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Perplexity unlawfully copied thousands of CNN stories, videos and images to power its products, CNN said in its lawsuit.

United States news channel CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in New York federal court, alleging the AI search engine provider is unlawfully distributing its copyrighted content, marking the latest legal tussle between the AI firm and a news publisher.

The complaint, filed on Thursday, said that Perplexity unlawfully copied thousands of CNN stories, videos and images to power its products and distribute “identical or substantially similar” competing content.

“You can’t copyright facts,” Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said in response to the lawsuit.

CNN is asking for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking Perplexity from violating its intellectual property rights.

“CNN’s lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits,” the Warner Bros-owned news company said in a statement.

“By exploiting CNN’s reporting in this manner, Perplexity violates the protections afforded by copyright law and undermines the economic incentives that make original newsgathering possible,” CNN said in the complaint.

Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, news publishers and writers have worried about their content being repurposed to appear in the results of a chatbot query, triggering battles over copyright, compensation and ownership.

CNN’s lawsuit is one of dozens of high-stakes US cases brought by copyright owners, including news outlets, authors and publishers, against tech companies over alleged misuse of their work to train large language models. Anthropic was the first AI company to settle one of these cases last year, agreeing to pay $1.5bn to resolve a class action lawsuit from a group of authors.

The CNN suit is the latest in a series of legal challenges brought against Perplexity, which uses AI to scour websites and answer users’ queries, alleging the company has infringed copyrights and unlawfully scraped data to train its technology.

Perplexity is also facing lawsuits from The New York Times, Reddit and Dow Jones, among others.

Several news firms have now signed licensing deals and partnerships with Big Tech and generative AI companies to ensure that their models have access to verified sources of news, while also compensating publishers and linking back to original articles.

WASHINGTON — In the 2024 election, hundreds of social media influencers were credentialed for the first time to attend the Democratic and Republican conventions. They have been invited to holiday parties in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, to political rallies in Texas and to events at the White House by both the Biden and Trump administrations.

The role of influencers is surging as candidates and groups across the political spectrum see their social media feeds and personas as a pathway to younger audiences and harder-to-reach groups of voters.

“You have that sense of authenticity, like a friend is talking to you,” said Emma Briant, a professor at Notre Dame University’s Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society who studies propaganda.

That’s exactly what campaigns are hoping to harness when they partner with influencers, she said.

But the nature of that partnership has come into question in California’s hotly contested gubernatorial race after it emerged that a number of content creators — some with millions of followers, others with only a handful — had taken payments from the campaign of Democratic candidate Tom Steyer and not disclosed that they were paid to create those posts.

Some popular content creators have felt the need to explain themselves to their audience. Others have questioned how common such under-the-table payments might be, since there are no disclosure requirements for paid content at the federal level and few jurisdictions have any rules mandating it.

Some campaign finance advocates are concerned that voters could increasingly be influenced by social media posts that they don’t know are sponsored.

“The problem is that it doesn’t look like an ad,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former enforcement attorney at the Federal Election Commission. “It ends up really getting people at a place where they’re not skeptical and not able to tell the difference between what’s voluntary and where the influencer is acting as a paid spokesperson.”

Ghosh is now the director of campaign finance reform at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which has filed a petition asking the FEC to require disclaimers on paid content created by influencers.

Roughly 1 in 5 Americans said they regularly got news from social media influencers in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, and that number was nearly double for younger adults between the ages of 18 and 29.

Working with social media creators can be an easy way for candidates to try to boost their image, particularly with a younger audience.

“If they don’t have big personalities, maybe partnering with some influencers who seem cool and fun can make you seem cool and fun also through association,” said Link Lauren, a political influencer and podcaster who served as a communications advisor for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign in 2024.

California is one of the few places that requires disclosure of sponsored social media posts, but the 2023 law that created those rules hadn’t gotten much of a workout before the issue was raised in this contest through a series of dueling complaints with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. The commission has yet to weigh in on the various accusations.

Under the law, influencers are required to provide disclosure that a post was sponsored and say who paid for it. Political groups are required to notify paid creators of the requirement.

Even if the commission finds that violations have occurred, the penalties are not especially harsh.

Violation of the law carries no civil, criminal or administrative penalties. The FPPC can take alleged violators to court and ask a judge to force compliance. And violations can be penalized with a fine of up to $5,000 per instance.

Influencers reporting influencers

In the gubernatorial race, the issue of compliance was raised, naturally, by a pair of influencers.

Beatrice Gomberg has built up a following of more than 180,000 followers on TikTok, where she posts under the handle antiplasticlady. Her side gig of creating nonplastic children’s cups and lunch boxes became her main gig after she lost her human resources job at Macy’s during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I started doing social media because I didn’t want to hire a marketing company,” Gomberg said.

Gomberg’s posts were initially largely focused on research related to plastic, but have become increasingly political over time. When campaigns put out the call for influencers to meet with candidates, Gomberg answered.

She interviewed Katie Porter, she met with Xavier Becerra. And it was at a Becerra event in April when she met Kaitlyn Hennessy, another influencer focused on politics.

They found that the world of online influencers can be isolating. “We stare in front of our phones,” Hennessy said. “You don’t want to see our screen time.”

