Politico

When Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” at the Democratic National Convention this week, the audience went wild, and the internet made the moment go viral. But on Trump’s end, something else was also going on when he made his (false) assertions that Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to inflate the crowd sizes in images of her rallies. AI might not have blown up politics the way some people worried it was going to.

When former President Barack Obama takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention, he’ll address a party that has done a major about-face on its relationship with technology since he left office. Hailed as the first “internet president” for his campaign’s embrace of then-nascent social media and blogs, Obama’s rise was inextricable from that of the digital landscape we now take for granted.

For a while, it looked like AI was going to blow up campaign politics in 2024. Powerful new tools, new persuasion techniques, less policing of social-media platforms, all were leading up to a landscape transformed, maybe dangerously so.

A group of archivists—a coalition from government, academia and nonprofits—has begun capturing the Biden administration’s digital footprint. The monthslong undertaking is called the End of Term Archive, and it has occurred every four years since the George W. Bush administration. Archivists first amass a sprawling list of public government URLs. They then catalog all of those websites (and the websites within those websites) and a snapshot of their content. In the end, it’s as much as 300 terabytes worth of material.

Conservative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have sent a chill across the tech sector. University science and engineering programs have curtailed race-based admissions and scholarships after last year’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.