Dear Commons Community,

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and NewsNation senior political contributor George Will joined “On Balance” to discuss how the United States needs help from Europe if President Trump’s bid to ensure peace between Ukraine and Russia is to succeed:

LELAND VITTERT, NEWS NATION HOST: Why should America be stronger about fighting Vladimir Putin than Europe collectively is right now? Why is it upon President Trump, in your mind and so many others, to stand stronger than Europe is willing to stand, as you point out, for its own safety and security?

GEORGE WILL: Well, first, let’s not prejudge what Europe is going to do.  Germany now has the fourth largest defense budget in the world. And Britain and France, two nuclear powers, have signed a new agreement to extend their nuclear umbrella, if you will, to European security.

Not just their national securities. So I think it’s arguable, Leland, that Europe is stepping up considerably. But beyond this, there is no reason to believe that Ukraine is the last morsel on the plate for Mr. Putin. He will-is very apt to turn his attentions to Eastern Europe, to Hungary, where there’s a regime that is, I think it’s fair to say, sympathetic to Putin, Mr. Erdogan’s Hungarian government. There are the three Baltic states who are members of NATO. And Article 5 still exists.

An attack on one is an attack on the NATO alliance. So we’re playing with fire here. And there’s not just smoke.

There’s actual fire.

LELAND VITTERT: Fair enough. And I think you rightly point out the dangers and the fire that exists. Bill O’Reilly, on the program last night, made the point that Donald Trump should be given time to maneuver, when I argued that sanctions must come now, that we must speak Vladimir Putin’s language, because of the risks of a sociopath, as Vladimir Putin is, with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Take a listen.

     (BILL O’REILLY: Putin would, in my opinion, use nukes. He’d use them. And when you’re dealing with a guy like that, when life     matters not at all, life  doesn’t matter one bit to him, you’ve got to be very, very careful and methodical.)

LELAND VITTERT: Given that there is now conversation, there is now negotiation, which I think is a good thing, because we’re at least talking about ending this war, rather than just continuing the funding of a war that neither side can win, is Trump not entitled to more time?

GEORGE WILL: Well, speaking of time, he said, 50 days, Mr. Putin, or there’ll be severe consequences. Then he said 10 days, Mr. Putin, or there’ll be severe consequences. The 10 days came and went, no consequences.

Now he says, if we don’t make progress, and he says, it’s over to you to do this, Mr. Zelensky, Putin will find himself in a rough situation. Leland, there comes a point when people just aren’t going to take seriously what he says. Remember, Leland, how there was a kind of alarm and convulsion here in Washington when Barack Obama said, I’m drawing a red line about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Syria then did what he had said was crossing a red line, and nothing happened. It is serious business when a great nation loses its credibility. And I think we’re in the process of doing that.

Most definitely!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Trump administration has quietly rescinded long-standing guidance that directed schools to accommodate students who are learning English, alarming advocates who fear that schools will stop offering assistance if the federal government quits enforcing the laws that require it.

Since March, the Education Department has also laid off nearly all workers in its Office of English Language Acquisition and has asked Congress to terminate funding for the federal program that helps pay for educating English-language learners. Last week, education advocates noticed that the guidance document related to English learning had a new label indicating it was rescinded and remains online “for historical purposes only.”

On Tuesday, Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said that the guidance for teaching English learners, which was originally set forth in 2015, was rescinded because it “is not in line with Administration policy.” A Justice Department spokesman responded to questions by sending a link to the July memorandum and said he had no comment when asked whether the guidance would be replaced.

For decades, the federal government has held that failing to provide resources for people not proficient in English constitutes discrimination based on national origin under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

In rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration is signaling that it may stop enforcing the law under that long-standing interpretation. The Education and Justice departments have been responsible for enforcing the law.

In the July memorandum, Attorney General Pam Bondi cited case law that says treating people, including students, who aren’t proficient in English differently does not on its face amount to discrimination based on national origin.

Other guidance related to language access for people using services across the federal government is also being suspended, according to the memo, and the Justice Department will create new guidance by mid-January to “help agencies prioritize English while explaining precisely when and how multilingual assistance remains necessary.” The aim of the effort, Bondi said in a statement published alongside the memo, is to “promote assimilation over division.”

The consequences for school districts were not immediately clear, but advocates worry that rescinding the 2015 guidance could open the door for weaker instruction for English learners and upend decades of direction from the federal government to provide English-language services to students who need them.

