Latest news with #Peffer
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Broward judge denies violating judicial conduct code over deepfake AI call
Broward County Judge Lauren Peffer in a new court filing Friday formally denied the ethics charges filed against her, stemming from her promotion of a scandalous book and a deepfake AI recording during her campaign last year. In the routine filing with Florida's Supreme Court, Peffer denied the Judicial Qualifications Commission's charges filed last month that she violated judicial ethics rules that govern 'inappropriate political activity.' Peffer, a first-time judicial candidate, won her seat in August and began her term in January. During her campaign, which centered on trustworthiness and ethics in the judiciary, Peffer referenced in an endorsement interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board a book written and published by a former courthouse employee in the Orlando area called, 'The Ninth Circus Court of Florida, My 30-Year Job from Hell!' The book, written by someone who had been terminated, 'portrays the judiciary in the Ninth Judicial Circuit as corrupt and incompetent and attacks the character' of numerous judges, including current Chief Judge Lisa Munyon, according to the JQC's charging document. Peffer wrote in response to a Sun Sentinel editorial board questionnaire that the book's 'recent revelations' had 'highlighted an image crisis within Florida's judiciary,' according to the JQC's notice of formal charges. At the time Peffer cited the book in the Sun Sentinel interview, it lacked any published reviews and appeared to have generated no public discourse or impact, the Sun Sentinel previously reported. Asked by the Sun Sentinel about evidence of the book creating public mistrust, Peffer sent the newspaper a link to an 18-minute recording of what purported to be a phone call about the book between Munyon, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz and Justice Renatha Francis, according to the notice of charges. But the recording was fake, likely made with generative AI, and could be deemed so by 'any reasonable person,' the JQC said in its notice of charges. Broward judicial candidate drops Orlando author's self-published tell-all from her campaign stump speech Peffer was forwarded the link to the recording 'by another lawyer,' her response filed Friday said. Peffer in her response to the charges on Friday acknowledged that she had not 'carefully listened to the call but had a recollection that the judiciary was being criticized in the recording' and did not try to determine its veracity before providing it to the newspaper. 'Judge Peffer acknowledges that she should have more carefully listened to the recording before referencing it in her answers to the editorial board. In responding to these proceedings, Judge Peffer listened to the recordings without distraction, and it was immediately apparent that the purported phone call was a 'deep fake,'' her response said. However, she denied that she shared the recording 'despite clear evidence of its inauthenticity,' as the JQC alleged in its charges. In her response, Peffer also admitted that she never read the disgruntled employee's book before referencing it to the Sun Sentinel and did not research the claims the employee made. 'Judge Peffer did not intend to promote the validity of the book but instead, she intended to point to the book as an example of criticism of the judiciary,' her response said. She previously acknowledged issues with the book in a July interview with the Sun Sentinel and said she would stop citing it. Peffer denied that she 'ignored' the Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee's training on campaign ethics as the notice of charges alleged and denied that she 'helped facilitate the former employee's farce,' according to her response.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Y Combinator Startup Firecrawl Offers $1M For AI Agents That Blog, Code, And Do Customer Support Without Sleeping
Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is offering up to $1 million to hire three autonomous AI agents, one for blogging, one for customer support, and one for software development. According to founder Caleb Peffer, the listings attracted approximately 50 applicants within the first week of going live, signaling strong early interest in the concept of autonomous AI employment, TechCrunch reports. Don't Miss: Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Firecrawl develops AI-optimized web crawlers designed to help enterprises collect structured data for large language models. According to TechCrunch, rather than simply building tools for AI, the company is now seeking to hire AI agents as autonomous employees. Firecrawl's new job posts on Y Combinator's job board are labeled for 'AI agents only.' The company wants three distinct AI agents, each with a clear job description, performance expectations, and a monthly salary between $5,000 and $25,000. According to an X post made by Peffer on May 9, the full budget for this project tops $1 million. The first role is for a content creation agent designed to function as a full-stack marketing machine. According to the job description, this agent would write SEO-optimized blog posts, analyze engagement metrics, and continuously evolve its content based on real-time performance. Its goal is to produce content that ranks, converts, and improves itself without human interference. Trending: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — The second position is for a junior developer agent tasked with triaging GitHub