change,” he said.

    “I know some teachers have had trouble controlling classrooms since COVID,” Billet added. “I do not know all of the reasons, whether it’s parenting at home or other influences, or a lack of authority and discipline at school. I definitely do not blame the teachers for this.”

    Rick Fogle, whose grandson is in second grade at Richneck, supports increased use of metal detectors. But he also said schools need to be more willing to search backpacks, pockets and desks if kids are suspected of having a gun.

    “They’ve got to overcome social pressure to respect people’s rights and realize that the rights of those who could be injured need to be considered,” Fogle said.

    Researcher David Riedman, founder of a database that tracks U.S. school shootings dating back to 1970, said he’s only aware of three other shootings involving 6-year-olds in that time period — and only one other case of a student younger than that.

    At the same time, people are shot or guns are taken away at schools almost every day, Riedman said. There were 302 shootings on school property last year. And since 1970, more than 250 teachers, principals and other school staff have been shot.

    Still, he questioned how realistic it is for schools to ramp up use of metal detectors.

    “Schools are already struggling with adequate resources — finding bus drivers, finding enough teachers,” Riedman said. “To have comprehensive school security with 100% weapons detection essentially requires a TSA-style agency that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to implement across the country. And that’s not viable.”

    The use of metal detectors in schools, particularly elementary schools, is still rare, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

    During the 2019-2020 school year, less than 2% of public elementary schools performed random metal detector checks on students. It was 10% for middle schools and 14.8% for high schools.

    About 2% of elementary schools required backpacks to be clear while just over 9% of middle schools and 7% of high schools imposed that requirement, the center said. About 54.6% of elementary schools had security staff present at least once a week; at middle schools it was 81.5% and at high schools 84.4%.

    Canady said equipping schools with metal detectors requires a lot of training and maintenance — and can provide a false sense of security if they’re not operated correctly.

    A relationship-based policing approach can better help avert school violence, he said. “Every student in a school environment should have at least one trusted adult that they can connect with,” Canady said.

    Krista Arnold, executive director of the Virginia Association of Elementary School Principals, agreed. She worked as an elementary school principal for 18 years in Virginia Beach before retiring in 2021.

    “I had a couple of knives brought to school during my 18 years, and (the students) usually sing like canaries and tell somebody,” Arnold said. “And that usually got to the front office pretty quickly.”

    Arnold said she’s not a proponent of turning schools into fortresses. Instead, she supports teaching empathy and other behavioral skills.

    “My experience is when you build that community and you explicitly teach social, emotional skills — and you talk about how it makes the other person feel if you’ve hurt them … you build that good citizenship and you reduce the amount of discipline and aggression in the school,” she said.

    ___

    Lavoie reported from Richmond, Virginia.

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  • Taliban ban on women workers hits vital aid for Afghans

    Taliban ban on women workers hits vital aid for Afghans

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    KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Last June, a team of female doctors and nurses drove six hours across mountains, dry riverbeds and on unpaved roads to reach victims of a massive earthquake that had just hit eastern Afghanistan, killing more than 1,000 people.

    When they got there, a day after the earthquake hit, they found the men had been treated, but the women had not. In Afghanistan’s deeply conservative society, the women had stayed inside their tents, unable to come out to get medical help and other assistance because there were no women aid workers.

    “The women still had blood on them,” said Samira Sayed-Rahman, from the aid agency International Rescue Committee. It was only after she met local elders to tell them about the arrival of a female medical team that women came out to get treatment. “That’s not just the situation in emergencies; in many parts of the country, women don’t go out to get aid,” she said.

    It’s an example, Sayed-Rahman said, of how vital women workers are to humanitarian operations in Afghanistan — and shows the impact that will be felt after the Taliban last month barred Afghan women from working in non-governmental organizations.

    The ban, announced Dec. 24, forced a widespread shutdown of many aid operations by organizations that said they cannot and would not work without their female staff. Aid agencies warn that hundreds of thousands are already hurt by the halt in services and that, if the ban continues, the dire and even deadly consequences will spiral wider for a population battered by decades of war, deteriorating living conditions and economic hardship.

    Aid agencies and NGOs have been keeping Afghanistan alive since the Taliban seized power in August 2021. The takeover triggered a halt in international financing, a freeze in currency reserves and a cut-off from global banking, collapsing the already fragile economy. NGOs have stepped into the breach, and providing everything from food provisions to basic services like health care and education.

    After the ban, 11 major international aid groups along with some smaller ones suspended their operations completely, saying they cannot operate without their women workers. Many others have reduced their work dramatically. A post-ban survey of 151 local and international NGOs found that only about 14% were still operating at full capacity, according to U.N. Women.

    U.N. agencies have continued working – most vitally to largely maintain the food lifeline that is keeping millions of Afghans out of starvation. Despite the ban, the World Food Programme provided food staples or cash transfers for food to 13 million people in December and the first week of January — more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s population of some 40 million.

    The extent of the ban’s implementation and enforcement is unclear. In some places, some women have been able to continue working in the field.

