Author: Frank Salvato

The explosion of low-quality, AI-generated content—commonly referred to as “AI slop”—is forcing major technology companies to confront a problem they helped create. As generative AI dramatically lowers the cost of producing text, music, images, videos, and other digital media, platforms are finding themselves flooded with repetitive, misleading, and often worthless material that degrades the user experience. In response, several companies have begun removing spam-like AI-generated uploads, tightening moderation practices, and refining recommendation algorithms to preserve trust and improve content quality. The growing recognition that unlimited AI generation can overwhelm human-created work has shifted the debate from celebrating AI’s capabilities to…

A Maryland Tax Court has struck down the nation’s first state tax on digital advertising, ruling that the law violated multiple constitutional and federal legal protections while ordering refunds for taxes already paid by affected companies. The court found the tax ran afoul of the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, the First Amendment, and the Commerce and Due Process Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. The decision represents a significant setback for state efforts to impose targeted taxes on large technology companies and could influence similar proposals under consideration elsewhere. Maryland officials have indicated they intend to continue defending the policy…

An Israeli startup, Hemispheric, is pursuing an ambitious effort to use artificial intelligence to translate the brain’s electrical activity into meaningful clinical insights, with the long-term goal of improving diagnosis and treatment for neurological and psychiatric disorders. The company says it has trained its AI on EEG data collected from approximately 100,000 individuals, allowing it to identify electrical patterns that may correspond with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, epilepsy, and other brain-related illnesses. Rather than relying solely on traditional imaging or subjective symptom reporting, Hemispheric hopes to establish a scalable system that can interpret the brain’s own electrical…

Kalshi’s expansion into political prediction markets is encountering mounting legal resistance as state officials, regulators, and private litigants increasingly challenge whether the company’s federally regulated event contracts amount to unlawful gambling under state law. While Kalshi maintains that its markets operate legally under oversight from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a growing number of lawsuits argue that betting on elections, sporting events, and other real-world outcomes falls within longstanding state prohibitions on gambling. The resulting legal conflict has become a broader test of federal versus state authority, with court decisions expected to shape not only the future of prediction…

President Donald Trump has expanded the federal government’s authority to use offensive cyber capabilities against transnational criminal organizations, marking a significant shift from a largely defensive cybersecurity posture to a more proactive strategy. The new national security memorandum authorizes federal agencies to oversee cyber surveillance and cyber effects operations directed at foreign cyber-enabled criminal organizations responsible for ransomware attacks, financial fraud, phishing, extortion, and other cybercrimes targeting Americans. The directive also establishes a framework allowing qualified private-sector cybersecurity firms to participate in government-directed operations under strict federal oversight. Supporters argue the initiative acknowledges the reality that sophisticated criminal organizations increasingly…

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a valuable diagnostic aid for patients suffering from rare and difficult-to-identify medical conditions, reducing what has traditionally been years-long searches for answers. The technology is helping detect subtle patterns that may escape even experienced physicians, including genetic syndromes and complex disorders such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Cases highlighted in recent reporting demonstrate that AI-powered tools can identify conditions that are later confirmed through conventional genetic testing and clinical evaluation. While researchers continue to find that AI can outperform physicians in certain diagnostic exercises involving rare diseases, medical experts emphasize that these systems remain…

Artificial intelligence has taken another notable step forward in advanced mathematics after researchers reported that Anthropic’s Claude model substantially improved a longstanding lower-bound result connected to the 167-year-old Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. While the AI did not prove the hypothesis itself, it advanced the percentage of nontrivial zeros known to lie on the critical line from 41.6% to 67.2%, a result that mathematicians have described as remarkably significant. The work also highlighted an unexpected aspect of modern AI development: a non-mathematician’s encouragement and persistence helped guide the model through hundreds of unsuccessful attempts…

America is built on a proposition that is simultaneously liberating and demanding: free people are entitled to make their own choices, but they must also accept responsibility for those choices. That principle has traditionally distinguished a free society from a paternalistic one. Government may punish fraud, coercion, theft, and violence, but it should hesitate before protecting competent adults from every temptation, vice, or bad decision. Social media presents a difficult challenge to that philosophy because the central question is no longer merely whether people use these platforms excessively. It is whether the platforms have been deliberately engineered to make voluntary…

Phoebe Gates, daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has drawn renewed scrutiny after discussing how she and a business partner deliberately withheld their family backgrounds while developing a shopping startup in hopes of obtaining more candid market feedback. According to reports, the strategy instead fueled criticism that wealthy founders were attempting to obscure the considerable advantages available to them. The episode has reignited debate over whether startup culture rewards merit or entrenched privilege, with critics arguing that transparency is essential when entrepreneurs seek investor confidence and public trust. The controversy also underscores broader concerns about elite influence within the technology…

Silicon Valley has embraced a new piece of artificial intelligence-inspired jargon: “hill-climbing,” a term once confined to machine learning research that now serves as shorthand for continuous improvement in business, technology, and even personal development. The phrase describes an optimization process in which incremental adjustments produce progressively better outcomes, mirroring how AI systems refine their performance through feedback. Leading technology executives have increasingly adopted the expression to describe corporate AI strategies and product development, while startup founders and engineers use it to characterize everything from career advancement to parenting. As AI becomes more deeply integrated into the technology sector, its…