Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All
So began an extensive career in bot watching. As a distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington, Menczer has studied the way bots proliferate, manipulate human beings and turn them against one another. In 2014 he was part of a team that developed the tool BotOrNot to help people spot fake accounts in the wild. He's now regarded as one of the internet's preeminent bot hunters.
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CNBC
2 hours ago
- CNBC
Trump Media builds $2 billion bitcoin hoard, as crypto swells president's net worth
Trump Media and Technology Group said Monday it has accumulated roughly $2 billion in bitcoin and related assets, as President Donald Trump's highly lucrative pivot to crypto continues to grow his net worth while in office. The bitcoin holdings now account for about two-thirds of Trump Media's total liquid assets, the company said in a press release. Trump Media shares popped as high as 9% when markets opened Monday morning. They were up around 4% at 2 p.m. ET. Trump's stake in the company — which trades on the Nasdaq under his initials, DJT — is worth nearly $2.3 billion. The announcement offered the latest marker of how Trump and his family have embraced digital currency to such a degree that crypto now accounts for most of the president's wealth on paper, according to a Forbes analysis from June. Trump, once a digital-currency skeptic, has vowed to make the U.S. the world's crypto capital. He has already taken multiple steps in that direction by signing an executive order to establish a "strategic bitcoin reserve," appointing a "crypto czar" and urging Congress to pass multiple crypto-related bills. Trump on Friday signed one of those bills, the GENIUS Act, into law after it passed with bipartisan support in the House. Trump has made millions more off of other crypto ventures, including the decentralized finance entity World Liberty Financial and the meme coin $TRUMP, whose initial coin release came just days before his inauguration. The Trump family, which owns much of World Liberty through a business entity, has made about $500 million since the venture's launch in September, according to a Reuters analysis. Trump's spokespeople have said that the president's connection to World Liberty does not create a conflict of interest because his assets are in a trust that is currently managed by his son, Donald Trump Jr. But assets in that revocable trust still belong "indirectly" to the president, who is the trust's grantor and its sole beneficiary. And the funds would be available to him after he leaves office in 2029. Critics, including Democratic lawmakers and ethics experts, warn that Trump's crypto interests and his political power create an environment ripe for corruption. "As a stakeholder in crypto assets, President Trump will likely profit from the very policies he is pursuing," the advocacy group Democracy Defenders Fund said in a report in April. Before taking office in January, Trump transferred all of DJT shares to a revocable trust managed by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. Some experts were unconvinced Trump was eliminating conflict-of-interest concerns by removing himself from direct control of the shares. Since then, Trump Media has effectively redefined itself as a crypto and financial services company. The company's first product was the Twitter-like social media platform Truth Social, which is used by Trump but has failed to generate much revenue. The company, which went public last year through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, nevertheless attracted thousands of retail investors In late January, the company announced a FinTech brand called boosted by a $250 million allocation in investments including bitcoin and exchange-traded funds. In February, the company began pursuing what it called a "strategic acquisition fund with select investors," and in March it inked a partnership with to launch a series of ETFs. In late May, the company said it raised over $2.3 billion in net proceeds from selling stock and convertible notes to about 50 institutional investors, and that it would those funds to build a bitcoin treasury. Trump Media's announcement Monday morning came less than a week after bitcoin hit an all-time high, making it by far the world's most valuable and popular cryptocurrency. The asset jumped past $120,000 as investors anticipated Congress would pass new U.S. crypto legislation to establish a clearer regulatory framework for the nascent industry. "We're rigorously implementing our publicly announced strategy and fulfilling our bitcoin treasury plan," Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said in Monday's release. "These assets help ensure our Company's financial freedom, help protect us against discrimination by financial institutions, and will create synergies with the utility token we're planning to introduce across the Truth Social ecosphere," Nunes said.