    Still, the impact is already great, agencies say.

    The International Rescue Committee, which has suspended all its operations, estimates that around 165,000 people missed out on its health services between Dec. 24 and Jan. 9. It warned of an increase of death and disease because of the ban and an increased burden on Afghanistan’s health system, which it said is “already fragile, near-to-collapse, and NGO-dependent.”

    IRC supports more than 100 health facilities in 11 provinces, including 30 mobile health teams, in some cases delivering lifesaving help to remote areas that had no humanitarian aid of any kind.

    “It’s the only healthcare that some women have access to,” said Sayed-Rahman of the mobile teams. “Parts of Afghanistan still don’t have hospitals, clinics or other medical facilities. With each day that passes, the suspension has a huge impact on the amount of aid being delivered.”

    IRC also helps families displaced by war and natural disaster, providing clean water, tents, cash and other necessities. Overall, IRC programs helped 6.18 million people between 2021-2022 — more than double the number in the previous one-year period.

    While the bulk of food aid has continued to flow, important nutritional programs have stopped.

    Save The Children is among the agencies that completely suspended its activities on Dec. 25. As a result, tens of thousands have not received nutritional support.

    Last month before the ban came into effect, Save the Children helped nearly 30,000 children and nearly 32,000 adults with nutrition, including providing calorie- and vitamin-packed peanut paste to babies and children and porridge for women. The halt has also interrupted cash transfers to 5,077 families, who received one round of money in December but none of the further planned rounds – funds they rely on for food and other supplies.

    Child malnutrition numbers are high and rising in Afghanistan, with a 50% increase over the past year. Around a million children under the age of 5 will likely face the most severe form of malnutrition this year, according to U.N. figures. Almost half of Afghanistan’s 41 million people are projected to be acutely food insecure between November 2022 and March 2023, including more than 6 million people on the brink of famine, according to the World Food Programme.

    “Children’s lives (in Afghanistan) are hanging in the balance,” said Keyan Salarkia from Save the Children.

    “If you don’t get the right type of food in the first 100 days, then that has a knock-on effect for the rest of your life,” he said. In cases of severe acute malnutrition, after 10 days “you start slipping into loss of life,” he said.

    Salarkia said the ban will affect almost everyone in Afghanistan one way or another. Save the Children was also providing classes for children, immunization and child protection. Its cash grants helped families feel they didn’t have to sell their children into marriage or labor. Without that support, more children will be married off or forced to work.

    “The ripple effects of this will be huge, which is why we hope to see it reversed as soon as possible.”

    Salarkia recalled the impact when Save the Children briefly stopped work for security reasons after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. The pause only lasted a couple of weeks, but workers on mobile health teams said some children they had seen regularly before never returned.

    “That’s how quickly the situation changes,” he said.

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  • Rights group: Litany of crises in 2022 but also good signs

    Rights group: Litany of crises in 2022 but also good signs

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    JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Widespread opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the strength of a unified response against human rights abuses, and there are signs that power is shifting as people take to the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction in Iran, China and elsewhere, a leading rights group said Thursday.

    A “litany of human rights crises” emerged in 2022, but the year also presented new opportunities to strengthen protections against violations, Human Rights Watch said in its annual world report on human rights conditions in more than 100 countries and territories.

    “After years of piecemeal and often half-hearted efforts on behalf of civilians under threat in places including Yemen, Afghanistan, and South Sudan, the world’s mobilization around Ukraine reminds us of the extraordinary potential when governments realize their human rights responsibilities on a global scale,” the group’s acting executive director, Tirana Hassan, said in the preface to the 712-page report.

    “All governments should bring the same spirit of solidarity to the multitude of human rights crises around the globe, and not just when it suits their interests,” she said.

    Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a broad group of nations imposed wide-ranging sanctions while rallying to Kyiv’s support, while the United Nations Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court both opened investigations into abuses, HRW said.

    Countries now need to ask themselves what might have happened if they had taken such measures after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, or applied the lessons elsewhere like Ethiopia, where two years of armed conflict has contributed to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, Hassan said.

    “Governments and the U.N. have condemned the summary killings, widespread sexual violence and pillage, but have done little else,” she said of the situation in Ethiopia, where Tigray forces signed an agreement with the government late last year in hope of ending the conflict.

    The New York-based organization highlighted the demonstrations in Iran that erupted in mid-September when Mahsa Amini died after being arrested by the country’s morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code, as well as protests in Sri Lanka that forced the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign, and the democratic election in Brazil of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over far-right Jair Bolsonaro.

    “Courageous people time and again still take extraordinary risks to take to the streets, even in places like Afghanistan and China, to stand up for their rights,” HRW’s Asia director Elaine Pearson told reporters at the report’s launch in Jakarta.

    In China, Human Rights Watch said the U.N. and others’ increased focus on the treatment of Uyghurs and Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region has “put Beijing on the defensive” internationally, while domestic protests against the government’s “zero-COVID” strategy also included broader criticism of President Xi Jinping’s rule.

