Wired

Ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, Trump is already boosting conspiracies that the event is being “rigged” in favor of Harris.

In recent days, Trump has promoted a number of baseless conspiracies claiming that ABC News, who will host the debate, is essentially colluding with the Harris campaign. But this is just one of numerous conspiracies the former president has been promoting in recent weeks, and his tirades to the press, online, and in fundraising emails hace included baseless allegations about immigrants flooding the country to vote, claims that the election will be fraudulent, and the idea that Harris became the Democratic nominee in a “coup.”

In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman cofounded OpenAI based on a seemingly ethical ethos: to develop AI technology that benefits humanity, rather than systems controlled by big-money corporations.

Fast-forward a decade that included a spectacular falling out between Musk and Altman, things look very different. Amid legal battles with his friend and former business partner, Musk’s latest company, xAI, has launched its own powerful competitor, Grok AI.

Described as “an AI search assistant with a twist of humor and a dash of rebellion,” Grok is designed to have fewer guardrails than its major competitors. Unsurprisingly, Grok is prone to hallucinations and bias, with the AI assistant blamed for spreading misinformation about the 2024 election.

Your devices may be revealing a lot more about your life than you realize.

During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, we set out to find just how much data is floating around in the digital ether all around us. Armed with a fanny pack filled with radios—including a hot spot loaded with custom code developed by the digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an Android phone armed with the data-revealing app Wiggle—WIRED reporters collected signals from nearly 300,000 devices in and around the DNC. This included more than 2,500 police body cameras, which effectively revealed how the Chicago Police Department deployed its officers at the protests. It also exposed new ways everyone—police and activists alike—can be surveilled via our gadgets.

In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.

Using closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:

X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, seemingly to handle the messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.

When WIRED emailed X for comment about the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, a reply came from Michael Abboud, the managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm Targeted Victory. According to his LinkedIn, Abboud worked for the State Department in the last year of the Trump administration and as press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

My first story for WIRED—yep, 31 years ago—looked at a group of “crypto rebels” who were trying to pry strong encryption technology from the government-classified world and send it into the mainstream. Naturally I attempted to speak to someone at the National Security Agency for comment and ideally get a window into its thinking. Unsurprisingly, that was a no-go, because the NSA was famous for its reticence. Eventually we agreed that I could fax (!) a list of questions. In return I got an unsigned response in unhelpful bureaucratese that didn’t address my queries. Even that represented a loosening of what once was total blackout on anything having to do with this ultra-secretive intelligence agency. For decades after its post–World War II founding, the government revealed nothing, not even the name, of this agency and its activities. Those in the know referred to it as “No Such Agency.”

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A few months ago, everyone was worried about how AI would impact the 2024 election. It seems like some of the angst has dissipated, but political deepfakes—including pornographic images and video—are still everywhere. Today on the show, WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and Will Knight talk about what has changed with AI and what we should worry about.

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

As national legislation on deepfake pornography crawls its way through Congress, states across the country are trying to take matters into their own hands. Thirty-nine states have introduced a hodgepodge of laws designed to deter the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes and punish those who make and share them.

Earlier this year, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a victim of nonconsensual deepfakes, introduced the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or Defiance Act. If passed, the bill would allow victims of deepfake pornography to sue as long as they could prove the deepfakes had been made without their consent. In June, Republican senator Ted Cruz introduced the Take It Down Act, which would require platforms to remove both revenge porn and nonconsensual deepfake porn.

Are you an election denier who’s just not satisfied with the number of conspiracies about Wi-Fi-connected voting machines or reports about floods of illegal immigrantsstuffing ballots into drop boxes on TikTok or Instagram? Do you pine for a place to share and learn even more? Want to connect with like-minded election deniers?

Well, with just 60 days until the 2024 presidential election, and with efforts to undermine the outcome of the vote already well underway, there’s now an app just for you—and no, it’s not Elon Musk’s X.