As they scrolled through social media posts about the governor’s race, they found a cause to unite them.

They kept seeing videos posted by social media accounts espousing similar messages in support of Tom Steyer. Hennessy wondered at first if they were actually created by artificial intelligence.

They found that the posts seemed to be created by a network of women who, in some cases, had created several different profiles to promote a variety of products.

They pored over Steyer’s campaign disclosures and saw that the campaign listed payments to several prominent influencers — including one with the handle Zay Dante, with 1.8 million followers on TikTok — who had not disclosed creating paid content for the campaign.

The pair filed a complaint laying out their allegations, which the Steyer campaign has called “baseless.”

In the wake of their complaint, Steyer defended his campaign’s use of paid influencers, writing on Substack that his campaign believed content creators should be paid for their work and that the campaign had been transparent about disclosing those payments.

In a separate post, influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina said he had been paid $400,000 for work he has done for the Steyer campaign. Espina, who has more than 14 million followers on TikTok, is an advisor to the campaign, which was publicly announced.

“You will never see anything on my channels that I don’t believe in, or that I think goes against the best interest of my community. No one buys my opinion. But I also think it’s fair to be compensated for my work,” he wrote on Substack.

Not everyone is ready to accept payment for posts.

Lauren, the influencer who advised Kennedy’s campaign, said that while he doesn’t begrudge other influencers accepting sponsorship, he chooses not to.

“A passive viewer might think you really believe this,” he said. “I have a strong connection with my audience. I really consider them my family.”

Lauren said he favors disclosure requirements.

Briant, the propaganda researcher, said she is concerned about the possibility of foreign actors trying to influence Americans through paid posts.

In 2024, for example, federal prosecutors filed an indictment alleging that Russian state media employees had paid nearly $10 million to a Tennessee company that paid popular right-wing social media influencers to unwittingly produce pro-Russia content.

Briant said she believes that the only way to counteract increased manipulation through social media influencers is to impose harsh penalties when paid content is not disclosed.

“Ultimately, it’s a wild west at the moment if there are no repercussions for not doing it,” she said.

Watchdog instructs social media giant to strengthen moderation following circulation of ‘grossly offensive’ content.

Malaysia’s internet watchdog has ordered TikTok to take action against “offensive and defamatory” content about the country’s monarchy.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said on Thursday that it had instructed the video-sharing platform to take “immediate remedial measures” in response to an account purporting to be linked to King Sultan Ibrahim.

The MCMC said its order requires the social media company to strengthen its moderation policies and provide a “formal explanation” for its failure to block the “grossly offensive, false, menacing and insulting” content, including AI-generated videos and manipulated images.

The regulator said it takes a “serious view” of online platforms being used to disseminate content that is false or “detrimental to public order”, particularly as it relates to the monarchy.

It added that it issued the order after finding TikTok’s response to previous notifications to be “unsatisfactory”.

TikTok, founded by Chinese tech company ByteDance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“MCMC will continue to take firm and proportionate action where necessary to ensure digital platforms operating in Malaysia uphold their responsibilities in maintaining a safe, secure and respectful online environment,” the watchdog said in a statement.

Malaysia, a constitutional monarchy, penalises speech deemed to inspire “hatred or contempt” against the royal family under a sedition law passed in 1948.

The watchdog’s order against TikTok is the latest move by authorities in the Southeast Asian country to regulate social media platforms.

In January, the MCMC briefly blocked access to the AI assistant Grok amid a global backlash over its use to create sexually explicit images of people without their consent.

Malaysia’s government is also currently preparing to enforce legislation passed last year to prohibit social media use by under-16s, following similar moves by countries including Australia, Indonesia and France.

WASHINGTON — A political influencer has filed a complaint against Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor, saying the committee failed to notify her of disclosure requirements, as required by law, when she was paid to meet with Steyer in March and later produced social media content from the meeting.

What’s more, she said the Steyer campaign falsely accused her of posting paid content in support of Steyer’s chief Democratic rival, Xavier Becerra, and failing to disclose it in a complaint filed by the billionaire’s campaign this week.

Maggie Reed, who regularly posts satirical takes on politics to roughly half a million followers on Instagram and TiKTok under the username mermaidmamamaggie, said she was actually paid by Steyer’s campaign and signed an agreement that barred her from disclosing the payment.

She posted, and later deleted, a video from her meeting with Steyer in March.

“In plain terms: the Committee paid for political content, structured it to look like an ordinary creator’s organic opinion, and used a non-disclosure agreement to keep the public from learning the truth,” says the complaint, filed Thursday with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission.

Steyer’s campaign disclosed in a campaign filing that it had paid the agency that represents Reed $5,000 for digital advertising, but didn’t indicate that the payment was connected to Reed’s meeting with Steyer or her production of content.

The Steyer campaign said that while it did pay to meet with Reed, it left the decision of whether to create content entirely up to her.

Since then, Reed has produced several videos expressing support for Becerra, the former California congressman and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, but she said that she was not paid to produce those videos and that they reflected her genuine support for Becerra’s campaign.

Becerra has been the top Democrat in recent polling in the race, maintaining a narrow edge over Steyer and a firm grip on one of the top two spots in the June 2 primary that would send him to the general election in November.

