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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Science Fiction 'Hugely Shapes OpenAI's Imagination And Where They're Going,' Author Karen Hao Says
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is 'deeply obsessed' with the 2013 film Her, according to technology journalist Karen Hao. 'Science fiction hugely shapes OpenAI's imagination and where they're going,' Hao said during a discussion Tuesday of her bestselling new book, Empire of AI, hosted by the Pulitzer Center in New York. More from Deadline Luca Guadagnino Eyes 'Artificial' At Amazon MGM As Next Movie With Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro And 'Anora' Actor Yura Borisov Circling Sky Boss Dana Strong Raises Artificial Intelligence Copyright Concerns: "I Can't Fathom How A Small Producer Keeps Up" Tastes Great, Less Filling? Report On Meta Plan For Cheaper, Fully AI-Made Ads Boosts Tech Giant's Stock As Media Agency Shares Slump Altman 'has evoked throughout OpenAI's history his idea that Her is the thing that OpenAI should building,' the author said of the film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson. 'Artificial generative intelligence doesn't have a definition, and so they actually use pop culture as the way to describe and put a shape to the nebulous thing that they're trying to achieve.' An 'under-talked-about' current in the world of AI, Hao said, is the 'deep, intertwined relationship between science fiction and pop culture portrayals of these things and, ultimately, the technologies that we get. Because a lot of these people are sci-fi nerds and they want these things, and then it shapes their beliefs, their ideas of what they want to do.' Hao was interviewed by Marina Walker Guevara, the executive editor at the Pulitzer Center who previously oversaw the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigative journalism projects. Empire of AI, which was published two weeks ago, is one of two new books to profile Altman, along with Keach Hagey's The Optimist. Hao, by her own description, is delivering a 'critique' of the arms race that AI has become. Much of her talk focused on her reporting around the world documenting the harmful effects of AI, including communities whose water supply has been compromised by data center construction. Low-paid workers in the global south, she writes, must sift through reams of objectionable content in order to train large-language models. Her book also traces the development of OpenAI, which began as a well-intentioned non-profit co-founded by Elon Musk before turning into a commercial entity worth billions of dollars and funded by Microsoft. A central question during the discussion was whether there are ways to push back against the immense wealth and dominance of Silicon Valley. 'Every community that I spoke to, regardless of that there were artists having their intellectual property taken or water activists who were having the fresh water taken, they were all saying the same exact thing. When they encounter the empire, they feel this incredible loss of agency, a profound loss of the agency to self-determine their people,' Hao said. If that loss is permitted, she argued, 'democracy cannot survive, because democracy is based on the fact that people feel that agency and they' willing to go to the booth to vote, because they know that it will matter. And so the theme that I find hopeful is that there are so many movements that I encountered around the world that are now trying to reclaim that the agency.' She cited a protest in Chile, where activists managed to hold tech companies to account for the way their AI projects were harming the water supply. 'If we we allow this to happen 100,000-times-fold, if we really amplify and support this work, that is how we can get this trajectory of air development to turn from a more imperial approach, and top-down, 'we just say whatever we want and it goes' to a more broad-based, democratically beneficial version of AI,' Hao said. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far
CBC
16-04-2025
- Politics
- CBC
How a network of journalists uncovered billion-dollar accounts and toppled world leaders
In 2011, Gerard Ryle, an Irish journalist working in Australia, received a package. Inside was a disk featuring content that would lead to multiple investigations, exposing corruption worldwide, and forcing some political leaders to resign. Ryle is the executive director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., responsible for some of the biggest international investigative stories of our time. The Offshore Leaks. The Panama Papers. The Paradise Papers. The Pandora Papers. Just to name a few. These stories uncovered billions of dollars stashed away in secret offshore accounts. Before taking the job at ICIJ, Ryle had published a major newspaper investigation into a company called Firepower. It claimed to have invented a pill that, if you put it in your gas tank, would vastly improve your mileage. The Australian government celebrated the company as a major success story. However Ryle found out that it was a Ponzi scheme, and that the pill was a scam and didn't work. Ryle later wrote a book about his investigation into Firepower. And someone who read it put a disk in the mail to Ryle. This disk would change Ryle's life dramatically, leading to the ICIJ becoming a leader in global investigations, and expose the nefarious world of dark money in offshore accounts, among other revelations. IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed recently interviewed Gerard Ryle onstage at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was part of the annual Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism. Here is an excerpt from their conversation. GR: "After I wrote the book, someone then sent me a disk in the mail, and it was like a computer hard drive. It was the offshore law firm in Singapore that had set up all the offshore structures for this particular Firepower pill." NA: But