08 May 23
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Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves
This is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or flat-out wrong. Like, for instance, when you ask a bot for a definition of something that doesn’t exist and it, rather convincingly, gives you one, complete with made-up footnotes. “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, told an interviewer recently.
That’s true – but why call the errors “hallucinations” at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches? Well, hallucination refers to the mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms. By appropriating a word commonly used in psychology, psychedelics and various forms of mysticism, AI’s boosters, while acknowledging the fallibility of their machines, are simultaneously feeding the sector’s most cherished mythology: that by building these large language models, and training them on everything that we humans have written, said and represented visually, they are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species. How else could bots like Bing and Bard be tripping out there in the ether?
Warped hallucinations are indeed afoot in the world of AI, however – but it’s not the bots that are having them; it’s the tech CEOs who unleashed them, along with a phalanx of their fans, who are in the grips of wild hallucinations, both individually and collectively. Here I am defining hallucination not in the mystical or psychedelic sense, mind-altered states that can indeed assist in accessing profound, previously unperceived truths. No. These folks are just tripping: seeing, or at least claiming to see, evidence that is not there at all, even conjuring entire worlds that will put their products to use for our universal elevation and education.
Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. These, I fear, are the real AI hallucinations and we have all been hearing them on a loop ever since Chat GPT launched at the end of last year.
There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.
And as those of us who are not currently tripping well understand, our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations – is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.
I’ll dig into why that is so. But first, it’s helpful to think about the purpose the utopian hallucinations about AI are serving. What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.
This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal. Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?
The painter and illustrator Molly Crabapple is helping lead a movement of artists challenging this theft. “AI art generators are trained on enormous datasets, containing millions upon millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history. Perpetrated by respectable-seeming corporate entities backed by Silicon Valley venture capital. It’s daylight robbery,” a new open letter she co-drafted states.
The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.
We saw it with Google’s book and art scanning. With Musk’s space colonization. With Uber’s assault on the taxi industry. With Airbnb’s attack on the rental market. With Facebook’s promiscuity with our data. Don’t ask for permission, the disruptors like to say, ask for forgiveness. (And lubricate the asks with generous campaign contributions.)
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff meticulously details how Google’s Street View maps steamrolled over privacy norms by sending its camera-bedecked cars out to photograph our public roadways and the exteriors of our homes. By the time the lawsuits defending privacy rights rolled around, Street View was already so ubiquitous on our devices (and so cool, and so convenient …) that few courts outside Germany were willing to intervene.
Now the same thing that happened to the exterior of our homes is happening to our words, our images, our songs, our entire digital lives. All are currently being seized and used to train the machines to simulate thinking and creativity. These companies must know they are engaged in theft, or at least that a strong case can be made that they are. They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time – that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all.
It’s also why their hallucinations about all the wonderful things that AI will do for humanity are so important. Because those lofty claims disguise this mass theft as a gift – at the same time as they help rationalize AI’s undeniable perils.
By now, most of us have heard about the survey that asked AI researchers and developers to estimate the probability that advanced AI systems will cause “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. Chillingly, the median response was that there was a 10% chance.
How does one rationalize going to work and pushing out tools that carry such existential risks? Often, the reason given is that these systems also carry huge potential upsides – except that these upsides are, for the most part, hallucinatory. Let’s dig into a few of the wilder ones.
Hallucination #1: AI will solve the climate crisis
Almost invariably topping the lists of AI upsides is the claim that these systems will somehow solve the climate crisis. We have heard this from everyone from the World Economic Forum to the Council on Foreign Relations to Boston Consulting Group, which explains that AI “can be used to support all stakeholders in taking a more informed and data-driven approach to combating carbon emissions and building a greener society. It can also be employed to reweight global climate efforts toward the most at-risk regions.” The former Google CEO Eric Schmidt summed up the case when he told the Atlantic that AI’s risks were worth taking, because “If you think about the biggest problems in the world, they are all really hard – climate change, human organizations, and so forth. And so, I always want people to be smarter.”
According to this logic, the failure to “solve” big problems like climate change is due to a deficit of smarts. Never mind that smart people, heavy with PhDs and Nobel prizes, have been telling our governments for decades what needs to happen to get out of this mess: slash our emissions, leave carbon in the ground, tackle the overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor because no energy source is free of ecological costs.
The reason this very smart counsel has been ignored is not due to a reading comprehension problem, or because we somehow need machines to do our thinking for us. It’s because doing what the climate crisis demands of us would strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets, while challenging the consumption-based growth model at the heart of our interconnected economies. The climate crisis is not, in fact, a mystery or a riddle we haven’t yet solved due to insufficiently robust data sets. We know what it would take, but it’s not a quick fix – it’s a paradigm shift. Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.
Clear away the hallucinations and it looks far more likely that AI will be brought to market in ways that actively deepen the climate crisis. First, the giant servers that make instant essays and artworks from chatbots possible are an enormous and growing source of carbon emissions. Second, as companies like Coca-Cola start making huge investments to use generative AI to sell more products, it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff.