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
Tesla CEO Elon Musk back to ‘sleeping in the office' ahead of earnings this week
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is back to 'sleeping in the office' as he tries to reassure shareholders that his companies have his full attention following the end of his controversial stint in the White House. 'Back to working 7 days a week and sleeping in the office if my little kids are away,' Musk wrote in a post on X, his social media platform formerly known as Twitter, in the early hours Sunday morning. Tesla is scheduled to make its first earnings report since Musk stepped down from his White House role on Wednesday. 3 Tesla CEO Elon Musk and President Trump speak to reporters as they display Tesla vehicles in the White House driveway. REUTERS His time at DOGE left behind lasting brand damage, as protesters against his severe government spending cuts set Tesla vehicles ablaze and demonstrated at showrooms. But the world's richest man also saw shareholders grow concerned that his time was split between too many responsibilities – the White House role and his five other companies, including X, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink and The Boring Company. It's been this wobbly public opinion around Musk that has rocked the stock, which stood at around $250 a share when the Tesla founder endorsed Trump in July 2024. It soared to a record high of $488.54 a share shortly after Trump's inauguration – even as the automaker continued to report flailing sales. The stock boost was thanks to optimism that Musk's close friendship with Trump could result in EV-friendly White House policies. That trend reversed course in April, when Tesla stock traded below $215 as the automaker reported a decline in sales and fears that Trump's tariffs would reheat inflation worsened. A full-blown meltdown between Trump and Musk on social media in early June didn't help matters. 3 Elon Musk stands near President Trump during a press briefing in the Oval Office. AP Musk agreed with a call for the president's impeachment and claimed Trump was in the Jeffrey Epstein files, while Trump wrote that Musk had gone 'CRAZY.' Tesla sold 721,000 vehicles in the first half of the year, down 13% from the same period last year – flaming fears that Musk's Trump-aligned politics were turning off left-leaning EV customers. Wall Street analysts had expected sales closer to 970,000 in the first half, according to FactSet. Tesla sold about 384,000 cars in the second quarter, which came in line with reduced expectations. 3 Elon Musk speaks at the Vivatech fair in 2023. AP On Wednesday, analysts are expecting earnings of about 40 cents a share, down from about 50 cents in the same quarter last year. If earnings fall again, it will be the sixth quarterly decline in a row for Tesla. Investors are hoping to hear updates on Tesla's recent robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas and its planned rollout of AI humanoid robots, which it plans to start selling in significant volumes next year. Shareholders are also eager to hear details on a long-awaited Tesla vehicle sold at a lower price point. Yet it's arguably most important for investors to hear that Musk is back to actively leading Tesla and plans to stay there for a while.
Scientific American
6 hours ago
- Scientific American
How Humility Can Restore Trust in Expertise
Whom would you trust more: an expert who seems to have all of the answers or one who admits what they don't know? We have spent the past five years studying that question and the many ways people may respond. Our research was sparked by a recurring tension we both noticed early in our academic careers. Our graduate studies made us deeply aware of how little we knew about our respective research areas, even as we developed specialized knowledge in these fields. Scholars call this particular variety of self-awareness ' intellectual humility,' and it's something we suspect many experts encounter as they transition into a new role. On the other hand, barely anyone seemed to expect us to be intellectually humble in our then new positions. People seemed to engage with us as know-it-all, capital-E experts who could confidently answer any questions that were even remotely related to our specialties. The scariest part was that we could have easily exploited these opportunities to share our opinions on topics well beyond our expertise. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. These experiences got us thinking about the importance of humility among experts. There is value in having confidence in what you know, but being truthful about the limits of your knowledge is also important, even if it's not always encouraged. Research has linked intellectual humility with many desirable behaviors, including considering others' perspectives, being better at conflict resolution and being less dogmatic. Conversely, when experts claim to know more than they actually do, this is not only a betrayal of trust but also potentially disastrous in terms of promoting healthy public discourse. Given these high stakes, we decided to study how people think about expertise and humility. We discovered that, indeed, many people assume a true expert 'knows all'—even though that's highly unlikely. We propose that encouraging others to value intellectual humility in experts could be critical to correcting that tendency. We designed a series of studies to understand how people think about experts. Our first was a simple survey. We asked 100 paid participants (recruited through an online research platform) to freely describe