you didn't know that when you got this disk? "Well, I had a fair idea. Another tip for you as a journalist is try to get stuff anonymously because you can always then say you don't know who the source was. And so when I was dealing with the sources, I was saying, 'Well, look, if you wanted to give me this material, please just send it to me in a brown paper bag at my newspaper address.' And when it arrived, my biggest challenge was understanding it and trying to work out what it was." So what did you do with it? "Well, at that stage, I had taken a new job in Canberra, and I bribed the IT guy with beer to try and open up the disk and to let me know what was in there. I found lots of spreadsheets of names [and] a lot of material about my company, but at that point, I'd written the book and I thought, 'Well, there's nothing new that I can really do with this.'" About Firepower? "About Firepower. But I'm not making this up, but I saw all these names from around the world and I remember distinctly seeing a Canadian name that got me really interested. It was a guy…" Do you remember the name? "I don't. And I can't even replicate what I'm about to tell you because I did try and search for this afterward and I still can't find it. But it's a true story. So, I saw this Canadian guy and apparently, he'd been killed involving some sort of drug deal. I think it was in Toronto. And there I saw an email address with his offshore company and the email address was something like: 'On the run at And honestly, it was like a light bulb [moment] for me. I thought, 'Oh my God, I wish I knew a Canadian journalist, I could give this to.' But when you're an investigative reporter and you're working in one country, you really have no interest in helping anybody else. "And so I sat on the material." For how long did you sit on the material? "A few months later, again, out of the blue, I got a call from Washington D.C. And it was from [a person who] was sitting on an organization called the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. And part of the Center For Public Integrity was the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. They were desperately searching for a new director. What I hadn't realized was that the ICIJ, at the time, was really just a fundraising device for the center, for the larger organization. "The ICIJ only had one grant, it was from a Dutch foundation. And the Dutch foundation had been very critical. The ICIJ had been going for about 12 years at that point. They'd given it a three-year grant. They were saying, we won't give you another three-year grant because you're too American-focused. So I thought I was being hired for my skills. But in fact, the only reason I was being hired is that I wasn't American. "But of course, I did have this disk in my back pocket." Right. Did you tell them about the disk? "I did not. Because again, I was worried that maybe it was a story, maybe it wasn't a story. I couldn't unpack the disk. It turned out the disk had two and a half million records. And my beer-consuming IT person had only allowed me to look at a very small part of it. "But I had an instinct that there had to be a good story in there somewhere. I just needed to work out a way of doing it." I am curious: are there ethical lines or boundaries for you in terms of what you will do to get at that data, or maybe what you won't do? "It's a good question. I mean, I obviously deal with a lot of people who have stolen material, and they're giving you stuff that is stolen. And often they get a reaction, 'Well, why would you take material that has been stolen?' But I keep asking myself the same question, which again, is the question that my lawyer in the U.S. keeps asking me: 'Is the material of public interest?' Your job as a journalist is to the public. It's not to courts or anyone else. Is this material of public interest? And if it is, then I will take the material. "There are things I would never do though. I mean, I would never pay for material and there are certain ethical lines that I would never go past. But generally speaking, what I tend to do if I do manage to get a big data set is that I will sit down, look at the data first, then I would write a note to my lawyer with what I'm seeing and make a case for why we should look at that material in more detail. And that was what we did every time." Would you ever endorse the idea of hacking into any kind of database or information source? "If I did the hacking myself, I wouldn't be able to use the material. If I paid for the material, I wouldn't be able to use it, so I'm very, very careful not to cross that line. But of course, I'm aware that a lot of material has been hacked, and the last 20 years have been transformational for information. Everything has been digitized... when people actually have access to them, they can be copied quite easily. And therefore, that's why whistleblowers now give you more and more data." This hasn't come up a lot lately in public, but what do you think about WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange? "The model that he was using was very much: publish everything. And I think that was a model that went against journalism because the idea of journalism is that you filter the information. You only publish what's in the public interest, not everything. The criticism of WikiLeaks was that it was just basically raw data dumped." "One of the things I wanted to do when I took over ICIJ was literally to take on that model in a different way, to show that journalism was important, that when we publish our big data sets, we do not publish all of the information that we find. "We have people's passport details, their bank accounts, passwords to their bank accounts. That is not in the public interest. But if it's a politician or if it is a public figure who's in there and they've got a secret offshore account and it's linked to something that you can prove is in the interest, then that is the kind of material that I think we need to, as journalists, do."
