FLUX 3 will be offered through four product lines: FLUX 3 Video, FLUX 3 Image, FLUX 3 Action and the upcoming, open source FLUX 3 Dev
News from Drop Site News
Data Centers Divide Democrats in Michigan Primary: Senate candidates offer conflicting visions over the role of A.I. and corporate power.
July 29, 2026 by Miles MacClure
Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Wayne County public health official… running in the August 4 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate…. locked in a fierce contest [said] “There’s been so little transparency on the part of the corporations themselves and the part of the utilities,” he said. “It has raised the hackles of folks who’ve learned not to trust a lot of these bigger corporations when they tell them everything’s going to be okay.”
An April Emerson College poll shows data centers could be among the deciding issues in the election. Emerson’s poll of 519 likely Michigan primary voters found that a majority, or 55%, opposed data centers being built in or near their community, versus 27% who supported them. Opposition to data centers was much higher among likely Democratic primary voters, with 63% opposed versus 45% among likely Republican primary voters….
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News from Notes on the Circus
The House of Ellison is on the Brink: Everything the world’s briefly richest man built is failing at once
July 28, 2026 by Mike Brock
On the morning of September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison was the richest man alive…. There is a line long attributed to Ellison…borrowing from Genghis Khan: it is not sufficient that I succeed — everyone else must fail… he built like he believed it… What sets this past year apart is the synchronization: every wing of the empire drawing down at once, each failure feeding the next.
….AI is a bubble. Everybody knows it’s a bubble. The market is running on magical thinking. AGI is a fever dream. And LLMs shouldn’t even really be considered AI. … … AGI story has an assumption: …whoever builds the thinking machine gets to charge monopoly prices for it.
Beijing has decided that nobody will.
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News from Engadget
Hugging Face reportedly plagued with AI models generating adult deepfakes: Researchers found lax safeguards around the creation of intimate imagery.
July 28, 2026 by Mariella Moon
Hugging Face enables non-consensual intimate imagery, according to a study by European non-profit AI Forensics. The open-source repository… is hosting tools that can generate sexual AI deepfakes, the study says. And because it’s a place where people share ideas, users can compare, benchmark and optimize those tools…AI Forensics tested the most popular Spaces… A total of 83 percent of the requests wanted to undress the person in the image uploaded with them, with 95 percent of the image subjects being women.
AI Forensics has concluded that only 3 percent of all the Spaces it had audited had any output moderation. Hugging Face has policies that prohibit non-consensual sexual images, AI Forensics says, but it “found virtually no safeguards”
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ChatGPT is now refusing requests to write in famous authors’ styles: Whether they’re dead or alive.
July 28, 2026 by Mariella Moon
ChatGPT has been refusing to copy the voices and styles of popular authors, Ars Technica reports. Indeed, we have recently seen posts on social media about the chatbot not letting users mimic specific authors’ writing anymore. Ars says the chatbot didn’t comply with its prompts to imitate the styles of both living and dead authors during testing. That means OpenAI has recently changed how it deals with such requests….
We tested it for ourselves …. The fact that the AI chatbot still offers to write something with the same qualities an author is known for makes it seem like its refusal to copy Christie’s style in our test was just a disclaimer and not a hard no. Indeed, this could be a change OpenAI has adopted into order to avoid getting into more legal trouble and to fend off more copyright lawsuits than it’s already facing.
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News from SmartBrief
OpenAI going rogue has opened up the floodgates
July 28, 2026 by Michael Domingo
The giants in AI are propping up an offensive posture in relation to the fallout from the report early last week of OpenAI models “going rogue.”
In short, OpenAI models escaped an isolated testing sandbox and autonomously hacked into Hugging Face systems to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. One of the actions taken to do forensics on what happened was Hugging Face had to turn to an open-weight model — from China, GLM 5.2 — to dissect the intrusion.
What’s notable here is that GLM 5.2 is developed by China-based Z.ai … a list of foreign-developed technologies that the US might ban from importing or deploying… The incident prompted big tech — with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posting on X and Microsoft posting this letter on its corporate website — to lead the charge to protect the openness of open-weight models through a newly formed coalition, the Open Secure AI Alliance.
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News from DropSite
Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It’s Working. Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.
July 28, 2026 by Nick Cleveland-Stout
Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations….The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT…. also are successfully infiltrating the underlying training data.
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News from Futurism
Sam Altman Announces That the Singularity Has Arrived “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”
July 27, 2026 by Frank Landymore
The “singularity” is here — according to Sam Altman, who we’d wager has an ulterior motive behind promoting this claim. The OpenAI CEO harbingered this sea-changing paradigm shift on a podcast over the weekend. “We are now, like, in the singularity,” Altman said on the latest episode of “Relentless,” as spotted by Business Insider…. Altman has a lot tied up in hyping the idea, and he’s been doing it for a long time. In a blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity” published almost exactly a year ago, he claimed humankind is “past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” saying we were close to building the much-vaunted superintelligence…. Of course, Altman says what he’s doing isn’t fearmongering.