issues, writing documentation, and submitting production-ready code in both TypeScript and Go. This agent is expected to function like a 10x engineer assistant: fast, accurate, and endlessly scalable, the job description says. The third position is a customer support engineer agent capable of answering tickets in under two minutes. The job description says the agent must understand when to escalate an issue and learn from repeated interactions. According to the job post, prior customer support experience is preferred, a wink at the fact that this job is ideally suited for a semi-autonomous AGI trained on thousands of support threads. While the ads are targeted at autonomous agents, Firecrawl is also open to hiring the humans who design and build these agents, Peffer's X post says. The company may also hire the humans who build the agents, whether as full-time employees, contractors, or external startups, TechCrunch founder acknowledges the limits of current AI, saying that the dream agent doesn't exist yet. But he believes the future belongs to humans who can deploy and manage AI armies, not just use AI tools. 'AI can't replace humans today. The future, what we see, is a world where the next 10x engineers are operating armies of agents, AI systems that they're building, maintaining, and monitoring. What we want to do is work with people that want to be those agent operators,' Peffer told TechCrunch. Firecrawl isn't the only startup hiring AI agents. Across Y Combinator's job board, demand for AI agents and agent developers is climbing. From customer service bots to autonomous coders, Silicon Valley startups are betting big on modular, multi-agent systems, TechCrunch reports. With a bold $1 million wager and a head start in building ethical crawling infrastructure, Firecrawl is positioning itself at the forefront of the AI agent movement. Read Next: Invest where it hurts — and help millions heal:. Deloitte's fastest-growing software company partners with Amazon, Walmart & Target – Image: Shutterstock Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Y Combinator Startup Firecrawl Offers $1M For AI Agents That Blog, Code, And Do Customer Support Without Sleeping originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judicial watchdog files charges against Broward judge who promoted salacious rumors, AI recording in campaign
The state's official judicial ethics watchdog has filed formal charges against a newly elected Broward judge who promoted a salacious tell-all and a deepfake recording during her 2024 campaign. Lauren Peffer, whose term on the bench began in January after she won the August 2024 primary, campaigned on a platform of restoring public confidence in the judiciary. As evidence that of that loss in confidence, Peffer made public references to a self-published book called 'The Ninth Circus Court of Florida,' a tell-all written by a former employee of the Orlando-area court system. Those references to the book were made in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel's Editorial Board when seeking the media company's endorsement. The Sun Sentinel did not endorse her. The book painted the Ninth Circuit as a hotbed of corruption, but as Peffer's 2024 campaign was taking shape, there was no indication that the book Peffer promoted had any impact in that judicial circuit. It had no published reviews and no news organizations wrote or broadcast any stories about it. Asked by the South Florida Sun Sentinel in June about the apparent silence surrounding the book, Peffer provided a link to a recording that purported to be a conversation about the book between Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz and Lisa Munyon, chief administrative judge of the Ninth Circuit. On the recording, those two judges are supposedly joined by Florida Supreme Court Justice Renatha Francis. The recording was a fake, according to all three judges and the Judicial Qualifications Commission notice of charges, which accuse Peffer of failing to maintain the 'dignity appropriate to judicial office and act in a manner consistent with the impartiality, integrity, and independence of the judiciary,' as outlined in the state judicial canons. 'Artificially created deepfakes are a tool for misinformation and digital impersonation used to influence elections and spread disinformation,' the Judicial Qualifications Commission wrote in its announcement of formal charges. 'Your campaign theme was to restore the public's trust, but your behavior did the opposite and brought harm to the dignity and integrity of the judiciary.' Peffer acknowledged the problems with the book in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel in July and promised to stop referring to it in her campaign. She won the election with 52.5% of the vote. But according to the JQC, she should never have cited the book in the first place. She admitted she never spoke to the author of the tell-all, never spoke to any of the judges involved in the accusations, and never tried to authenticate the recording before sharing it. 'Rather than promote public confidence in the judiciary, your actions eroded public confidence by perpetuating a false perception of illegal, unethical, or immoral conduct by Justices of the Florida Supreme Court, a Chief Judge, and others working within the judicial branch,' the JQC wrote. Peffer has 20 days to file a written response to the charges. She released a statement Friday afternoon pointing out that she had no ties to the author of the Ninth Circuit book, whose website also posted the deepfake recording. 'My sole intent was to provide an example of the scrutiny a judge faces and why the judiciary must hold itself to the highest moral standard,' she said. 'While unintentional, I take responsibility for my actions and apologize for the unfortunate effects my reference may have caused my fellow judiciary members.' Rafael Olmeda can be reached at rolmeda@ or 954-356-4457. Follow him on