And there is a third factor, this one a little harder to pin down. The more our media channels are flooded with deep fakes and clones of various kinds, the more we have the feeling of sinking into informational quicksand. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as “the godfather of AI” because the neural net he developed more than a decade ago forms the building blocks of today’s large language models, understands this well. He just quit a senior role at Google so that he could speak freely about the risks of the technology he helped create, including, as he told the New York Times, the risk that people will “not be able to know what is true anymore”.
This is highly relevant to the claim that AI will help battle the climate crisis. Because when we are mistrustful of everything we read and see in our increasingly uncanny media environment, we become even less equipped to solve pressing collective problems. The crisis of trust predates ChatGPT, of course, but there is no question that a proliferation of deep fakes will be accompanied by an exponential increase in already thriving conspiracy cultures. So what difference will it make if AI comes up with technological and scientific breakthroughs? If the fabric of shared reality is unravelling in our hands, we will find ourselves unable to respond with any coherence at all.
Hallucination #2: AI will deliver wise governance
This hallucination summons a near future in which politicians and bureaucrats, drawing on the vast aggregated intelligence of AI systems, are able “to see patterns of need and develop evidence-based programs” that have greater benefits to their constituents . That claim comes from a paper published by the Boston Consulting Group’s foundation, but it is being echoed inside many thinktanks and management consultancies. And it’s telling that these particular companies – the firms hired by governments and other corporations to identify costs savings, often by firing large numbers of workers – have been quickest to jump on the AI bandwagon. PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers) just announced a $1bn investment, and Bain … Company as well as Deloitte are reportedly enthusiastic about using these tools to make their clients more “efficient”.
As with the climate claims, it is necessary to ask: is the reason politicians impose cruel and ineffective policies that they suffer from a lack of evidence? An inability to “see patterns,” as the BCG paper suggests? Do they not understand the human costs of starving public healthcare amid pandemics, or of failing to invest in non-market housing when tents fill our urban parks, or of approving new fossil fuel infrastructure while temperatures soar? Do they need AI to make them “smarter”, to use Schmidt’s term – or are they precisely smart enough to know who is going to underwrite their next campaign, or, if they stray, bankroll their rivals?
It would be awfully nice if AI really could sever the link between corporate money and reckless policy making – but that link has everything to do with why companies like Google and Microsoft have been allowed to release their chatbots to the public despite the avalanche of warnings and known risks. Schmidt and others have been on a years-long lobbying campaign telling both parties in Washington that if they aren’t free to barrel ahead with generative AI, unburdened by serious regulation, then western powers will be left in the dust by China. Last year, the top tech companies spent a record $70m to lobby Washington – more than the oil and gas sector – and that sum, Bloomberg News notes, is on top of the millions spent “on their wide array of trade groups, non-profits and thinktanks”.
And yet despite their intimate knowledge of precisely how money shapes policy in our national capitals, when you listen to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI – maker of ChatGPT – talk about the best-case scenarios for his products, all of this seems to be forgotten. Instead, he seems to be hallucinating a world entirely unlike our own, one in which politicians and industry make decisions based on the best data and would never put countless lives at risk for profit and geopolitical advantage. Which brings us to another hallucination.
Hallucination #3: tech giants can be trusted not to break the world
Asked if he is worried about the frantic gold rush ChatGPT has already unleashed, Altman said he is, but added sanguinely: “Hopefully it will all work out.” Of his fellow tech CEOs – the ones competing to rush out their rival chatbots – he said: “I think the better angels are going to win out.”
Better angels? At Google? I’m pretty sure the company fired most of those because they were publishing critical papers about AI, or calling the company out on racism and sexual harassment in the workplace. More “better angels” have quit in alarm, most recently Hinton. That’s because, contrary to the hallucinations of the people profiting most from AI, Google does not make decisions based on what’s best for the world – it makes decisions based on what’s best for Alphabet’s shareholders, who do not want to miss the latest bubble, not when Microsoft, Meta and Apple are already all in.
Hallucination #4: AI will liberate us from drudgery
If Silicon Valley’s benevolent hallucinations seem plausible to many, there is a simple reason for that. Generative AI is currently in what we might think of as its faux-socialism stage. This is part of a now familiar Silicon Valley playbook. First, create an attractive product (a search engine, a mapping tool, a social network, a video platform, a ride share …); give it away for free or almost free for a few years, with no discernible viable business model (“Play around with the bots,” they tell us, “see what fun things you can create!”); make lots of lofty claims about how you are only doing it because you want to create a “town square” or an “information commons” or “connect the people”, all while spreading freedom and democracy (and not being “evil”). Then watch as people get hooked using these free tools and your competitors declare bankruptcy. Once the field is clear, introduce the targeted ads, the constant surveillance, the police and military contracts, the black-box data sales and the escalating subscription fees.
Many lives and sectors have been decimated by earlier iterations of this playbook, from taxi drivers to rental markets to local newspapers. With the AI revolution, these kinds of losses could look like rounding errors, with teachers, coders, visual artists, journalists, translators, musicians, care workers, coders and so many others facing the prospect of having their incomes replaced by glitchy code.
