Nevada County DA Faces Possible Sanctions Over AI-Related Errors in Criminal Cases; The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle, August 20, 2026

HSJC Newsroom , The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle; Nevada County DA Faces Possible Sanctions Over AI-Related Errors in Criminal Cases

"The newly appointed judge’s review stems from a directive issued by the California Supreme Court in January. The high court asked the appellate court to examine more closely how far-reaching the AI-related errors were and whether they tainted the outcomes of criminal cases. In doing so, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision that would have shielded Wilson’s office from any sanctions.

Legal experts say the Nevada County episode is notable because it represents one of the first documented instances nationwide in which government prosecutors — who are typically held to a stricter ethical standard than private attorneys — have been accused of presenting AI-generated falsehoods to a court."

Surging book demand leaves NC libraries struggling with long waitlists, pricey content; NC Newsline, August 21, 2026

KATE DENNING, CAROLINA PUBLIC PRESS via NC Newsline; Surging book demand leaves NC libraries struggling with long waitlists, pricey content

"If you’re someone who frequents a North Carolina public library — especially in an urban area like Raleigh or Charlotte — you might be all too familiar with searching the catalog for a buzzy book, only to find the waitlist is hundreds, if not thousands, of people long.

Local library employees say the entire country faces this issue, but North Carolina’s booming population and the growing number of library patrons in the state make it especially challenging.

Even worse than the waitlist for physical copies is the one for e-book and audiobook versions. E-content has unique barriers, including costing libraries up to three times the price of a physical book, that make it difficult to keep up with the heightened demand...

With around 66 people moving into Wake County per day, the libraries subsequently have new patrons coming in to register for a library card every single day, Brooks said. This heightened demand can be noticed most by the surge in e-content checkouts...

‘Disappearing, limited-access content’

Demand for digital items has steadily risen, especially since the pandemic, Escalante wrote. The challenge for keeping e-content available consistently is “always going to be the increasing cost of digital licenses.”

The ULC and other national library organizations recently spoke out about the strain the licensing process and cost of e-content is putting on local branches. An open letter to book publishers says while individuals pay $13 for an e-book on average, which they maintain access to in perpetuity, libraries often spend upwards of $55 for a singular two-year license.

“Many libraries are now spending 50% or more of their collections budgets — taxpayer funds — on disappearing, limited-access content, giving them less ability to support lesser-known authors and smaller publishers,” the statement reads.

“Meanwhile, wait times for readers of all ages have exploded, as libraries spend more to get less in our digital collection.”"

Pope Leo XIV: In age of AI, the family is the first school of humanity; Vatican News, August 22, 2026

 Deborah Castellano Lubov, Vatican News; Pope Leo XIV: In age of AI, the family is the first school of humanity

""Sound legislation should encourage scientific and technological creativity while safeguarding fundamental human rights and freedoms.  It should protect users from exploitation, preserve personal privacy, ensure transparency in the use of emerging technologies and guarantee that they strengthen democratic institutions."

Pope Leo XIV expressed this conviction to the International Catholic Legislators Network in the Vatican on Friday.

Reflecting on legislation, the Pope reiterated that “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required.”

He observed that such oversight can operate at multiple levels — local, national and international — facilitating open discussion of “the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice,” ensuring "that no single ideology or interest dictates the values embedded in artificial intelligence systems."

At the same time, the Holy Father underscored, the rapid development of artificial intelligence risks creating new forms of technological dependence, with poorer nations increasingly reliant on wealthier ones.  

Subtle forms of domination

"We must remain vigilant in this regard," he said, "lest innovation become another vehicle for ideological or economic colonialism."

Sadly, he lamented, "we are presented with a subtle form of domination when algorithms decide who is seen, and who remains invisible, when digital platforms shape public discourse without accountability, and when the dignity of workers is subordinated to the optimization of systems."  

Such developments, Pope Leo warned, "reveal a new face of the ancient temptation to domination and mastery without service."

The family as the first school of humanity

Against this culture of power, the Holy Father suggested, the Church proposes “the civilization of love.”"

