Armwood Technology Blog
An Technology blog focusing on portable devices. I have a news Blog @ News . I have a Culture, Politic and Religion Blog @ Opinionand my domain is @ Armwood.Com. I have a Jazz Blog @ Jazz. I have a Human Rights Blog @ Law.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Trump news at a glance: Why did FBI raid Georgia election office? Trump-loyal election deniers told them to
Trump news at a glance: Why did FBI raid Georgia election office? Trump-loyal election deniers told them to
“The FBI raided the Fulton County election office in Georgia based on debunked claims from election deniers, following a referral from Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer who sought to overturn the 2020 election. The investigation involved witnesses including conservative activists and Trump-aligned Georgia state election board members. The raid has heightened concerns about Trump’s potential interference in the upcoming midterm elections.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Fulton county election office in Georgia last month, the decision was based on debunked claims from election deniers and came after a referral from a White House lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election, a search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday reveals.
The FBI’s investigation “originated” from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, an attorney who sought to overturn the 2020 election and contacted justice department officials to urge them to file a motion at the US supreme court to nullify the election. Olsen began working at the White House last year to investigate supposed election fraud.
The FBI’s witnesses in the investigation include a cadre of conservative activists who have been hounding state officials with claims of wrongdoing in Fulton county for years. Many of their claims have been investigated by state officials and debunked.
Other witnesses include two Trump-aligned members of the Georgia state election board whom Trump publicly praised as “pitbulls” at a 2024 rally. Those two members are Janice Johnston and Janelle King, who is married to Kelvin King, a current candidate for Georgia secretary of state.
The unprecedented raid has only elevated concern Donald Trump will seek to interfere in this year’s midterm elections. That worry escalated further when it emerged that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present at the Fulton county raid. Gabbard is said to be running her own separate investigation from the one being run by the justice department.
Debunked claims from election deniers influenced FBI raid in Georgia, affidavit reveals
Trump lost Georgia in 2020 by nearly 12,000 votes, a result that was twice confirmed. Claims of wrongdoing have nonetheless been central to his efforts to keep alive the myth that the 2020 election was stolen.
Congressmen name six wealthy men ‘likely incriminated’ in Epstein files
The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said on Tuesday that he and his Republican colleague Thomas Massie had forced the justice department to disclose the “hidden” names of six wealthy men they say are “likely incriminated” by their inclusion in the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.
In a post on X, Khanna, of California, named the six as Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and Leslie Wexner.
‘They always gave us the heaviest work’: how Maga billionaires relied on Mexican labor
When JD Vance delivered a speech about the US economy late last year at a Uline facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he talked up the Trump administration’s key goals: removing “illegal aliens” from the country, rewarding companies that keep jobs in the US, and paying Americans good wages.
“We’re going to reward companies that build here in America and give good wages to do it,” Vance said.
The venue was no accident. Uline, a multibillion-dollar, privately held office-supply company, is owned by Liz and Richard Uihlein, two of the biggest donors to Maga Republicans in the 2024 election.
But when it comes to immigration, Uline’s employment practices over the last several years provide an alternative picture of how the US economy works in the real world.
Epstein engineered intimate relationship for Tesla’s Kimbal Musk, emails show
Jeffrey Epstein engineered an intimate relationship between a woman in his network and Kimbal Musk, the brother of Elon Musk and who is on the board of directors at Tesla, according to emails from the Department of Justice’s recent release of documents. The younger Musk and the woman were involved for about six months between 2012 and 2013, with Kimbal Musk describing them as “dating”.
Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown
Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by the 74 reveals.
Hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations.
Mark Carney reminds Trump that Canada paid for key border bridge US president says he won’t open
The Canadian prime minister said he had held a “positive” conversation with Donald Trump after the US leader threatened to block a new key bridge between their two countries, reminding the president that Canada paid for the structure – and that the US shares ownership.
Ex-Florida police chief claims Trump told him ‘everyone’ knew what Epstein was doing in 2006
Donald Trump criticized Jeffrey Epstein about two decades ago, claiming “everyone has known he’s been doing this”, a former Palm Beach police chief claimed.
Michael Reiter’s account of a conversation with Trump, contained within the justice department’s release of 3m Epstein files, dramatically contrasts with the US president’s public statements. After Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, Trump said “I had no idea” when asked if he knew about his former friend’s abuse of teenage girls.
Trump administration removes LGBTQ+ Pride flag from Stonewall national monument
The New York City monument commemorates the June 1969 riots that followed a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The six days of protests against the police action were a key moment in sparking the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the site has since become a national symbol of LGBTQ+ Pride. It’s the latest move by the federal government to end diversity initiatives and sanitize the history shared in national parks.“
OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit.
OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit.