“The Department of Education and the Department of Justice are walking away from 55 years of legal understanding and enforcement. I don’t think we can understate how important that is,” said Michael Pillera, an attorney who worked at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights for 10 years and now directs the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Without pressure from the federal government to comply with the law, it is possible that some school districts will drop services, Pillera said, particularly as many districts struggle with financial pressures.

“It’s going to ripple quickly,” he predicted. “Schools were doing this because the Office for Civil Rights told them they had to.”

Many districts will probably not change their services, but rescinding the guidance opens the door, said Leslie Villegas, an education policy analyst at New America, a think tank. Advocates may watch for changes in districts that previously had compliance problems or those that had open cases with the Office for Civil Rights related to English-language instruction, she noted.

“The rescission of this guidance may create the mentality that no one’s watching,” Villegas said.

In recent months, the Justice Department notified at least three school districts — in Boston; Newark; and Worcester, Massachusetts — that the government was releasing them from government monitoring that had been in place to ensure they offered services to English-language learners.

Officials in Worcester said they expected the action even before Trump took office. But in Boston, some parent advocates questioned why the monitoring had ended, the Boston Globe reported.

Supporters of immigration restrictions argued that relieving pressure on schools to provide these services might be helpful, especially given the costs to districts.

“If you devote all these resources to these kids coming in [to school] completely unprepared, inevitably it will diminish the quality of education others are getting,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Todd DuBois, communications director for U.S. English, a group that advocates for English as the official and common language, said some education is needed to help “bridge the gap” for students who do not speak English, but the group is concerned that multilingualism “gets in the way of teaching English literacy earlier in life.”

The requirement to serve English-language learners in school is based on two federal statutes. The first is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on national origin, among other traits. A landmark 1974 Supreme Court case, Lau v. Nichols, interpreted this law to include a mandate for English-language services in schools.

The second federal law at issue is the 1974 Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which requires public schools to provide for students who do not speak English. A 1981 case decided in federal appeals court, Castañeda v. Pickard, laid out a test to determine whether schools were properly providing services to English learners in school.

In 2015, the Justice and Education departments published their 40-page guidance document, explaining how schools can properly comply with these laws and avoid potential federal investigations and penalties.

“For a teacher, it was kind of like the Bible,” said Montserrat Garibay, who headed the Office of English Language Acquisition under the Biden administration. “If, in fact, we want our students to learn English, this needs to be in place.”

In her memorandum, Bondi said that in addition to cutting back on multilingual services the administration deems “nonessential,” federal agencies would be tasked with boosting English education and assimilation.

“Instead of providing this office with more capacity and more resources to do exactly what the executive order says — to make sure that everybody speaks English — they are doing the total opposite,” Garibay said.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration enforcement measures, suggested the federal government should not direct how school districts offer services. But he also said that teaching children English is consistent with efforts to make sure people living in the United States speak English.

“I’m all for English-language education. We probably need to do even more of that,” he said. “If you’re going to let people in who don’t speak English, then you want them to be acquiring English as soon as possible.”

Tony

Patrick McMullan/Samuel Corum /Getty

Dear Commons Community,

During her summer break from The View, Ana Navarro is still holding political figures accountable.

The View’s Republican panelist shared a video on Instagram this week addressing Melania Trump’s recent letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The First Lady’s message, hand-delivered by Donald Trump during a meeting with Putin, urged him to end the war in Ukraine.  As reported in the Daily Beast.

Navarro labeled the letter as “stuff that’s so hypocritical you almost can’t believe it.” In the letter, Melania wrote that Putin could end the conflict with the “stroke of the pen,” and stressed that leaders had a “responsibility to sustain our children” in a “dignity-filled world” rooted in peace.

“Think about what her husband, what Donald Trump, is doing to the children of immigrants in America,” Navarro said. She pointed to immigration raids that have sparked controversy across the country.

“How many of those children are living with the fear of their parents being dragged through the streets of America? Their car windows smashed in? Their parents were beaten by masked men and disappeared?”

“How about all of the children in America?” Navarro asked, pointing to examples of children “being denied SNAP benefits” and “children all over the world who are not receiving U.S. aid because [Melania’s] husband’s government decided we shouldn’t be feeding starving children all over the world?”

She ultimately concluded that Melania’s Ukraine appeal “strikes me as ridiculously hypocritical,” though Navarro acknowledged that it was “a good thing” the First Lady had spoken out, but suggested the message should be directed at her husband.