Don’t worry, the AI enthusiasts hallucinate – it will be wonderful. Who likes work anyway? Generative AI won’t be the end of employment, we are told, only “boring work” – with chatbots helpfully doing all the soul-destroying, repetitive tasks and humans merely supervising them. Altman, for his part, sees a future where work “can be a broader concept, not something you have to do to be able to eat, but something you do as a creative expression and a way to find fulfillment and happiness”.
That’s an exciting vision of a more beautiful, leisurely life, one many leftists share (including Karl Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who wrote a manifesto titled The Right To Be Lazy). But we leftists also know that if earning money is to no longer be life’s driving imperative, then there must be other ways to meet our creaturely needs for shelter and sustenance. A world without crappy jobs means that rent has to be free, and healthcare has to be free, and every person has to have inalienable economic rights. And then suddenly we aren’t talking about AI at all – we’re talking about socialism.
Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss – with actual artists among the first to fall.
That is the message of Crabapple’s open letter, which calls on “artists, publishers, journalists, editors and journalism union leaders to take a pledge for human values against the use of generative-AI images” and “commit to supporting editorial art made by people, not server farms”. The letter, now signed by hundreds of artists, journalists and others, states that all but the most elite artists find their work “at risk of extinction”. And according to Hinton, the “godfather of AI”, there is no reason to believe that the threat won’t spread. The chatbots take “away the drudge work” but “it might take away more than that”.
Crabapple and her co-authors write: “Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists.” But there are ways to resist: we can refuse to use these products and organize to demand that our employers and governments reject them as well. A letter from prominent scholars of AI ethics, including Timnit Gebru who was fired by Google in 2020 for challenging workplace discrimination, lays out some of the regulatory tools that governments can introduce immediately – including full transparency about what data sets are being used to train the models. The authors write: “Not only should it always be clear when we are encountering synthetic media, but organizations building these systems should also be required to document and disclose the training data and model architectures …. We should be building machines that work for us, instead of ‘adapting’ society to be machine readable and writable.”
Though tech companies would like us to believe that it is already too late to roll back this human-replacing, mass-mimicry product there are highly relevant legal and regulatory precedents that can be enforced. For instance, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) forced Cambridge Analytica, as well as Everalbum, the owner of a photo app, to destroy entire algorithms found to have been trained on illegitimately appropriated data and scraped photos. In its early days, the Biden administration made many bold claims about regulating big tech, including cracking down on the theft of personal data to build proprietary algorithms. With a presidential election fast approaching, now would be a good time to make good on those promises – and avert the next set of mass layoffs before they happen.
A world of deep fakes, mimicry loops and worsening inequality is not an inevitability. It’s a set of policy choices. We can regulate the current form of vampiric chatbots out of existence – and begin to build the world in which AI’s most exciting promises would be more than Silicon Valley hallucinations.
Because we trained the machines. All of us. But we never gave our consent. They fed on humanity’s collective ingenuity, inspiration and revelations (along with our more venal traits). These models are enclosure and appropriation machines, devouring and privatizing our individual lives as well as our collective intellectual and artistic inheritances. And their goal never was to solve climate change or make our governments more responsible or our daily lives more leisurely. It was always to profit off mass immiseration, which, under capitalism, is the glaring and logical consequence of replacing human functions with bots.
Is all of this overly dramatic? A stuffy and reflexive resistance to exciting innovation? Why expect the worse? Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects. Altman, like many creatures of Silicon Valley, is himself a prepper: back in 2016, he boasted: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
I’m pretty sure those facts say a lot more about what Altman actually believes about the future he is helping unleash than whatever flowery hallucinations he is choosing to share in press interviews.
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People in Oakland listen to the reparations task force, a nine-member committee studying restitution proposals for African Americans. (photo: Sophie Austin/AP)
Saturday’s meeting in Oakland was the 15th public meeting of the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, according to Kamilah Moore, chair of the panel.
The recommendations will be presented at the task force’s next meeting before being presented to the Legislature by the deadline of July 1. The recommendations outline restitution, which, if approved, could cost the state billions of dollars.
Among the possible estimates of reparations for Black Californians recommended by the task force are:
- Estimated value of payment for health care disparities: $13,619 for each year of residency, based on 71-year life expectancy.
- Estimated payment for housing discrimination: $148,099 or $3,366 for each year between 1933 and 1977 spent as a resident of the state.
- Estimated payment for mass incarceration and overpolicing: $115,260 or $2,352 for each year of residency in California during the 49-year period between 1971 and 2020.
The task force recommendations have previously called for a state office to process reparations claims and “identify and mitigate the ways that current and previous policies have damaged and destabilized Black families,” to restore historical sites, to support education, and to offer free legal aid and other services.
Other recommendations include updating language in the state’s Constitution, removing racial bias and discriminatory practices in standardized testing, compensating people deprived of profits for their work, investing in and creating free health care programs, and apologizing for acts of political disenfranchisement.
It is not yet clear how and if the Legislature will put all or some of the recommendations into place. California’s Black population is more than 2.5 million, according to the US Census Bureau.
At the end of Saturday’s meeting, Moore urged people to “stay encouraged and know that justice will prevail at the end of the day.”
