Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Tamilla Triantoro, Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Information Systems, Quinnipiac University

Pick up an August 2025 issue of Vogue and you’ll come across an advertisement for the brand Guess featuring a stunning model. Yet tucked away in small print is a startling admission: She isn’t real. She was generated entirely by AI.

For decades, fashion images have been retouched. But this isn’t airbrushing a real person; it’s a “person” created from scratch, a digital composite of data points, engineered to appear as a beautiful woman.

The backlash to the Guess ad was swift. Veteran model Felicity Hayward called the move “lazy and cheap,” warning that it undermines years of work to promote diversity. After all, why hire models of different sizes, ages and ethnicities when a machine can generate a narrow, market-tested ideal of beauty on demand?

I study human-AI collaboration, and my work focuses on how AI influences decision-making, trust and human agency, all of which came into play during the Vogue controversy.

This new reality is not a cause for doom. However, now that it’s becoming much harder – if not impossible – to tell whether something is created by a human or a machine, it’s worth asking what’s gained and what’s lost from this technology. Most importantly, what does it say about what we truly value in art?

The forensic viewer and listener

In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing wondered whether a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

He proposed his famous imitation game. In it, a human judges whether they’re conversing with a person or a computer. If the human can’t tell the difference, the computer passes the test.

For decades, this remained a theoretical benchmark. But with the recent explosion of powerful chatbots, the original Turing Test for conversation has arguably been passed. This breakthrough raises a new question: If AI can master conversation, can it master art?

The evidence suggests it has already passed what might be called an “aesthetic Turing Test.”

AI can generate music, images and movies so convincingly that people struggle to distinguish them from human creations.

In music, platforms like Suno and Udio can produce original songs, complete with vocals and lyrics, in any imaginable genre in seconds. Some are so good they’ve gone viral. Meanwhile, photo-realistic images are equally deceptive. In 2023, millions believed that the fabricated photo of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket was real, a stunning example of AI’s power to create convincing fiction.

Why our brains are being fooled

So why are we falling for it?

First, AI has become an expert forger of human patterns. These models are trained on gigantic libraries of human-made art. They have analyzed more paintings, songs and photographs than any person ever could. These models may not have a soul, but they have learned the mathematical recipe for what we find beautiful or catchy.

Second, AI has bridged the uncanny valley. This is the term for the creepy feeling we get when something looks almost human but not quite – like a humanoid robot or a doll with vacant eyes.

That subtle sense of wrongness has been our built-in detector for fakes. But the latest AI is so sophisticated that it has climbed out of the valley. It no longer makes the small mistakes that trigger our alarm bells.

Finally, AI does not just copy reality; it creates a perfected version of it. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this a simulacrum – a copy with no original.

The AI model in Vogue is the perfect example. She is not a picture of a real woman. She is a hyperreal ideal that no living person can compete with. Viewers don’t flag her as fake because she is, in a sense, more “perfect” than real.

The future of art in a synthetic world

When art is this easy to generate – and its origin this hard to verify – something precious risks being lost.

The German thinker Walter Benjamin once wrote about the “aura” of an original artwork – the sense of history and human touch that makes it special. A painting has an aura because you can see the brushstrokes; an old photograph has an aura because it captured a real moment in time.

AI-generated art has no such aura. It is infinitely reproducible, has no history, and lacks a human story. This is why, even when it is technically perfect, it can feel hollow.

When you become suspicious of a work’s origins, the act of listening to a song or viewing a photograph is no longer simply about feeling the rhythm or wondering what may have existed outside the frame. It also requires running a mental checklist, searching for the statistical ghost in the machine. And that moment of analytical doubt pulls viewers and listeners out of the work’s emotional world.

To me, the aesthetic Turing Test is not just about whether a machine can fool us; it’s a challenge that asks us to decide what we really want from art.

If a machine creates a song that brings a person to tears, does it matter that the machine felt nothing? Where does the meaning of art truly reside – in the mind of the creator or in the heart of the observer?

We have built a mirror that reflects our own creativity back at us, and now we must decide: Do we prefer perfection without humanity, or imperfection with meaning? Do we choose the flawless, disposable reflection, or the messy, fun house mirror of the human mind?