their understanding of expertise. In our next study, we analyzed about 200 posts on Twitter (now X) that related to experts during the onset of the COVID pandemic. And in our third study, we asked 700 online participants to tackle a word sorting task in which they identified and grouped different terms (such as 'knowledge' or 'qualifications') into broader perspectives on expertise. Across these studies, our results suggested that most people assume that exceptional knowledge is a defining feature of expertise. The notion that expertise is defined by solving problems and getting results was also a recurring tendency, as was the belief that specialist training and education are central to expertise. At first glance, these understandings of expertise seem obvious and benign. There's nothing wrong with using credentials and a demonstrated record of overcoming problems to evaluate someone's position as an expert. Our concern, however, is that relying on these criteria alone may leave some people vulnerable to perceiving expertise in those who only appear to know their stuff—in other words, those who simply project confidence. Much research has shown that the link between confidence and competence is far from straight forward. From this standpoint, defining expertise largely in terms of knowledge and capability may ironically make people more vulnerable to following those who simply project these qualities rather than actual experts. We argue that humility is a trait worth valuing just as much as competence when thinking about experts. Across our datasets, a small portion of respondents linked expertise with intellectual humility. One participant wrote about how experts are people who come to the 'humble realization that you'll always be a student and there is a lot more to learn.' Or, as one Twitter user put it, 'A tell-tale sign of an expert is that if they don't know something, they will say so.' Our studies also showed that expecting experts to be all-knowing might contribute to significant problems. For example, people could develop unrealistically high expectations of those in expert roles, leading to disappointment, anger or resentment when they inevitably fail to deliver on those expectations. Some of the tweets we gathered during the pandemic pointed to such frustration, with one person writing, 'Your 'experts' have caused 1000s to die.' After our initial studies, we wanted to dig deeper into attitudes around humble experts, so we designed and conducted an online experiment with 200 managers. We asked our participants to watch one of three videos. One video highlighted the value of a humble expert. Another depicted the upsides of a highly confident, gets-things-done expert. And the third acted as a control that simply focused on negotiation styles. After they watched the videos, we asked our participants to imagine themselves collaborating with a legal specialist who was open and transparent about the limitations of his expertise. Afterward, our participants rated the specialist on various criteria, measuring the extent to which they saw him as an expert. We found that showing people a relatively short and simple video that explained the virtues of a humble expert led those participants to rate the specialist in the vignette more highly than those participants who watched the other videos. In a second, scenario-based experiment, we asked 240 managers with hiring experience to watch their respective videos and then review an application package from a job candidate for a sustainability specialist in a (fictional) organization. Some of the applications portrayed the candidate as highly confident and assured. Others presented someone humble and open about their limitations. Much like the first experiment, our videos could push people to recognize a particular candidate as more (or less) of an expert, depending on the video they viewed. In future research, we want to see if it's possible to create more substantial changes in how people understand expertise—changes that endure for weeks, months and potentially years. We want to know whether helping people prize intellectual humility in experts might make them better at detecting when someone is venturing beyond the boundaries of their expertise. In the spirit of humility, we also need to acknowledge our work's limitations. Our research is not a perfect fix for people's vulnerability to experts who claim to know all. But ultimately, it suggests that we can shift people's thinking about experts to create environments that prize and foster intellectual humility. Doing so seems especially valuable, given the potential for intellectual humility in helping experts gain public trust and confidence. Our research gives us hope for our society and the state of expert engagement. People can and do hold nuanced understandings of expertise, and it's possible to help people move from simplistic understandings of what makes an expert to more thoughtful ones. Part of the solution may lie in valuing intellectual humility in and of itself. Interestingly, researchers have recently found that young children tend to see intellectually humble people as nicer and smarter than those who are arrogant. A shift toward valuing unwarranted confidence over humility may therefore happen later in life. Although humility is not the first quality most people consider when they think 'expert,' societies can take steps to strengthen this mental link. Doing so can ensure that humble experts, who are aware of and transparent about the limits of their expertise, are there to help humanity tackle our world's most urgent and pressing challenges.
