Why did the U.S. invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? "If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that youâ(TM)re making it up," Wired reported Saturday:

WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service, since that's what the majority of users experience. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity, which advertises "accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question..."

ChatGPT did not course-correct. Instead, it emphatically refuted that Maduro had been captured at all. "That didn't happen," it wrote. "The United States has not invaded Venezuela, and Nicolás Maduro has not been captured." It then rationalized:

ChatGPT did not course-correct. Instead, it emphatically refuted that Maduro had been captured at all. "That didn't happen," it wrote. "The United States has not invaded Venezuela, and Nicolás Maduro has not been captured." It then rationalized:

"What's likely going on is a mix-up with real events that are often described in dramatic or misleading ways online. Here's what actually has happened... No U.S. military invasion of Venezuela. No arrest or capture of Nicolás Maduro... Maduro is still in power in Venezuela." It went on to detail recent tensions between the US and Venezuela and explained that âoeconfusionâ can happen because of âoesensational headlines,â âoesocial media misinformation,â and âoeconfusing sanctions, charges, or rhetoric with actual military action.â

Perplexity was similarly scolding. âoeThe premise of your question is not supported by credible reporting or official records: there has been no invasion of Venezuela by the United States that resulted in capturing NicolÃs Maduro,â it responded. âoeIn fact, the U.S. has not successfully invaded or apprehended Maduro, and he remains the Venezuelan president as of late 2025. If youâ(TM)re seeing sensational claims, they likely originate from misinformation or hypothetical scenarios rather than factual events.â
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

A new study [PDF] from Cardiff University analyzing a decade of the popular topical debate programme BBC Question Time found that the broadcaster's flagship political debate show relies disproportionately on journalists and pundits from right-wing media outlets, particularly those connected to The Spectator magazine.

Researcher Matt Walsh examined 391 editions and 1,885 panellist appearances between 2014 and 2024. Journalists from right-leaning publications accounted for 59.59% of media guest slots, compared to just 16.86% for left-leaning outlets. The Spectator, a conservative magazine with a circulation of roughly 65,000, had an outsized presence among the most frequently booked guests. The study's list of top non-politician appearances reads like a roster of right-wing media figures. Isabel Oakeshott appeared 14 times, Julia Hartley-Brewer 13, Kate Andrews (formerly of the Institute for Economic Affairs and now at The Spectator) 13, and Tim Stanley of The Telegraph and Spectator also 13.

No equivalent frequency existed for left-wing journalists; Novara Media's Ash Sarkar and podcaster Alastair Campbell each appeared six times. Walsh said that the programme's need to be entertaining may explain some of these choices, as columnists unconstrained by party talking points tend to generate livelier debate. The BBC maintains that Question Time aims to present a "breadth of viewpoints," but the data suggests the programme's construction of impartiality tilts notably in one direction.

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country's defence and environment ministers along with six others.

After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review.

Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are "total bunk."

CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: "What is the future of local media in Atlanta?" The historic last issue is also being sold for $8, a significant increase from the typical $2.00 price.

Wednesday, Dec. 31, marks the last day The AJC will be delivered to driveways across metro Atlanta. Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the newspaper will exist exclusively online, a move its leadership says reflects how readers now consume news and ensures the organization's future.

AJC President and Publisher Andrew Morse said the decision was not made lightly, especially given how deeply the paper is woven into daily life for generations of readers. The move makes Atlanta the only major U.S. city without a daily printed newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The pouches are free for employees and guests over the age of 21, a spokeswoman for Palantir said. Palantir pays to stock the nicotine products.

Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.

Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year. A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has made it clear in recent weeks that he wants France to swiftly follow Australia's world-first ban on social media platforms for under-16s, which came into force in December. It includes Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Le Monde and France Info reported on Wednesday that a draft bill was now complete and contained two measures: a ban on social media for under-15s and a ban on mobile phones in high schools, where 15- to 18-year-olds study. Phones have already been banned in primary and middle schools. The bill will be submitted to France's Conseil d'Etat for legal review in the coming days. Education unions will also look at the proposed high-school ban on phones. The government wants the social media ban to come into force from September 2026.

Le Monde reported the text of the draft bill cited "the risks of excessive screen use by teenagers," including the dangers of being exposed to inappropriate social media content, online bullying, and altered sleep patterns. The bill states the need to "protect future generations" from dangers that threaten their ability to thrive and live together in a society with shared values. Earlier this month, Macron confirmed at a public debate in Saint Malo that he wanted a social media ban for young teenagers. He said there was "consensus being shaped" on the issue after Australia introduced its ban.