Tamilla Triantoro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI has passed the aesthetic Turing Test − and it’s changing our relationship with art – https://theconversation.com/ai-has-passed-the-aesthetic-turing-test-and-its-changing-our-relationship-with-art-262997

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jake Rosenfeld, Professor of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis

During the 2024 election campaign, the Republican Party’s historically fraught relationship with organized labor appeared to be changing. Several influential Republicans reached out to unions, seeking to cement the loyalties of the growing ranks of working-class Americans who have been backing Donald Trump’s presidential runs and voting for other members of his party.

During Trump’s first bid for the White house, the percentage of votes in households where at least one person belongs to a union fell to its lowest level in decades. In 2021, Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator at the time, wrote a USA Today op-ed supporting a unionization drive at an Amazon facility. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, walked a United Auto Workers picket line in 2023 in solidarity with striking workers.

As the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, Trump spotlighted International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien with a prominent speaking slot at the Republican National Convention – rewarding the union for staying neutral in that campaign after endorsing Joe Biden four years earlier.

Yet O’Brien shocked many in the convention crowd by lambasting longtime GOP coalition partners such as the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable for hurting American workers.

Once in office, Trump continued to signal some degree of solidarity with the blue-collar voters who backed him. He chose former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Teamsters ally, to be his second-term labor secretary.

I’m a sociologist who has been researching the U.S. labor movement for over two decades. Given conservatives’ long-standing antipathy toward unions, I was curious whether the GOP’s greater engagement with labor portended any kind of change in its policies.

Fumbled at the starting line

The GOP’s various outreach efforts during the 2024 campaign led University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, a scholar of declining labor power, to write, “Is a pro-labor Republican Party possible?”

More than six months into Trump’s second term, I would say that based on the evidence thus far the answer to Posner’s question is a resounding no.

In late March 2025, Trump issued an executive order stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.

Overnight, twice as many federal employees lost their union protections as there are members of the United Auto Workers union, making the action “the largest and most aggressive single act of union-busting in U.S. history,” according to Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin.

While affected unions have challenged that action and similar subsequent ones in court, the Trump administration is moving onto other agencies. In August, over 400,000 federal employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Environmental Protection Agency saw their union contracts terminated and their collective bargaining rights dissolved.

Everett Kelley, the American Federation of Government Employees president, described the attacks on federal workers as a “setback for fundamental rights in America.”

Tariffs, other policies aren’t helping

The Trump administration has pitched its erratic tariff policies as a boon to U.S.manufacturing, including in the automotive industry, once the foundation of the U.S. labor movement.

In reality, U.S. car producers are struggling to keep up with rising tariff-related costs of raw materials and parts. The number of factory jobs has fallen to the lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, a supporter of targeted tariffs to buttress the domestic auto industry, criticized the administration’s trade policy in April 2025, saying, “We do not support reckless tariffs on all countries at crazy rates.”

Other administration actions cast as relief for struggling workers are unlikely to deliver as advertised. The “no tax on tips” provision in Trump’s huge tax-and-spending package excludes the nearly 40% of tipped workers whose earnings fall below the federal income tax threshold. Tipped workers make up a tiny share of the low-wage workforce.

Culinary Workers Local 226, a powerful Nevada union representing many tipped workers in Las Vegas and Reno, supported the provision. Yet it blasted the overall package, calling it a “big, horrible bill” for its windfalls to the rich instead of the working class.

Removing the watchdogs

The National Labor Relations Board is responsible for ensuring management and labor adhere to provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. Passed in 1935, that law established workers’ fundamental rights to collective bargaining. The board is responsible for conducting union elections, investigating allegations of unfair labor practices and outright abuses by employers, and enforcing court orders when employers or unions are found to have broken labor laws.

Presidents regularly use vacancies to tilt the ideological balance of the board to a more or less labor-friendly position. Trump, however, went further.

Soon after he was sworn in for a second term, Trump fired the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel along with board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was only halfway through her five-year term. Wilcox’s dismissal was unprecedented and violated the National Labor Relations Act provision on board personnel changes.