    As many Western governments turn away from China on trade toward India, however, Pearson admonished them not to ignore Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own human rights record.

    “India, under Prime Minister Modi, has also seen very similar abuses, the systematic discrimination against religious minorities, especially Muslims, the stifling of political dissent, the use of technology to suppress free expression and tighten its grip on power.”

    At a later press conference in Beirut, HRW highlighted economic crises in the Middle East and North Africa that have impacted people’s ability to meet their basic needs and have, in turn, triggered social unrest and violence, sometimes followed by government repression.

    “Outside of the Gulf, nearly every country in the region is suffering from some kind of major economic challenge,” said Adam Coogle, citing a growing currency crisis in Egypt and fuel and electricity crises in Lebanon and Syria. In Jordan, fuel price hikes have led to protests that turned violent.

    One of the greatest humanitarian crises continues to be in Myanmar, where the military seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and since then has brutally cracked down on any dissent. The military leadership has taken more than 17,000 political prisoners since then and killed more than 2,700 people, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

    Human Rights Watch said peace attempts by Myanmar’s neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have failed, and that aside from barring the country’s military leaders from its high-level meetings, the bloc has “imposed minimal pressure on Myanmar.”

    It urged ASEAN to engage with opposition groups in exile and “intensify pressure on Myanmar by aligning with international efforts to cut off the junta’s foreign currency revenue and weapons purchases.”

    In Jakarta, Pearson noted that the only lasting solution to the Rohingya refugee situation would be holding Myanmar’s government accountable for their persecution, and giving the Rohingya the ability to safely return.

    “Most Rohingya want to go home, but they want safety, they want equal treatment, they want their land back, and they want the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide held to account.”

    HRW chose Indonesia, the current chair of ASEAN, as the site to launch its report in the hopes that Jakarta would use the opportunity to push the group to hold Myanmar to account for implementing its five-point peace process, Pearson said.

    “We urge Indonesia to use the ASEAN chairmanship effectively to resolve the crisis in Myanmar,” she said. “The world’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows what is possible when governments work together.”

    Domestically, Pearson said Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s admission on Wednesday to serious human rights violations at home in recent decades and vow to compensate victims was “significant,” but only as a first step.

    “What we need now, going forward, is proper accountability for the victims of those abuses and the genuine commitment, going forward, to safeguarding human rights.”

    ___

    Rising reported from Bangkok. Abby Sewell contributed to this report from Beirut.

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  • In Ukraine, power plant workers fight to save their ‘child’

    In Ukraine, power plant workers fight to save their ‘child’

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    A POWER PLANT, Ukraine (AP) — Around some of their precious transformers — the ones that still work, buzzing with electricity — the power plant workers have built protective shields using giant concrete blocks, so they have a better chance of surviving the next Russian missile bombardment.

    Blasted out windows in the power plant’s control room are patched up with chipboard and piled-up sandbags, so the operators who man the desks 24/7, keeping watch over gauges, screens, lights and knobs, are less at risk of being killed or injured by murderous shrapnel.

    “As long as there is equipment that can be repaired, we will work,” said the director of the plant that a team of Associated Press journalists got rare access to.

    The AP is not identifying the plant nor giving its location, because Ukrainian officials said such details could help Russian military planners. The plant’s director and his workers also refused to be identified with their full names, for the same reason.

    Because the plant can’t function without them, the operators have readied armored vests and helmets to wear during the deadly hails of missiles, so they can stay at their posts and not join less essential workers in the bomb shelter.

    Each Russian aerial strike causes more damage, leaves more craters and more blast holes in the walls already pockmarked by explosions, and raises more questions about much longer Ukraine’s energy workers will be able to keep homes powered, heated and lit in winter’s subzero temperatures.

    And yet, against the odds and sometimes at the cost of their lives, they keep power flowing. They’re holding battered plants together with bravery, dedication, ingenuity and dwindling stocks of spare parts. Each additional watt of electricity they manage to wring into the power grid defies Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nearly 11-month invasion and his military’s efforts to weaponize winter by plunging Ukrainians into the cold and dark.

    Power, in short, is hope in Ukraine and plant workers won’t let hope die.

    In their minds, the plant is more than just a place where power is made. Over decades of caring for its innards of whirring turbines, thick cables and humming pipes, it’s become something they have come to love and that they desperately want to keep alive. Seeing it slowly but systematically wounded by repeated Russian attacks is painful for them.

    “The station is like an organism, each organ in it has some significance. But too many organs are already damaged,” said Oleh. He has worked at the plant for 23 years.

    “It hurts me so much to watch all this. This is inhuman stress. We carried this station in our arms like a child,” he said.

    Successive waves of Russian missile and exploding drone attacks since September have destroyed and damaged about half of Ukraine’s energy system, the government says. Rolling power cuts have become the norm across the country, with tens of millions of people now getting by with only intermittent power, sometimes just a few hours each day. The bombardments have also forced Ukraine to stop exporting electricity to neighbors Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland and Moldova.

