OUR PICKSBanning Election Betting as Traders Flock to Prediction Sites | Why AI Detection Tools Can Fail to Catch Election Deepfakes | What Kamala Harris Did – and Didn’t Do – on Immigration and the Border, and more

U.S. Looks to Ban Election Betting as Traders Flock to Prediction Sites  (Tony Romm, Washinton Post)
The U.S. government has embarked on a broad crackdown against election betting, relying on a mix of newly proposed rules and ongoing court cases to try to stamp out a nascent industry that critics call a potential threat to democracy.
To Democrats, these wagers on the outcome of a particular campaign invite more money into an electoral system that’s already rife with it. But the staunchest backers of political prediction marketplaces insist that the fears of election interference are overstated — and that the insights gleaned from their data serve a greater purpose.

See Why AI Detection Tools Can Fail to Catch Election Deepfakes  (Kevin Schaul, Pranshu Verma and Cat Zakrzewski, Washington Post)
Artificial intelligence-created content is flooding the web and making it less clear than ever what’s real in this election. From former president Donald Trump falsely claiming images from a Vice President Kamala Harris rally were AI-generated to a spoofed robocall of President Joe Biden telling voters not to cast their ballot, the rise of AI is fueling rampant misinformation.
Deepfake detectors have been marketed as a silver bullet for identifying AI fakes, or “deepfakes.” Social media giants use them to label fake content on their platforms. Government officials are pressuring the private sector to pour millions into building the software, fearing deepfakes could disrupt elections or allow foreign adversaries to incite domestic turmoil.
But the science of detecting manipulated content is in its early stages. An April study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that many deepfake detector tools can be easily duped with simple software tricks or editing techniques.
Meanwhile, deepfakes and manipulated video are proliferating.

What Kamala Harris Did – and Didn’t Do – on Immigration and the Border  (Toluse Olorunnipa and Maria Sacchetti, Washington Post)
Two months into his presidency, Joe Biden confronted a political crisis: The number of migrants illegally crossing the southern border into the United States was soaring. So he asked Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the administration’s diplomatic efforts to reduce problems at the border.
That assignment included working with three Central American countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — to improve living conditions and lower the odds that migrants would leave those countries for reasons including poverty, gang violence and corruption. (Cont.)