Wilcox’s removal left the body without a quorum, preventing it from responding to appeals or requests for review and allowing employers accused of violating workers’ rights to delay any settlement. The Trump administration has left those important NLRB jobs vacant for months, although it has nominated two management-friendly replacements, both of whom awaited Senate approval in mid-August.

In the meantime, the agency is unable to hear labor disputes.

Disempowering the NLRB is a long-standing Republican tactic, suggesting more continuity with past GOP attacks on labor than a new era of partnership.

Hawley standing out

To be sure, Republicans don’t all agree with one another on the importance of supporting workers and labor rights. One who has stood out so far is Hawley. The relatively pro-labor Republican senator’s stance led him to partner with Sen. Corey Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, to co-sponsor the Faster Labor Contracts Act.

This new bill would force employers to negotiate a contract in a reasonable time frame with employees once they have voted in favor of forming a union.

Hawley also joined with Democrats to reintroduce a bill that would ban dangerous work speed requirements in warehouses. Hawley said, when summarizing his efforts on behalf of working people, “It’s time we deliver for them.”

The Missouri senator is not completely alone. Sens. Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Roger Marshall of Kansas, both Republicans, have backed some labor-friendly legislation in the spring and summer of this year.

GOP leaders in Congress are not moving those bills forward so far, likely in part due to pushback from Republicans and their allies outside Congress.

And there are limits to Hawley’s labor friendliness. He voted for Trump’s tax-and-spending package, despite publicly airing his misgivings about the harm it may cause his blue-collar constituents.

Meanwhile, his past partners in the more labor-friendly wing of the GOP now occupy prominent administration posts. Yet they have largely fallen silent on union issues – except, in Rubio’s case, to oversee the firing of well over 1,000 State Department employees, many of them members of the American Foreign Service Association union.

Trump labor approach echoes Reagan’s style

Another GOP presidential administration courted segments of the labor movement to divide a key Democratic constituency, only to take actions that weakened unions.

In 1980, for example, Ronald Reagan sought and won the endorsement of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. A year later, he fired 13,000 striking members of that union.

The Teamsters union also backed Reagan – twice. It endorsed him in 1980 after he pledged during the 1980 campaign not to pursue anti-labor policies. Although he broke his promise, personal outreach from Vice President George H.W. Bush in the lead-up to the 1984 election earned him the Teamsters endorsement a second time.

What seems clear in my view is that whenever the GOP has tried to cast itself as a labor-friendly political party, it has emphasized symbolism over substance, favoring using rhetoric embracing workers who belong to unions versus taking actions to strengthen labor rights.

To support his research, Jake Rosenfeld has received funding from the Economic Policy Institute, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Urban Institute, and the National Science Foundation.

– ref. Trump administration has proven no friend to organized labor, from attacking federal unions to paralyzing the National Labor Relations Board – https://theconversation.com/trump-administration-has-proven-no-friend-to-organized-labor-from-attacking-federal-unions-to-paralyzing-the-national-labor-relations-board-263176

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

The 2026 midterms are more than a year away, but some high-profile primary election battles in the Democratic Party are gaining national attention. Much of that attention is focused on the age of the candidates.

Thanks to Texas’ proposed mid-decade redistricting, a showdown is looming between two Democrats serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from that state: 36-year-old Rep. Greg Casar has made clear his intention to run against a colleague, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, despite Doggett’s public pressure on Casar to run in a different district. Doggett is 78 years old and has served in the House since 1994.**

An even more stark generational divide has emerged in New York’s 12th district, where 26-year-old political organizer Liam Elkind is making a similar challenge in a Democratic primary. The 18-term incumbent in that race, Rep. Jerry Nadler, will be 79 years old by next year’s midterm election. He began his political career as a New York state assemblyman in 1977 — more than 20 years before Elkind was born.

These generational matchups have become common in the Democratic Party. They have also gained significant attention, particularly since the 2018 upset of another veteran Democratic leader, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, in a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was 28 at the time.

These challengers often criticize the seniority of older lawmakers. They say seniority is not a benefit but a hindrance to effective representation because the longtime incumbents are out of touch with the needs of their districts and the country, and that remaining in office crowds out crucial younger perspectives.