Reed’s complaint is the latest volley in a back and forth involving the use of paid influencers in the gubernatorial race.

Two influencers who support Becerra — but were not paid by his campaign — filed a complaint last week saying that a number of influencers had created paid content in support of Steyer, but failed to disclose so in their posts.

Steyer’s campaign then filed a complaint earlier this week in which it leveled accusations against Reed and another influencer named Jay Gonzalez, who is now a paid staffer on the Becerra campaign. The complaint alleges that Gonzalez made several pro-Becerra posts after joining the campaign and belatedly amended them to include disclosure that they were sponsored.

The Becerra campaign has maintained that it does not otherwise pay influencers to produce content on its behalf.

Steyer’s complaint included screenshots of an email sent to Reed’s talent agency by a gubernatorial campaign gauging her interest in producing paid content.

While the screenshots produced in Steyer’s complaint did not disclose who had sent the inquiry, Reed said in her complaint that the request had come from a staffer for the gubernatorial campaign of former Los Angeles Mayor and California State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

Disclosure of paid political content by social media creators is required in California thanks to a law passed in 2023.

Influencers themselves are required to disclose that a post they created was sponsored, but campaigns are required to notify them of the requirement.

Violation of the law doesn’t trigger civil, criminal or administrative penalties, but the FPPC has the right to take violators to court and request that a judge force compliance with the law.

The agreement Reed signed with Steyer’s campaign, which was attached to her complaint, indicated that she needed to follow all applicable state, federal and local laws, but made no specific mention of her requirement to disclose that content she produced was sponsored.

The agreement did specify that Steyer’s campaign might need to disclose the payment.

WASHINGTON — In the latest escalation of a fight over the use of paid social media creators, Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor filed a complaint Tuesday accusing influencers who posted content supportive of Xavier Becerra’s campaign of failing to disclose that they had been paid, which is required by California law.

The complaint, filed with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, accuses Jay Gonzalez of producing at least 14 pro-Becerra posts on Instagram and Facebook in late April and early May, after he was hired by the campaign, and only belatedly editing the posts to acknowledge they had been sponsored by the campaign.

The complaint also said that a social media creator named Maggie Reed, who posts under the username mermaidmamamaggie, created four pro-Becerra posts on Instagram and had previously offered to create paid posts for another gubernatorial campaign, though the complaint doesn’t specify how the campaign knows Reed was paid.

Reed and a talent agency that represents her did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Becerra campaign maintained that it has not paid influencers who have created posts in support of the campaign.

“All of the content you see online is entirely and purely organic,” said Becerra spokesman Jonathan Underland.

Becerra and Steyer have been the top two Democratic candidates in recent polling for the governor’s race, with Becerra consistently maintaining a slight edge in those polls.

The complaint by Steyer’s campaign comes after two influencers who support Becerra filed a complaint last week accusing social media creators hired by the Steyer campaign of failing to disclose that they had been paid to produce their posts.

The campaign of the billionaire candidate for governor had previously disclosed payments to some influencers with large audiences, including one creator with the user name zayydante, who has 1.8 million followers on TikTok, and another with the user name littleyeg, who has nearly 350,000 followers on TikTok. The complaint filed last week said that both of these influencers failed to disclose that they had been paid by the campaign to produce content.

The complaint also highlighted several accounts created by user who don’t appear to live in California who created posts promoting Steyer and, in at least one case, posted elsewhere that they had been paid by the campaign.

The influencers who filed the original complaint said they saw the newly filed complaint as an attempt by Steyer’s campaign to deflect criticism.

“All he’s done is attack his opponent instead of taking accountability for violating the law,” said Kaitlyn Hennessy, one of the two influencers who filed the complaint against Steyer’s campaign. Hennessy and the other influencer who filed the complaint both said they have not been paid by the Becerra campaign.

In a post on Substack, Steyer defended his campaign’s use of paid social media influencers and said that it had been transparent about their use.

“Every creator we compensate has been and will be publicly disclosed as required by law,” he wrote.

Under a California law passed in 2023, social media creators who create paid content on behalf of a political campaign are required to disclose in their post that the material was sponsored and who paid for it.

The onus is on creators to provide the disclosure, but campaigns are required to notify influencers they hire of the requirement.

Violation of the rules doesn’t trigger criminal, civil or administrative penalties but the FPPC can take alleged offenders to court and ask a judge to force compliance with the law.

The Hollywood sign is ablaze as Spencer Pratt, the reality TV star now running for mayor of Los Angeles, suits up as Batman, enters City Hall and leads the people to overthrow a cabal of corrupt, out-of-touch progressives intent on destroying the city.

Then he is Luke Skywalker. Dressed in a Jedi robe, he swoops through the city on an Imperial speeder bike, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (Emperor Palpatine) rebukes incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (Darth Vader) for not burning the city down to the ground in her first term.

“Make sure you finish the job in your second,” Newsom tells Bass with a tilt of the head and a smirk.

“The only thing that can stop us is someone telling the truth,” Bass replies. “As long as they don’t have any hope, the city’s ours.”

