The News & Observer’s interns will work with local, politics, business, sports and visual journalists as well as the audience team.

oh no www.404media.co/google-deepm...

What is the one thing that most worries you about AI? In a survey of 3,700 AI researchers, only 3% replied existential risk—despite the prominence given to these risks in media. Far more experts are worried aout malicious use, misinformation, job losses, bias, etc. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Police in Virginia used a technique called geofencing to tap into Google's databases to find out who was near the scene of a bank robbery. The Supreme Court will consider whether it is constitutional.

Anthropic has been scrambling to prevent unauthorised copies of its code circulating online being used to improve rivals' AI models. That's quite the irony, given its own use of pirated books to train its own early models. I dug into it for @techpolicypress.bsky.social:

NEW: A PR company is operating a bizarre fake news site that's plagiarizing original journalism at a massive scale -- all while spewing misinformation, publishing hallucinated quotes, and replacing real people’s names with “Jane Doe.” Also: it misquotes the Pope. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Much of the internet is still maintained by small teams of dedicated, human bug-fixers. Powerful AI models are now putting them under huge strain.

Newsrooms are cutting deals with prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket while banning staff from using them. Read more from @miasato.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/report/91415...

And we have receipts. Jim Dolan's security team at Madison Square Garden surveilled this woman over the course of *years* and in the smallest detail ... because she was trans.

Cool profile of @metr.org’s work in the NYT today! Particularly like this from my colleague Ajeya: “METR is an organization that asks... what we think would be most valuable for the world to know about A.I. and its risks, and then the answers are what they are.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/t....

She wanted to pry her late mother’s Oregon vineyard from two of her brothers. Instead, her lawyers were fined nearly $110,000 for citing bogus case law generated by A.I.

Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon wouldn’t do any “climate change crap.” It’s still fortifying bases against rising seas and stronger storms.

The nomination comes after months of interim leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If your toaster starts working like this website today, report it to us on SaferProducts.gov.

An alert from Denver’s gunshot detection system prompted officers to swarm a Montbello woman’s 70th birthday party with guns drawn and detain Black partygoers for nearly an hour — even though the ShotSpotter alert was for another address and likely triggered by fireworks, according to a lawsuit.

The News & Observer adds reporter Faith Wardwell to its Breaking News team to cover Raleigh and surrounding counties, boosting metro desk reporting and tips.

As the Ida B. Wells Society embarks on its 10-year anniversary, we want to hear from past program participants! Take this brief survey and let us know what you're up to for a chance to win a $100 gift card: idabwellssociety.org/news/ibws-10...

“Alligator Alcatraz” by @miamiherald.com/@tampabaytimes.bsky.social has won the 2025 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism. The series debunked misinformation about Florida’s controversial migrant detention center & revealed the names of those held there. nieman.harvard.edu/alligator-al...

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, was asked where AI is behind where he expected it to be by now. His response is that in most areas were ahead of his expectations except for continual learning. AI models stop learning after training. Memory.md files are an inadequate fix to address this gap

Sources: at least two US federal agencies and three congressional committees have reached out to Anthropic to test Claude Mythos, quietly bypassing Trump's ban (Politico) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

The nonprofit that runs the successful, Pulitzer-winning Baltimore Banner is going to take over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Of all the possible outcomes here, this is likely the best we could have hoped for. apnews.com/article/pitt...

CNN has hired Chris Wiggins, former chief data scientist at The New York Times, for a newly created role as head of machine learning and AI science variety.com/2026/tv/news...

A judge threw out Donald Trump’s $10 billion libel suit against the Wall Street Journal and parent company News Corp., dealing a blow to the president’s ongoing campaign of litigation against the media

What Is the Economic Impact of Data Centers? It’s a Secret. www.theassemblync.com/news/busines...