The task force voted for the next meeting to be held on June 29 in Sacramento, where the group will discuss final changes before presenting its proposals to the Legislature.
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Cars are seen on fire after Russian missile strikes on the capital, Kyiv. (photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Air raid sirens have sounded across Ukraine after Russia launched a fresh wave of drone and missile strikes.
One person was killed in the attack on the southern Odesa region. Ukraine's Red Cross says its warehouse was hit.
It marks the fourth attack in eight days on Kyiv and comes just 24 hours before Russia celebrates Victory Day.
The annual holiday commemorates the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany during World War Two, a conflict the Kremlin has baselessly tried to draw parallels with since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
After a lull in Russian attacks on civilian targets in recent months, which saw Kyiv go days without an attack, Moscow has intensified its air raids over the past week ahead of a widely expected Ukrainian counter-offensive.
The Ukrainian military said the latest Russian raids - which lasted for more than four hours and were launched shortly after midnight - saw Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones swarm across the country.
Kyiv's Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said nearly 60 drones had been launched by Russia, describing it as the "biggest" such attack so far.
He added that all 36 drones had been destroyed over Kyiv, but five people had been injured by falling debris from downed drones.
The BBC has not been able to verify these numbers.
Emergency services responded after drone wreckage fell on a runway at Zhuliany international airport - one of the city's two commercial airports - Kyiv's military administration said.
And civilians were injured after drone debris hit a residential building in the central Shevchenkivskyi district, the administration added.
Elsewhere, in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, a warehouse was set ablaze after eight missiles were fired at targets by Russian bombers, Ukrainian officials said.
In a statement, Ukraine's Red Cross said its warehouse with humanitarian aid was destroyed and all aid deliveries had to be suspended.
Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine's Southern Command, later said a body of a man - a security guard - was pulled from the wreckage.
In a daily update, the Ukrainian military's command said there had also been a wave of missile strikes on the Kherson, Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions.
At least eight people - including a child - were injured in two villages in the southern Kherson region, local officials said.
In Zaporizhzhia, the head of the Russian installed administration, Vladimir Rogov, said Russian forces hit a warehouse and a Ukrainian troop position in the small city of Orikhiv.
On the eastern front, the Ukrainian commander of forces in the besieged eastern city of Bakhmut said Russian troops had stepped up shelling, in a bid to take the city by Tuesday's celebrations.
Russian troops and fighters from the Wagner Group, a private military company, have been trying to capture Bakhmut for months - despite its questionable strategic value.
Over the weekend, Wagner's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared to U-turn on a threat to withdraw from the city after he was promised fresh ammunition supplies by the defence ministry in Moscow.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that 9 May would from now be celebrated as Europe Day, in line with the European Union. The move - which needs parliamentary approval - is seen as a pointed rebuke to Russia.
Mr Zelensky said he had signed a decree that the day would commemorate European unity and the defeat of "Ruscism" - a term that is shorthand for "Russian fascism".
He also said that 8 May would now officially be a Day of Remembrance and Victory, as marked in many countries around the world.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will hold talks with Mr Zelensky in Kyiv on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, as Russia is preparing for Tuesday's Victory Day parade on Moscow's Red Square, the Kremlin is yet to reveal what President Vladimir Putin's role will be at the annual event.
Last year, Mr Putin addressed the marching troops and was seen sitting among World War Two veterans in the VIP box.
Russia says the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - all former Soviet republics - are expected at the parade, which has been otherwise snubbed by major world countries, including the UK, the US and France - all wartime allies of the then Soviet Union.
In a separate development, a court in Berlin banned the carrying of Russian and Soviet flags during rallies at Soviet war memorials in the German capital on 9 May.
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The White House has concluded that Republicans will attack President Joe Biden over the charging decision in Hunter Biden's case whether Hunter is criminally indicted or not. (photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP)
Biden aides are more worried about the personal toll it will take on the president as a father.
And they’ve concluded that Republicans will attack them over it whether President Joe Biden’s son is criminally indicted or not.
In conversations, Democrats and senior West Wing aides are downplaying the potential impact, arguing Hunter Biden was a factor in the 2020 election and voters elected his father anyway. They point out the president’s top rival, Donald Trump, was just indicted himself.
But people close to Biden still worry about the personal toll it will take on a father who has already felt anguish about a son’s struggles amid a long history of family tragedy. And they wonder how long he can compartmentalize personal anger with the attacks on Hunter and the political calculation that he’s better off not responding to it. Biden has long agonized over the fate of his surviving son, expressing that worry in phone calls with longtime friends and to Hunter himself.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden met at Justice Department headquarters in Washington last week to discuss the tax- and gun-related case with prosecutors, according to a person familiar with the matter. Often a signal that an investigation is concluding, such meetings are used by defense lawyers to urge prosecutors to refrain from seeking an indictment or to consider reduced charges. The probe has centered on whether Biden failed to report all of his income and whether he lied on a form for buying a gun. His attorneys declined comment.