“But maybe she should turn around and say the exact same thing to her husband, because there are children in America crying, suffering, going to bed in fear, returning to homes that are abandoned and empty, not knowing where their next meal is coming from,” Navarro said.

So right, Ana!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Oklahoma will require applicants for teacher jobs coming from California and New York to pass an exam that the Republican-dominated state’s top education official says is designed to safeguard against “radical leftist ideology,” but which opponents decry as a “MAGA loyalty test.”

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s public schools superintendent, said Monday that any teacher coming from the two blue states will be required to pass an assessment exam administered by PragerU, an Oklahoma-based conservative nonprofit, before getting a state certification.

“As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York,” Walters said in a statement.

PragerU, short for Prager University, puts out short videos with a conservative perspective on politics and economics. It promotes itself as “focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.”

Quinton Hitchcock, a spokesperson for the state’s education department, said the Prager test for teacher applicants has been finalized and will be rolling out “very soon.”

The state did not release the entire 50-question test to The Associated Press but did provide the first five questions, which include asking what the first three words of the U.S. Constitution are and why freedom of religion is “important to America’s identity.”

Prager didn’t immediately respond to a phone message or email seeking comment. But Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, told CNN that several questions on the assessment relate to “undoing the damage of gender ideology.”

Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, said Oklahoma’s contract with PragerU to test out-of-state would-be teachers “is a watershed moment.”

“Instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system,” he said. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

Zimmerman said the American Historical Association did a survey last year of 7th- to 12th-grade teachers and found that only a minority were relying on textbooks for day-to-day instruction. He said the upside to that is that most history books are “deadly boring.” But he said that means history teachers are relying on online resources, such as those from Prager.

“I think what we’re now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers,” Zimmerman said.

One of the nation’s largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, has often been at odds with President Donald Trump ‘s administration and the crackdown on teacher autonomy in the classroom.

“This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.

She was critical of Walters, who pushed for the state’s curriculum standards to be revised to include conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

“His priority should be educating students, but instead, it’s getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him,” Weingarten said in a statement.

Tina Ellsworth, president of the nonprofit National Council for the Social Studies, also raised concerns that the test would prevent teachers from applying for jobs.

“State boards of education should stay true to the values and principles of the U.S. Constitution,” Ellsworth said. “Imposing an ideology test to become a teacher in our great democracy is antithetical to those principles.”

State Rep. John Waldron, the Oklahoma Democratic Party chairman, decried the test as “political posturing.”

“If you want to see a textbook definition of indoctrination, how about a loyalty test for teachers,” said Waldron. “It’s a sad echo of a more paranoid past.”

Waldron, a New Jersey native, said he would have been in the target demographic for this kind of test when he moved from Washington, D.C., to Oklahoma to teach social studies in 1999. He said it would have struck him as an indication that the state “wasn’t serious about attracting quality teachers.”

“Teachers are not rushing here from other states to teach. We’ve got an enormous teacher shortage and it’s not like we have a giant supply of teachers coming in from blue states anyway,” he said.

Did I hear someone say “It’s a sad echo of a more paranoid past”.

Tony

Photograph: EnviroBuild

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative George Will in his column in The Washington Post yesterday described Trump “as flaccid as a boned fish” compared to Vladimir Putin. 

Trump has been trying to distract reporters from the Jeffrey Epstein controversy by meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday, August 15 and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders in the White House Oval Office on Monday, August 18.

Trump went to Anchorage hoping that Putin would agree to a ceasefire in the Ukraine/Russia War. Instead, Russian forces’ bombing of Ukraine continued after Trump and Putin departed Alaska.

“Alaska clarified what was unclear only to the obtuse: Putin wants to win the war, Trump wants to end it, and as George Orwell said, the quickest way to end a war is to lose it,” Will argued. “Putin insolently did not suppress his smirk while on the red carpet that Trump rolled out for him. He almost certainly already had dangerous clarity about Trump. For a nation, more dangerous than an enemy’s hatred is his contempt, which makes him reckless and implacable. Speaking to some of his generals in August 1939, Hitler said, ‘Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.’ And the war came days later.”

Putin, Will warned, is “yearning to restore the supposed grandeur of the Soviet Union’s decrepitude” — and Trump gave him the upper hand in Anchorage.

“Eighty-five summers ago, the United States, which began as an emanation of Europe, was saluted by Britain’s prime minister in the House of Commons,” Will explains. “On a dark day, June 4, 1940, he anticipated the day when ‘the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old.’ Now, it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States.”

