The AI-ification of government

Last week, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit western Colombia, killing over 300 people. The cities of Cali, Manizales and Pereira were hit especially hard, as were the places in between.

The disaster response has been widespread and ongoing. Al Jazeera reports that emergency response teams have saved over 350 lives. Rescue teams and aid organizations are now focusing on providing shelter and other necessities for people affected.

Some cities affected by last week’s earthquake had only recently finished rebuilding from another deadly earthquake in 1999. Armenia, a Colombian city devastated by that quake, saw zero deaths from this recent earthquake. Engineers and officials told The Washington Post that’s because of the post-1999 planning and reconstruction efforts, which Colombia dedicated a $1 billion fund to. Those efforts weren’t perfect, but the city is nevertheless being looked at as a model for disaster preparedness.

Karoline Leavitt announced on social media this week that she will step down as White House press secretary at the end of this month. Speculation swirled that it was because she was left on a plane that Trump was smuggled off of following a threat from Iran. If my boss left me on a plane that might get attacked without telling me, I’d be mad! But that’s almost definitely not what happened. A New York Times reporter and a White House spokesperson told Snopes that Leavitt wasn’t on the plane. And other reporting shows she was on parental leave while that airplane switcheroo happened.

We don’t know yet who will replace her. But some people believe it could be Natalie Harp, whose intense love for Donald Trump has reportedly freaked out even the Secret Service. Her job seems to be to go where Trump goes, including onto the non-decoy airplane that Trump was smuggled onto.

One administration official reportedly told NBC News that Trump isn’t in a rush to replace Leavitt before the midterms. During Leavitt’s last absence amid her parental leave, the administration didn’t name an interim press secretary and instead had administration officials hold press briefings.

That brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise! News about public figures can be overwhelming. Here’s how to stay on top of it.

A lawmaker in New Brunswick, Canada, went viral at the end of last month for delivering a speech to the legislature that was written by AI. The lawmaker read aloud lines like, “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech, rather than a series of short bullet points.”

Here’s another version of a bullet point on this topic, but about the U.S.: Our former colleague Anna Liss-Roy (who appeared in a bunch of videos with us, including the first iteration of LNI’s long-form show) reported that Congress is widely using AI. Unlike most workplaces, this doesn’t just mean emails from coworkers include more em dashes than usual — it means chatbots’ sometimes incoherent outputs show up in the bills shaping our everyday lives. And Anna found there are few overarching rules for how Congress uses AI.

Here’s a different bullet point, drawing from a different news source: POLITICO reported this week that as congressional offices and outside groups use AI more and more to write legislative proposals, congressional lawyers are having a hard time keeping up with all the errors that introduces. Those errors could lead to lawsuits. And one person said fixing those errors takes more time than writing a law from scratch.

Spirit Airlines ceased operations suddenly in May. So I can no longer get the worst flight of my life for the price of a special, but not extravagant, meal out. But in some ways, Spirit lives on. In you, in me, and in the 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, HR information and financial data it left behind. Heartwarming.

Much as how Dr. Frankenstein desecrated the dead to create his monster, AI companies want this dearly departed airline’s data to train their models. Google agreed to pay $10 million for it, beating out another bidder named Mercor that bid $7.5 million.

So, is Google’s AI gonna know exactly who sent which angry Teams message about a coworker that really should’ve been a text instead? Spirit has said the data will be “deidentified” so that it can’t be traced back to individuals, and Google has agreed not to try and trace it back to specific people, either. But flight attendants still have privacy concerns around how this data will be used. A U.S. bankruptcy court still has to approve the sale.

An Army battalion in Georgia is offering some soldiers a four day pass to play “GTA 6” when it comes out in November. The catch? You have to agree to stay in the Army for at least two more years. “GTA 6” has been in development for over a decade, making it the straight guy equivalent of the MCU X-Men.

That’s not the only reason the Army is giving this pass. They’ve also been struggling to recruit and retain people the past few years, but since the economy is so severely in the toilet, more people have been enlisting recently for the benefits. Now, the Army is trying to find creative ways of keeping people on.

This question is maybe not super important, but it is one I cannot help but ask: What happens if you want four days off but you have truly no interest in playing “GTA 6”? If you’re reading this from the 9th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team at Fort Stewart, Georgia, I don’t think anyone is making you play this game. The pass is meant to coincide with when the game comes out, but no one seems to be checking that you’re playing the game while you’re using your time off.

Lest we forget that the U.S. military apparatus is a big, serious thing with big, serious consequences, let’s turn our attention to the USS Abraham Lincoln. Democratic senators have raised concerns about poor living conditions on the aircraft carrier, including reports of supply shortages, contaminated water, plumbing problems and mental health crises. So, things a four day pass to play GTA wouldn’t fix, probably. The carrier has been deployed for 270 days amid the U.S. war on Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also reportedly failed to publicize Iranian strikes on the base tasked with resupplying the carrier.