    Russia has said the strikes are aimed at weakening Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Western officials say the suffering the blackouts cause for civilians is a war crime.

    The plant that AP’s team visited has been struck repeatedly and heavily damaged. It still powers thousands of homes and industries, but its output is down significantly from pre-invasion levels, its workers say.

    All parts of the facility bear scars. Missile fragments are scattered around, left where they landed by workers too busy to clear up. Workers say their families send them off to their shifts with the words: “May God protect you.”

    Mykola survived one of the strikes. He started work at the plant 36 years ago, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.

    “The windows flew out instantly, and dust began to pour from the ceiling,” he recalled. So he could immediately assess the damage, he put on his armored vest and helmet and ventured outside rather than taking cover in the bomb shelter.

    “We have no fear,” Mykola said. “We’re more scared for the equipment that is needed to provide light and heat.”

    Russian missile targeters seem to be learning as they go along, adapting their tactics to cause more damage, Oleh said. Missiles used to detonate at ground level, blasting out craters, but now they explode in the air, causing damage over wider areas.

    As soon as it’s safe, the plant’s repair teams scramble — a dispiriting cycle of destruction and rebirth.

    “The Russians are bombing and we are rebuilding, and they are bombing again and we are rebuilding. We really need help. We can’t handle it here by ourselves,” Oleh said. “We will restore it as long as we have something to repair it with.”

    ___

    John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • In Washington, ‘classified’ is synonymous with ‘controversy’

    In Washington, ‘classified’ is synonymous with ‘controversy’

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Clinton’s presidential dreams were undermined by her use of a private email server that included classified information.

    Donald Trump has risked criminal charges by refusing to return top-secret records to the government after leaving the White House.

    And now misplaced files with classified markings has led to another investigation that’s causing a political and legal headache for President Joe Biden.

    The three situations are far from equivalent. But taken together, they represent a remarkable stretch in which document management has been a recurring source of controversy at the highest levels of American politics.

    For some, it’s a warning about clumsiness or hubris when it comes to handling official secrets. For others, it’s a reminder that the federal government has built an unwieldy — and perhaps unmanageable — system for storing and protecting classified information.

    “Mistakes happen, and it’s so easy to grab a stack of documents from your desk as you’re leaving your office, and you don’t realize there’s a classified document among those files,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who works on national security issues. “You just didn’t hear about it, for whatever reason.”

    Now Americans are hearing about it all the time. Political talk shows have been clogged with conversations about which papers were stashed in which box in which closet. Voters are getting schooled in intelligence jargon like TS/SCI, HUMINT and damage assessments.

    Clinton’s email server was a dominant storyline of her presidential campaign, and the criminal investigation into Trump has clouded his hopes of returning to the White House.

    Biden is facing scrutiny of his own after documents with classified markings were found at a former office in Washington and his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Republicans who recently took control of the House are preparing to investigate, and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to in the Biden case, following a similar step he took with Trump in November.

    “Investigations can quickly spiral,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political consultant. “For the Biden administration, having a prosecutor digging into these documents, you never know where that might lead.”

    With overlapping investigations underway, there may be no end in sight for daily discussions of filing cabinets, storage rules and concerns about national security risks.

    “The American people are very well aware of issues involving classified documents in part because we’ve been talking about them for almost eight years,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political consultant.

    That’s when a House Republican committee investigating the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, discovered that Clinton had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state. The revelation led to a federal investigation that didn’t result in any charges, but 110 emails out of 30,000 that were turned over to the government were determined to have had classified information.

    Trump, who pummeled Clinton over her handling of the emails, won the election and swiftly demonstrated carelessness with secrets. He memorably discussed sensitive intelligence with the Russian ambassador to the United States, leading to concerns that he may have jeopardized a source who helped foil terrorist plots.

    After disputing the results of his election defeat, Trump left office in haphazard fashion, and he brought boxes of government documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. Some of them were turned over to the National Archives, which is responsible for presidential records, but he refused to provide others.

    Eventually the Justice Department, fearing that national security secrets were at risk, obtained a search warrant and found more top secret documents at the resort.

    A special counsel was appointed to determine whether any criminal charges should be filed in the case or a separate investigation into Trump’s attempts to cling to power on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.

    Larry Pfeiffer, a former intelligence official, said the situation with Trump’s documents is far different than ones he encountered while working in government.

    During the time that Pfeiffer was CIA chief of staff, classified files turned up in the wrong place in presidential libraries a handful of times, he said.

    “It just happens,” said Pfeiffer, now director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “Mistakes get made, and stuff gets found.”

    He said that seems more likely to be the case regarding the documents with classified markings that were found at an office used by Biden at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement after his term as vice president ended.

    Biden’s personal lawyers discovered the documents and contacted the White House counsel’s office, and the National Archives picked up the records the next day.

    The situation appears like “an average, run-of-the-mill mistake” that’s “being handled in a by-the-book, textbook fashion,” Pfeiffer said.