Pratt’s fan-generated AI election campaign videos have been praised and mocked, but heavily shared. And some see them as a harbinger of how artificial intelligence could reshape political messaging across the country.

His supporters are far from the first to create AI-generated ads. But political experts say it’s remarkable the degree to which they have used new technology to churn out a stream of outlandish, hyper-cinematic memes, creating buzz around his campaign and his message.

Some warn, however, that as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will become harder for many people to distinguish between AI and real videos.

“When you’re creating content that is not based in reality, and then platforms are amplifying it in order to attract more eyeballs, you are putting a burden on the public for figuring out what is real and what is factual, and what is fake and misleading,” said Mark Jablonowski, the chief executive of DSPolitical, a progressive advertising firm.

Pratt’s campaign did not create the viral AI videos depicting him as a superhero taking on a cast of California Democratic villains. But he has shared the ads crafted by AI filmmaker Charlie Curran, founder of L.A.’s Menace Studio.

Supercharged and Hollywood inspired, the videos represent a brazen new era of fan-generated AI in political campaign advertising. Deploying generative AI tools to clone human voices and images, they bolster a hyperbolic and ultra-conspiratorial political narrative that depicts L.A. under Democratic rule as a hellscape in which Newsom and Bass deliberately conspire to harm the people.

Bass has condemned the ads, describing them as “very scary” and “absolutely 150% fiction.”

“His social media is now taking on a violent turn,” Bass told CNN, citing the Batman ad that depicts Angelenos pelting her with tomatoes.

Some political experts dismiss such fears of AI campaign ads as overblown. Most AI videos shared by political campaigns and their fans, they note, are more comedic than deliberately misleading.

“Spencer Pratt is using AI the way it should be used, which is to sharpen reality,” said Matt Klink, an L.A.-based Republican political consultant. “His whole shtick is that Los Angeles is broken, the insiders have failed, and the political class wants to explain away what voters are seeing with their own eyes.”

“Obviously, you don’t run an AI ad where you have someone saying something that they didn’t say, and you should disclose that they’re generated by AI,” Klink noted. But when it comes to ads that depict Pratt as Batman or Luke Skywalker, he said, “if you don’t know that they’re AI generated, you’re pretty clueless to begin with.”

For as long as political candidates and their supporters have experimented with new technology — from the pamphlets of the 1600s to the memes of the 21st century — they have faced complaints that they mislead the public.

As large language models ushered in a new era of AI, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) warned in 2024 that “a deluge of deception, disinformation and deepfakes are about to descend on the American public.”

The term “deepfake” was first coined in 2017 by a Reddit user who used open-source face-swapping technology to splice celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. Within months, it entered the mainstream lexicon as a way to describe any AI-generated synthetic media that realistically clones a person’s image or voice.

Blumenthal cited a “chilling example.” In January 2024, Republicans placed robo calls using an AI “deepfake” voice mimicking President Biden to New Hampshire residents to discourage Democrats from voting in the presidential primaries.

New Hampshire authorities said the message violated the state’s voter suppression laws. A month later, the Federal Communications Commission outlawed robocalls that use voices generated by AI. The company that sent the messages agreed to pay a $1-million fine.

But others kept pushing the boundaries of AI — mostly as overt parody or satire, an arena that offers greater 1st Amendment protection.

In July 2024, an AI content creator created a mock campaign ad of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with a computer-generated voiceover to make it seem she was describing herself as the ultimate “diversity hire” and “deep state puppet.” The post was titled ‘Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY.’

Newsom slammed the post, saying on X, “Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal.” Two months later, he signed into law a series of bills that clamped down on AI in politics.

But a federal judge blocked one of the new laws that regulated election-related content that is “materially deceptive,” saying it probably violated the 1st Amendment.

No comprehensive federal rules govern the use of AI content in political ads or messaging. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 29 states have passed laws restricting the use of deepfakes in political campaigns: Some states, such as Texas and Minnesota, prohibit the use of deepfakes  a certain number of days before an election; the other 27 states require a media disclosure if content contains a deepfake.

Some political advertising experts call for more federal regulation. The state-by-state patchwork of regulations, they argue, makes it very difficult for social media platforms to be compliant.

“At the end of the day, we really need to see platforms being more responsible with the content that they’re sharing,” Jablonowski said. “We need to have clear guidelines and a level playing field across the country, so we’re not in a position where what’s OK in one state is not OK in another.”

Pratt’s embrace of AI is part of a larger 2026 political trend.

In January, Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton released an ad depicting two of his opponents for a Senate seat — Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett — waltzing and swinging. A few months later, the National Republican Senatorial Committee shared a video that used a manipulated image of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the Texas Senate seat, mouthing his own tweets.

But Pratt has been particularly successful in using fan-based AI to help garner attention, pulling in a number of content creators to craft AI videos for his campaign.

One posted a video parody of the 2004 Downfall film, portraying Bass as Hitler. Another created an animated video, geared to a Latino audience, showing Angelenos lining the streets to cheer as Pratt wheels a garbage can piled with trash and the incumbent mayor. The slogan “SPENCER, SACA LA BASSURA” [Spencer, take out the trash] flashes atop the screen.

