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Ugly AI Art Used to Protest AI Data Centers
You can pretty much expect to see AI slop when you hop onto Facebook, but one particular strain of slop has been appearing in my feed a lot lately. There are all of these weird anti-data center messages, clearly AI-generated, that appear on pages about life in Minnesota.
For example...
And...
Both of the images above were posted by a page called Minnesota Roots, which almost exclusively posts AI-generated images about Minnesota. Think of the most annoying local meme page you can, then make its content even broader—Minnesota Roots posts about failing to use your turn signal, or blizzards, or the prevalence of geese. (There's a weird fixation on getting pulled over by State Patrol.)
Then, there are the anti-data center posts, notable for the fact that they're... ya know, made with the very AI platforms that necessitate the data centers they're supposedly against. It turns out posts of this genre aren't exclusive to our state; 404 Media's Matthew Gault dug into the phenomenon and found that from Texas to Idaho, these "AI spam farms," as he calls them, are posting near-identical anti-data center content.
Why? Well, people hate AI data centers. And as Michael Whitesides, deputy communications director of the nonprofit Local Progress, explains, that makes them just the kind of broadly appealing subject matter spam farms love.
“AI slop usually followed a very predictable pattern," Whitesides says. "They’re either designed to provoke intense reactions [or] to play to a very middle of the road audience. The fact that Facebook content farms have switched to producing AI-generated images opposing data centers shows just how universal and uncontroversial this opposition is.”
Inside Fort Snelling's "Mega Master" Immigration Hearings
Ya know, the phrase "mega master" just sounds evil on its surface, does it not? So if you saw the words "mega master immigration hearings" and your crumbling-democracy senses started tingling, you would be right—this Trump administration tactic to accelerate hearings and speed up deportations is not, like, a benevolent one.
For MinnPost, Shadi Bushra writes that these mega master hearings, which cram dozens of cases into one short immigration court session, have come to Minnesota. (The practice started in courts in Chicago, Boston, and Chelmsford, Massachusetts.) Bushra visited the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Monday and found there were 73 cases scheduled to be heard in a half hour window that morning.
“In the time we’ve been tracking docket numbers, we’ve not seen a docket with 73 people listed for a single morning or afternoon,” Amy Lange, head of the Advocates for Human Rights’ court observation project, tells MinnPost. That project has been ongoing since 2017.
Is this bad for immigrants, immigration lawyers, and the very concept of due process? Sure seems like it!
How to Help New Jersey
Perhaps you've been watching the ongoing protests at Delaney Hall, the ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, with a sickening sense of déjà vu. The conditions, and the violent response to those protesting them, aren't at all dissimilar to what we witnessed at the Whipple Building in Minneapolis this past winter.
Perhaps you've also been wondering, for what feels like the hundredth time this year, how to help. On that front, at least, we have some good news. Ashley Fairbanks, who started the Stand With Minnesota website during Operation Metro Surge, has added a landing page with links to resources, crowdfunding campaigns, bail funds, and New Jersey-based accounts and orgs to follow and amplify.
The nation and the world stood with Minnesota this winter. Let's stand with Jersey now.
Gold Medal Flour House Restored
Remember last July, when south Minneapolis homeowner George Johnson was re-siding his house and discovered an incredibly well-preserved Gold Medal Flour mural?
Well he's finished restoring it! KARE 11 caught up with George and his wife, Leigh, to talk about the nearly yearlong restoration process, which was facilitated by a bunch of local companies (and made possible with community crowdfunding support and General Mills).
"We re-insulated, modernized the wall, put on new sheeting, waterproofing barrier, drainage plane, and everything, too," George tells KARE. "So this essentially then carefully went back up onto the house. They took everything off and numbered it, put it all back up right where it was, and now it's just a decorative screen."