The conservative columnist continues, “It [USA] needs to be liberated from the chimera that it has no substantial stake in the outcome of high-intensity, state-on-state violence inflicted by a nuclear power obedient to a man who has actual beliefs: crackpot, but real, and menacing.”

Will’s entire column is below.

Tony

The Washington Post

“Now it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States”

George Will

August18, 2025

As flaccid as a boned fish, Donald Trump crumpled quicker than even Vladimir Putin probably anticipated. The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child. The president’s thunderous demands — a 50-day deadline, a 10-day deadline, “severe consequences,” a ceasefire before negotiations — all were just noise.

As Mark Twain said, thunder is impressive but lightning does the work. Into Trump’s post-Alaska vagaries about progress and agreements on “many points,” an old question intrudes: Can the phrase “insipid beyond words” be applied to words?

Alaska clarified what was unclear only to the obtuse: Putin wants to win the war, Trump wants to end it, and as George Orwell said, the quickest way to end a war is to lose it. Putin insolently did not suppress his smirk while on the red carpet that Trump rolled out for him. He almost certainly already had dangerous clarity about Trump.

For a nation, more dangerous than an enemy’s hatred is his contempt, which makes him reckless and implacable. Speaking to some of his generals in August 1939, Hitler said, “Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.” And the war came days later.

Let us hope that America’s domestic political degradations have not rendered it incapable of embarrassment, which is a prerequisite for recuperation. Alaska was not just another drop in our overflowing bucket of mortifications. It was proof that for the next 41 months, no interlocutor can believe a word the U.S. president says.

The problem is not that he is endlessly cynical, which would be an improvement. Rather, he seems promiscuously sincere, believing everything equally, no matter how discordant his beliefs today are with yesterday’s. It has been well said that our most important ideas are those that contradict our feelings. Does Trump have any such?

Does he have an inkling of the coarse culture that produced Putin? When Dwight Eisenhower asked Gen. Georgy Zhukov, the foremost Soviet hero of World War II, how the Red Army cleared minefields, Zhukov replied that it marched through them. Putin has been marinated in lore about that war, and about “the West” trying “to cancel a whole 1,000 year culture, our people.” He is delusional, but serious.

He articulates his seriousness while his U.S. adversary advertises his lack thereof. Hence Trump’s inability to recognize the continuity between the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia.

Speaking last week on Russia state television, Konstantin Zatulin, a leader in Putin’s political party, said of Ukraine: “Everywhere that a Russian soldier has put his feet will undoubtedly be kept by Russia.” The Brezhnev Doctrine has been tweaked.

This doctrine was enunciated by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, three weeks before Soviet forces intervened to crush the “Prague Spring” liberalization in Czechoslovakia. It was: Wherever socialism had been planted, socialist regimes had a duty to preserve it.

Putin’s yearning to restore the supposed grandeur of the Soviet Union’s decrepitude is worse than mere nostalgia, as sociologist Robert Nisbet defined it: “a rust of memory.” A corrosion. The Soviet nomenklatura, of which Putin and some of his satraps were members, derived psychological as well as material income from the U.S.S.R.’s status as a superpower. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived at his Alaska hotel wearing a “CCCP” sweatshirt, the Cyrillic initials for the U.S.S.R.

Trump, too, resembles a fly in amber, frozen decades ago. Speaking on Fox News, referring to nuclear arsenals, he said of Russia, “We are number one and they are number two in the world.” They, however, have one-third of the European Union’s population and one-tenth its GDP.

As this is written, leaders from a continent thickly planted with military cemeteries have come to Washington, soon to go home. Then we shall learn whether, at long last, “Europe” is more than a geographical expression.

Eighty-five summers ago, the United States, which began as an emanation of Europe, was saluted by Britain’s prime minister in the House of Commons. On a dark day (June 4, 1940) he anticipated the day when “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

Now it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States. It needs to be liberated from the chimera that it has no substantial stake in the outcome of high-intensity, state-on-state violence inflicted by a nuclear power obedient to a man who has actual beliefs: crackpot, but real, and menacing.

U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York\

Dear Commons Community,

Elise Stefanik isn’t usually the one in the hot seat.

The Republican congresswoman from New York has built her no-holds-barred political brand around grilling college presidents during congressional hearings.

But it was her turn to face intense public scrutiny on Aug. 18, when she was met with a wave of loud boos from the crowd during an event to honor a late local politician in the town of Plattsburgh. The jeering, which went viral, was so bad that she gave up on speaking and passed the microphone back to others on stage. As reported by USA Today.