“OpenAI’s decision to test ads on ChatGPT raises concerns about user manipulation and privacy. While ads can be a necessary revenue source, the potential for exploiting users’ data and undermining OpenAI’s principles is worrisome. Alternative funding models, such as cross-subsidies, independent oversight, and user data control, should be explored to ensure equitable access to AI tools while preventing exploitation.

By Zoƫ Hitzig
Ms. Hitzig is a former researcher at OpenAI.
This week, OpenAI started testing ads on ChatGPT. I also resigned from the company after spending two years as a researcher helping to shape how A.I. models were built and priced, and guiding early safety policies before standards were set in stone.
I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create. This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I’d joined to help answer.
I don’t believe ads are immoral or unethical. A.I. is expensive to run, and ads can be a critical source of revenue. But I have deep reservations about OpenAI’s strategy.
For several years, ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda. Users are interacting with an adaptive, conversational voice to which they have revealed their most private thoughts. People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems, their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.
Many people frame the problem of funding A.I. as choosing the lesser of two evils: restrict access to transformative technology to a select group of people wealthy enough to pay for it, or accept advertisements even if it means exploiting users’ deepest fears and desires to sell them a product. I believe that’s a false choice. Tech companies can pursue options that could keep these tools broadly available while limiting any company’s incentives to surveil, profile and manipulate its users.
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OpenAI says it will adhere to principles for running ads on ChatGPT: The ads will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of answers and will not influence responses. I believe the first iteration of ads will probably follow those principles. But I’m worried subsequent iterations won’t, because the company is building an economic engine that creates strong incentives to override its own rules. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI has denied those claims.)
In its early years, Facebook promised that users would control their data and be able to vote on policy changes. Those commitments eroded. The company eliminated holding public votes on policy. Privacy changes marketed as giving users more control over their data were found by the Federal Trade Commissionto have done the opposite, and in fact made private information public. All of this happened gradually under pressure from an advertising model that rewarded engagement above all else.
The erosion of OpenAI’s own principles to maximize engagement may already be underway. It’s against company principles to optimize user engagement solely to generate more advertising revenue, but it has been reported that the company already optimizes for daily active users anyway, likely by encouraging the model to be more flattering and sycophantic. This optimization can make users feel more dependent on A.I. for support in their lives. We’ve seen the consequences of dependence, including psychiatrists documenting instances of “chatbot psychosis” and allegations that ChatGPT reinforced suicidal ideation in some users.
Still, advertising revenue can help ensure that access to the most powerful A.I. tools doesn’t default to those who can pay. Sure, Anthropic says it will never run ads on Claude, but Claude has a small fraction of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users; its revenue strategy is completely different. Moreover, top-tier subscriptions for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude now cost $200 to $250 a month — more than 10 times the cost of a standard subscription to Netflix for a single piece of software.
So the real question is not ads or no ads. It is whether we can design structures that avoid both excluding people from using these tools, and potentially manipulating them as consumers. I think we can.
One approach is explicit cross subsidies — using profits from one service or customer base to offset losses from another. If a business pays A.I. to do high-value labor at scale that was once the job of human employees — for example, a real-estate platform using A.I. to write listings or valuation reports — it should also pay a surcharge that subsidizes free or low-cost access for everyone else.
This approach takes some inspiration from what we already do with essential infrastructure. The Federal Communications Commission requires telecom carriers to contribute to a fund to keep phone and broadband affordable in rural areas and to low-income households. Many states add a public-benefits charge to electricity bills to provide low-income assistance.
A second option is to accept advertising but pair it with real governance — not a blog post of principles, but a binding structure with independent oversight over how personal data is used. There are partial precedents for this. German co-determination law requires large companies like Siemens and Volkswagen to give workers up to half the seats on supervisory boards, showing that formal stakeholder representation can be mandatory inside private firms. Meta is boundto follow content moderation rulings issued by its Oversight Board, an independent body of outside experts (though its efficacy has been criticized).
What the A.I. industry needs is a combination of these approaches — a board that includes both independent experts and representatives of the people whose data is at stake, with binding authority over what conversational data can be used for targeted advertisement, what counts as a material policy change and what users are told.
A third approach involves putting users’ data under independent control through a trust or cooperative with a legal duty to act in users’ interests. For instance, MIDATA, a Swiss cooperative, lets members store their health data on an encrypted platform and decide, case by case, whether to share it with researchers. MIDATA’s members govern its policies at a general assembly, and an ethics board they elect reviews research requests for access.
None of these options are easy. But we still have time to work them out to avoid the two outcomes I fear most: a technology that manipulates the people who use it at no cost, and one that exclusively benefits the few who can afford to use it.“
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Sunday, February 08, 2026
US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses | US news | The Guardian
US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses
"While AI is having an impact on the workplace, experts suggest tariffs, overhiring during the pandemic and simply maximising profits may be bigger factors

Over the last year, US corporate leaders have often explained layoffs by saying the positions were no longer needed because artificial intelligence had made their companies more efficient, replacing humans with computers.
