The Fake Grandmothers and Invented Fathers Pushing Political Narratives on Your Feed
Tech Gobbles
Hundreds of AI-generated fake accounts — complete with fabricated faces and invented life stories — were just caught flooding social media to manufacture pro-Trump grassroots support that doesn't exist.
The Fake Grandmothers and Invented Fathers Pushing Political Narratives on Your Feed
Scroll through X long enough and you'll meet them: a smiling grandmother from Ohio, a young dad from Georgia, a college student who just discovered her political awakening. According to The New York Times, hundreds of these profiles are entirely fabricated — AI-generated faces stitched onto invented personas, deployed specifically to amplify pro-Trump messaging and make manufactured consensus look like organic groundswell.
These aren't the crude spam bots of 2016, blasting identical links at 3 a.m. These avatars hold conversations. They have profile histories. They blend. The operation represents a qualitative leap in political manipulation: instead of buying ads or paying influencers, someone built a fake electorate and seeded it into real communities. The scale suggests this wasn't a lone actor with a laptop — it points to a coordinated effort with real resources behind it.
The terrifying part isn't that they got caught. It's how long they didn't.
Gobble's Take: If a thousand people online agree with you, statistically some of them never existed — and that number is only going up.
Source: The New York Times
A Code-Writing Chatbot Is Now Worth More Than Ford, Estée Lauder, and Marriott — Combined
Cursor, an AI tool that helps software developers write and debug code faster, is reportedly in talks to raise $2 billion at a valuation north of $50 billion, according to CNBC. The company has not yet closed the round. For context: $50 billion is roughly what it would cost to buy Ford Motor Company outright, with billions left over. For a product that has existed for a handful of years and whose core pitch is "your coding, but faster," the number is staggering.
What's driving it is the widespread belief inside venture capital that software development is about to be permanently restructured. Every company that builds digital products — which is nearly every company — needs developers. If AI can make each developer two or three times more productive, the economic upside is enormous. Cursor is betting it becomes the tool those developers can't work without, the same way engineers once couldn't imagine building without Stack Overflow or GitHub.
At $50 billion, the market isn't pricing in what Cursor is. It's pricing in what software development becomes.
Gobble's Take: The most valuable skill in five years won't be writing code — it'll be knowing exactly what to ask the machine to write for you.
Source: CNBC
New York Is Training 100,000+ Government Workers to Use AI — Before the AI Arrives
New York State isn't waiting for a crisis to figure out what to do with artificial intelligence. The state is rolling out an AI training initiative for its entire workforce — tens of thousands of government employees — aimed at teaching them to understand, use, and oversee AI tools before those tools become unavoidable, according to WRGB. The goal isn't to teach clerks to code. It's to make sure that when an AI system starts processing benefits applications or flagging infrastructure risks, the humans supervising it actually know what they're looking at.
The specifics of the curriculum and timeline are still being finalized, but the signal is clear: state government, historically the last institution to adopt anything, is treating AI readiness as an operational necessity rather than a distant IT problem. That's a meaningful shift. When the DMV starts preparing for algorithmic coworkers, the technology has officially left the innovation labs.
Other states are watching. New York just made ignoring AI a policy choice, not a default.
Gobble's Take: The government workers who learn to supervise AI this year will outlast the ones who wait to be replaced by it.
Source: WRGB
An AI CEO Says There's No Jobs Apocalypse Coming. He Also Sells the AI.
At a moment when economists are split and workers are nervous, an unnamed AI chief executive told Forbes this week that artificial intelligence won't cause an employment "apocalypse" — that new jobs will emerge, human creativity will remain irreplaceable, and history suggests we've survived automation before. The argument is familiar: looms didn't end textile work, ATMs didn't kill banking jobs, and this time will rhyme with those.
The counterargument, also familiar, is that this time the technology isn't automating one category of physical task — it's automating cognition itself, across nearly every white-collar profession simultaneously. Whether the CEO's optimism reflects genuine analysis or the occupational hazard of building the thing everyone's afraid of is a question worth sitting with. The Forbes piece doesn't name the executive, which makes it harder to weigh their specific track record or product against their reassurances.
History says technology creates jobs. History also took decades to make that case while a generation absorbed the disruption.
Gobble's Take: An AI CEO telling you not to worry about AI jobs is a conflict of interest dressed up as calm — demand the receipts.
Source: Forbes
Quick Hits
- Two foreigners arrested in Iran for smuggling Starlink gear: Iranian authorities arrested two foreign nationals for importing Starlink satellite internet equipment, which Iran bans as a tool of Western influence — a reminder that internet access itself is a geopolitical flashpoint. Reuters
- NYT op-ed argues AI "learning games" can't replace real education: A New York Times opinion piece makes the case that gamified, AI-assisted learning produces the feeling of progress without the hard cognitive work that actually builds knowledge — a distinction schools are about to be forced to confront. The New York Times
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