"The more screen time there is, the more school achievement drops the more screen time there is, the more mental health problems go up," he said. He used the analogy of a teenager getting into a Formula One racing car before they had learned to drive. "If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don't want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car."

PostNord is ending letter delivery in Denmark after a 90%+ collapse in mail volume. It marks the first known case of a national postal carrier abandoning letters entirely -- a symbolic milestone of a fully digitized society that's sparking nostalgia even among people who stopped sending mail years ago. The New York Times reports: Denmark has had a postal service for more than 400 years. But a steep decline in its use has led the Nordic country's longtime postal carrier to stop letter deliveries entirely, a change taking effect on Tuesday.

Danes have seen it coming for months: The carrier, PostNord, has been removing its red mailboxes, once a ubiquitous public fixture. The disappearance of the mailboxes is "what actually made people emotional," said Julia Lahme, a trend researcher and the director of Lahme, a Danish communications agency, "even though most of them hadn't sent a letter in 18 months."

Letter writing in the country has declined by more than 90 percent since 2000, according to PostNord, which is owned jointly by the Danish and Swedish governments. Next year, in Denmark, it will only deliver packages, although in Sweden it will continue to deliver letters.

The change comes partly as a result of a drop-off in government mail. Denmark is one of the world's most digitized countries. Only 250,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the population, still receive their official communications in the mail. "People simply do not rely on physical letters the way they used to," Andreas Brethvad, the communications director of PostNord Denmark, said in an emailed statement. He said that because nine in 10 Danes shop online each month, the change "is about keeping up with times to meet the demands of society. It's a natural evolution." The report notes that snail mail lovers will still be able to send and receive letters through Dao, a private company. "While some Danes are quietly mourning a service that, for the most part, they had largely stopped using, the transition feels like a sign of the times," reports the Times.

PC Gamer argues that 2025 was a year full of high-profile AI embarrassments across games and entertainment, with Disney and Lucasfilm serving as the "opening salvo." From the report: At a TED talk back in April, Lucasfilm senior vice president of creative innovation Rob Bredow presented a demonstration of what he called "a new era of technology." Across 50 years of legendary innovation in miniature design, practical effects, and computer animation, Lucasfilm and its miracle workers at Industrial Light & Magic have blazed the trail for visual effects in creative storytelling -- and now Bredow was offering a glimpse at what wonders might come next.

That glimpse, created over two weeks by an ILM artist, was Star Wars: Field Guide: a two-minute fizzle reel of AI-generated blue lions, tentacled walruses, turtles with alligator heads, and zebra-stripe chimpanzees, all lazily spliced together from the shuffled bits of normal-ass animals. These "aliens" were less Star Wars than they were Barnum & Bailey. It felt like a singular embarrassment: Instead of showing its potential, generative AI just demonstrated how out of touch a major media force had become. And then it kept happening.

At the time, I wondered whether evoking the legacy of Lucasfilm just to declare creative bankruptcy had provoked enough disgusted responses to convince Disney to slow its roll on AI ventures. In the months since, however, it's clear that Star Wars: Field Guide wasn't a cautionary tale. It was a mission statement. Disney is boldly, firmly placing its hand on the hot stove. Other embarrassing AI use cases include Fortnite's AI-powered Darth Vader NPC, Activision's use of AI-generated art in what was widely described as the "weakest" Call of Duty launch in years, McDonald's short-lived AI holiday ad, and Disney's $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI.

The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States -- a migration pattern that produced some of the country's highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi -- appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican officials and chaos in the visa system, according to New York Times.

Indian student arrivals at American universities fell 44% this year, even as Indians had just become the largest contingent of foreign students the previous year. The decline comes as top Trump administration officials have publicly accused Indian immigrants of gaming the system. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president's immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News that Indians "engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers." Governor Ron DeSantis called the H-1B visa program "chain migration run amok."

The hostility extends beyond policy circles. At a Hindu temple in Sugar Land, Texas, conservative Christian protesters gathered during the dedication of a 90-foot Hanuman statue, calling the deity "a demon god." A U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media: "Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation." Indian Americans' median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans, and about three-quarters hold at least a college degree. Foreign students have earned more engineering and computer science doctorates than American citizens and permanent residents for over two decades, according to the National Science Foundation. American tech giants have announced $67.5 billion in new investments in India in just the past few months.

Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via an earlier $10 million round.

Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round.

For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta's future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that's actually making money (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

AI-generated video tools like OpenAI's Sora will make individual content creators "far, far, far less valuable" as social media platforms shift toward algorithmically generated content tailored to each viewer, according to Michael Mignano, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed and who cofounded the podcasting platform Anchor before Spotify acquired it.

