07/06/2025

SATURDAY | JUNE 7, 2025

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AI-generated Pope sermons spread on social media

post on X saying “whatever“, and rebutted Trump’s suggestion that he had seen the Bill before he left the White House, calling the claim “false”. However, he acknowledged that some of his opposition stems from the elimination of the EV tax credit. “This Bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!” Musk ramped up his crusade on Wednesday to convince lawmakers to kill Trump’s Bill, which is estimated to add US$2.42 trillion to US budget deficits over the next decade. “Bankrupting America is not ok!” – Bernama-Anadolu U.S. COURT BLOCKS GOVT ASSAULT ON HARVARD NEW YORK: A court on Thursday put a temporary stay on US President Donald Trump’s latest effort to stop foreign students from enrolling at Harvard. “(This) is part of a concerted and escalating campaign of retaliation by the government in clear retribution for Harvard’s exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” said Harvard. US district judge Allison Burroughs said Harvard has shown that without a temporary restraining order, it risked sustaining “immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties”. – AFP PM MULLS ‘DEADLY FORCE’ AGAINST VENEZUELAN SHIPS PORT OF SPAIN: Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said on Thursday she is considering using“deadly force”against any Venezuelan vessel in her country’s waters, a day after Venezuela announced the arrest of a Trinidadian “mercenary”. “We have to take all threats against any incursion into our territory seriously. I will speak to the defence minister and attorney-general to seek advice on protection for our Coast Guard to use deadly force on any unidentified vessel entering our waters from Venezuela.“ – AFP COMMUNICATION CHANNELS TO BE SET BY CANADA, CHINA OTTAWA: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Chinese Premier Li Qiang agreed to establish regular communication channels between Canada and China in a call on Thursday, the Prime Minister’s Office said. They also discussed trade between the two countries and committed their governments to working together to address the fentanyl crisis, it said. “Carney took the opportunity to raise trade irritants affecting agriculture and agri-food products, as well as other issues.“ – Reuters

BR I E F S

WASHINGTON: Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos and audios of Pope Leo XIV are populating rapidly online, racking up views as platforms struggle to police them. An AFP investigation identified dozens of YouTube and TikTok pages that have been churning out AI-generated messages delivered in the pope’s voice or attributed to him since he took charge of the Catholic Church last month. The hundreds of fabricated sermons and speeches, in English and Spanish, underscore how easily hoaxes created using AI could elude detection and dupe viewers. “There is natural interest in what the new pope has to say, and people Suspect in antisemitic attack faces 118 counts LOS ANGELES: The suspect in a Molotov cocktail attack on a Jewish protest march in Colorado appeared in court on Thursday, facing 118 charges over an incident that injured 15 people. Mohamed Sabry Soliman is alleged to have thrown firebombs and sprayed burning gasoline at a gathering on Sunday, in support of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The 45-year-old Egyptian, who federal authorities said was in the country illegally after overstaying a tourist visa, faces 28 attempted murder charges and other counts relating to his alleged use of violence, including a count of animal cruelty for a dog that was hurt. Boulder County district attorney Michael Dougherty said he could face a centuries-long prison term if convicted. “The defendant is charged with attempted murder in the first degree as to 14 victims. If convicted and those sentences run consecutively, that would be 48 years for each victim, which comes to 672 years.” Soliman is also expected to be charged with federal hate crime offences. This week, his wife and five children were detained by immigration agents as the White House took to social media to taunt them about an impending deportation. However, a judge on Wednesday imposed a temporary restraining order that bars any attempt to remove them from the country. Police who rushed to the scene of the attack found 16 unused Molotov cocktails and a backpack weed sprayer containing gasoline that investigators say Soliman had intended to use as a makeshift flamethrower. – AFP o YouTube terminates 16 channels, TikTok removes 11 accounts posting such videos

never preached. Disclaimers annotating their use of AI were often hard to find, and sometimes nonexistent. On YouTube, a label demarcating “altered or synthetic content” is required for material that makes someone appear to say something they did not. Such disclosures only show up towards the bottom of each video’s click-to-open description. A YouTube spokesperson said the company has since applied a more prominent label to some videos on the channels flagged by AFP that were not found to have violated the platform’s guidelines. TikTok also requires creators to label posts sharing realistic AI-generated content, although several pope-centric videos went unmarked. A TikTok spokesperson said the company proactively removes policy-violating content and uses verified badges to signal authentic accounts.

Santa Clara University technology ethics director Brian Patrick Green said the moderation difficulties are the result of rapid AI developments inspiring “chaotic uses of it”. Many clips on the YouTube channels amassed tens of thousands of views before being deactivated. On TikTok, one Spanish-language video received 9.6 million views while claiming to show Leo preaching about the value of supportive women. Another, which carried an AI label but still fooled viewers, was watched some 32.9 million times. No video on the pope’s official Instagram page has more than six million views. The AI-generated sermons not only “corrode the pope’s moral authority” and “make whatever he actually says less believable”, but could be harnessed “to build up trust around a channel before having the pope say something outrageous or politically expedient”, said Green. – AFP

do not yet know his stance and style,” said University of Washington professor emeritus Oren Etzioni, who is also founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit fighting deepfakes. After AFP presented YouTube with 26 channels posting predominantly AI-generated pope content, the platform terminated 16 for violating its policies against spam, deceptive practices and scams, and another for violating its terms of service. The company also booted six pages from its partner programme allowing creators to monetise their content. TikTok removed 11 accounts that AFP pointed out, with over 1.3 million combined followers, citing the platform’s policies against impersonation, harmful misinformation and misleading AI-generated content of public figures. With names such as “Pope Leo XIV Vision”, the social media pages portrayed Leo offering a flurry of warnings and lessons he

POLITICAL SATIRE ... Cantonese opera actor Lung Koon-tin portraying US President Donald Trump onstage with another actor playing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in “Trump, The Twins President” in Hong Kong. – REUTERSPIC

Trump threatens Musk with funding cuts WASHINGTON: US President

our budget is to terminate Elon’s government subsidies and contracts.” Earlier in the day, Musk said Trump would have lost the 2024 US election without his support, and suggested that it may be time for the country to establish a new political party. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Democrats would control the (White) House and Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,“ Musk wrote on X. Trump said on Thursday he is“very disappointed” with Musk amid the tech billionaire’s campaign against his signature spending and tax Bill. He suggested that Musk’s criticism of the “big, beautiful Bill”

may be rooted in jealousy. “I am very disappointed because Musk knew the inner workings of this Bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it. “All of a sudden, he has a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we are going to have to cut the EV mandate,“ he said in the Oval Office as he hosted German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The EV mandate refers to a long-standing one-time tax credit of up to US$7,500 (RM31,725) for those who purchase EVs. Musk quickly responded with a

Donald Trump said he asked Elon Musk to leave his role in the Trump administration, and appeared to threaten billions of dollars in government funding as the row between the once close allies continued to widen on Thursday, Anadolu Ajansi reported. “Elon was ‘wearing thin‘. I asked him to leave, I took away his EV (electric vehicle) mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went crazy!” wrote Trump in a social media post. “The easiest way to save money in