I don’t know how many different ways I can say this: CHECK. YOUR. VOTER. REGISTRATION.
And now we have 75,000 more reasons why. Harris County election officials are processing about 75,000 voter registration records after a Texas Department of Public Safety system problem prevented some applications and updates from reaching counties as expected.
Before anybody panics, that does not mean 75,000 Harris County residents aren’t registered. Many records may be duplicates or require no changes. About 2,000 require additional review.
But here’s what matters: The deadline to register for the Nov. 3 election is Oct. 5. So why leave something this important to chance?
Go to VoteTexas.gov, click “Am I Registered?” and check your status. If something is wrong, contact the Harris County voter registrar. And if you registered or changed your address through DPS, make sure everything says what it’s supposed to say.
Then don’t stop with yourself. The Defender’s Round Up Five campaign is asking you to check on five other people. Your children. Your parents. Your neighbors. Your fellow organization members. Your group-chat friends who know everything happening on TikTok but somehow don’t know whether they’re registered to vote.
We can’t fix every problem with the system. But we can make sure we know our own status before Oct. 5.
Don’t worry about AI. The president says we’re good.
I know everybody is worried about the AI apocalypse. Will artificial intelligence take our jobs? Spread misinformation? Launch cyberattacks? Become so powerful that humans can no longer control it?
Have no fear, faithful readers. President Donald Trump has weighed in. It’s a “HOAX.”
Awww. Now we can all stop worrying.
Trump recently dismissed warnings that artificial intelligence could eventually threaten humanity, writing that “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.” He has also argued against slowing AI development, saying excessive regulation could hurt the United States in its technological competition with China.
To be clear, the debate over existential AI risk is far from settled. Nobody knows whether we’re headed toward The Terminator, a productivity revolution or some complicated combination of extraordinary advances and problems humans haven’t figured out yet.
But the concerns aren’t coming exclusively from conspiracy theorists stocking canned beans. Leaders and researchers inside the AI industry have warned that increasingly powerful systems require serious attention to safety and oversight. That doesn’t mean we should panic, but it dang sure should give us pause. “Nothing to see here” probably isn’t much of an AI policy.
I’m not knocking AI usage, but we might want to pay attention to what people who actually study this technology are warning us about.
And maybe price a bunker. Just in case.
The Hotel Lobby trend is cute. But…
I’ll admit it. Some of these Hotel Lobby AI videos are hilarious. If you’ve been on social media lately, you’ve probably seen them: Cats, politicians, celebrities and fictional characters suddenly performing inside that familiar orange room.
But here’s what a lot of people may not realize. That room, those movements and that performance didn’t originate with AI. They belong to Quavo and Takeoff, from Migos, and their phenomenal BLACK crew.
The viral trend is built from their 2022 COLORS performance of “Hotel Lobby,” replacing the two Black artists with other people and characters while preserving elements of their original performance. Takeoff was killed in Houston just months after it was recorded.
And that makes this feel different to me. We’re laughing at AI versions while the original Black creators become almost incidental to the joke.
Quavo apparently noticed, too. As the trend exploded, he reposted the original performance with two simple words: “The Original.”
That’s the larger AI conversation we can’t ignore. Generative AI doesn’t create from thin air. These tools can reproduce voices, faces, movements, styles and creative work that originated with actual human beings. Questions about consent, compensation and ownership aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re sitting right there in our social media feeds.
So while you’re enjoying the Hotel Lobby videos, remember that once again, Black folks created the culture. Everybody else found a way to remix it.