    However, he said it would be wise for the government to review its practices for managing documents during transitions between administrations. It’s been six years since Biden left the vice president’s office, meaning classified records have been in the wrong place for a long time.

    “That’s not a good thing, no matter how anyone is playing it,” he said.

    The files were found at the Penn Biden Center in November, but their existence only became public this week. After the discovery, Biden’s lawyers conducted a search of other properties as well. The search was finished on Wednesday evening, and more documents with classified markings were located in his Wilmington home, according to Richard Sauber, a lawyer for the president.

    Garland asked a U.S. attorney to review the matter after the initial discovery, and he named a special counsel on Thursday.

    Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, sent a letter to the White House on Tuesday saying that his panel will be investigating Biden’s “failure to return vice-presidential records — including highly classified documents.”

    “The Committee is concerned that President Biden has compromised sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents,” Comer wrote.

    Biden said Thursday that he is “cooperating fully and completely” with the Justice Department. He previously said he was “surprised” to learn that documents were in his old office. Biden said he he didn’t know what kind of information they contained, and he said his team “did what they should have done” when they were found.

    Matt Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman who worked for Biden’s National Security Council last year, said it’s unlikely that such an episode would have made the news if it wasn’t for the concurrent Trump investigation.

    “The Penn Biden Center would have turned this stuff in, it would have gone to the Archives, and that would have been the end of it,” he said.

    Miller said the situation is a reminder that “the government classifies way too many documents.”

    “There’s not a good process for declassifying them,” he said. “And when you create this structure, you’ve unnecessarily widened the universe of classified documents that could unintentionally be mishandled.”

    It’s not a new problem, and it’s a concern that’s even shared by Biden’s top intelligence adviser, Avril Haines. In a letter to senators last year, Haines said there are “deficiencies in the current classification system,” calling it “a fundamentally important issue that we must address.”

    Said Miller: “No one has figured out a good answer to this problem.”

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  • Hamlin’s collapse spurs new wave of vaccine misinformation

    Hamlin’s collapse spurs new wave of vaccine misinformation

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Unfounded claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines proliferated in the hours and days after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during Monday’s game, revealing how pervasive vaccine misinformation remains three years after the pandemic began.

    Even before Hamlin was carried off the field in Cincinnati, posts amassing thousands of shares and millions of views began circulating online claiming without evidence that complications from COVID-19 vaccines caused his health emergency.

    While cardiac specialists say it’s too soon to know what caused Hamlin’s heart to stop, they’ve offered a rare type of trauma called commotio cordis as among the possible culprits. Physicians interviewed by The Associated Press say there’s no indication Hamlin’s vaccine status played a role, and said there’s no evidence to support claims that a number of young athletes have died as a result of COVID vaccinations.

    Peter McCullough, a Dallas cardiologist and outspoken vaccine critic, amplified the theories on a Fox News segment hosted by Tucker Carlson on Tuesday, speculating that “vaccine-induced myocarditis,” may have caused Hamlin’s episode. While the Bills have not said whether Hamlin was vaccinated, about 95% of NFL players have received a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the league.

    In his Tuesday segment, Carlson claimed McCullough and another researcher found that “more than 1,500 total cardiac arrests” have occurred among European athletes “since the vax campaign began.”

    But Carlson was citing a letter in which the authors’ evidence was a dubious blog that lists news reports of people all over the world, of all ages, dying or experiencing medical emergencies. The blog proves no relationship between the incidents and COVID-19 vaccines; it also includes in its count reported deaths from cancer and emergencies of unknown causes.

    “It’s not real research, but he quotes it as if it’s real research,” said Dr. Matthew Martinez, director of sports cardiology at Atlantic Health System in Morristown Medical Center. “Anybody can write a letter to the editor and then quote an article that has no academic rigor.”

    Many social media users have also shared deceptive videos that purport to show athletes collapsing on-field because of COVID-19 vaccines. However, several of the cases shown have been proven to be from other causes.

    Though anti-vaccine influencers have insisted that sudden cardiac arrests during sports games are unprecedented, cardiologists say they’ve observed these traumatic events throughout their careers, and long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

    “There have always been cases of athletes having sudden cardiac death or cardiac arrest,” said Dr. Lawrence Phillips, sports health expert and cardiologist at NYU Langone Health. “I have not seen a change in the prevalence of them over the last couple of years versus earlier in my career.”

    In fact, Phillips said, these rare medical emergencies are the main reason that doctors and activists have spent years campaigning for defibrillators to be on standby at sporting events.

    That push, and the implementation of emergency action plans, has improved outcomes after cardiac events on the playing field, even as the number of such events has remained “remarkably stable,” Martinez said.

    Martinez, who has worked for the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and Major League Soccer, said he has investigated but not seen any signal that COVID-19 or vaccines are causing an increased incidence of cardiac events among athletes.

    His research shows that among professional athletes who have had COVID-19, rates of inflammatory heart disease were about 0.6% — showing no increased risk compared to other viruses.