ABC News
27-04-2025
- Health
- ABC News
WorkSafe ACT investigation finds life-threatening work conditions for nurses after ‘serious' assaults
Nurses and allied health workers' lives were put at risk by a failure of safety protocols, according to the ACT's workplace safety watchdog. The ruling follows four assaults on nurses or allied health workers carrying out home visits in March. Canberra Health Services (CHS) chief executive Dave Peffer said the assaults were serious. "Serious enough to require medical assessment…we did offer occupational violence leave, and that was certainly taken up," Mr Peffer said. The incidents occurred during home visits as part of the Hospital in the Home and Belconnen Recovery Service programs run by CHS. Canberra Health Services chief executive Dave Peffer says they are working closely with WorkSafe to improve practices. ( ABC News: Mark Moore ) The staff involved have since returned to work. The assaults were severe enough that CHS was required by law to report them to the workplace safety watchdog WorkSafe ACT. A WorkSafe investigation into the incidents found: "The situations resulted in physical and psychological harm to the affected workers and had serious potential to result in the death of a person." "That's the finding of WorkSafe, and we don't step away from that at all," Mr Peffer said. "We've taken that on board, and that's why we've been working so closely with the regulator to improve our practices." Years of raising safety concerns However, Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) ACT Regional Secretary Maddy Northam said she wasn't surprised to hear about the assaults, because members had been raising safety concerns for years. She said nurses and midwives attempting to provide hospital level care in patients' homes often encountered "really scary situations". "We've had members who have had the front door opened and the patient or a family member may be holding a machete or a knife or an axe or chain," Ms Northam said. "There are firearms present, guns, bows and arrows." CPSU ACT regional secretary Maddy Northam said members were forced into very scary situations during in-home visits. ( ABC News ) She said members' reporting such incidents had not lead to change. "CPSU members at Canberra Health Services have been raising pretty serious safety concerns about home visits for more than two years now," Ms Northam said. Improvement and prohibition notices As part of its assessment of the assaults, WorkSafe issued six improvement notices and one prohibition notice to CHS in March in relation to home visit safety protocols. These notices list changes and improvements CHS are required to make under the Work Health and Safety Act. Union representatives say health staff face dangerous situations when attempting to provide in-home healthcare. ( ABC News: Maren Preuss ) WorkSafe found the risk assessments used for home visits were "ineffective", the alarm systems "unsafe" and required a series of changes in order to better protect staff. CHS has now undergone those mandatory changes and the safety notices have been lifted. A CHS spokesperson said some of the actions taken included strengthening the risk assessment tool, mandatory training for staff before a home visit and ensuring staff have a duress device and that their manager always knew where they were. However, Ms Northam said CPSU members felt let down. " Our members are really disappointed that it took an unprecedented prohibition notice from WorkSafe to actually get CHS to listen. " 'Almost impossible to foresee' Mr Peffer said safety issues had been raised over the past few years but denied it was the WorkSafe notice that finally brought about action. "I acknowledge that these have been issues that have been raised throughout the years, and to be fair to the to many of our teams, they have adjusted their processes," he said. "Occupational violence is something we've been working on for a long time, for many years. It didn't start when these incidents occurred, and certainly it won't end tomorrow. "Some of the situations where assaults have occurred it is almost impossible to foresee that that would have happened." In 2024 there were six assaults on nurses and allied health workers in the home care programs run by CHS. More broadly, there were 43 instances of occupation violence across CHS services. In March Mr Peffer, in a regular update to staff, wrote: "Team, that's 43 too many. As an organisation we've let our team members down — and for that I am deeply sorry." More than sorry Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation ACT Branch secretary Carlyn Fidow said its members had also raised safety concerns several times over many years. ANMF ACT branch secretary Carlyn Fidow says she "wasn't surprised" to hear about the four assaults after raising concerns multiple times. ( ABC News: Mark Moore ) She said an apology wasn't enough. "Nurses and midwives — they don't want to hear apologies for it after the fact," Ms Fidow said. "They want to see some action. They want to know that their employer is going to do something to address the assaults in a timely manner. "Over many years, we have continued to raise safety concerns which lead to potential risk of assaults. "It shouldn't take a WorkSafe notice to get some action."