As generational challenges have become more common, they’ve also become sharper in their explicit appeals to age as a key candidate quality. And candidates like Elkind have made the argument that the stakes go beyond generational “vibes.”

A geriatric Congress can also have demonstrable effects on the policymaking that happens on Capitol Hill.

Slim majorities make age a bigger issue

Why is candidate age so prominent in the current election cycle?

One big reason is that razor-thin majorities in Congress make every seat count.

Slim margins create legislative and institutional uncertainty that has very real consequences for how Congress is run and how policy gets made.

In his candidacy announcement video, Elkind makes this point explicitly: “In the last five months, three House Democrats passed away, allowing Trump’s billionaire bill, gutting health care and food stamps for millions of people, to go through by one vote.”

Although it’s likely that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would have passed even without these vacancies, the Democratic absences undoubtedly made Speaker Mike Johnson’s job of passing the bill a little bit easier.

Elkind also notes that the last eight members of Congress who passed away in office were Democrats. In essence, Elkind is arguing that Democrats must elect more young members not just as a matter of representation but as a way of preserving power in Congress.

How do vacancies occur?

Seat vacancies caused by the early departures of members of Congress happen regularly, and in a variety of ways.

The 118th Congress, which met from Jan. 3, 2023, to Jan. 3, 2025, set a modern record with 17 vacancies, a rate unmatched going back to the 1950s. This was partly because of four member deaths, including Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.

Other high-profile vacancies in the 118th Congress were due to different causes. Some members were forced to resign or even expelled from Congress because of scandal, like GOP Rep. George Santos of New York, who was convicted in 2024 for a range of crimes and subsequently sentenced to several years in prison.

Others cut short their current term due to political defeats: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, resigned after being ousted from his leadership post in 2023. The current 119th Congress has seen additional resignations from members who took positions in the second Trump administration.

Resignation is the most common reason for departure in recent Congresses. However, at least one member – and often more than one – has died in all but one Congress in the past 70 years. The number of deaths that regularly occur among members is more than sufficient to change how the majority party functions in a closely contested Congress like this one.

And for Democrats, three member deaths in the first nine months of the current Congress is far ahead of previous years’ paces, making incumbents’ advanced age a relevant issue on the campaign trail.

How are vacancies filled?

Although U.S. Senate vacancies are often – though not always – filled through an appointment by the governor of that state, the Constitution mandates that House vacancies be filled by special elections scheduled by the governor.

These elections usually happen within a few months of the vacancy. What this means is that there are real possibilities for the size of a party’s majority to shrink, or grow, between election years, in ways that have profound impacts on policymaking. And even if a majority party shift doesn’t happen, a district could still replace a moderate departing representative with an extremist, or vice versa.

What does this mean for the 2026 midterms?

Whether younger candidates’ message will resonate with primary election voters remains an open question. Longer-serving incumbents hold major advantages like deeper campaign experience. Younger candidates traditionally lack the name recognition and donor bases that older incumbents have built up over decades.

But given the public concern over the high-profile declines of candidates for president – like former President Joe Biden – and for Congress, like Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell, generational politics may be more important than ever, and help reverse this trend.

This story contains material from a previous article published on Jan. 3, 2023.

Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In a closely divided Congress, aging lawmakers are a problem for Democrats – https://theconversation.com/in-a-closely-divided-congress-aging-lawmakers-are-a-problem-for-democrats-262914

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.

It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.

It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.

Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.

Winners write the history

Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.

Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.

As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”

This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.

The Ministry of Truth

The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”

The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.

Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.

The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.

But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”

At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.

The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.

Down the memory hole

Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.

Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.

Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life ofHarriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.

Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.

Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.

Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”

Repressing thought

Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.

According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”

The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.

If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.

It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.

As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.

This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.

The Smithsonian is a member of The Conversation U.S.

Laura Beers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Orwellian echoes in Trump’s push for ‘Americanism’ at the Smithsonian – https://theconversation.com/the-orwellian-echoes-in-trumps-push-for-americanism-at-the-smithsonian-263304