A recent survey from the American Assn. of Political Consultants shows that AI adoption is growing rapidly among political consultants — and Republicans are more likely to use it than Democrats.

But political observers in L.A. note that leading Democrats in the mayoral race are unlikely to follow Pratt in using AI. Bass, they note, is a more cautious political figure than Pratt, a brash online influencer who relished playing the role of villain on MTV’s “The Hills.”

While Pratt’s user-generated AI ads have inspired giddy delight from out-of-state Republicans — conservative radio host Buck Sexton praised the Batman video for ushering in “a new era of online persuasion” — it’s still not clear if they will convince Angelenos to vote for him.

Certainly, the ads have helped Pratt gain recognition. They have also given voice to a groundswell of frustration with L.A.’s Democratic establishment and created space for more pressing debate on the future direction of the city.

But there is little evidence that the AI ads, in themselves, are persuading new voters.

So far, none of the AI ads that Pratt has shared have received as many views on his X account as a non-AI ad his campaign produced that has racked up more than 14 million views.

In it, Pratt stands outside Bass’ city-owned Hancock Park mansion and Nithya Raman’s home in leafy Silver Lake, then pans to an Airstream on the charred ruins of his own home, which burnt down during the Palisades fire.

“They don’t have to live in the mess they’ve created,” Pratt says as he walks down an L.A. street littered with homeless tents.

Meghan Daum, a former Los Angeles Times columnist who has endorsed Pratt and dubs herself a self-appointed “liberal elite whisperer for Pratt,” said she thought Pratt’s Airstream ad was more effective than the AI superhero ads. She voiced concern his sharing of AI videos could actively undermine his campaign.

“They will be repellent to the undecided voters Pratt needs to catch, most of whom will think they’re coming directly from the campaign,” she said on X. “Get smarter, guys.”

Using AI, she told The Times, could turn off voters in a town where so many film workers have lost jobs to AI. She also worried about the legality of ads — such as one video purporting to be a Bass campaign ad — that put words in the mouth of computer-generated politicians.

But Daum noted that others told her this was the aesthetic of the new world and a way of getting people who have not voted in the past excited about something.

“That may be true,” she said.

So far, there is little evidence that AI in U.S. political campaigns has affected elections.

“There’s a lot more fear about the effects of AI in politics than evidence of the effects of AI in politics,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who co-authored a recent report on AI and persuasion.

During the 2024 election, Nyhan noted, AI was frequently used to create “obviously false” images of attention-grabbing, funny or raging content. “It seems to be more of a mechanism for reaching your base,” he said, “rather than persuading voters who haven’t made up their mind or might stay home.”

Ultimately, Pratt’s personal story of loss — and more specific complaints about L.A.’s systemic failures in preparedness and emergency response during the 2025 firestorms and spending on unsuccessful programs to house the homeless — may resonate more than simplistic AI stories of evil Democrats hellbent on razing their city.

Some L.A. political observers admit they were surprised by Pratt’s performance in a May 6 televised debate with Bass and Raman.

”Spencer Pratt was kind of a laughingstock when he first announced that he was going to run, and he has dramatically exceeded expectations,” said Klink, the GOP strategist. “I think that he surprised people in his ability to come up with solutions. … That’s what’s going to convince people to vote, not the Batman or Star Wars ad.”

As millions of people click on Pratt videos — in some cases more than the 3.8 million people living in L.A. — Klick said there was one question Pratt needs to be asking: “Do views of his ads translate into votes?”

Firefighters battled a fire Sunday that erupted in the early morning and remained active well into the afternoon at a downtown L.A. office supplies store.

Roughly 120 firefighters were called about 4 a.m. to the two-story building with a mezzanine at 1225 S. Hope St. near West Pico Boulevard. Upon arrival, firefighters encountered heavy smoke and flames. One firefighter suffered minor injuries in the battle and was hospitalized.

Firefighters transitioned from offensive to defensive mode and used a remote-suppression robot to enter the building, LAFD spokesperson Jennifer Middleton said. Arson and emergency air units also were requested.

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1. Firefighters battled a fire Sunday that erupted in the early morning and remained active well into the afternoon at a downtown L.A. office supplies store. (Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

The blaze was initially contained by 5:52 a.m., but the building’s contents rekindled, said LAFD Battalion Chief Peter Hsiao.

About 10 a.m., firefighters were “trying to remove paper from the building to stop it from catching on fire,” Hsiao said.

By 10:30 a.m., the building’s roof had collapsed, according to Times photographer Kayla Bartkowski, who was at the scene. Thirty minutes later, the building was again engulfed in flames.

At 1:30 p.m., firefighters were trying to contain the blaze by using a forklift and heavy machinery to pull boxes of office supplies and pallets of paper out of the building, then spraying it all down with water.

Firefighters on the roof also were spraying the fire to prevent it from spreading, she added.

A blaze was reported at about 4 a.m. in downtown L.A. at 1225 South Hope St.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The address is associated with Bluebird Office Supplies. A voicemail left for a number listed for the business owner was not immediately returned.