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Corruption hunters say Trump's USAID cuts just made organized crime groups 'much more dangerous'
While most of the fallout from the destruction of USAID will be felt abroad, journalists who were formerly funded by the agency say that the cuts are likely to enable organized crime and corruption abroad, which ultimately impact everyday Americans. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is among the largest international investigative journalism outfits, and up until a few weeks ago, the project received significant funding from USAID. The group's reporting has been involved with some of the biggest international corruption stories in recent memory, including the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and the Russian Laundromat. Drew Sullivan, an investigative reporter and one of the founders of OCCRP, told Salon that the organization received about 38% of its operational budget from the United States government, coming through agencies like USAID, the National Endowment of Democracy and the State Department. Since the cuts came down, Sullivan said the organization has had to lay off about 40% of its staff. This has impacted reporting projects covering topics from Tren de Aragua in El Salvador to 'Ndrangheta in Italy to money laundering operations buying up real estate in the United States. Sullivan said, from even from strictly an efficiency standpoint, the cuts don't make sense, because OCCRP's investigations, and the investigations conducted by its partner organizations, have helped return more money to Americans than it costs to keep these outfits open. 'We've had a tremendous return to U.S. taxpayers. Over $3 billion has been returned to U.S. coffers in the United States,' Sullivan said. 'Every dollar invested in OCCRP has returned $100 to the U.S. Treasury or other government agencies' This, Sullivan says, is in addition to the fact that cutting funding for journalists leaves many of them vulnerable to arrest or at risk of being removed from the country they work in, as many require work visas. Pavla Holcova, a regional editor for OCCRP in Central Europe, worked on investigations into topics like the Pegasus Project and the Russian Asset Tracker. 'It's kind of short-sighted to think that the U.S. will save money by cutting this budget, because we, as journalists, getting this kind of grants, we are just keeping the environment for business much more transparent and much more accountable than it would be otherwise,' Holcova told Salon. One OCCRP investigation, for example, exposed how real estate in American cities like New York and Miami have become top destinations for those seeking to invest laundered cash. The demand for such investment properties rose to a level that developers appear to have contributed millions to New York City politicians in what appears to have been a successful effort to secure millions of dollars in tax breaks for developers building luxury properties. Holcova said, in her view, the cuts by President Donald Trump and Republicans are short-sighted and that these issues of corruption and organized crime are likely to become 'much more dangerous' if reporting teams are disassembled. Attila Biro, another journalist associated with OCCRP, reports on crime and corruption from Romania. His work in Romania led him to cover a credit-card skimming operation in Latin America. In the operation, an international gang operating in Romania and Mexico allegedly stole the credit card information of tourists by tampering with ATMs. The scheme brought in around $1.2 billion, which was funneled into real estate investments in the United States and Brazil. 'If you were a tourist and you were going to Cancun, and you were using your credit card there, there were big, big chances that your data was stolen by this organized crime group that we have investigated. We have exposed them. We have showed the authorities how they are acting, and the FBI and other law enforcement in Mexico, in Romania and other parts shut this group down,' Biro told Salon. 'You know, we are going after organized crime figures that affect everyone, no matter what type of political affiliation you have, you know, like monsters who steal from, you know, Democrats and Republicans at the same rate.'Biro said funding through OCCRP and the United States government enabled their investigation and the training of reporters to do these sorts of investigations. He said without this funding, his organization is taking things 'month by month.' As it stands, OCCRP is one of the organizations that has sued the federal government in an attempt to restore the funding it was supposed to receive, as allocated by Congress, and it joined with the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition in the suit. While the federal judge hearing the case agreed and ordered funding restored, the White House responded by claiming that, despite the court order, the administration still maintained the authority to freeze funds and terminate grants.