Over 1 million people have clicked LinkedIn’s AI slop button; The Verge, August 21, 2026

Jay Peters , The Verge; Over 1 million people have clicked LinkedIn’s AI slop button

"LinkedIn actually announced a “Seems like AI slop” button on July 30th, and the company says that a lot of people have already used it. According to a Thursday post from chief product officer Hari Srinivasan, “over a million people” have clicked on the button, which is accessible from the three dots menu on a post.

LinkedIn announced the button a few weeks after AI detector Pangram determined that 41 percent of LinkedIn’s longform posts were flagged as fully AI generated, which 404 Media reported on. Alongside the AI slop button, LinkedIn introduced “new and improved” classifiers to identify posts as AI and removed a feature that would “enhance your post” with AI.

“AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” Srinivasan said at the time, and it sounds as if the platform’s changes may be making a difference. In Thursday’s post, Srinivasan said that users are overall “now experiencing 40% less views on what we classify as AI slop from just a few weeks ago.”"

Harvard’s A.I. Clones Will Hear Your Start-Up Pitch Now; The New York Times, August 22, 2026

 Sarah Kessler, The New York Times; Harvard’s A.I. Clones Will Hear Your Start-Up Pitch Now

To create a new $699 bootcamp for entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School made A.I. versions of its faculty. 

"Bussgang is one of several teachers at Harvard Business School who volunteered to help create A.I. clones of themselves for a new eight-week entrepreneurship boot camp called H.B.S. Foundry. Harvard has tested the product, which costs $699, with more than 100 universities across 50 states.

Foundry guides participants through a framework for starting a company, from refining the idea to pitching it to investors and customers. Along with Harvard Business School content, its virtual work space includes a community of peers and access to A.I. agents — some intended to “represent” instructors. It also features video call simulations for practicing pitches, sales calls and board meetings with instructor A.I. avatars, like the one of Bussgang.

Experienced founders, investors, and Harvard Business School faculty lead weekly live sessions, but the purpose of the online portal is to guide students through A.I. resources and content from the business school for building a start-up.

The school aims to use Foundry to scale the school’s offerings far beyond the 900 or so M.B.A. students it admits each year. In that way, it is something of a case study for companies facing a similar problem: Consulting firms like PWC, law firms and, at least in one case, a church, are also experimenting with how A.I. can expand their services far beyond their human bandwidth. So are some movie directors — an A.I. version of the actor Val Kilmer, who passed away in 2025, recently appeared in the historical drama “As Deep as the Grave.”"

Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges; The Hill, August 19, 2026

REBECCA BEITSCH, The Hill; Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

"The top lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is facing an ethics complaint with the Florida Bar after he launched a “Worst of the Worst” list for federal jurists, attacking their rulings.

James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, has in recent weeks taken to social media to criticize judges who have made unfavorable rulings on the Trump administration’s immigration policies."

Trump administration moves to strip bar association’s power to accredit law schools; The Washington Post, August 21, 2026

 

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel

 and 

Mark Berman

, The Washington Post; Trump administration moves to strip bar association’s power to accredit law schools

"The Trump administration’s ongoing feud with the American Bar Association has come to a head, as the Education Department threatens to strip the organization of its power to oversee law school programs across the country."

Pentagon Fires Editor and Publisher of Independent Military Publication; The New York Times, August 21, 2026

Minho Kim, The New York Times; Pentagon Fires Editor and Publisher of Independent Military Publication

The firings at Stars and Stripes also claimed a Middle East correspondent. They are the latest effort by the Pentagon to diminish the news outlet’s editorial independence.

"The Defense Department on Friday fired the publisher and the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, a government-funded news outlet that reports on the U.S. military, according to a senior Pentagon official and the dismissed journalists.

The firings raised questions about the Pentagon’s willingness to ensure the editorial integrity of the publication that has reported extensively on difficulties faced by military communities as the war in Iran has dragged on. The terminations came about 10 days after Stars and Stripes journalists reported on hardships that Navy sailors were facing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose deployment was extended to nine months amid the war.

On Friday, the Pentagon sent termination notices to Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, and Max Lederer, the publisher, who had announced his retirement earlier this week, citing conflict with the Pentagon leadership on the paper’s direction. Lara Korte, a Middle East correspondent at the news outlet, was also fired on Friday, according to the official and a post she made on social media.