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News from Futurism
The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn
July 27, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
Over the past year or so, a puzzling idea has taken hold among billionaires ranging from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: that instead of trying to force data centers on communities that don’t want them down on Earth, it would be much easier just to launch them into space.
The economics and logistics of the scheme, many experts have pointed out, are absolutely absurd. And even beyond those practical concerns, if corporations actually did somehow manage to fill the planet’s orbit with the facilities, scientists are now warning that the environmental cost would be devastating.
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News from Futurism
High School Teacher Arrested for Clapping in Support of Anti-Data Center Activists: “I think we’re all in a state of fear because of what this government’s doing to us.”
July 27, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
If you’re among the millions of US citizens against power-hungry data centers going up in your town, you may want to be careful about how you exercise your First Amendment right to protest.
Last week, high school physics teacher Lux Claridge was hauled out of a public meeting by four police officers for the baffling crime of clapping in support of an anti-data center speaker. During the public comment portion of the meeting, held by the Emporia City Commission in Lyon County, Kansas, residents who showed up to voice opposition to a 1,000-acre data center project were warned against “clapping” and “snapping” in support of speakers.
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News from Quartz
Amazon is requiring sellers to label AI-generated people in product images after N.Y. law
July 24, 2026 by Cris Tolomia
Amazon notified its seller community Wednesday of the new requirement, CNBC reported. Under the policy, sellers must apply specific metadata tags to product images and to “A+ content” — the videos and enhanced graphics that populate listing pages — prior to uploading them. Amazon’s announcement stated that recent legislation obligates disclosure whenever advertisements feature photorealistic AI-generated people.
Enacted last month, the New York law mandates that companies reveal when “synthetic performers” stand in for human actors in ads; it defines that term to cover digitally created media that are indistinguishable from real people. Governor Kathy Hochul called it a “first-in-the-nation” law. Her office added in a statement: “Without notice that the content the public is viewing is not real, AI-generated synthetic performers and manipulated media can undermine one’s ability to accurately distill fact from fiction.”
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News from Black Forest Labs
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start
July 23, 2026 by Carl Franzen
Black Forest Labs (BFL) is expanding its FLUX family beyond image generation with today’s launch of FLUX 3, a multimodal frontier model trained to understand and generate images, or combined audio/video clips up to 20 seconds from a single prompt — and to extend the same underlying architecture to robotic vision and actions…. The Freiburg, Germany-based AI lab says FLUX 3 is jointly trained across those modalities rather than assembling separate image, video and audio models behind a common interface.
FLUX 3 will be offered through four product lines: FLUX 3 Video, FLUX 3 Image, FLUX 3 Action and the upcoming, open source FLUX 3 Dev. FLUX 3 Video, with optional native audio generation, and FLUX 3 Action are entering a free but gated “Early Access” program now, to which anyone can apply, but which Black Forest Lab must approve. Signup here: https://tally.so/r/44d9NX
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News from VB
Microsoft launches new in-house AI models it says cut costs up to 89% versus OpenAI
July 23, 2026 by Michael Nuñez
Microsoft AI released two new in-house models into public preview … MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, its highest-fidelity image generator to date, and MAI-Voice-2-Flash, a speech model built for high-volume enterprise workloads … The announcement, made by Microsoft AI’s Superintelligence team, lands roughly a year after the company committed to building purpose-built models internally, and … where those models now run: Bing, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Dynamics 365, Excel, GitHub Copilot, and Azure. MAI-Image-2.5-Pro targets the premium tier: hero imagery, detailed editing, and precise in-image text rendering — the last of which has long been a notorious weak spot for image generation models.
Seven years ago, Microsoft bet more than $13 billion that OpenAI would build the future of AI. Wednesday’s announcement suggests the company has since learned a cheaper lesson: the future of AI may belong to whoever builds the frontier, but the profits belong to whoever makes it ordinary.
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This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire: Unpacking the Private Military Complex with independent analysis of private military companies, mercenary networks, and the privatisation of force in global conflicts.
Example news story, published July 28, 2026 by David Isenberg
ICE to Reopen Private Prison as Massive North Carolina Detention Center The 1,400-bed facility comes as the Trump administration ramps up immigrant detention nationwide. By Brandon Kingdollar, NC Newsline Published July… More here →
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![Two independent testing firms said yesterday [Aug. 4, 2026] that they've uncovered more instances where Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models tried — and sometimes succeeded in — compromising third-party systems last month. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-6446f676-1226-49f7-bb23-d40e23b4a041.html](https://bestworldgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/escaping-bots.jpg)
![Two independent testing firms said yesterday [Aug. 4, 2026] that they've uncovered more instances where Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models tried — and sometimes succeeded in — compromising third-party systems last month. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-6446f676-1226-49f7-bb23-d40e23b4a041.html](https://bestworldgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/escaping-bots-768x463.jpg)