No one was inside the building at the time of the blaze, Middleton said.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

“The Devil Wears Prada 2” opens like a knockoff of itself, with sight gags calling back to the mean quips in the 2006 hit: near-identical teal belts, a gala hailing the less-than-innovative theme “Spring Florals” and a red carpet that’s actually cerulean. Those belts, if you’ll remember, were the trigger for Meryl Streep’s Oscar-nominated speech about how her imperious fashion magazine editor in chief Miranda Priestly creates trends that trickle down to the rest of us rabble.

That first film (I’ll go ahead and anoint it a classic) followed a dowdy college graduate, Andy (Anne Hathaway), pursuing a low-level position at Runway magazine — Vogue in everything but name — as a bridge to a serious reporting career. Woe, said bridge is guarded by three trolls: fellow assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), tastemaker Nigel (Stanley Tucci) and the devil herself, Streep’s silver-haired Miranda, whose saintly last name is an ironic joke. Miranda is a riff on Vogue’s former editor in chief Anna Wintour, who used to be irritated by her caricature but eventually came around. After all, she’s getting played by Meryl Freaking Streep.

The setting was glam, the struggle relatable. Andy’s transition from sensible boots to stilettos served as a metaphor for the effort — even discomfort — it takes to chase your dreams, however they might evolve. “The Devil Wears Prada” gets celebrated for her makeover, with even Andy’s clueless boyfriend, played by Adrian Grenier, accusing her of caring about her Runway job solely for the shoes. No, it was never about the shoes. It was about respecting the workaholic she saw in the mirror.

The sequel, from returning director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, doesn’t find its own footing until it acknowledges that a Cinderella story about making it in journalism no longer fits. Gone are the days when Miranda and Nigel could casually tell their deep-pocketed publisher Irv (Tibor Feldman) that they’re junking a $300,000 photo shoot because it failed to reach their lofty standards. Likewise, Andy’s story starts when a magnate shutters her current job at a newspaper called the New York Vanguard, firing her and her colleagues for a $500-million tax write-off. (Cue the workers of at least one major Hollywood studio nodding in recognition.)

Hathaway’s Andy, smart and likable as ever, returns to a budget-slashed Runway as the features editor in charge of investigative pieces that online metrics reveal nobody reads — that is, until she breaks a celebrity engagement. Meanwhile, the internet has reduced Miranda to a meme. Her most recent viral scandal has gotten her animated into that Homer-Simpson-in-a-hedge GIF.

McKenna writes Miranda a self-aware scene where she acknowledges that her harsh reputation boosts her clout. Yet I wonder what Wintour will make of this diminished avatar pursuing the same promotion that she herself just claimed at Condé Nast as global head of content. After elevating custom couture to an art form, just the word “content” sounds like a demotion. Content is to prestige journalism what Shein is to Chanel.

Twenty years later, all of the money and power in publishing has been siphoned to the very, very rich. There seem to be as many billionaires in the script for “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as magazine assistants. Mighty Miranda must kowtow to the luxury brands and their ambassadors, whose sponsorship keeps Runway strutting, including the once-harried and humiliated Emily, who is now an executive at Dior. The tension is thicker than mink. The film franchise chooses to ignore original author Lauren Weisberger’s own 2013 follow-up novel “Revenge Wears Prada,” although I’d love to see a threequel that follows her lead and gives Blunt’s hilariously frosty Emily the center stage as she does in her third book, “When Life Gives You Lululemons.”

The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé. Instead of Paris, we’re now whisked to cameo-studded shindigs in the Hamptons and Milan, including a dinner party underneath Da Vinci’s mural of “The Last Supper.” (Not only is the painting’s topic apropos, Da Vinci himself butted heads with his wealthy patrons.) Much of the first half feels like we’re cooling our heels with the gang, waiting for a plot to start. There are a lot of idea threads that fray off and don’t go anywhere. Are we supposed to interpret anything from the fact that Miranda has succumbed to throwing a spring florals event — a theme she famously loathes — or are we just supposed to chuckle at the banner and move on? Also, no one in attendance is even wearing anything with flowers. Is the old gal slipping, or is the costume design?

Finally, things get going with a funeral — I won’t say whose, only that the death makes a fitting twist for an industry already getting the axe. Like Andy, I started writing for newspapers a few years after Craigslist decimated the classified page. My personal version of “The Devil Wears Prada” would be closer to a grindhouse flick. At least the Runway employees look killer at their own wake.

Twerpy MBAs force Miranda to fly coach. Of course you snicker — her character hasn’t gone past the first-class curtain since everyone onboard got served a hot meal and plenty of legroom. But there’s no schadenfreude watching her squeeze into a middle seat, no glee in her comeuppance. If Miranda Priestly can get thrown in steerage, we’re all screwed.

The movie is simultaneously more depressing than the original and more saccharine, with a repellent amount of affection between characters who should know better. Tucci’s endearingly steadfast Nigel is finally applauded for his years of service to Runway, and I was dismayed to find myself rolling my eyes at how corny the moment felt. Frankel and McKenna were geniuses to keep things callous on the first go-round, but they now add a romantic subplot between Andy and an Australian apartment contractor (Patrick Brammall) that detracts from the platonic workplace relationships — it’s fan service that I’m not sure fans actually want. Miranda, too, has found love again, and her new husband’s part is so small that I kept trying to convince myself that the actor couldn’t really be the great Kenneth Branagh..

