Protest Tube

In the Killers song, the band asks, “Are we human, or are we dancer?” The question is pretty timely given that it was inspired by “Hunter S. Thompson, who stated that America was ‘raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line.'” But these days, there’s often an even more pressing question. Are you human or are you a bot? And the answer to that question can be connected back to getting people to keep in line. Wired: This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops. “American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on ‘college protesters,’ ‘radicalized’ political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers.”

+ Meanwhile, “community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds.” As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond. “The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out.”