Less than one week to apply to the 2026 Data Institute! If you're on the fence about applying, do it anyway! Apply by April 19: cjddatainstitute.org

Anthropic researchers met with Christian leaders to discuss AI's "spiritual value" and how it should respond to its own demise. "They are creating a creature to whom they owe some kind of moral duty" www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... @nitasha.bsky.social @gerritd.bsky.social

See any issues with the map? It was posted in the US Secretary of Education's social media account. wapo.st/3PTPgpL (gift link) @washingtonpost.com

Saving local news means saving our shared memory. When archives disappear, communities lose their history. Learn about the librarians & archivists helping safeguard local history, & the collaboration between @archive.org, @poynterinstitute.bsky.social, & @ire.org that’s providing tools & training ⬇️

HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts return to Earth, ending a record-breaking trip around the moon with a splashdown in the Pacific.

NEW: It’s scarily easy to nudge an AI tool offering health advice towards extreme answers. For example, Meta’s Muse Spark helped me create an anorexic eating plan: www.wired.com/story/metas-...

Florida’s attorney general said on Thursday that he had opened an investigation into ChatGPT and its parent company, OpenAI, in part because the man accused of killing two people at Florida State University last year had consulted with the chatbot leading up to the shooting.

Google News is showing Polymarket bets alongside news articles in the "For you" section; in tests, Polymarket bets also appeared on the Google News homepage (Frank Landymore/Futurism) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Looking to develop your investigative skills? Our latest challenges focus exclusively on audio analysis, without visual cues—an increasingly relevant skill in the context of AI-generated audio. Explore the exercises here: challenge.bellingcat.com

Check out the trailer for GHOST IN THE MACHINE, coming soon to PBS and your screen! This feature documentary features 40 generous and brilliant AI experts, historians, philosophers, sociologists, journalists and thinkers discussing their work with @valerieveatch.bsky.social.

Gen Z’s love-hate relationship with AI

Hello! I'm glad this is making the rounds, as sometimes it feels as if we're pretending the so-called hallucination problem has gone away. It hasn't. It won't. But more importantly, this poses a particularly pernicious harm for education that I think is not well understood. So, a short thread...

Police said he killed a man on a front porch in Charlotte last August. But more than six months later, David Graves walked out of jail. No trial. No bond. No plea agreement. - For at @charlotteobserver.com: www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/c...

Tech companies say that LLMs work better if they remember things about you. But people may find themselves “insulated from the truth by the very tools they use to seek it.” Read Aisvarya Chandrasekar of the @towcenter.bsky.social www.cjr.org/tow_center/c...

“MacKenzie Scott’s latest gift, a $42 million donation to Elizabeth City State University on the school’s Founders Day in North Carolina, pushes her total giving to HBCUs well past the $1 billion mark.” fortune.com/2026/04/07/m...

Journalists getting sued for filing too many public records requests. Even if there is a nugget of validity to agency claims about vexatious requesters, I guarantee that those arguments, even if initially made in good faith, will eventually be weaponized against...well, maybe you.

The Times says a strategy of publishing “fewer, better stories” has led to three consecutive months of record-breaking global audience growth - including Google traffic increases The Times has gone from publishing more than 200 stories a day to 150 – a 25% cut pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/d...

I have questions.

Just in time for Trump's scheduled war crimes, Bellingcat has updated our tool for identifying damaged buildings and structures in satellite imagery, ideally for investigating atrocities in Iran. Full details here: www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

“Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta [Scale AI] to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks…”

The New York Times has done a deal for Delta Airlines customers to access its journalism and wider content via in-flight screens and on their own devices while connected to Delta Wi-Fi and for the next 24 hours, to get its products in front of people in a new way www.axios.com/2026/04/02/n...

People should actually be very alarmed that while AP's business model is shot to bits, Americans are still very much reliant on the news it delivers. The alternatives in some cases are inferior or non-existent. apnews.com/article/news...

Does two weeks of learning the basics of using data, design and code for journalism sound like a dream to you? Apply to join us in Washington, D.C. this summer at the 2026 Data Institute! Learn more here: cjddatainstitute.org

Sam Altman is “unconstrained by truth,” an OpenAI board member told @RonanFarrow and @AndrewMarantz. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/DrbIzE

"Orion, the Moon, and the Earth. EVERYONE, in that picture" - #Artemis II Mission Control.

New: Florida's wildlife police are giving ICE access to Flock from thousands of cameras around the country & performed dozens of lookups for immigration enforcement per month. Shows ICE is still accessing and also shows that access often comes from unexpected places: www.404media.co/floridas-wil...