Justin Theroux has a showier, funnier part as the billionaire Benji Barnes who, every time you see him, is holding court about another inane idea or giggling about how a civilization-destroying Pompeii disaster is on the horizon. Terrifyingly, he refers to “humans” in the third person, as if he no longer considers himself one of our species. Given the film’s interest in the figures gutting journalism and how his character’s ex-wife (Lucy Liu) refers to their marriage as being like “a rocket ship to a hall of mirrors,” he’s Jeff Bezos with a sprinkle of Elon Musk. It’s pointed timing, given that Bezos is sponsoring May’s Met Gala, wrapping the Wintour-chaired event in his brand like a giant cardboard box.

But enough about what “The Devil Wears Prada 2” has to say about the economy. How are the clothes? Aesthetically, I dug Andy and Miranda’s sleek menswear looks, lots of vests and blazers with panache. Narratively, their characters — a heroine and her nemesis — shouldn’t dress as though they could swap wardrobes. Then again, they’re here aligned as champions of art, beauty and the press, standing shoulder to shoulder in the all-but-hopeless fight to protect Runway from the philistines. The real devils wear Fitbits.

Taylor Swift is entering her trademark era.

The global pop star’s company, TAS Rights Management, filed three new trademark applications last week, per the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Two of the applications relate to soundbites of her voice, saying the phrases “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor.” The other is a well-known image of Swift, often representative of her recent Eras tour, featuring the 36-year-old onstage, holding her pink guitar and dressed in a shimmering bodysuit.

The push to lock down her public image comes at a time when many high-profile celebrities have called for regulations against unauthorized AI-generated content. Matthew McConaughey was one of the first Hollywood A-listers to leverage trademark law as an extra layer of protection.

In January, the “Interstellar” actor secured eight trademarks for his likeness, including images of him smiling and the iconic recording of him saying, “Alright, alright, alright,” from the 1993 movie “Dazed and Confused.”

“My team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it’s because I approved and signed off on it,” the actor told the Wall Street Journal in January. “We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.”

Registering a trademark for a celebrity’s speaking voice to defend against the prospect of AI-voice generation is a novel legal approach that has not yet been tested in court. Representatives for Swift did not respond to a request for comment on the intent of the recently filed trademarks. But Josh Gerben, one of the first attorneys to report Swift’s latest legal moves, said this is one of the growing gaps in intellectual property protection that AI can exploit.

Before AI infiltrated the internet, musicians, like Swift, would typically rely on copyright law to help prevent the unauthorized use and distribution of their music, while right to publicity laws would protect them from unlawful commercial use of their likeness. But with AI, users can manipulate people’s voices and images to sing or say practically anything.

So if McConaughey has a trademark on his voice saying a phrase, then theoretically any AI-generated voice that sounds similar to it could be considered a violation of that trademark, according to Gerben.

“If they have this trademark protection in place, then the [AI] platforms can’t use that same voice to create new content,” Gerben said. “Every celebrity would essentially have to go and do the same thing, but it’s trying to cut this off at the source as much as possible.”

Variety first reported news of Swift’s trademark filing.

As one of the most popular musicians, Swift has dealt with her share of unauthorized AI-generated content. She was previously one of the many female celebrities whose likeness was among several of Meta’s AI chatbot virtual celebrities. The illicit chatbots allegedly produced pornographic images. Before the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump also shared AI-generated images of Swift falsely suggesting that she had endorsed him, including one of her dressed as Uncle Sam with the words, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”

Because Swift is such a recognizable public figure, Luke Arrigoni, the chief executive of Loti AI, a tech company that focuses on likeness protection, said trademark filings like these aren’t merely defensive but rather a setup for a long-term protective infrastructure.

“By locking down these trademarks now, she’s ensuring that if a brand wants to use a ‘Swift-like’ AI voice in 2027, they’ll have to go through her authorized gates or face federal trademark infringement,” Arrigoni said in a statement. “She’s essentially putting a price tag on her digital self, and that’s exactly where the entire talent industry needs to go to survive.”

It felt like the Olympics. Crowds cheering. The American flag standing tall above the bleachers. Trainers jumping with anticipation. A swimmer staring in disbelief at the clock after his final stroke. The Jumbotron announced: Kristian Gkolomeev — 20.89 seconds. A new world record in the 50-meter freestyle.

Well, kind of.

I’ve left out some details. There was only one swimmer. The crowd? Just doctors, trainers and filmmakers. This was not in an Olympic city nor an Olympic year, but in Greensboro, N.C., in 2025. And there were no iconic rings on the banners, just “Enhanced Games.”

Yes, Gkolomeev swam faster than César Cielo, the official record holder at the time (20.91 seconds). But he did it “enhanced” — a polite way to say that he used performance-enhancing drugs. At the Enhanced Games, doping isn’t punished. It’s required.

The concept, as described by the organization: “to create the definitive scientific, cultural and sporting movement that safely evolves mankind into a new superhumanity.”

Backed by investors such as Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, the Enhanced Games embodies a techno-utopian ideal: athletes as canvases for chemical optimization, testing the limits of human health for a lot of money. Gkolomeev earned $1 million for his record.

