Chinese Citizens at the Southern Border | UFO Crash Materials | The End of the Silicon Valley Dream, and more

AI Is Being Used to ‘Turbocharge’ Scams  (Matt Burgess, Wired)
Plus: Amazon’s Ring was ordered to delete algorithms, North Korea’s failed spy satellite, and a rogue drone “attack” isn’t what it seems.

The End of the Silicon Valley Dream  (Joel Kotkin, The Spectator)
It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable center of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.
Very little remains of that founding culture. America’s tech titans have attained oligopolistic sway over markets comparable to that of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt. They may wear baseball caps rather than top hats, but their economic and cultural power is as vast – and their rise has been the death knell of the Valley’s bracing entrepreneurial culture.

What Will Stop AI from Flooding the Internet with Fake Images?  (Shirin Ghaffary, Vox)
Within a matter of minutes of being posted, the realistic-looking image spread on Twitter and other social media networks after being retweeted by some popular accounts. Reporters asked government officials all the way up to the White House press office what was going on.
The photo was quickly determined to be a hoax, likely generated by AI. But in the short amount of time it circulated, the fake image had a real impact and even briefly moved financial markets.
This isn’t an entirely new problem. Online misinformation has existed since the dawn of the internet, and crudely photoshopped images fooled people long before generative AI became mainstream. But recently, tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, and even new AI feature updates to Photoshop have supercharged the issue by making it easier and cheaper to create hyperrealistic fake images, video, and text, at scale. Experts say we can expect to see more fake images like the Pentagon one, especially when they can cause political disruption.
One report by Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, predicted that as much as 90 percent of content on the internet could be created or edited by AI by 2026. Already, spammy news sites seemingly generated entirely by AI are popping up. The anti-misinformation platform NewsGuard started tracking such sites and found nearly three times as many as they did a few weeks prior.

If the Government Has UFO Crash Materials, It’s Time to Reveal Them  (Christopher Mellon, Politico)
Despite breakthroughs in government transparency about these sightings, there’s one thing the Pentagon and the intelligence community have so far not addressed, and that is whether they have had any direct contact with these objects. There are persistent rumors that the U.S. government recovered “crash materials” from UAP, and even that the government has been working secretly to reverse engineer the technology.

Chinese Citizens at the Southern Border, Explained  (Harvest Prude, The Dispatch)
Most migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border hail from Latin America. But a growing number of Chinese asylum seekers have shown up at the United States’ southern border after making a dangerous overland trek through Latin America.
That someone from China would choose to travel through as many as 10 countries—including 2,500 miles overland through Central America alone, with some of that on foot—to get to America might seem mind-boggling. But for many in China, safer routes—such as arriving via a direct flight and claiming asylum—are not an option.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tests the Conspiratorial Appetite of Democrats  (Michael Scherer, Washington Post)
He began a recent speech here by recounting the Eisenhower Administration’s 1960 decision to lie when the Soviets downed an American spy plane by calling it weather research. Then came further alleged deceptions — some proven, some refuted, many just conjecture.
Before long, Kennedy was arguing that a 2019 tabletop exercise about a mock pandemic archived on YouTube actually revealed a secret plan, involving U.S. spymasters, to enrich drug companies and suppress free speech. He then rattled off clinical data from a coronavirus vaccine trial that was not designed to measure mortality, falsely suggesting clear evidence that vaccines killed more people than they saved.
He made no mention of the abundant science that has found the vaccine prevented serious illness and saved lives.
That alarmist message has given him a platform that he believes will remake the Democratic Party and fulfill the ambitions denied his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), and stolen from his uncle, former president John F. Kennedy — two men he argues were likely assassinated by elements of the CIA, based on circumstantial evidence, which the government has denied.