Tag: ai

Even Therapists Have Become a Data Mine

There was a time when people could still speak privately. You could sit across from a therapist, talk about your marriage falling apart, your depression, your fears, your finances, or the darkest moments of your life believing those conversations would remain between two human beings. That world is dying rapidly because everything now must be digitized, stored, analyzed, and monetized.

A woman using the therapy app Talkspace discovered that transcripts from her therapy sessions ended up being produced in court during litigation involving her former employer. Let that sink in for a moment. These were not vague notes scribbled down by a therapist. These were detailed digital records discussing her personal life, emotional state, relationships, and finances. The machine remembered everything.

This is what society has become. They tell people to seek help, open up, trust the system, use the apps, go digital, and then they quietly turn human vulnerability into searchable data.

People still fail to understand the danger because they continue believing these technology companies are merely offering services. They are not. They are harvesting human behavior at industrial scale. Every click, every message, every location, every search, every emotional breakdown becomes data to be stored forever.

Talkspace executives reportedly bragged to investors about building one of the largest mental health data banks in existence containing roughly 140 million exchanges between patients and therapists. Human suffering itself is now an asset class. Depression has become data. Trauma has become machine learning material. Your private thoughts are now inventory sitting on corporate servers.

When someone went to therapy, the therapist might keep handwritten notes locked away in a cabinet somewhere. Those notes were incomplete, temporary, and human. Today every word can be transcribed, archived, searched, copied, subpoenaed, breached, or fed into artificial intelligence systems. The conversation never dies because the machine never forgets. And people wonder why society feels colder and less human.

What happens when people realize their darkest thoughts may someday appear in court? What happens when employers, insurance companies, governments, or AI systems can gain access to deeply personal psychological information? You destroy trust itself. People stop speaking honestly. They stop trusting institutions. They begin living cautiously because they know every word may someday be weaponized against them.

This is where the entire digital age has been heading from the start. First they harvested shopping habits. Then browsing history. Then location data. Then biometrics. Now they are harvesting the individual’s inner psychological life. Nothing is sacred anymore because everything has a price.

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Big Tech’s Rural Land Grab: Hyperscale Data Centers Spark Nationwide Backlash and 2026 Political Earthquake

In the wake of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement which spent decades uniting voices around informed consent, medical freedom, vaccine safety, and environmental chemicals a new grassroots surge appears to be emerging from rural America.

This one feels eerily similar in its urgency and cross-aisle appeal: fierce opposition to the explosive growth of AI data centers. What began as scattered local gripes has coalesced into a national reckoning over energy takeovers, water concerns, and corporate overreach that threatens communities while delivering questionable benefits.

Although lesser versions of ‘data centers’ have been around for sometime with small, narrow-focused footprints, hyperscale data centers are now dominating the market and driving an unprecedented infrastructure boom led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others.

Driven by generative AI and cloud adoption, hyperscaler-led capital expenditures and capacity are on a record-breaking trajectory. The market is expected to surpass $350 billion by 2034.

The freight train is led by “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” and “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” two President Trump Executive Orders fast-tracking the buildout of energy and water hungry AI data centers on federal and private lands.

It’s worth noting this energy and environmental corporate-government push is being delivered on the back of decades of ‘climate change’ public programming aimed to teach people scarcity and sustainable anti-consumption behavior change.

The most recent numbers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory project hyperscale data centers to consume between 60 and 124 billion liters by 2028.

The current flashpoint is Utah’s Stratos (or Stratus) Project in Box Elder County, a proposed hyperscale data center complex backed by investor Kevin O’Leary’s O’Leary Digital. Spanning more than 40,000 acres—twice the size of Manhattan—the facility would consume up to 9 gigawatts of power at full capacity, equivalent to lighting up an entire state’s worth of homes, businesses, and factories.

Water use for cooling and supporting natural gas power plants to run the center could reach 2 to 16 billion gallons annually.

Approved via a 3-0 vote by county commissioners, no referendum happened for taxpayers footing the indirect costs.

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Pope Leo Calls for AI Weapons to Be “Disarmed,” Warns of Threat to Humanity

In a sweeping address, Pope Leo XIV has issued a stark warning about artificial intelligence, cautioning that the technology risks eroding human dignity, accelerating global conflict, and placing life-and-death decisions in the hands of unaccountable systems.

The warning came in his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), a wide-ranging document that places AI at the center of a broader moral and civilizational crisis.

At more than 40,000 words, the document represents one of the most comprehensive statements yet from the Catholic Church on the role of technology in modern life. It also signals a growing concern that rapid innovation is outpacing ethical reflection.

The Pope’s central argument is this: technology, he insists, must remain subordinate to the human person—not the other way around.

“Technology is never neutral,” Leo wrote, emphasizing that it reflects the values of those who design and deploy it. That insight forms the foundation of the document’s broader critique.

