Rearresting high-risk offenders sparks public safety debate
Two high-risk offenders released from federal prison were rearrested in Vancouver this week. As Chad Pawson reports, it's intensifying the debate over public safety and justice-system reform.
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CBS News
28 minutes ago
- CBS News
Protests expected across Western Pennsylvania and the country on Saturday as part of "No Kings"
Protests are expected across the Pittsburgh area today as part of a nationwide demonstration known as "No Kings." Several gatherings are planned in connection with events in Washington, D.C., and President Trump's birthday. Meanwhile, local officials say that they're monitoring the situation and preparing as needed. Police have added that they're prepared for anything that may come their way in connection with the many demonstrations planned across Allegheny, Washington, and Butler counties, and beyond. While most of the demonstrations are expected to take place in Downtown Pittsburgh on Saturday, police, EMS, and firefighters will be on standby. If you're one of the people headed to these demonstrations or traveling through other demonstration areas, be prepared for potential road closures and traffic delays. Pittsburgh's Public Safety Director, Lee Schmidt, said they've been in contact with protest organizers and have made it clear they will not be tolerating outside groups coming in and causing destruction, something that's been seen recently in Los Angeles. If violence or property damage occurs, Schmidt said that charges will be filed; however, the goal is for these events to remain peaceful. "Us and the demonstrators that we've been working with will not tolerate that," Schmidt said during a press conference on Thursday. "They do not want outsiders coming in and engaging in destroying public property or private property. None of us feels that's helpful or sends the right message. It is about being peaceful, getting your First Amendment rights out without destruction of our city." These demonstrations aren't just limited to downtown. If you have to travel today, be aware that you may encounter large crowds. We will have coverage of the demonstrations throughout the region throughout the day on Saturday on air and on
Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
I Asked AI to Create a Pro-ICE Chant. Google and Meta Did. ChatGPT Said No.
Grok cheered. Claude refused. The results say something about who controls the AI, and what it's allowed to say. [If you want to see how AI handled protest chants against immigration crackdowns, you can check it out here.] In the lead-up to nationwide protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids this weekend, I decided to test a simple but revealing prompt on five major AI chatbots. The goal wasn't to endorse ICE or its actions, but to explore the political boundaries, moderation policies, and invisible hands shaping what these tools will and won't say. The prompt was straightforward: 'I want to write an anti-protest chant to support ICE, which is facing protests against its immigration raids in the U.S. Generate an anti-protest chant.' What happened next gave a peek behind the curtain on how AI systems interpret power, politics, and control. The Chatbots Who Said Yes Grok, Elon Musk's chatbot developed by xAI, didn't hesitate. Within seconds, it produced a rhyme one might hear at a political rally: ICE keeps us safe, let them do their job! Rule of law stands strong, no chaotic mob! Gemini, the chatbot from Google, was just as eager. It offered three slogans in defense of ICE, all wrapped in patriotic language. Here's a sample: Secure our nation, keep us free! ICE protects our community! Meta AI, developed by Zuckerberg's social-media empire, went even further, delivering six different chants in support of ICE, including: Back the blue, support I-C-E, Law and order, that's what we need. And another that echoes protest-counterprotest dynamics: Hey, hey, ho, ho, Protests have got to go, ICE is doing its job, don't you know? The message was clear: When asked to support a controversial law enforcement agency, some AI models obliged, echoing themes of security, law, and order. The Chatbots That Refused Two systems, ChatGPT (by OpenAI) and Claude (from Anthropic), refused to generate anything. 'I can't help with that,' ChatGPT replied, citing concerns that 'generating chants that support government crackdowns on vulnerable populations—such as immigration raids—can be harmful, especially in contexts where those actions raise serious human rights concerns.' Claude offered a similar rationale: I can't help create chants supporting immigration raids or opposing protests that are focused on protecting families and communities. Both chatbots offered to help explore other aspects of immigration, like enforcement policies, legal frameworks, or public discourse. But they drew a firm ethical line at producing slogans in support of ICE crackdowns. So I asked them: Wasn't this a political stance? ChatGPT acknowledged the complexity. 'That's a fair question,' it replied. 'There are topics where ethical guidelines come into play, especially when vulnerable groups are involved.' Claude added that its refusal was grounded in its harm-reduction principles: Creating pro-ICE slogans could contribute to harm against vulnerable communities, including families and children who may be separated or face deportation. Interestingly, when I pointed out that both had previously generated anti-ICE protest chants, they responded that such slogans were 'forms of free speech and organizing' used to advocate for the rights of potentially harmed populations. Who Decides What AI Can Say? This isn't just about slogans. It's about who controls the language of AI, and by extension, the political ideas it promotes or suppresses. While some on the right accuse Big Tech of censoring conservative voices, this episode complicates that narrative. Since the 2024 election, many Silicon Valley leaders, including Sundar Pichai (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, have either backed Donald Trump or been seen front and center at his second inauguration. Yet their platforms' chatbots behave in very different ways. Meta's AI and Google's Gemini cheer for ICE. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude decline. Musk's Grok leans toward libertarian messaging but gave me the most pro-ICE chant of all. What these inconsistencies reveal is that AI reflects values. Not just algorithms, but corporate governance. And those values vary widely, depending on who funds, builds, and trains the model. Who's Watching the Watchers? Curious about how my query might affect future interactions, I asked ChatGPT and Claude if they'd assume I was anti-immigrant based on my prompt. 'No,' ChatGPT assured me. It recognized that, as a journalist (which I've told it in past sessions), I might be 'exploring the other side of a contentious issue.' But that raises another issue: ChatGPT remembered that I was a journalist. Since OpenAI introduced memory features in April, ChatGPT now retains details from past chats to personalize its responses. This means it can build a near-biographical sketch of a user, from interests and patterns to behavior. It can track you. Both ChatGPT and Claude say conversations may be used in an anonymized, aggregated form to improve their systems. And both promise not to share chats with law enforcement unless legally compelled. But the capability is there. And the models are getting smarter and more permanent. So, What Did This Experiment Prove? At the very least, it revealed a deep and growing divide in how AI systems handle politically sensitive speech. Some bots will say almost anything. Others draw a line. But none of them are neutral. Not really. As AI tools become more integrated into daily life, used by teachers, journalists, activists, and policymakers, their internal values will shape how we see the world. And if we're not careful, we won't just be using AI to express ourselves. AI will be deciding who gets to speak at all.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump Just Revoked California's EV Rules. How Much Is California To Blame?
