The threat of perjury has a funny way of forcing people to say the quiet parts out loud.

As a recently unsealed and unredacted motion in the ongoing legal battle between the New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft shows, top AI executives have admitted that training AI models required “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”

In the motion filed on behalf of the NYT, flagged by digital media advocate Jason Kint, attorneys used the quotes of Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht and OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman to essentially argue their case for them: that the AI industry built its foundation on an unfathomably large pile of stolen intellectual property.

Hecht, for his part, is quoted calling the AI buildout the “largest theft of labor in human history.” It’s a damning admission as the NYT accuses the two AI labs of copying “millions of [the] Plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products.”

Brockman, for his part, is quoted saying that “publishers” face an “existential threat” from generative AI, which “are largely substitutive, period, [and] will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

As the plaintiff’s counsel argues, these admissions “eviscerate” any claim to fair use — a statement with which Hecht evidently agrees.

“For Defendants to prevail on this defense ‘would,’ the same Microsoft executive recognized, arguably “make a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use,'” the motion reveals.

The damning documents come during the middle stretch of a case that began in 2023, when the NYT accused the two AI labs not only of vacuuming up its original news content, but of using that content to train AI products meant to compete with traditional news outlets.

As Axios recently reported, the battle is far from over, as the presiding judge is expected to decide whether to allow the case to proceed to trial by sometime in 2027.

More on AI: Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

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It’s always a good idea to carefully consider the company you keep — especially if you happen to work for one of Elon Musk’s massive companies.

According to local channel FOX7, SpaceX manager Kyle Gonzalez has been arrested over the alleged stabbing of a Tesla contractor during a team-building exercise gone horribly wrong.

During the night out with a group of co-workers and friends, Gonzalez reportedly got into a heated argument with the Tesla worker over a game of pool at the Waterhole Saloon, a roadside honky-tonk just outside of Austin, Texas.

Court documents viewed by the Austin American-Statesman claim that the SpaceX manager became irate after one of the women he had entered the bar with went to compliment the Tesla contractor’s performance on a karaoke song. When the Tesla worker asked the woman to join him for a game of pool, Gonzalez allegedly became angry, saying he was “going to kill” the contractor.

That’s when Gonzalez allegedly pulled out his pocket knife and stabbed the man in the neck, leaving him with a one-inch puncture wound, the Statesmen recounts.

The unnamed contractor was then rushed to the hospital for life-saving surgery, and is expected to pull through.

Gonzales was reportedly found hiding out in a nearby parking lot, still holding the bloody knife. Court documents note that the SpaceX manager said he hid “for his safety,” though he later apologized for the attack three separate times. He was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, with a bond set at $25,000.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Vows to Keep Poisoning Nearby Towns With Its Fume-Belching Data Center For Another Year

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After only a few months on the market, Meta’s new AI-integrated smart glasses are already being exploited for nefarious purposes.

Dubbed “pervert glasses” for their incognito ability to film anybody in public, the new specs have enabled voyeurs and content creeps the world over, leading to widespread harassment, bullying, and privacy violations.

And now the pervert glasses are also feeding another grim genre of content: joybait.

You may have heard of ragebait, which is online content deliberately designed to piss people off, therefore driving clicks and views. Joybait is ragebait’s seemingly innocent twin: content designed to stir up those warm fuzzies and make you smile.

A now-viral clip uploaded by public prank content creator Levese shows that a user of Meta’s AI glasses shows how the scheme unfolds. The video, first spotted by journalist James Vincent, shows Levese catch a glimpse of the author Travis Schick as he shops with his partner in a Walmart.

Crucially, Levese doesn’t approach Schick right away, but rather uses his phone to snap a photo of Schick’s face, which he then searches using a facial recognition site. After the service uncovers Schick’s social media accounts — revealing the random man as an aspiring novelist — Levese makes his approach, recording with his Meta glasses as he catches the unassuming writer off guard.

“Wait, Travis?” Levese asks as Schick tries to check out. “You wrote the book ‘The Readhead?'”

“Yeah?” the confused writer confirms.

“No way I love that book man! Yo I love that book bro,” Levese replies disingenuously. “It was a really good novel.”

“Yeah that was me,” Schick says, trying to contain a smile.

@1evese

Let’s Make His Book #1 . . . . | #author #caught #digitalfootprint #fyp |

♬ original sound – 1evese

As positive as the interaction seems on its surface, it’s all based on a false premise constructed through use of facial recognition software, without which Levese never would have known who Travis Schick actually was. Of course, Schick himself is ancillary to the entire scheme, which was really about making some content — joybait — for Levese to post to his 225,000 TikTok followers.

And as content, the stunt was wildly successful. The reel has over 60 million views and 30,000 comments on Levese’s TikTok page alone, and has become easy fodder for content farms on every social media feed you can think of.

On uncovering the clip, the journalist James Vincent remarked that it embodies “individualized surveillance culture posing as feelgood content.”

Falling for the original premise of the bait, some excused the privacy violation, arguing the exposure is boosting Schick’s work.

Sure enough, comments under Schick’s novel “The Redhead” on the creative platform Quotev are flooding in by the hundreds, full of well wishers and supporters who otherwise never would have found his work. Schick’s TikTok page has likewise exploded, going from around 150 followers to well over 12,700 in just a few short days.

But Schick’s viral moment is beside the point, as Vincent observes: “there may be positive outcomes from this one video (which stem from its novelty as short form content) — but the larger effect is creating a society where we monetize kindness, exploit the goodwill of strangers, and destroy the right to privacy in public,” he wrote in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter.