“Obviously, the Biden team would hope that this investigation does not result in an indictment for a multitude of reasons,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who served as President Barack Obama’s communications director. “But the Republicans have failed — both in the 2020 campaign and in their 2023 congressional hearings — to have questions about Hunter Biden impact public opinion and I don’t think they will succeed now, regardless of what DOJ decides.”
There is no Hunter Biden war room at the White House, according to four people familiar granted anonymity to speak freely. Defense for the president’s son is being handled by his personal attorneys and the White House is not involved with legal matters.
The campaign and the Democratic National Committee officials will likely take the lead in responding to political inquiries, while White House staffers will respond if the accusations touch on official government business.
No matter what DOJ decides at the end of its six-year investigation, the decision could have significant implications for the president’s just-announced reelection bid, giving fodder to Republicans as they seek to paint the Biden family as corrupt.
There is a sense among Biden allies that he’ll face some blowback either way. If Hunter Biden is charged with a crime, Trump and Republicans will try to link his behavior to his father’s conduct and fitness for office. And if charges are not brought, Republicans have telegraphed that they will claim that the Department of Justice was biased and that Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, rigged the decision.
“The Biden administration is the most corrupt administration in American history. Hunter Biden is a criminal, and nothing happened to him, nothing happened,” said Trump at a recent rally. “Joe Biden is a criminal and nothing ever seems to happen to him because you know, say what you want, but the Democrats stick together.”
Largely, aides said, the Biden campaign will continue to move forward and focus on other issues that they believe are more pertinent to voters. The White House believes that many Americans, especially those with addictions in their own family, are, and will be, sympathetic to the Bidens.
“First of all, my son has done nothing wrong. I trust him. I have faith in him,” Biden said in an interview Friday with MSNBC. “It impacts my presidency by making me feel proud of him.”
Aides to the president stress that the White House is not involved with the Department of Justice’s decision. The matter is being investigated by U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, a Trump appointee.
The probe into Hunter Biden began in 2018 and initially centered on his finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work. Investigators later shifted their focus to whether he failed to report all of his income and whether he lied on a form for buying a gun by denying that he was a drug abuser. Hunter Biden has spoken openly about his crack addiction and other drug problems.
The investigation into Hunter was discussed prior to launching the 2024 campaign. First lady Jill Biden made clear last year that it would not play a decisive role in whether or not the president would run for reelection. But the impact that the scrutiny of another campaign might have on Hunter Biden was weighed, according to three people not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
Biden advisers acknowledge Republicans will revive the issue for the 2024 campaign, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions. But they also point out that Trump made many of these allegations during the 2020 campaign, even springing one of Hunter’s ex-business partners, a man named Tony Bobulinski, as a surprise guest at the last 2020 general election debate. It had little impact.
But the claims about Hunter Biden have continued to flourish in conservative media, which has grown convinced that the 2020 attacks would have landed harder if the press corps and social media companies had not been initially skeptical of the provenance of his former laptop. POLITICO has not authenticated the hard drive files that underpinned a New York Post story about the laptop, but POLITICO confirmed the authenticity of some emails on the drive in a 2021 book.
Republicans assert that the content of the laptop offers evidence of corrupt dealings, which has fueled investigations from the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Thursday deemed the allegations against the younger Biden as “very serious.”
“I just hope that he is being treated like everybody else,” Hawley said. “There [are] various whistleblower allegations that there’s been interference, that people have tried to stymie the investigation. That better not have happened.”
Biden advisers believe the focus on Hunter could backfire on Republicans and serve as another sign the GOP is out of step with normal Americans, much as polling suggests the party is on issues like abortion and guns.
Moreover, they suggest GOP attacks could very well divert attention to Trump’s own legal peril. The former president has already been indicted in New York for falsifying business records in connection to a hush money payment to a porn star and is the subject of several other probes. Moreover, Democrats have claimed that Trump’s own family benefited financially from their access to his political power and are quick to point out that Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings there.
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The White House did bolster its team ahead of the 2022 midterms to prepare for a more hostile environment and a GOP House. It brought on communications specialist Ian Sams as a spokesperson and several lawyers to handle personal investigations into the president, including Dick Sauber, a longtime Washington defense attorney in investigations.
And Hunter Biden has taken a more aggressive tack in recent months, bringing on longtime D.C. lawyer Abbe Lowell and pushing back more forcefully against Republican attacks on his personal history and how his personal effects ended up in the hands of GOP operatives like Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. But some Democrats are anxious about talk that Hunter Biden may create a legal defense fund, which would raise scrutiny about the president’s son raising money to pay for his legal woes.
“The president loves his son and is proud that he has overcome his addiction and is moving forward with his life,” said Sams. “Republican officials’ politically motivated, partisan attacks on the president and his family are rooted in nonsensical conspiracy theories and do nothing to address the real issues Americans care about.”
Hunter Biden has written extensively about the challenges in his life, including his addictions and struggle to cope with the 1972 car accident that killed his mother and sister and critically injured him and his brother, Beau. He also lived much of his life in the shadow of Beau Biden, the former Delaware attorney general who died of brain cancer in 2015, at the age of 46.