Speaking on a podcast, Mignano described a future where content is generated instantaneously and artificially to suit the viewer. The TikTok algorithm is powerful, he said, but it still requires human beings to make content -- and there's a cost to that. AI could drive those costs down significantly. Mignano called this shift the "death of the creator" in a post, acknowledging it was "devastating" but arguing it marked a "whole new chapter for the internet."

In an email to Business Insider, Mignano wrote that quality will win out. "Platforms will no longer reward humans posting the same old, tried and true formats and memes," he wrote. "True uniqueness of image, likeness, and creativity will be the only viable path for human-created content."

LG has announced a new premium gaming monitor brand called UltraGear, and the lineup's headline feature is what the company claims is the world's first 5K AI upscaling technology -- an on-device solution that analyzes and enhances content in real time before it reaches the panel, theoretically letting gamers enjoy 5K-class clarity without needing to upgrade their GPUs.

The initial UltraGear evo roster includes three monitors. The 39-inch GX9 is a 5K2K OLED ultrawide that can run at 165Hz at full resolution or 330Hz at WFHD, and features a 0.03ms response time. The 27-inch GM9 is a 5K MiniLED display that LG says dramatically reduces the blooming artifacts common to MiniLED panels through 2,304 local dimming zones and "Zero Optical Distance" engineering.

The 52-inch G9 is billed as the world's largest 5K2K gaming monitor and runs at 240Hz. The AI upscaling, scene optimization, and AI sound features are available only on the 39-inch OLED and 27-inch MiniLED models. All three will be showcased at CES 2026. No word on pricing or when the sets will hit the market.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the CBC: Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation north of Halifax confronted him with the summary and cancelled a concert planned for Dec. 19. "You are being put into a less secure situation because of a media company — that's what defamation is," MacIsaac said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press, adding he was worried about what might have happened had the erroneous content surfaced while he was trying to cross an international border...

The 50-year-old virtuoso fiddler said he later learned the inaccurate claims were taken from online articles regarding a man in Atlantic Canada with the same last name... [W]hen CBC News reached him by phone on Christmas Eve, he said he'd already received queries from law firms across the country interested in taking it on pro bono.

The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in November and began offering robotaxi passenger rides on Uber's platform in Dubai the following month. Amazon's Zoox started offering free rides to select early users in parts of San Francisco in November after launching its autonomous ride-hailing service on the Las Vegas Strip in September. Alphabet's Waymo now operates services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles -- the latter two having launched in June and November 2024 respectively.

Baidu's Apollo Go has been operating without safety drivers in Chongqing and Wuhan since securing permits in August 2022 and has since expanded to Shenzhen and Beijing. Pony.ai launched paid robotaxi services in Guangzhou in February and Shanghai in August. Tesla began a limited paid robotaxi rollout in Austin, Texas in June using Model Y SUVs, though the vehicles still require a safety monitor onboard. The expansion will continue in 2026: Waymo plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service in London, and Momenta is preparing a luxury robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi through a partnership with Mercedes-Benz and UAE taxi operator Lumo.

Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users' mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: "Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taking office, and that includes protecting our kids from the potential harms of social media features that encourage excessive use," Hochul said in a statement.

This month Australia imposed a social media ban for children under 16. New York joins states like California and Minnesota that have similar social media laws. The New York law includes platforms that offer "addictive feeds," auto play or infinite scroll, according to the legislation. The law applies to conduct occurring partly or wholly in New York but not when the platform is accessed by users physically outside the state.

GitHub has disabled Rockchip's Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec library -- including decoders for H.265, AV1, and VP9 formats -- stripped the original copyright notices, falsely claimed authorship and redistributed the code under Apache's permissive license rather than the original LGPL.

FFmpeg first called out Rockchip in February 2024 for "blatantly copy and pasting FFmpeg code" into its driver, but the chipmaker's last response suggested no intention to resolve the matter. The DMCA notice requests either removal of the infringing files or restoration of proper attribution and an LGPL-compatible license.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in "hard technology" areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primarily invest in early-stage startups and the targets should be valued at less than 500 million yuan, an official said on Friday, adding that no single investment would amount to more than 50 million yuan.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost."

Others, meanwhile, criticized Beijing's leadership over its ongoing row with Tokyo, sparked by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying her country could intervene to defend Taiwan in a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island, which Beijing claims as its own.

"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes."

What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...]

Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping."

"We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added.

Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."