“Shame!” protesters shouted, along with “Unseal the Epstein files!”

“It is a disgusting disgrace that this is what the far left does,” she later told a local news outlet.

It’s the latest instance of a GOP lawmaker encountering unhappy constituents in recent months. Anger over the economic impact of tariffs, the president’s new tax and spending law and cuts to the federal workforce has prompted a series of acrimonious town halls across the country.

The Democratic National Committee seized on the moment, writing in a post on X: “That’s what happens when you sell out your constituents to Donald Trump.”

The moment comes at a changing political time for Stefanik as she eyes a run for governor of New York state.  Trump pulled her nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations earlier this year.

She deserves the backlash!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Washington Post had a featured article yesterday describing a new wave of entertainment called “AI Slop” which uses AI tools that turn text commands into full-color footage that can look uncannily real. In the three years since ChatGPT’s launch, AI videos have come to dominate the social web, copying and sometimes supplanting human artists and videographers whose work helped train the systems in the first place.  In sum, AI is creating new alternate video universe on the Web.

Aren’t we lucky!

Below is video explaining AI Slop.  The entire Washington Post article follows

Tony

Washington Post

Making cash off ‘AI slop’: The surreal video business taking over the web

A mad rush of creators is using AI video tools to flood the internet — and turn a profit — with videos that can seem remarkably real.

By Drew Harwell

August 18, 2025

Luis Talavera, a 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho, first went viral in June with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers, some of whom comment to ask if the scenes are real.

The low-effort, high-volume nature of AI videos has earned them the nickname “AI slop,” and Talavera knows his videos aren’t high art. But they earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok’s creator program, he said, so every night and weekend he spends hours churning them out. “I’ve been on my couch holding my 3-month-old daughter, saying, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, we’re gonna create this script,’” he said.

Nothing has transformed or polluted the creative landscape in the past few years quite like AI video, whose tools turn text commands into full-color footage that can look uncannily real. In the three years since ChatGPT’s launch, AI videos have come to dominate the social web, copying and sometimes supplanting the human artists and videographers whose work helped train the systems in the first place.

Their power has spawned a wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work. Adele, a 20-year-old student in Florida who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used because she fears harassment, told The Washington Post she is taking a break from college to focus on making money from her AI-video accounts. Another creator in Arizona who went viral with an AI airport kangaroo said he made $15,000 in commissions in three months, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern over online harassment.

But the flood of financially incentivized “slop” has also given way to a strange new internet, where social media feeds overflow with unsettlingly lifelike imagery and even real videos can appear suspect. Some viral clips now barely rely on humans at all, with AI tools generating not just the imagery but also the ideas.

“I think of it more as a science than an art,” said one 25-year-old creator in Phoenix, who uses the online name Infinite Unreality and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had received threats online. “In reality, there’s not a whole lot of creativity happening. And whatever creativity is happening is coming from the computer.”

Some of the videos are otherworldly art pieces or cartoonishly goofy satires, carrying labels marking them as AI-made. But many others are deceptively realistic and styled as news reports, influencer posts or mean-spirited jokes, often in hopes they’ll be shocking enough to grab attention — and from there, revenue.

Built on tools from America’s biggest tech giants, offered free or at low cost, the videos have touched off a kind of existential panic among the purveyors of traditional art, fueling anxiety that they could crowd out filmmakers, journalists and other creators for whom every scene takes money and time.

“As AI accelerates the production of content, human creativity will inevitably feel overwhelmed,” said Tony Sampson, a senior academic at the University of Essex who studies digital communication.

AI videos don’t try to compete on “authenticity, aesthetic value or thought-provoking concepts,” he said. Instead, they’re pumped out at industrial speed for maximum engagement, relying on viewers’ shock and fascination to make them spread.

The creators themselves say that AI videos are inevitable, regardless of their impact, and that they enjoy experimenting on AI’s cutting edge. They are also eager to reap the rewards of mass attention: Juan Pablo Jiménez Domínguez, a 29-year-old creator known online as Pablo Prompt who works at a university in the Canary Islands, said he has used AI to create videos for ad campaigns and now makes enough that he “could live entirely from this work.”

“A few months ago, we couldn’t do half the things we can do now,” he said. The technology, he added, will help “bring our ideas to life without the technical or financial blocks that used to hold us back.”