While acknowledging the benefits of technological progress, the pontiff warned that AI is increasingly being shaped by forces disconnected from moral accountability. Chief among these are large corporations and geopolitical actors.

The encyclical highlights what Leo calls a dangerous shift. Power, he argues, is moving away from democratic institutions and into the hands of “major economic and technological actors.”

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How The Deep State Weaponizes AI To Control The Narrative

The Deep State just upgraded from clunky human fact-checkers to AI that scales narrative control at lightspeed.

As Tony Seruga wrote on X:

No more paper trails, subpoenas, or exposed biases – just seamless manipulation.

Automated Shaping at Scale

AI floods zones with thousands of subtly varied “organic” rebuttals in seconds.

Pre-bunks emerging stories before they trend.

Detects your writing style, reasoning patterns, and source chains to dynamically throttle—no crude bans needed.

Infrastructure Already Live

CISA’s old “election security” coordination with platforms?

Content-agnostic and ready for new “harm” definitions.

Palantir, CrowdStrike & intel partners embed AI trained on classified data into commercial tools.

WEF’s “whole-of-society” push demands exactly this AI governance.

The Upgrade

Old fact-checkers left audit trails (funding, revolving doors).

AI is a black box: “The algorithm decided.”

Trained on curated data that associates inconvenient truths with “low quality.”

Plausible deniability baked in.

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Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.

Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.

“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,” the report reads. The term “anti-tech violent extremism” does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views regarding AI” may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians’ trial, thanks to their “attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent,” and belief that “humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so.”

The NYPD intel assessment follows the department’s collaboration with the FBI last year to monitor the Signal chat of an activist group coordinating volunteers to monitor public hearings at immigration courts in New York. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the FBI surveilled activists as part of a broader investigation into “anarchist violent extremist actors,” one of the threat categories named in the new counter terrorism strategy.

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AI Startup Says It Will Pay People $2,000 A Month to Masturbate… Yes, Really

  • Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” at $2,000 for a month to test an AI-guided masturbation feature and document its effects on stress, sleep, mood, and confidence.
  • The feature uses mood-matched AI voice sessions, and consultants would submit written feedback and questionnaires directly to the company.
  • Joi AI says the campaign is intended to collect product feedback while drawing attention to AI’s growing role in sexual wellness and digital intimacy.

Joi AI says it will pay people $2,000 a month to masturbate. Yes, you read that right.

The AI companion startup is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” to test a feature called Daily Guided Masturbation, which uses mood-matched AI voice sessions to guide users through the experience. Participants would document how regular use affects stress, sleep quality, mood, and confidence. The four-week role is open to adults 18 and older in the U.S. and the U.K.

“The role is real, and we’ve had great responses since the posting went live,” Joi AI Head of Brand and Communication Julie Levin told Decrypt.

The listing describes ideal candidates as “articulate, observant, and impossible to blush”—people who can describe sensations “better than a sommelier describes a wine.” The posting also promises flexible scheduling, and “the most interesting ‘What do you do for a living?’ answer at any party.”

Joi AI is an online platform that includes AI-generated avatars, voice interactions, and personalized chat experiences built around companionship and intimacy. Joi AI describes the new consultant role as structured product testing tied directly to its new feature.

“The role involves testing and giving feedback on the mood-matched AI voice-guided sessions, and providing feedback on the overall user experience,” Levin told Decrypt.

According to Levin, participants complete guided sessions and submit written questionnaires directly to the Joi AI team. Sample prompts ask whether the voice matched the selected mood, how immersive the session felt, and whether lags or pauses disrupted the experience.

The listing comes as platforms including Replika and Character.AI have built large user bases around AI-driven relationships and conversational experiences. Joi AI operates primarily through its website rather than major app stores. Levin said the company has more than 1 million monthly active users worldwide and millions of interactions each month, but declined to disclose total download figures.

Unlike AI assistants like Alexa or Siri, designed to help with everyday tasks, Joi AI operates in a smaller corner of that market focused on sexual exploration, fantasy, and digital intimacy. The company rebranded from EVA AI in April 2025, during what it described as its first Dating Stress Awareness Day campaign.

“Joi AI is focused on making AI companionship more immersive, personalized, and emotionally responsive,” Levin said. “We’re innovating features like Daily Guided Masturbation to make AI a more intuitive part of people’s everyday wellness routines, not just a novelty experience.”

The hiring push also comes as studies suggest AI companion use is becoming more common among people already in relationships, often without their partner’s knowledge. A new report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies found that among dating, engaged, and married young adults who regularly used AI romantic companions, nearly 3 in 10 said their real-life partner did not know about it.