The president, some of his friends say, checks on his son nearly every day. Hunter kept a low profile during the 2020 presidential campaign but has recently taken on a more public role. He appeared with his father at events including the state dinner for French President Emmanuel Macron in December. And he was a nearly constant presence at the president’s side at nearly every stop during last month’s trip to Ireland, their ancestral homeland.
But there have been recent sightings that serve as a reminder of the unfortunate headlines that he can sometimes create.
Hunter Biden appeared in an Arkansas courtroom this week as part of a bitter dispute with the mother of his 4-year-old child over reducing his child support payments. The mother of the child, Lunden Roberts, has accused the younger Biden of ignoring court orders to provide information about his finances and has asked a judge to declare him in contempt and have him jailed until he complies.
The president and first lady have yet to publicly acknowledge the existence of the child, who is their seventh grandchild. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this week declined to discuss the subject during her briefing.
The Biden campaign declined to comment. Democratic lawmakers, many close to Biden personally, often decline to weigh in on the ongoing probe.
“There’s an investigation. It’s up to the prosecutors to decide what action to take,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.). “Whatever is appropriate, that’s the action that should be taken independent of what the political consequences are. It’s not our business and Congress to interfere with the prosecution.”
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North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper characterized the proposed 12-week abortion ban in his state as harmful to women's health. (photo: Allison Joyce/Politico)
Gov. Roy Cooper has vowed to veto the bill, but his veto could be overriden.
The legislation, approved last week and sent to Cooper, would restrict abortion to within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (down from 20) but also apply other restrictions as well. “They’ve dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it’s really not,” Cooper, a Democrat, told host Margaret Brennan on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
He added: “It will effectively ban many abortions altogether, because of the obstacles that they have created for women, for clinics and for doctors.”
Cooper has vowed to veto the bill, but Republican legislators hold large majorities in both the General Assembly and state Senate and could override the veto.
“They ran through a bill in 48 hours with no public input, with no amendments, that drastically reduces access to reproductive freedom for women,” said Cooper of the Republican lawmakers.
North Carolina’s laws, until now at least, have made it something of an aberration in the South, where stricter abortion laws have gone into effect in the last year, since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. “The unborn will be recognized as having a fundamental right to be born, and mothers will get our unconditional support. It’s time to catch up with the science that affirms parenthood before birth,” said Rep. Sarah Stevens, a Republican member of the General Assembly of the new legislation.
Cooper characterized the measure as harmful to women’s health.
“North Carolina has become an access point in the Southeast,” he told Brennan. “And what this legislation is going to do is going to prevent many women from getting abortions at any time during their pregnancy, because of the obstructions that they had put here. Many of these clinics are working very hard to treat women, and now they’re going to have many new medically unnecessary requirements that I think many of them are going to have to close.”
Cooper said he was hopeful that at least one Republican would decide not to override his veto.
“We only need one Republican to keep a promise,” Cooper said. “At least four Republican legislators made promises to their constituents during this campaign that they were going to protect women’s reproductive freedom. They only have a supermajority by one vote in the Senate, and one vote in the House. And we’ve seen Republicans across the country step up. We saw them step up in South Carolina, we saw them step up in Nebraska, because they know that people don’t want abortion bans.”
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People walk towards the US-Mexico border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (photo: Christian Chave/AP)
Biden administration is preparing for end of contentious US policy that let authorities turn away most asylum seekers.
The end of Title 42 on Thursday caps a prolonged legal battle between rights groups and US President Joe Biden’s administration, which has also faced court challenges from several Republican-led states seeking to keep the restriction in place.
Title 42 was first invoked by former US President Donald Trump in March 2020 on the pretext of stemming the spread of COVID-19. It has been used to rapidly expel people more than 2.8 million times since then, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
The Biden administration this month announced plans to send additional troops to the US-Mexico border in anticipation of the policy’s expiration, which coincides with the end of the federal COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11.
Washington has also implemented measures to discourage border crossings – including expedited screenings and deportations – that observers have said continue to raise rights concerns.
Here’s the path the policy took through the government and courts:
March 2020: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under then-President Trump invokes Title 42 – a portion of US law that deals with public health, social welfare and civil rights – to allow US authorities to turn away most asylum seekers at the country’s borders.
The administration’s use of a public health measure to tighten US immigration laws is shaped by Trump’s hardline adviser, Stephen Miller, US media outlets will later report.
November 7, 2020: Biden – who on the 2020 campaign trail promised to take a more “humane” approach to immigration than Trump – is declared the winner of the US presidential elections.
November 18, 2020: A US federal court mulling a class-action lawsuit by several rights groups rules that Title 42 cannot be used to expel unaccompanied children at the border.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the plaintiffs in the case, calls the decision “a critical step in halting the Trump administration’s unprecedented and illegal attempt to expel children under the thin guise of public health”.
January 2021: Biden takes office, but faces criticism for not immediately moving to end Title 42. The administration does, however, end the practice of expelling unaccompanied minors under the rule, per the November 2020 federal court ruling.
March 2021: US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas says the US is on pace to see the biggest increase in the number of migrants and refugees at its southwestern border in 20 years.
Mayorkas says the majority of people seeking to enter are being turned away under Title 42. Top Republicans blame Biden’s policies for the surge, while administration officials say they inherited a “broken” system.