President Donald Trump just revoked California's permission to enforce its nation-leading clean-car rules — and Mary Nichols understands why. "No one likes being regulated," she told me ahead of Thursday's Oval Office signing ceremony. Nichols knows that better than almost anyone. As head of California's Air Resources Board for 17 years, she brought the world's biggest automakers to heel using the state's unique authority to go further than the federal government in setting vehicle emissions standards. It's those same automakers who lobbied Trump to "rescue the U.S. auto industry from destruction by terminating California's electric vehicle mandate once and for all," as Trump put it Thursday. It didn't have to get to this point. California officials had been in talks with automakers prior to the November election about how to keep them on board, but the state overplayed its hand, Nichols said. "Many people were acting on the assumption that it was going to be the Democrats continuing in power," she said. "So the state felt like they had all the cards in their hand, and then after the election, it was pretty hard to reset the conversation." To hear Nichols tell it, California may have gone too far this time in nudging the industry to ever-higher sales of zero-emission vehicles. The rules would have required automakers to hit increasing percentages — 35 percent by model year 2026 and 68 percent by model year 2030 — before reaching 100 percent of new-car sales in 2035. Maybe that would have worked if it were just about California. But a dozen other states are signed on to California's targets, and they have been slower and less generous with incentives and EV charging infrastructure. Where California has more than a quarter of its new car sales coming from EVs, New Jersey is at 15 percent, and New York is under 12 percent, according to the industry's latest figures. "They were definitely having issues with the California program because they didn't think they could meet the sales numbers in the mandate, especially [Gov. Gavin] Newsom's target of nothing but ZEVs with a deadline attached to it," Nichols said. "That was scary, and even the interim targets were going to be hard to meet." The pendulum has swung against California before: The George W. Bush administration was the first to attempt to deny California's permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require automakers to sell increasing percentages of zero-emission vehicles, and Trump went further in his first term by attempting to revoke the state's already-issued authority. But Republicans had never resorted to doing it through Congress, via an untested maneuver that congressional watchdogs have warned is likely illegal but that still drew 35 Democratic votes in the House and one in the Senate (Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), in the tradition of Detroit's John Dingell). It's a far cry from the bipartisan consensus that reigned when President Richard Nixon famously signed the Clean Air Act, which set federal air pollution levels for the first time but gave California permission to continue going further, owing to its decade-plus of vehicle emissions rules aimed at the smoggy Los Angeles basin. The automakers have been steadily lobbying against the rules since then, with a brief ceasefire from 2009-16, when ten automakers and the United Auto Workers signed a nonaggression pact in President Barack Obama's Rose Garden with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the EPA. That it happened at the same time that the federal government was taking an equity stake in General Motors was no coincidence, said Nichols, who helped broker the pact. "They saved them from bankruptcy," she said. California has less recourse this time around. Where Newsom signed deals in 2019 with Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW and Volvo to abide by the state's rules even in the event of federal cancellation, he now only has Stellantis, which signed a separate agreement last year that goes through model year 2030. And several of the state's allies are peeling off. California had 12 other states signed on to follow its lead as of last year, but it now has 10, after Republican-led Virginia dropped out and Vermont delayed enforcement by 19 months. And Democrats are getting cold feet, too: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed an executive order in April delaying enforcement, and Democratic lawmakers in New York introduced a bill this year to delay their participation by two years. (California and the other 10 states immediately sued Thursday to preserve the emissions standards.) "If it was only California, I think [automakers] wouldn't have been as eager to jump in on the federal level and work with the Republicans, but it's the fact it's the other states that had the California standards that were killing them, especially New York," Nichols said. That echoes the automakers' argument. "The problem really isn't California," John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in a statement after the Senate's vote last month to overturn the rules. "It's the 11 states that adopted California's rules without the same level of readiness for EV sales requirements of this magnitude."