‘A human being, just like you’

The main benchmark for AI video is known as the Will Smith Eating Spaghetti test, and it works exactly how it sounds: A tool’s progress is graded by how well it can make the actor look like he’s chowing down.

In 2023, the best versions looked muddy and deformed: Noodles oozed cartoonishly, eyes bugged out. This year’s top performer, however, is practically undetectable as AI, save for one giveaway: The fake Smith makes crunching sounds, because the AI doesn’t know how real spaghetti gets chewed.

The quirk, in a Google-made tool called Veo 3, actually represents a major breakthrough for AI video: Unlike past tools, Veo 3 generates sound for every scene. And the progress continues rapidly: Google announced last month that the tool can now animate any photo into a lifelike eight-second clip.

Every link of the AI-video supply chain has shown extraordinary progress over the past year, multiplying video makers’ production power. A creator might, for instance, draft video ideas and dialogue with ChatGPT, generate images with Midjourney, compose realistic voices with ElevenLabs, and animate it all together with OpenAI’s Sora, Meta’s Movie Gen or a smaller upstart, such as Hailuo, Luma or Kling.

In the late 2010s, amateurs used early, kludgy AI tools to splice women’s faces into “deepfake” pornography, soliciting money for individual requests. But the newer tools have made the process so simple that basically anyone can use them — as seen on Elon Musk’s social network X, where users have prompted its AI tool Grok to create fake explicit videos of Taylor Swift.

“Five years ago, AI video was nonexistent to complete garbage. One year ago it was okay, not very usable, sort of just beginning,” said Mark Gadala-Maria, a co-founder at the AI tool Post Cheetah who tracks video trends. “And today it’s virtually indistinguishable from reality.”

The shift has unleashed a barrage of AI video onto the web. In May, 4 of the 10 fastest-growing YouTube channels by subscribers trafficked in AI videos, an analysis in Sherwood News found, including Masters of Prophecy (’80s-style synthwave music videos) and Chick of Honor (nonsensical animal skits).

Beyond video, there is AI music; one band, Velvet Sundown, had its AI-generated folk song “Dust on the Wind” climb to the top of Spotify’s Viral 50 charts, despite the fact that the band members don’t actually exist.

A single viral hit can spawn thousands of copycats, as with the videos of fake roller-coaster disasters, Bigfoot video diaries, jet-flying babies and Jiménez Domínguez’s cats flipping off a diving board.

To stand out, some creators have built AI-generated influencers with lives a viewer can follow along. “Why does everybody think I’m AI? … I’m a human being, just like you guys,” says the AI woman in one since-removed TikTok video, which was watched more than 1 million times.

The best-performing videos, Gadala-Maria said, have often relied on “shock value,” such as racist and sexist jokes depicting Black women as primates, as first reported by Wired, or joking about what young “AI gals gone wild” would do for cash.

Others have ventured into dreamlike horror. One video showing a dog biting a woman’s face off, revealing a salad, has more than 250 million views.

The major social media platforms, scared of driving viewers away, have tried to crack down on slop accounts, using AI tools of their own to detect and flag videos they believe were synthetically made. YouTube last month said it would demonetize creators for “inauthentic” and “mass-produced” content.

But the systems are imperfect, and the creators can easily spin up new accounts — or just push their AI tools to pump out videos similar to the banned ones, dodging attempts to snuff them out.

“Humans are attracted to things that are over the top,” Gadala-Maria said. “And AI is really good at that.”

‘Slop money’

The typical AI creator’s first dollar comes from the video platforms themselves, through the kinds of incentive programs that TikTok, YouTube and Instagram built to reward viral success.

Adele, the Florida student, shared a screenshot from her TikTok account showing she had made $886 within four days from an AI-made video showing a fake influencer eating glass fruit.

The 20-year-old said she had recently paused her psychology studies to focus on her entrepreneurial goals, including her “AI Viral Club,” which offers video-making guides to roughly 70 subscribers paying $29 a month.

“I’ve seen a lot of my friends have a really hard time getting jobs, even with their degrees,” she said. “This is the future.”

Like Adele, many creators have worked to diversify beyond viral payouts, selling AI-tool courses and templates to aspiring creators eager to make their own. After an AI video showing two women eating a Korean-style “mukbang” went viral, its creator began selling a $15 visual handbook on how others could copy its style.

The creator, Jayla Bennett, who uses the account name “Gigglegrid.ai,” said she is 26, works part-time in North Carolina and just started making AI videos this summer, seeing a chance at easy money. “The trick is to get ahead of the curve and not be a part of the wave,” she said.