At particular issue is the challenge of processing thousands of unaccompanied minors, who by law are required to be transferred out of Customs and Border Protection facilities to shelters within 72 hours. Photos of bleak conditions at crowded processing centres stoke further outrage.
August 2021: The Biden administration renews Title 42, saying lifting the policy would “exacerbate overcrowding at [Department of Homeland Security] facilities and create significant public health risks”.
After negotiations with the Biden administration break down, the ACLU and other rights group re-up a court challenge to the order.
September 2021: A federal judge rules that the Biden administration must stop using Title 42 expulsions against families with children, saying plaintiffs had “shown a likelihood of suffering irreparable harm”.
The Department of Justice appeals the decision, and a judge later rules the administration can continue to expel families.
April 2022: The CDC says the Title 42 order is “no longer necessary” to stop the spread of COVID-19 and will be terminated on May 23, 2022.
In line with the CDC’s decision, US Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas announces that the Biden administration will stop using Title 42 to expel asylum seekers at the border by that same date.
Meanwhile, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, begins sending buses of migrants to Democratic-led cities in an effort to put pressure on the Biden administration over its border policies. Arizona will later join the campaign, as will Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
May 2022: US District Judge Robert Summerhays issues a nationwide injunction barring the Biden administration from lifting Title 42. The ruling comes after two dozen US states sued the federal government over its plan to end the policy.
June 10, 2022: Under pressure for its push to end Title 42 and seeking to deter asylum seekers from reaching the border, the Biden administration unveils a plan it says will help nations across the Americas region address migration.
The “Los Angeles Declaration”, unveiled on the final day of the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, reflects what one expert dubs Biden’s “more carrots, fewer sticks” approach to immigration.
October 13, 2022: The US announces that Mexico has agreed to accept Venezuelan migrants and refugees expelled under Title 42.
The administration also says it will extend humanitarian parole – a temporary status that allows people to come to the US and work legally, but does not offer them a path to citizenship – to as many as 24,000 Venezuelans who apply from outside the US.
Tyler Mattiace, a Mexico researcher at Human Rights Watch, says the new US border policies for Venezuelan nationals are “effectively punishing those … who have been forced to flee their country on foot”.
November 16, 2022: A federal judge, responding to the lawsuit from the ACLU and other rights groups, orders the Biden administration end Title 42 within five weeks. In his decision, the judge says Title 42 is an “arbitrary and capricious” policy that violated federal regulatory law.
December 2022: Following a request filed by several Republican state attorneys general, the US Supreme Court agrees to take up the GOP-led case challenging the Biden administration’s plan to end Title 42. The top court’s decision means the policy will remain in place indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration sees the highest number of border crossings since taking office, with US authorities encountering 251,487 people irregularly crossing the southern border during the month.
January 2023: The US announces it will end the COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11. Days later, the Biden administration tells the Supreme Court that the end of the emergency would also mean the de facto expiration of Title 42, making the ongoing court case moot.
The Biden administration also announces a plan to accept up to 30,000 people a month from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti – if they apply from outside of the country and meet certain criteria. But people from those four countries who seek to enter the US through the southern border will be sent back to Mexico – a policy again decried by rights groups.
February 2023: In preparation for the end of Title 42, Washington unveils a proposal that would bar asylum seekers from seeking protection in the US if they did not first apply and get rejected in Mexico or other countries they crossed in their journeys to the border.
Rights groups dub the proposed rule an “asylum ban” and urge the Biden administration to reconsider. Critics accuse the US president of employing a failed deterrence policy and working to extend the US border further south.
May 2023: The Biden administration announces it will open two migrant processing centres in Latin America, but will expedite screenings and deportations of those who cross the border irregularly. Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), calls the move a “Faustian bargain”.
The Department of Defense also authorises a request to send 1,500 additional US troops to the southwestern border for 90 days to help immigration authorities respond to an “anticipated increase in migration” when Title 42 expires on May 11.
While ailing, African elephant Noor Jehan rested on a sand pile at a zoo in Karachi, Pakistan. The photo was taken on April 14. The elephant died 8 days later. (photo: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)
"We are all absolutely heartbroken," said Mahera Omar, cofounder of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society, which dispatched volunteers and local vets to bolster Noor Jehan's care, overseen by the Austrian-based animal charity, Four Paws International. "We are trying to do our best to keep her comfortable." Volunteer Jude Allen urged the elephant to eat stalks of sugar cane. "Good girl," he crooned, "You can do it."
Noor Jehan's tragedy captivated Pakistan, with journalists delivering rapid-fire updates. In her enclosure – roughly the size of four tennis courts, a section was lopped off with rope to accommodate the some dozen television news cameras that trained on her for days.
And for some, the elephant's plight became something more. "Noor Jehan has become a symbol for the state of our own country" says Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a conservationist with an outsize profile as the grandson and nephew of two of Pakistan's most beloved prime ministers. He was volunteering to bathe and feed Noor Jehan on a recent day. "She has been caged, starved, abused, exploited. And this is the state of Pakistan."
Despite the last-ditch efforts to save her, the elephant died on April 22.