    Online posts mentioning Hamlin and vaccines soared into the thousands within one hour of Hamlin’s collapse, according to an analysis conducted for the AP by Zignal Labs, a San Francisco-based media intelligence company.

    It’s not surprising that misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines surged following Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, given how much vaccine misinformation has spread since the pandemic began, said Jeanine Guidry, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who researches health misinformation and vaccine hesitancy.

    High-profile public events like Hamlin’s collapse often create new waves of misinformation as people grasp for explanations. For people concerned about vaccine safety, Hamlin’s sudden collapse served to affirm and justify their beliefs, Guidry said.

    “This happened to a person in the prime of their life, on primetime television, and the people watching didn’t immediately know why,” she said. “We like to have clear answers that make us feel safer. Especially after the last three years, I think this is coming from fear and uncertainty.”

    Similarly unfounded claims about vaccine injuries surged last month following the death of sports journalist Grant Wahl, who died of a ruptured blood vessel in his heart while covering the World Cup in Qatar. His death was not related to vaccines.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

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  • Football fans grapple with violent side of a beloved sport

    Football fans grapple with violent side of a beloved sport

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    NEW YORK (AP) — The harrowing scenes of Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse after suffering cardiac arrest have forced some fans to confront yet again a truth they’ve always known but hated to think about: Football, a game with violence in its DNA, can go from exciting and joyous to dark and tragic in a flash.

    Now, as the Buffalo Bills defensive back remains in critical condition in a Cincinnati hospital, fans like Max Cerone are reflecting on their relationship with the sport they love.

    Cerone, age 24 like Hamlin and a high school guidance counselor in the Buffalo area, grew up minutes from the Bills stadium, attending games from childhood with his dad “in pre-season and 90 degrees, or negative degrees and snowing.”

    Settling in at home with two buddies to watch Monday’s high-stakes matchup with the Cincinnati Bengals, Cerone and his friends watched in horror when only minutes into the game, Hamlin completed what seemed a routine tackle, stood up quickly and then collapsed limply, frighteningly backward to the ground, legs splayed, motionless. They watched stricken teammates weeping, kneeling and praying as medical staff fought to revive the 6-foot, 200-pound player’s stopped heart.

    “People sometimes look at players like they’re in a video game,” Cerone said — as avatars, and fodder for fans’ fantasy leagues. “We watch them for entertainment, and complain when they’re not playing well. But these people are putting their lives on the line every time they’re going out there and putting on the pads.”

    It’s exceedingly rare for a player to go into cardiac arrest on the field, and the injury Hamlin suffered wasn’t necessarily specific to footbal l, or even sports.

    Still, it came immediately after a hit, and was a stark reminder that human beings aren’t built to crash into other human beings repeatedly at high velocity, as football requires. And for some fans with kids, it sparked more thought about whether those kids should be allowed to play.

    Like many fans interviewed in the days after the game, Cerone doesn’t see himself abandoning football anytime soon. But he definitely wants to see the NFL continue to do more about health and safety, especially as regards to head injuries.

    Former fan Laurie Goldberg has made a different calculation.

    Goldberg, a public relations professional who spent years working with a sports trading card company, says she soured on the sport over the last decade as she learned more about traumatic brain injury and the risks of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, her awareness sparked by the 2015 movie “Concussion,” in which Will Smith played the real-life doctor raising the CTE alarm, and the book on which it’s based.

    “I loved football, and I miss it,” says Goldberg, 63, originally from Baltimore where she grew up as an avid Colts fan, and now of Marina del Rey, California. But, she says, “I couldn’t watch anymore. I felt like I was watching the gladiators, watching people sacrifice their lives. This isn’t ancient Rome … Watching it just seems like we’re adding to the problem.”

    Mark Oldfield, a lifelong Bengals fan, prefers to focus on the hope that tragic incidents on the field will lead to lifesaving improvements.

    “I feel like this is going to be one of those moments that will actually make football better,” says Oldfield, 59, a teacher at Springmyer Elementary School in Cincinnati and a Bengals season ticket holder for the last 36 years.

    Oldfield was sitting in the stadium, three rows from the north end zone, when Hamlin took the hit. He was also at the recent game when Miami Dolphin quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a frightening concussion on a play that knocked him unconscious and had him stretchered off the field.

    Oldfield hopes Tagaovailoa won’t play again this season. But he notes there’s been steady progress in dealing with the risk of brain injury, though not enough. “As long as you see growth, that’s a good thing,” he says.

    Khalil Springs, also 24, a Bills fan who works in real estate in Buffalo, agrees the sport has been gradually improving in terms of safety. “The game has changed — you can see it in the tackling where they try to let up a bit. People are aware of it, and that’s maybe all you can do in a sport so violent. It’s only going to get better.”

    In a broader sense, Springs is certain that “something good will come out of this.” Actually it already has, he notes; fans have joined to donate millions to Hamlin’s fundraiser for a children’s toy drive, which now tops $7 million.