Many creators also sell “prompt drops,” listing the commands they gave the AI to make a certain scene, while others charge for custom-commissioned work. One creator said he is able to charge $200 to $300 for a five-second clip.

Even bigger deals are being made. The prediction-gambling company Kalshi paid for a TV commercial during the NBA Finals featuring AI people, including a woman being battered by a hurricane, screaming their bets about current events. Jack Such, a Kalshi spokesman, said the video cost $2,000 in AI-prompting fees and went from idea to live in less than 72 hours, far quicker than a traditional studio could do. The creator, PJ Accetturo, said “high-dopamine” AI videos would be “the ad trend of 2025.”

Angst over AI has roiled the traditional media for years, helping ignite the Hollywood strikes in 2023 and legal battles over artists’ rights. In June, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, ruling narrowly for Meta in a lawsuit brought by authors accusing the company of violating copyright law by training AI on their books, said AI would “dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way.”

The technology has steadily inched its way into filmmaking nevertheless. Ted Sarandos, a co-chief of Netflix, said last month that the streamer had recently used AI video tools for the first time to help animate a building collapse for an Argentine sci-fi show, and that the move had been cheaper and “10 times faster” than a traditional special effects crew.

Even for amateurs, AI video’s ease of use has spawned a global business. Jiaru Tang, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology who recently interviewed creators in China, said AI video has become one of the hottest new income opportunities there for workers in the internet’s underbelly, who previously made money writing fake news articles or running spam accounts.

Many university students, stay-at-home moms and the recently unemployed now see AI video as a kind of gig work, like driving an Uber. The average small creator she interviewed did their day jobs and then, at night, “spent two to three hours making AI-slop money,” she said. A few she spoke with made $2,000 to $3,000 a month at it.

“They see their business as internet traffic, chasing really short-term trends, some of which are three to four days long,” said Patrik Wikstrom, a professor who oversaw Tang’s research. “They don’t really care about if this is morally sound or if this is creative. They’re chasing the traffic. They’re chasing the next thing.”

‘They just want to be entertained’

For the AI-video creator Daryl Anselmo, this moment recalls a similarly massive shift known as the “Demoscene,” an underground movement in the ’90s built on computer nerds tinkering with real-time 3D graphics before “Toy Story” and the Sony PlayStation made them mainstream. That era, too, stirred up apprehension among animators over the death of art. It also churned out a lot of slop.

But the longtime video game artist has nevertheless gone all in on AI video, believing it offers a revolutionary new kind of artistic freedom. From his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, he describes himself as the creative director for a team of semiautonomous AI machines, each with its own task: visualizing ideas, generating images, animating scenes and stitching them together into experimental videos that are often skin-crawling and avant-garde.

One morning, he takes photos of some leftover spinach and commands the system to make a spinach monster. It creates 10 different takes, and he chooses the leafiest and most menacing, telling the tools to examine the last video in the sequence and create the next most logical scene.

All of the experimentation has cost him in the form of graphics-processing bills, which total thousands of dollars a month. But the videos have won him consulting work from companies eager to emulate what he calls his “grimoire” of AI tools. And they’ve gained him attention on social media, where he often feels he must fight the urge to give people what they want: the creepiest videos, the most over-the-top.

He can now churn out phantasmagoric scenes of hollow-eyed monsters at a speed and quality that would have once required a specialized team, but the pace of advancement slightly freaks him out. The 10 seconds of high-quality video it took him 10 minutes to create last year now takes just two minutes and, he expects, will soon take just a few seconds. At that speed, he said, creators could start really pushing the boundaries, rolling out hyper-personalized commercials and interactive videos a viewer could shape in real time, like a video game come to life.

“I don’t know if we’re prepared for the flood of generative media that’s about to hit us,” he said.

Even for those with less experience than Anselmo, this level of AI power has changed the industry. The creator in Phoenix, Infinite Unreality, started playing around with AI video while working in IT for his dad’s company, hoping to spark a content-creator career with “the most returns off minimal effort.”

He made his first videos by taking viral clips on Instagram Reels and throwing them into Sora, asking the AI to transform them into something new. His first viral hit, which he described as “some fat dude getting a massage,” gained 30 million views, but many more have followed. He now uses AI in every part of his eight-step workflow, from generating ideas to adding his logo in postproduction to discourage video thieves.