Poached from the wild, popular in Pakistan
Noor Jehan was always big news.
When she first arrived at the zoo as a plump toddler, nearly 15 years ago, Pakistanis flocked to see her. To add to her allure, zoo officials named her after the beloved Pakistani diva Noor Jehan.
But activists say her life has been anything but glamorous. She arrived to Karachi after a Pakistani poacher captured her from her herd in Tanzania, along with three other baby elephants. Her new home was an enclosure at the crumbling Karachi Zoo, near a busy road.
Elephants live in matriarchal herds, and in the wild, female elephants stay close to their mothers their whole lives. But Noor Jehan's only company has been a fellow captive female elephant, Madhubala.
Omar, of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society, gestured to the concrete shed where the two used to sleep. For years, they were shackled while they slept – it's unclear why, Omar said. "I don't know how one can sleep if you know your three legs are chained – two in the front, one in the back."
It's not just the elephants that suffer at the zoo. On a recent spring day, boys chipped off cobblestones to hurl at a crocodile huddled in a concrete pool. Others threw chips and chocolate at baboons in a tiny enclosure, gleefully watching them gobble them up. A gorilla sat quietly in another cage, entirely alone.
The zoo's current director, Kanwar Ayub, told NPR he couldn't comment on Noor Jehan's neglect, her living conditions or even that of other zoo animals, as he had only been appointed to manage the institution in early April. Since then, he told NPR, he was dealing with Noor Jehan's decline. Local media reported he was appointed in the wake of the previous director's dismissal for negligence after several zoo animals died and Noor Jehan's mysterious injuries went untreated.
A discussion of animal — and human — neglect
As the details of Noor Jehan's neglect came to air, the revelations sparked an online conversation about the widespread neglect and abuse of animals in Pakistan.
"I regret to say this, but I think Noor Jehan can only find peace when she dies," said Pakistani singer Natasha Baig in an Instagram story republished in the Pakistani daily, The Express Tribune. "Pakistan is truly incapable of showing mercy to animals," she continued. "Noor Jehan's story also raises the question of whether countries like Pakistan are even capable of operating zoos," wrote local publication, Global Village Space.
Activists hope the conversation will continue, because they say, the situation is dire for Pakistan's animals.
"What I have seen in Pakistan as far as animal abuse goes, I have never seen in any other country," says Ayesha Chundrigar, founder of the Pakistani charity, ACF Animal Rescue, which rescues about 20 animals a day, ranging from tortured stray cats and dogs, a donkey forced to swallow acid and a monkey whose arm flesh was burnt off, leaving only a bone.
Chundrigar spoke to NPR on a recent day in the working-class district of Korangi, where she was overseeing a medical camp for donkeys who cart heavy loads, like scrap metal across the city. It is the only welfare check available for Pakistan's thousands of work donkeys. "There's this notion that violence toward vulnerable living beings in Pakistan is considered to be" — the former psychotherapist fished for the word — "asserting dominance."
Others have made a connection between animal abuse and the broader plight of Pakistan's downtrodden. "Time and time again this country fails the vulnerable," wrote Alia Chughtai, a journalist and social commentator in Karachi, on Twitter. "You could be a woman, child or animal. No one cares enough. But please carry on fighting on TV shows," she tweeted, referring to political deadlock in Pakistan which has unraveled the economy and pushed food prices into hyper-inflationary territory, sending millions into hunger.
Chughtai is not the only one who has been reflecting on the parallels.
Back in Noor Jehan's enclosure, the conservationist, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, tells NPR that he can't stop thinking about an incident in March where hundreds of people, just a few miles from the Karachi Zoo, rushed into a factory complex where managers were distributing free food. As they jostled, 16 women and children were killed in a stampede. "The animals in this zoo are part of this system. It's an interconnected system," he says. "I think as a nation, we need to understand that if animals are not living a dignified life, it translates into also how we see other human beings."
Days after I visited Noor Jehan, on April 22, she developed a raging fever and died.
Her demise has put pressure on zoo officials, who promised to speedily shift her enclosure mate, the elephant Madhubala, to the nearby Karachi Safari Park, where she will have more space to roam. The provincial government ordered an investigation into zoo conditions.
Calls for kindness toward animals
There have been other recent measures to reform animal welfare.
Last June, Pakistan's federal government banned live animal testing in the capital Islamabad, and included animal rights in the school curriculum, said Salman Sufi, the head of the strategic reforms unit at the prime minister's office.
"I am a strong believer of having no zoos at all," said Sufi, a prominent progressive. But he said it needed to be an incremental process.
International attention has helped move things along in the past – like when the entertainer Cher advocated for the release of a lonely elephant who lived in the Islamabad Zoo. A local lawyer took up the case on behalf of the international welfare group Four Paws. In the end, the Islamabad High Court ordered the elephant, Kaarvan, to be shifted to a sanctuary — and the zoo to shutter.
Sufi said international attention on Pakistan following Noor Jehan's plight certainly added pressure. "But mostly, this is being down for our own conscience," Sufi said. "If our generation has not done what it should have, at least our future generation can be kinder toward animals than we were."
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