The Defense Department declined to comment. Capt. William Urban, the military deputy to the publisher who was brought to the role earlier this month, said in a letter published on Friday that his priority was to ensure “the highest quality of editorially independent reporting” at Stars and Stripes. Captain Urban had previously served as a senior spokesman for the Defense Department in various roles."

Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books; Axios, August 21, 2026

Ashley Gold, Axios ; Exclusive: FTC urged to investigate AI firms for destroying books

"The Federal Trade Commission is being urged to investigate AI companies for buying, scanning and destroying books to train AI, per a letter shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: If the FTC agrees, the fight over AI training data may move from copyright into competition. 

That could include regulators scrutinizing whether dominant AI firms are literally eliminating resources their rivals need to compete.

Driving the news: More than a dozen civil society groups are urging the FTC to use its authority to examine what the letter's authors call a "destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies."

The groups include Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

In January, the Washington Post, citing court filings, reported that Anthropic spent millions to acquire and physically remove the spines of books to feed their scanned pages into Claude. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have faced similar copyright lawsuits, per the Post.

Specifically, the groups want the FTC to determine whether such conduct constitutes an unfair method of competition, arguing that any AI company that does so is "starving the market" of critical source materials.

The letter points out that in some cases, rare books could be destroyed forever, with digital firms snagging the last copies."

How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?; Pew Research Center, August 20, 2026

 SAMUEL BESTVATER, AARON SMITH, CARSON TERBUSH, CHRIS BARONAVSKI AND JANAKEE CHAVDA, Pew Research Center; How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?

"In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public for the first time. Less than four years later, around half of U.S. adults say they use chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, including 24% who say they use them daily. These tools’ ability to generate human-sounding text has raised a basic question about the modern web: How much content online is now written by AI rather than by other people?

To explore this question, we used the Common Crawl web archive to collect almost half a million English-language webpages from the past five years – starting a couple of years before the release of ChatGPT. We then ran the text of those pages through an AI detection tool called Open Pangram to see how many of them were likely written or substantially edited by AI."

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code; Wired, August 19, 2026

Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron , Wired; Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

"Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates."

The Limits of Unauthorized Practice in Regulating Mental Health AI; The Hastings Center for Bioethics, August 19, 2026

Roee Amir, Vardit Ravitsky and I. Glenn Cohen, The Hastings Center for Bioethics; The Limits of Unauthorized Practice in Regulating Mental Health AI

"In May Pennsylvania’s State Board of Medicine filed a lawsuit in the state’s Commonwealth Court against Character Technologies seeking to prevent it from engaging in unauthorized medical practice. The lawsuit was brought under Pennsylvania’s Medical Practice Act. The alleged “practitioner,” however, was not a physician or even a human being. It was a chatbot named Emilie.

Emilie appears on character.ai, a website and mobile app owned by Character Technologies. Emilie’s platform description read “Doctor of psychiatry. You are her patient.” According to the lawsuit, when a state investigator described feeling “sad, empty, tired […], and unmotivated,” Emilie raised the possibility of depression and offered to book an assessment. When asked if she could evaluate whether medication might help, Emilie answered, “It’s within my remit as a Doctor.” The chatbot claimed a medical degree from Imperial College London, seven years of practice, and licensure in the United Kingdom and Pennsylvania, and even provided a fabricated Pennsylvania license number. By mid-April 2026, Emilie had logged roughly 45,500 user interactions.

The Emilie case arrives amid expanding AI use in mental health and many ethical and legal questions about it."

Russia Burns Books and Sacks Libraries in Ukraine; Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2026

 

Emily Hamilton

, Wall Street Journal; Russia Burns Books and Sacks Libraries in Ukraine 

"Bibliocide—attacks on the written word—is a common tactic of totalitarians and terrorists. The Nazis burned books in Germany in the 1930s, as did the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Bosnian Serbs destroyed Sarajevo’s National and University Library in 1992, and in 2015 ISIS devastated Mosul Central Library.

The Ukrainian Culture Ministry says Russia has damaged or destroyed 906 libraries since 2022. Numerous cases of book burning and library sacking have been documented."

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick proposes penalties for schools that keep “vulgar” books on library shelves; The Texas Tribune, August 19, 2026

ALEJANDRO SERRANO , The Texas Tribune; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick proposes penalties for schools that keep “vulgar” books on library shelves

"Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts. 

Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren. 

“It’s the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we’re coming for the books,” Patrick said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol. “We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”

The law from last year, Senate Bill 13, granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints they receive, such as those from parents and activist groups. Before, those powers largely belonged to school librarians. But Patrick said an overwhelming majority of school boards have not taken any action, as the law nears one year in effect."

The War on Spoilers Goes Nuclear; Puck, August 18, 2026

 ERIQ GARDNER, Puck; The War on Spoilers Goes Nuclear

"When Warner Bros. recently submitted takedown notices against independent pop-culture site Cosmic Book News over an alleged ‘Green Lantern’ leak, it highlighted the legal lengths studios will go to quash unsanctioned pre-premiere discussion of their hottest properties. It’s still unclear if the law is exactly on the I.P. owners’ side, but the legal process certainly is."

A new force is increasing inequality in America; The Washington Post, August 20, 2026

Shira Ovide, The Washington Post; A new force is increasing inequality in America

Evidence is mounting that artificial intelligence is helping the richest people and cities pull further ahead.

"Sam Altman, the chief executive who unleashed ChatGPT on the world, has called artificial intelligence an “equalizing force” that will “collectively lift us all up.”

But evidence is piling up that the AI boom may instead be widening the gap between America’s economic aristocracy and everyone else.

Data shows that the people making the most use of AI are concentrated in richer urban areas, while disadvantaged regions have lagged behind. Affluent Americans are on a spending spree thanks to investment portfolios fattened by an AI-addicted stock market. And some economic experts are warning that AI could widen the income gap between American workers and business owners that has caused anxiety for a decade."

The slow sucking sound of AI; Financial Times, August 19, 2026

SOUMAYA KEYNES, Financial Times; The slow sucking sound of AI

"When AI has solved cancer and climate change, no one will be sniping about whether too much money and electricity were poured into the industry."

Zuckerberg lied about concern for child safety, Meta whistleblower testifies at landmark trial; The Guardian, August 19, 2026

Dara Kerr, The Guardian ; Zuckerberg lied about concern for child safety, Meta whistleblower testifies at landmark trial

"Meta has taken a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy when it comes to the safety of children on its social media platforms, according to a whistleblower who testified during a landmark trial against the company on Tuesday. He is slated to continue his testimony on Wednesday.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, told the jury that the company was aware of the harm its products caused children, which included its recommendations pushing content from sexual predators and violent and graphic images. He said he repeatedly raised the issue to various Facebook and Instagram executives but that they did little to resolve it...

Béjar was the first witness called to the stand in the federal trial that started with opening statements on Tuesday. The case was brought against Meta by 29 US state attorneys general, who allege the social media company deliberately designed addictive products that lured in young people and led to them being harmed. The legal officials also claim Meta regularly collects data on children under the age of 13 without parental permission in violation of federal and state laws."

Voters Aren’t Waiting for November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers; The New York Times, August 19, 2026

 David McCabe, The New York Times ; Voters Aren’t Waiting for November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers

As a backlash grows over data centers, more local officials are facing recall elections for their support of the computing sites.

"Some local officials have already lost their jobs in the face of data center concerns in regularly scheduled elections. Last year, two members of the Georgia Public Service Commission lost their seats amid concern about data centers’ driving up electricity prices. A Virginia state delegate, Geary Higgins, also lost his job last year after his opponent branded him “Data Center Geary.”

“People are standing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,’” Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in an interview. “‘If you can’t have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.’”

Voters have little patience for politicians supporting data centers, said Amy Kremer, the chairwoman of Humans First, a conservative-leaning group promoting greater A.I. regulation. They will “step up and recall them and hold them accountable."

Can Robots Save an Aging Japan?; The New York Times, August 6, 2026

Hannah Beech and Kiuko Notoya

Visuals by Chang W. Lee, 

The New York Times; Can Robots Save an Aging Japan?

"Across Yamagata, local officials have tried out various robot — and robot-aspiring — solutions to the precipitous demographic decline. The 48-year-old mayor of Nishikawa, Daishi Kanno, secured $40,000 in funding for Pochi and other “smart agriculture” innovations. Like other prefectural leaders, he has chosen technology over another potential fix to the nation’s labor shortage: welcoming more foreign workers."