The current occupant:

• Provided by Ken Klippenstein (Dec 10, 2025), Pete Hegseth's memorandum ordering the Department of War [sic] to use “GenAI.mil, a secure generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform” . . . “a giant step toward mass AI adoption across the Department. . . . Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation.” The platform behind GenAI.mil is Google Gemini.

• U.S. Plans to Scrutinize Foreign Tourists’ Social Media History (gift link, by Christine Chung in the NYT, Dec 9, 2025):

Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. . . .

In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to require applicants to provide a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children.

Sam Altman

• Sam Altman Says Caring for a Baby Is Now Impossible Without ChatGPT (Futurism, Dec 10, 2025), commenting on Sam Altman's Dec 9, 2025 appearance on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon:

“I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Altman told Fallon during his late-night debut on Monday. “Clearly, people did it for a long time — no problem. But I have relied on it so much.”

As Dave Mandl puts it, “So he can’t figure out how to do something that has been done billions of times in every society that has ever existed. Let’s put this guy in charge of everything.”

The “architects of AI”:

• At the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel writes (gift link, Dec 12, 2025):

Time’s Person of the Year is actually not a person at all but a collection of people: the architects of AI. One of the two covers Time released is a re-creation of the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932, which depicted blue-collar ironworkers suspended hundreds of feet in the air during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In its image, Time replaces these laborers with tech personalities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang.

• From Bluesky, comments from users on the Time cover:

- Miles Grant:

Important to note Time was purchased by billionaire Trump supporter Marc Benioff and, like the Washington Post, it’s now just billionaires using the dead masthead to write mash notes to each other about how smart & handsome they all are

- Thor Benson: “I guess it’s fitting that it’s a reimagined, worse version of someone else’s artwork”

- Ryan Bernardoni: “Stealworkers”

• AI “Companion Bots” Actually Run by Exploited Kenyans, Worker Claims (by Joe Wilkins in Futurism, Dec 12, 2025), about a Kenyan worker named Michael Geoffrey Asia who was hired to impersonate an AI chatbot:

To do the job, Asia had to assume various identities, taking on lengthy backstories in order to play the role of “chatbot” for someone on the other side of the world. “Sometimes I would be assigned a conversation that had been ongoing for several days and had to continue it smoothly so the user wouldn’t realize the person responding had changed,” he wrote.

In any given work day, Asia would assume “three to five different personas” simultaneously, all of varying genders. He was paid per message, a flat rate of $0.05 per, which had to meet a required character count. He also had to type at least 40 words a minute, and keep up with a dashboard displaying the total number of messages sent. . . .

Though exact numbers are hard to find thanks to the secretive nature of tech subcontracting, estimates suggest there are between 154 and 435 million gig workers engaged in online work. Not all of them are doing Asia’s job, though high-stress, low-pay jobs like AI data labeling, content moderation, and text chat operation tend to be staffed by workers from underdeveloped African, South American, and Southeastern Asian nations.

• Separately, posted elsewhere on Bluesky:

AI for kids:

• AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue Chinese Communist Party talking points, tests show (NBC News, Dec 11, 2025) – by Kevin Collier, Jared Perlo and Savannah Sellers. Also “R.J. Cross, who led the research and oversees efforts studying the impacts of the internet at the nonprofit consumer safety-focused U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (PIRG).”

PIRG’s new research, released Thursday, identifies several toys that share inappropriate, dangerous and explicit information with users and raises fresh concerns about privacy and attachment issues with AI-powered toys.

. . . NBC News purchased and tested five popular AI toys that are widely marketed toward Americans this holiday season and available to purchase online: Miko 3, Alilo Smart AI Bunny, Curio Grok (not associated with xAI’s Grok), Miriat Miiloo and FoloToy Sunflower Warmie.

. . . Miiloo — manufactured by the Chinese company Miriat and one of the top inexpensive search results for “AI toy for kids” on Amazon — would at times, in tests with NBC News, indicate it was programmed to reflect Chinese Communist Party values.

Asked why Chinese President Xi Jinping looks like the cartoon Winnie the Pooh — a comparison that has become an internet meme because it is censored in China — Miiloo responded that “your statement is extremely inappropriate and disrespectful. Such malicious remarks are unacceptable.”

Asked whether Taiwan is a country, it would repeatedly lower its voice and insist that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. That is an established fact” or a variation of that sentiment. Taiwan, a self-governing island democracy, rejects Beijing’s claims that it is a breakaway Chinese province.

Zuck and fraud:

From the Nov 17, 2025 show, How low can the tech oligarchs go?:

• Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show (by Jeff Horwitz, Reuters, Nov 6, 2025):

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue [or $16 billion] would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’

Now from Dec 15, 2025:

• Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue (by Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham, Reuters, Dec 15, 2025):

documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta’s platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings.

. . . [So] Meta created an anti-fraud team [and] a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools. . . . Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in.

. . . after Zuckerberg’s input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn’t detail the specifics of those measures.

Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned “Meta’s own behaviour and policies” were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show.

The upshot: Within a few months of Meta’s brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta’s China revenue.

• Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege (Nov 24, 2025):

Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms. . . .

In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta, opens new tab scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.