Good morning. It was a big night for President Trump. His acolytes won Republican primaries across the country. There’s more below, including news about prehistoric dentistry. But first: There’s something you should know about me.
Who’s writing this?“The Future of Truth” is the title of a new book about what artificial intelligence is doing to veracity. Steven Rosenbaum, its author, used artificial intelligence to help him research, write and edit. You can probably guess what happened next. The Times took a close look at the book and found more than a half-dozen misattributed or completely made-up quotes concocted by A.I., including one stemwinder from the tech journalist Kara Swisher. It wasn’t just wrong, Swisher said, but “I also sound like I have a stick up my butt.” Rosenbaum acknowledged the delusions, telling our reporter that if the hallucination “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” Times readers are having a field day in the comments:
You can’t trust the machines — not always, not often. Of course, they’re getting better. Yes, they’ll make many things easier. (Yesterday, Google announced that it will overhaul the search bar it has used for the past 25 years to accommodate longer, more complex questions answered by A.I. Say, “Explain the theory of relativity to me as if I were a child.”) But they’re also changing life in uncomfortable ways, altering our relationship with truth and just generally disorientating people: That car on the road next to me has no driver. That’s one reason graduating students at the University of Arizona last week booed their commencement speaker, the former Google leader Eric Schmidt. He had been talking about the vast promise of A.I. to transform the world through technology. Graduates didn’t want to hear it. Job securityIf the future of truth is scary, so is the future of jobs. China seems to understand that. Its courts are trying to balance widespread A.I. adoption with the unemployment it may bring about, my colleague Catie Edmondson reports. One precedent-setting decision recently said that an employee couldn’t be fired after he’d been replaced by software. China is an A.I. leader, but it also has a high youth unemployment rate — about 17 percent. Some 200 million people work gig-economy jobs. Folks are worried. Robots will eventually own the gig economy.
The court rulings reflect the government’s worries, too: “Despite being an authoritarian country, the Chinese government is actually very attentive to what people are thinking and feeling and saying on the internet, and they feel like they need to respond,” one researcher told Catie. China’s not alone in wrestling with the problem. Officials in Japan, South Korea and Britain have proposed versions of a universal basic income for workers displaced by technology: a replacement for the salary they used to earn, courtesy of the government. There will be a lot of them. All too humanOne of the great pleasures of writing The Morning is the newsletter’s inbox. It groans most days with emails from readers expressing thanks, annoyance, interest, praise or anger, sometimes a lovely combination of all five. Reading the notes often makes me think of Nick Cave: “I hold this letter in my hand/A plea, a petition, a kind of prayer.” A lot of the mail concerns artificial intelligence. Some write to express relief that we’re not bots. (Yeah: me, too.) Some, like Dan Robbins of Tucson, Arizona, are worried we might be: I can only hope you are not AI or AI-aided as it’s not so easy to tell these days, especially with as upbeat as you seem to be. It is so sad I must be suspicious of everything I read. After a typo, another reader told me that he wonders “if you are relying too heavily on AI-generated editing.” My answer: We make those mistakes on our own, thank you. The team that delivers this newsletter — you can find their names on the masthead below — doesn’t use artificial intelligence to write or edit. I want to be clear about that here in your inbox. The Morning is built by humans, for humans. We may use A.I. to find information we verify elsewhere. We may use it for editorial chores, giving us time back for more reporting. We definitely use it to help us out at home, trying to figure out how to fix the damn air-conditioner. But the thought-making and question-asking and deep reading and writing that follow are tasks performed by journalists free of chips. The Times outlines its A.I. principles here. I write fueled by adrenaline and fear of errors. And I promise you that will never change.
We learned more yesterday about the Trump administration’s plan to compensate people who claim to have been victimized by Democratic administrations, as Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, went before Congress and defended the $1.8 billion program. President Trump gets some immunity. The deal that created the fund also settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against the I.R.S. after someone leaked his tax returns. (I.R.S. lawyers initially had tried to contest Trump’s lawsuit, drafting a 25-page document outlining what they saw as flaws in his argument.) As part of the settlement, the agency is barred from auditing Trump, his family or his businesses. Jan. 6 rioters may get paid. Vice President JD Vance, asked about the program, said he could not rule out that people convicted of assaulting police officers during the attack at the Capitol might receive payments from the fund. Rioters were enthusiastic about the idea. Blanche promises “full transparency.” He told lawmakers, “I very much anticipate that the claims that are awarded — the basis and the amount — will for sure be made public along the way.” Democrats slammed the project. Senator Patty Murray of Washington called it “corruption that has never been more blatant or more widespread.”
Tuesday was Primary Day in six states. On the Republican side, it was another strong showing for candidates that Trump favored. Some results: Kentucky: Representative Thomas Massie, an outspoken Republican critic of the president, lost his re-election bid to a Trump-backed challenger. And Representative Andy Barr, endorsed by Trump, won the Republican primary for the Senate seat being vacated by Mitch McConnell. Georgia: Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former mayor of Atlanta, won the crowded Democratic primary for governor. The Republican race will proceed to a runoff between a billionaire health care executive, Rick Jackson, and the Trump-backed lieutenant governor, Burt Jones. Pennsylvania: In a Republican-held House district that Democrats think they can flip, voters picked Bob Brooks, a firefighter and union leader backed by the party’s moderates and liberals, as the challenger. See more primary results, including from Oregon, Alabama and Idaho. And read our reporters’ takeaways from the big races.
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Higher education is in crisis, writes Michal Leibowitz. Fixing it might take work — specifically, farm work. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on what sports fandom teaches us about religious decline and Thomas Friedman on three factions of the Republican Party. The Times Sale ends soon: Expand your knowledge with our experts. Take advantage of our best offer and gain understanding and insight in every area of life. Just $1 a week for your first year of unlimited access to news, culture, cooking and more.
A pasta pilgrimage: Travelers flock to northern Sardinia to try su filindeu, “the threads of God.” This pasta shape is considered the rarest of the more than 350 officially recognized in Italy. Another Giuliani: Andrew, the son of Rudy and a longtime Trump loyalist, is overseeing the World Cup next month. It’s a big promotion. Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a recommendation for sheets.
59,000— That is how many years ago a Neanderthal endured the first known root canal. The discovery of a drilled-out tooth in a Stone Age cave in southern Siberia pushed back the earliest evidence of dentistry by more than 40,000 years. Read more about the gruesome procedure. Those hominins were tough!
N.B.A.: The New York Knicks were down 22 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. Then Jalen Brunson got to work. He scored 15 in the fourth quarter as the Knicks rallied, winning 115-104 in overtime. Tennis: Carlos Alcaraz, a two-time Wimbledon champion, will miss this year’s tournament with a wrist injury.
This is my favorite recipe for hummus, and it takes only about five minutes. Trowel it onto plates and top with shredded rotisserie chicken mixed with sliced red onion and lemon juice. Also with fat coins of eggplant dredged in cornstarch and shallow-fried in oil. With sliced pickles. With mint. With pomegranate seeds. I did that last night and served the meal with warm pita. The whole thing came together in under an hour.
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