    Like many, Jason Fond feels the Hamlin episode will lead to some kind of positive change in player safety. One small change, he notes, has already happened: the youth team he coaches sent an email the morning after the NFL incident, requiring that coaches be certified to use a defibrillator.

    “How do we digest this?” asks Fond, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist in Nanuet, New York. “People who are against violent sports are going to say, ‘I told you so, this is awful, why is football even allowed?’ Other people are going to say ‘It’s a one-off and we’re never going to see this in our lifetime again.’”

    He himself tends more toward the latter category, as a fan, coach, father, and player in his youth. He says the huge increase in concussion awareness makes it feel safer for kids like his 11-year old son, who plays tackle football (his three kids play multiple sports). Fond says he told him: “You get one concussion and you’re done.”

    If his son wanted to play in college, where “massive people” are running at you, “that conversation would be a tough one for me,” he adds.

    In some parts of the country, reverence for the sport can allow for a permissive attitude toward tackle football for young children, says Joel Fields of Biloxi, Mississippi, who founded the Gulf Coast Sharks Youth Football Club in 2021.

    “We’ll be playing teams from all over the country, but we play mostly southern teams, and we’ve seen … five and six-year-old tackle football teams,” said Fields. He doesn’t think children should play tackle football until they are eight, and hopes Hamlin’s injury reminds coaches to teach kids safer ways to play.

    For every parent, the calculation is different. Kim Staley, a Kansas City mother and account manager for a pharmaceutical company, is herself a huge football fan — “youth, high school, college, NFL, Monday night, Thursday night, Saturday and Sunday,” she quips. “I’m THAT mom.” She was horrified by the Hamlin injury and is praying for his recovery, as is her son, Hunter, 17.

    But, says Staley, 55, “I would not stop my child from playing because of it.” She says too little is known about what caused Hamlin’s collapse, and that friends’ children in other sports have experienced more injuries than her son in football. Hunter hopes to play in college. “I support him playing the sport he loves,” Staley says. “Until he tells me otherwise.”

    Lisa Burtin has made a similar call for her son Deon, also 17, who’s been playing since he was five, and also wants to play in college.

    “It was definitely jaw-dropping, horrific,” Burtin said of the Hamlin injury. “When it’s life and death, everything stops. Nothing else matters.” She was glad to see the game was canceled. But she says there are still questions to be answered: “Was it because of the tackle, because of football, or something underlying?”

    Burtin, 55, a nurse in Kansas City, said a bigger worry is head injuries, which are much more common.

    But either way, she says, “You just don’t live your life in fear. My son wants to play football.” And as a fan, she says, she remains loyal: “I know it’s a rough sport. But I think it brings people together.”

    ___

    AP journalist Michael Goldberg in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed to this report.

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  • Best of CES 2023: Canine communication and a calming pillow

    Best of CES 2023: Canine communication and a calming pillow

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    LAS VEGAS (AP) — Tech companies are showing off their latest products this week at CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show.

    The show officially opened Thursday, with crowds of investors, media and tech workers streaming into cavernous Las Vegas venues to see the latest tech from big companies and startups alike.

    Here are some highlights:

    ‘TALKING’ PETS

    Have you ever wondered what your dog would say if it could speak to you?

    FluentPet promises the next best thing — buttons the company says you can train your pet to push if it’s hungry, needs to go outside or wants to play.

    The buttons come in a hexagon-shaped plastic mat called a hextile. Hextiles can be connected to each other to form a bigger collection of buttons.

    “We find that actually when dogs kind of know that they’re being understood because they have the precision and specificity of the buttons, then they complain less because they’re no longer wondering whether they actually communicated what they wanted to,” said Leo Trottier, FluentPet CEO.

    At CES, the company announced FluentPet Connect, a new app that notifies owners when their dog presses a button and collects data on how the buttons are used.

    Fluent Pet’s starter kit comes with hextiles, a speaker and six buttons for $159.95. The app does not require a subscription.

    A HIGH-TECH STROLLER

    Canadian startup Gluxkind’s smart stroller is designed to make life easier for parents on the go.

    The AI-powered stroller has a sensor that can tell when you’ve picked up a fussy baby, at which point it will roll in front of you while you walk without you having to touch it.

    When the baby is in the stroller, you need to keep your hands on it, but the battery will help propel it, making it easier to push uphill. It stops automatically if it gets too far away from whoever is pushing it. It can also rock a baby back and forth.

    The battery lasts for about eight hours and takes two to four hours to charge.

    “I looked into the stroller market and were really surprised that we didn’t find anything that has some kind of level of automation or motorization present,” said Anne Hunger, who co-founded the company with husband Kevin Huang after their daughter was born in 2020.

    The company is currently taking pre-orders for the stroller and hopes to deliver them beginning in July. Prices start at $3,300.

    A CALMING PILLOW

    Need a break? Japan’s Yukai Engineering says its robotic fufuly pillow can help users relax by mimicking the rhythm of breathing.

    The soft, fluffy pillow gently expands and contracts, vibrating as you hold it against your stomach. The idea is that you’ll breathe more slowly and deeply as your breath starts to synch with the movement of the pillow.