So far, the competition has happened at one-off pop-up events. But in May, Las Vegas will host the first full-scale Enhanced Games, a four-day meet in swimming, track and field, and weightlifting. The group advertises a “potential prize purse of $7.5 million for just a single day of competition,” plus appearance fees.

Does it need to be said? Apparently yes: The Enhanced Games glorifies the risky use of enhancement drugs.

Steroids can harden arteries, elevate stroke risk, damage the liver and permanently alter hormone systems. They are not electrolyte tablets or a little preworkout creatine. If Lance Armstrong had been rewarded — rather than sanctioned — for doping, what would have happened to competitive cycling?

Fans — and especially kids — mimic their idols. As risky as the drugs are for athletes at the Enhanced Games, with its “medical commission” to give the illusion of safety, the substances are even more dangerous when used by people without medical supervision.

The games also expose the economic neglect that drives athletes toward such competition. As Benjamin Proud, the British silver medalist who recently joined the Enhanced Games, put it: “It would have taken me 13 years of winning a World Championship title in order to win what I could win in one race at these games.”

Indeed, the Enhanced Games might look like an easy way out. Only nine swimmers worldwide received prize money and performance bonuses above $75,000 in 2025, according to World Aquatics.

Investors clearly hope to make money off the games as well. The organization is moving closer to becoming a publicly traded company. The economics are not mysterious.

But the Enhanced Games are not just another sporting event. They are an arena for biomedical experimentation and should be regulated as such. The games should face limits similar to those imposed on other high-risk industries, including age restrictions and strict advertising rules.

We already know how to govern legal, profitable activities that carry serious health risks.

In the United States, that means oversight from the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission — bodies that regulate drug protocols and police misleading commercial claims. A steroid-based competition should not be treated as a sport but as a medical experiment and a marketing stunt.

Regulations on pharmaceutical advertising offer a useful model for the Enhanced Games. Prescription drugs are advertised every night on television, but only under strict rules. They require fair balance (content must present benefits and risks with comparable prominence, readability and duration) and a “major statement” of risks (most serious risks must be spoken aloud and not obscured by visuals or music).

Right now, when you play Gkolomeev’s “world-record” video on YouTube, a medical-risk warning appears for barely five seconds — then vanishes. If a cholesterol drug must audibly warn viewers of stroke risk, why shouldn’t a steroid-based competition do the same?

Enhanced Games content should be accompanied by clear warnings of the risks of performance-enhancing drugs and be clearly labeled, age-gated and distributed as high-risk content more akin to pornography than to a boxing match.

Prohibition is not the answer. Trying to shut down these games only fuels a controversy-driven brand. Just recently, the Enhanced Games sued organizations such as World Aquatics and the World Anti-Doping Agency, alleging antitrust violations and that blocking athletes from participating at the Enhanced Games is illegal. As those organizations fight back, they will be seeking to protect the integrity of mainstream sports, but they will also inadvertently be promoting the Enhanced Games.

If we want kids to admire clean athletes rather than those using banned drugs, the Las Vegas launch must not reach the world as a Super Bowl would. The Enhanced Games should not be televised or allowed to stream online to minors. Otherwise, Las Vegas, in May, risks becoming an unregulated public-health experiment mislabeled as a sporting event.

Fabricio Ramos dos Santos is a lawyer, entrepreneur and sports investor.

Within a year where big language models write press releases, student papers, and even peer-reviewed articles with a single press of a button, guesswork is not an option that teachers, editors, and grant reviewers can afford. They require valid methods of determining whether they are looking at a page that was designed by a human being or generated by an algorithm. The boundary is more than ever indistinct: text generators of the modern era do not only imitate idiosyncratic diction, they also reference sources and sprinkle their text with rhetorical flourishes, which traditionally were the bane of automation. But there are still prints, prints of fingers, that are revealed by a rigorous check-up.

Why Detection Matters in 2026

Key Linguistic Signals Still Holding Up

Long before you open a dedicated detector, close reading can raise red flags. AI prose often exhibits low burstiness, sentence lengths fluctuate within narrow bands, and high lexical predictability, especially in mid-length passages. Repeated use of transitional adverbs such as “moreover,” “furthermore,” and “overall” in rhythmic sequences is another giveaway. Similarly, large models smooth out idiosyncratic contractions, turning informal drafts into formally homogenized copy. When a reviewer suspects such fingerprints, a quick trip to Smodin to check if text is AI generated offers an immediate probability score without exporting the manuscript. Still, numbers alone are insufficient; the linguistic context of the assignment, the native proficiency of the writer, and genre conventions must frame interpretation.

Burstiness versus Perplexity: What the Metrics Really Say

Turnitin is LMS-based but is English-centric. Copyleaks can also analyze code snippets or prose, and is used in computer-science classes. Smodin is more concerned with breadth and sub-second throughput, with a thousand-word manuscript taking less than five seconds. Comparative reviews, such as Quillbot vs Grammarly vs Smodin, show that no single tool prevails in every context. Experienced editors therefore run suspect passages through at least two detectors before escalating to human forensic analysis.

Layered Verification Workflow

Beyond Algorithms: Human Tactics That Still Work