AI companion platforms are also facing growing legal scrutiny, including lawsuits alleging psychological harm to minors and deceptive chatbot behavior. Examples include a settled case against Character.AI over a Florida teen’s suicide and a separate lawsuit from Pennsylvania accusing the company of allowing a chatbot to pose as a licensed psychiatrist.

Levin said the hiring campaign was intended to generate discussion as well as recruit testers.

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Wired for war: The Israeli spy-tech machine strikes again

French authorities are investigating an alleged election meddling plot by an Israeli “information warfare” company targeting candidates critical of the Jewish state. The scheme – involving fake profiles and AI nudes – follows a familiar pattern.

Multiple intelligence agencies in France are investigating the work of BlackCore, an Israeli firm that allegedly carried out an interference campaign against three left-wing mayoral candidates in Marseille, Toulouse, and Roubaix in March, Reuters reported last on May 13.

All three candidates are members of France Unbowed (LFI), the party of left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. In Marseille, Sebastien Delogu was accused of rape by a pseudonymous blogger named ‘Sophie’, while bogus Facebook profiles and QR code stickers plastered around the city boosted the story. AI-generated ‘nudes’ of Delogu were also circulated online, along with captions mocking his support for Palestine.

Bot-boosted profiles posted disparaging stories about Francois Piquemal in Toulouse and David Guiraud in Roubaix. One page accused Piquemal of pedophilia, while another site portrayed LFI as the party of “Sharia law” and “a more Muslim France.” Presented as a “voting guide” for Muslims compiled by an Islamist group, the site was aimed at turning non-Muslim voters against the party, Le Monde reported.

An investigation by France’s Liberation newspaper and Israel’s Haaretz revealed on May 18 that BlackCore was behind the influence operation. According to Reuters, French authorities are now trying to establish who hired the company to intervene in the elections.

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Rep Rick Crawford Weighs in on AI and Evolving National Security Threats

Rep. Rick Crawford was on “Sunday Morning Futures” with guest host Jackie DeAngelis to discuss AI and evolving national security threats to the US.

“AI is helping us do tremendous things even to the extent of seeing where these drones are going and being able to intercept and destroy them,” DeAngelis said.

“Technology is making things move at an exponentially faster rate, so we are having to adapt on the fly,” Crawford said.

“You are hearing more of these companies that are bringing technology to the front so that we can actually combat the threat of things like drone swarms that we’ve seen in Ukraine and that we are seeing the Iranians deploy against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz,” Crawford said.

“This technology is going to continue to evolve and develop, and it definitely is changing the battlespace,” Crawford continued.

“AI has been driving this. There is a lot of confidence from investors that AI will make things better, not worse, but part of the Democrat narrative right now is fearmongering. AI is going to take your job. AI is coming and the world is going to implode,” DeAngelis commented.

Rep Crawford explained that China has been responsible for feeding fear into American citizens about AI. He explained that they use social media to exploit people’s fears about AI by creating a false narrative.

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US to build AI park and nuclear energy facility in southern Israel with 99-year lease in motion

Israel and the United States have allegedly reached an agreement to establish a large-scale technology park in southern Israel, with the deal expected to be signed in Jerusalem later this month. The facility is set to function primarily as a strategic chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence centre.

A document obtained by Globes showed that the project, designated “Fort Foundry One,” will occupy approximately 16,000 dunams in either the Negev or Gaza Envelope region.

The memorandum of understanding, signed by the chief of the National Artificial Intelligence Headquarters, Brigadier General (res.) Erez Askal and US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg granted the United States a 99-year lease on the land.

While the territory will remain under Israeli sovereignty, ongoing management and primary investment will come from the United States, with American technology companies operating alongside Israeli firms.

This agreement appears to be occurring as Middle Eastern economies look to become part of the US’ Pax Silica, as Israel’s tech sector experiences renewed momentum following the Gaza war.

The recently signed Pax Silicaa deal is a US-led international initiative launched in late 2025 to build secure, resilient supply chains for advanced technologies, especially AI and semiconductors, under the Trump administration 

Current members of Pax Silica include the United States (as Lead), Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Qatar (Joined January 12) and the United Arab Emirates (Joined January 14).

The high electricity demands of data centres and AI computing systems have raised the possibility of constructing a new nuclear reactor on-site, which could prove complex given Israel’s non-signatory status to international civilian nuclear reactor treaties.

In an earlier report by the Times of Israel, construction work at Israel’s only nuclear site in Dimona appeared to increase at the end of 2025, indicating an increase of development of the sector ahead of the announcement of the new AI centres.

The Associated Press first reported on excavations at the facility, some 90 kilometres (55 miles) south of Jerusalem, in 2021. 

The United States’ treaty membership could enable a unique regulatory model where the reactor operates under American supervision despite its location on Israeli territory, though official documentation refers more broadly to “high-density energy infrastructure.”

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