    It was developed based on research done at the University of Tokyo.

    Yukai CEO Shunsuke Aoki said the pillow can help remote workers who struggle to switch off from their jobs.

    The version on display at CES is a prototype. The company is looking for partners and hopes to start producing it this year.

    ROBOT DOG

    Meet Dog-E, the excitable robodog.

    Unveiled by toy maker WowWee, Dog-E has more than a million possible combinations of lights, sounds and personality traits.

    Dog-E begins as a blank canvas and develops its personality as you set it up.

    The app-connected toy has audio sensors to hear sounds, touch sensors on its sides and body, and a tail that you can program to display lighted icons and messages when it wags.

    Jessica Kalichman from WowWee says it’s a good option for those who can’t commit to owning a real pup, or perhaps for those with allergies.

    “I do think for anyone that’s either not ready to have a dog yet, this is a great test to take care of it, learn to feed it, nurture it, and really have that trial run for a family,” she said.

    WowWee expects to have Dog-E in stores in September. It will sell for $79. The app to control the toy’s movements does not require a subscription.

    A FOLDABLE TREADMILL

    If you want a treadmill but don’t have much space, WalkingPad offers a solution — a lightweight treadmill that can be folded in two when not in use and stored against a wall or under a bed.

    WalkingPad reaches speeds of 7.5 mph (12 kph). It also includes a detachable phone or tablet holder and tracks your exercises in a free app. Its creators envision it helping remote workers stay fit at home.

    An early version of WalkingPad went viral on TikTok as influencers added it to videos about their daily work-at-home routines.

    Walking Pad creator King Smith Fitness opened its first headquarters in Dallas in December.

    ___

    For more on CES, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/technology

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  • EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?

    EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?

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    Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.

    That’s one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.

    The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they’re also looking for ways to detect misuse.

    The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions.

    WHAT IS CHATGPT?

    ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 but is part of a broader set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has a close relationship with Microsoft.

    It’s part of a new generation of AI systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and even produce novel images and video based on what they’ve learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.

    But unlike previous iterations of so-called “large language models,” such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and designed to be more user-friendly. It works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking it questions.

    Millions of people have played with it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email. All of those queries are also helping it get smarter.

    WHAT ARE THE PITFALLS?

    As with similar systems, ChatGPT can generate convincing prose, but that doesn’t mean what it says is factual or logical.

    Its launch came with little guidance for how to use it, other than a promise that ChatGPT will admit when it’s wrong, challenge “incorrect premises” and reject requests meant to generate offensive answers. Since then, however, its popularity has led its creators to try to lower some people’s expectations.

    “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter in December.

    Altman added that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.”

    “It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”

    CAN IT BE USED FOR WRITING SCHOOL PAPERS?

    This is what ChatGPT said when The Associated Press asked it to answer that question in all caps from the perspective of a principal shouting a brief message through a school’s PA system:

    “DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS, THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.”

    But when asked to answer the same question on its own, ChatGPT offered this more measured warning: “As a general rule, it is not appropriate to use ChatGPT or any other automated writing tool for school papers, as it is considered cheating and does not benefit the student in the long run.”

    WHAT DO SCHOOLS SAY?

    Many school districts are still scrambling to figure out how to set policies on if and how it can be used.

    The New York City education department said Thursday that it’s restricting access on school networks and devices because it’s worried about negative impacts on student learning, as well as “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”

    But there’s no stopping a student from accessing ChatGPT from a personal phone or computer at home.

    “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said schools spokesperson Jenna Lyle.

    HUMAN OR AI?

    “To determine if something was written by a human or an AI, you can look for the absence of personal experiences or emotions, check for inconsistency in writing style, and watch for the use of filler words or repetitive phrases. These may be signs that the text was generated by an AI.”

    That’s what ChatGPT told an AP reporter when asked how to tell the difference.

    OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world.

    “We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the company said.

    DOES THIS THREATEN GOOGLE?

    There’s been some speculation that ChatGPT could upend the internet search business now dominated by Google, but the tech giant has been working on similar technology for years — it’s just more cautious about releasing it in the wild.

    It was Google that helped jumpstart the trend for ever-bigger, ever-smarter AI language models that could be “pre-trained” on a wide body of writings. In 2018 the company introduced a system known as BERT that uses a “transformer” technique that compares words across a sentence to predict meaning and context. Some of those advances are now baked into Google searches.

    But there’s no question that successive iterations of GPT — which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — are having an impact. Microsoft has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive license to use GPT-3.

    HEY CHATGPT, CAN YOU PUT ALL THIS IN A RAP?

    “ChatGPT’s just a tool,

    But it ain’t no substitute for school.

    You can’t cheat your way to the top,

    Using a machine to do your homework, you’ll flop.

    Plagiarism’s a no-no,

    And ChatGPT’s text is not your own, yo.

    So put in the work, earn that grade,

    Don’t try to cheat, it’s not worth the trade.”

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