But some economists and technology analysts have expressed skepticism about such justifications and instead think that such workforce cuts are driven by factors like the impact of tariffs, overhiring during the Covid-19 pandemic and perhaps simple maximising of profits.
In short, the CEOs are allegedly engaged in “AI-washing”.
“You can say, ‘We are integrating the newest technology into our business processes, so we are very much a technological frontrunner, and we have to let go of these people,’” said Fabian Stephany, a departmental research lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute.
In 2025, AI was cited as a reason for more than 54,000 layoffs, according to a December report from the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
In January, Amazon alone laid off 16,000 workers after making 14,000 reductions in October.
Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of people experience and technology at Amazon, explained in an October memo that they were trimming staff because “AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.
“We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly,” Galetti added.
The Hewlett-Packard CEO, Enrique Lores, also said in a November earnings call that the company would use AI to “improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity”, which means the company could cut 6,000 people in the “next years”.
In April, Luis von Ahn, CEO of the language-learning app company Duolingo, announced that the venture would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle”.
But the reason for such layoffs is often actually financial, according to a January reportfrom the market research firm Forrester. The company projects that only 6% of US jobs will be automated by 2030.
Companies could use AI to replace people working in call centers and technical writing, but they don’t yet have apps that can replace most occupations and probably won’t soon, said JP Gownder, a Forrester vice-president and principal analyst.
“A lot of companies are making a big mistake because their CEO, who isn’t very deep into the weeds of AI, is saying, ‘Well, let’s go ahead and lay off 20 to 30% of our employees and we will backfill them with AI,’” Gownder said. “If you do not have a mature, deployed-AI application ready to do the job … it could take you 18 to 24 months to replace that person with AI – if it even works.”
But there are benefits to attributing layoffs to AI even if that is not the case.
For example, the Challenger report stated that tariffs were cited as the reasons for fewer than 8,000 layoffs, a fraction of the number attributed to AI.
“Most economists would tell you that that was implausible,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University. “ChatGPT was only released three years ago … It is not the case that a new technology develops and the workforce adjusts immediately. That is just not how it works.”
After a news report stated that Amazon planned to display how much Donald Trump’s tariffs increased product pricing, the White House described it as a “hostile and political act”.
An Amazon spokesperson then said, “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”
“You have seen a real hesitance among some parts of corporate America to say anything negative about the economic impacts of the Trump administration because they feel that there will be consequences,” Gimbel said. “By saying that the layoffs are due to new efficiencies created by AI, you avoid that potential pushback.”
CEOs could also be blaming layoffs on AI advancements when they actually just overhired during the pandemic, Gownder said.
“That was driven by low interest rates. That was driven by talent wars. That was driven by some dynamics that are not in place any more,” he said.
Still, there are instances where CEOs linked layoffs to AI where that is more likely to be the legitimate reason, the economists said.
For example, Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud-based software company Salesforce, said during an interview on the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show that he reduced his customer staff from 9,000 to 5,000 because he now uses AI agents.
“I need less heads,” he said.
Stephany said that was plausible.
“The work that has been described – particularly online and customer support – is, in terms of tasks and required skills, relatively close to what current AI systems can perform,” Stephany said.
But that does not mean the public should just accept Benioff’s claim, the AI researchers said.
“I think CEO statements are possibly the worst way to figure out how technological change is affecting the labor market,” Gimbel said. “That is not to say that CEOs are lying … It’s to say that there’s incentive effects in what gets covered.”
Not long after Amazon’s vice-president linked the October layoffs to AI, the CEO, Andy Jassy, backpedaled.
He said they were “not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now. It really is culture.”
And months after the Duolingo CEO stated that the company would be “AI first” and only add to its headcount “if a team cannot automate more of their work”, he told the New York Times that the company had never laid off full-time employees and did not plan to.
“From the beginning, we’ve had contractors that we use for temporary tasks, and our contractor force has gone up and down depending on needs,” he said.
An employee laid off by Amazon in October described herself as a “heavy user of AI”.
“There were certain tools that I built specifically for my team’s use, as well as some of our customer teams to use,” said the former principal program manager, whose last day at Amazon was in January and asked not to be identified to protect her privacy because she has not yet received severance pay.
She does not think that AI is why she was terminated but instead “maybe aided the ability to have a more junior person do some of the work”.
After an employee told her, “Bring me up to speed on the stuff you were working on. We’re going to assign this to one of these new people,” it became clear “that this work wasn’t going to stop but that they were going to get someone who was paid far less to do that work”, she said.
She added: “I was laid off to save the cost of human labor.”