His widely shared video of a seemingly real kangaroo at an airport gate, he said, took him 15 minutes, mainly because it was the AI tool’s idea; he had asked it to spit out something that would go viral, and it did. “I don’t want to sit here and act like I’m this genius,” he said. “I’m an entrepreneur.”

But he has been unnerved by some of the responses to his more popular videos, including threats from viewers who say he’s summoning something dark he can’t control. His videos of lizard-headed babies — again, the AI tool’s idea — have been especially unpopular. “People are saying, ‘This is disturbing.’ But this is what you guys want to watch at the end of the day,” he said.

It’s not all easy money because many of the companies charge for individual AI-processing tasks; he budgets himself about $100 a day in AI fees, and a single 10-second rendering costs him about $7.50 to make. But he still expects to be made obsolete in short order, saying he believes that “in a year from now, pretty much everything is going to be very easy for the average person” to make.

His bigger fear, beyond how he’ll pay his mortgage when that time comes, is a more existential one: about what all this limitless creation is doing to our brains. “When you have every single form of media, every possible thing you can think of at your fingerprints at all times,” he said, “is anything exciting anymore?”

Gadala-Maria, in contrast, isn’t worried. He expects AI one day will cement itself as the most powerful medium for human storytelling — not a meme or a novelty but an art form all its own.

“People generally don’t care how their entertainment is created,” he said. “They just want to be entertained.”

Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, file) via Associated Press

Dear Commons Community,

Television’s MSNBC news network is changing its name to My Source News Opinion World, or MS NOW for short, as part of its corporate divorce from NBC.

The network, which appeals to liberal audiences with a stable of personalities including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Ari Melber and Nicole Wallace, has been building its own separate news division from NBC News. It will also remove NBC’s peacock symbol from its logo as part of the change, which will take effect later this year.

The name change was ordered by NBC Universal, which last November spun off cable networks USA, CNBC, MSNBC, E! Entertainment, Oxygen and the Golf Channel into its own company, called Versant. None of the other networks are changing their name.

MSNBC got its name upon its formation in 1996, as a partnership then between Microsoft and NBC.

Name changes always carry an inherent risk, and MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler said that for employees, it is hard to imagine the network under a different name. “This was not a decision that was made quickly or without significant debate,” she said in a memo to staff.

“During this time of transition, NBC Universal decided that our brand requires a new, separate identity,” she said. “This decision now allows us to set our own course and assert our indepedence as we continue to build our own modern newsgathering organization.”

Still, it’s noteworthy that the business channel CNBC is leaving “NBC” in its name. MSNBC argues that CNBC has always maintained a greater separation and, with its business focus, is less likely to cover many of the same topics.

Still, the affiliation between a news division that tries to play it safe and one that doesn’t hide its liberal bent has long caused tension.  Trump refers to the cable network as “MSDNC,” for Democratic National Committee. Even before the corporate change, NBC News has been reducing the use of its personalities on MSNBC.

Some NBC News personalities, like Jacob Soboroff, Vaughn Hillyard, Brandy Zadrozny and Antonia Hylton, have joined MSNBC. The network has also hired Carol Leoning, Catherine Rampell and Jackie Alemany from the Washington Post, and Eugene Daniels from Politico.

Maddow, in a recent episode of Pivot, noted that MSNBC will no longer have to compete with NBC News programs for reporting product from out in the field — meaning it will no longer get the “leftovers.”

“In this case, we can apply our own instincts, our own queries, our own priorities, to getting stuff that we need from reporters and correspondents,” Maddow said. “And so it’s gonna be better.”

Good luck to MS NOW!

Tony

Warren Buffett. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images© Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Billionaire Warren Buffett, who will step down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year, has built one of the most successful companies in history by living out a set of values that are as practical as they are inspiring.

When it comes to hiring, Buffett doesn’t mince words. Skills and experience matter, but if you miss one critical trait, you risk bringing serious damage into your organization.

The Buffett Quote:

“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”

In a knowledge economy, intelligence is obviously key. And energy fuels passion and productivity. But integrity? It’s the bedrock that holds everything together. Without it, talent becomes dangerous.

In my line of work coaching high-level leaders, integrity is a non-negotiable. I see how employees, colleagues, customers and stakeholders alike respond to their integrity by trusting their decision-making. People working for such leaders know that their actions are transparent, and their judgment sound. In collaborative environments, trustworthy leaders quickly earn a reputation for dependability and accountability—two accelerators of team trust.

How did we end up with Trump!

Tony