And the aspiring novelist is far from alone. Levese has dozens of videos following the exact same format, each with millions of views. For his part, the content creator is well aware that he’s crossing a line. The first one, in which the content creator stalks a man buying bananas, prominently features pinned text reading “day 1: stealing people’s digital footprint.”

“This app is dangrous [sic],” Levese wrote in the video caption.

More on Meta: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters

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Since the debut of Garrett P Serviss’ 1898 novel “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” space-based warfare was relegated to the imagination — but no longer.

In an address on the “State of the Space Force” on Tuesday, reported by Space.com, chief of space operations for the US Space Force General Douglas Schiess informed the public that the Pentagon has definitively deployed active space-based weapons platforms.

“Let me be crystal clear: today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said. “Space is both a battlefield and the backbone of our joint force.”

Schiess stopped short of providing any details about the weapons, instead sharing a war story of one Space Force operator named “Specialist Gray.”

“Even as alarm red sirens were blaring and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line, protecting forces, denying adversary capability, and delivering space effects until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety,” Schiess recounted with a dramatic flair. “She locked onto the target, optimized her weapon system and waged electromagnetic warfare against a determined adversary.”

As Space.com notes, those descriptive elements may point to a kind of non-physical platform, like a signal jammer or a microwave emitter, though it’s anyone’s guess what weapon “Specialist Gray” was supposed to be operating.

The news came just ahead of the Space Force’s request for over $71 billion in additional funding for 2027, adding to the over $100 billion it’s already been allocated, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported.

Evidently, the orbital-weapons announcement was meant to give that absurd request some extra oomph — which, if granted, it would represent the single highest one-year budget adjustment received by any US military branch since 1952.

More on space: NASA’s Powerful New Space Telescope, Just Cleared for Launch, Was Developed by an Intelligence Agency to “Spy on America’s Adversaries”

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With Wall Street on pins and needles amidst a wide-ranging discussion of AI safety, we may well be living through one of the most consequential weeks for the future of AI in the United States.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re headed to an ascendant future for the AI industry. According to London-based firm Capital Economics, the entire economy of the Western world is currently mired in a “late-stage bubble” — a massive misallocation of capital fueling the AI boom, Fortune reported.

In a recent analysis, also flagged by Fortune, Capital Economics senior markets economist James Reilly surveyed eight types of market indicators, finding the vast majority at or near critical levels. These indicators amount to blinking warning lights on the economic dashboard, which have historically only lit up ahead of massive fall-offs in market euphoria: equity and debt issuance is surging, market-cap is concentrated in just a few massive tech stocks, and expected income growth for major indices is looking increasingly unstable.

Breaking down all that marketspeak is beside the point. The fact is, financial markets are under tremendous strain from the AI buildout, and the only precedent for this moment comes from the months before markets crash, like the peak of the dot-com boom.

“On balance, we think the data look consistent with a late-stage bubble,” Reilly wrote in his analysis. “Most of the factors we consider are at, or close to, levels that have preceded past stock market peaks.”

And as economists work to make sense of the precarious moment we’re in, the US Federal Reserve faces a critical decision: whether to apply the emergency brake, or sit back and pray the current market euphoria doesn’t drive us off a cliff.

Later this afternoon, Fed chair Kevin Warsh is expected to announce he’s raising interest rates, applying brakes that would make borrowing more expensive, and — in an ideal scenario — curb both consumer and business spending, thus cool inflation. Yet for as routine an exercise as that is, some say inflation isn’t the issue it’s being made out to be, arguing that Fed intervention in this moment would be without historical precedent.

As Fortune reports, core consumer price index (CPI) inflation — a measure that excludes volatile costs like food and energy — reached a new post-pandemic low in August. That being the case, the analytics firm UBS expects the Fed to simultaneously lower its long-term inflation projections while raising interest rates anyway, something the company says has never happened before.

“That is really, really odd, indeed unique,” a UBS analyst wrote, quoted by Fortune.

Whatever the justification for that decision, its impact on the AI bubble will be telling. A CNN analysis notes there’s an acute possibility that rate hikes cool everything except runaway AI investments — in which case the warning lights could continue to blink as the brakes come all the way off.

More on AI: AI Really Is Eviscerating Entry-Level Jobs, New Data Shows

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So far, the long-fear AI job-apocalypse has been little more than smoke and mirrors, with one gigantic exception: entry-level tech workers.

According to a new report on New York City jobs data compiled by the nonprofit Center for an Urban Future — first reported by the City — job postings for entry-level roles in “computer and mathematical” occupations has plummeted by 49 percent since 2022, the latest indication that tech firms are using AI to justify a massive slowdown in new hires.

Though computer science grads are bearing the brunt of the mayhem, tech jobs may just be the first domino to fall. As Urban Future’s executive director Jon Bowles told the City, “entry-level postings” overall have “fallen off a cliff, and the first rung of the ladder in tech is under pressure.”

“For many years, these were amazing opportunities for people getting a job because tech was growing so fast and adding so many entry-level jobs,” Bowles continued. “Those positions for young people with limited experience are harder to come by and there is intense competition.”

Other industries with drastically lower entry-level hiring include roles in office and administrative support; financial operations; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media; and roles in education and libraries, among others.

While AI is the most obvious variable at play here, there are many other factors helping contribute to a decline in entry-level job postings. For one thing, tech companies have been slashing jobs left and right to reverse COVID-era overhiring, coinciding with the rise of generative AI.

The Urban Future findings also come amidst a rapidly decaying job market in the US, with nearly a quarter of the US labor force functionally unemployed as of July.

All told, AI certainly isn’t improving things, but if we were to shut down every AI chatbot tomorrow, it’s highly unlikely that entry level jobs would rebound on their own.

More on AI: Support for Unions Is Spiking as AI Threatens Jobs

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