iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

4/ Copilot cited AI-generated sources 27.8% of the time! ngl that's a little shocking. There's a lot of other interesting data points buried in the paper. Love the investigative spirit of this work. Read it here: arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23684

A quote from the paper. The highlighted section reads: "We find Copilot to cite AI-generated
sources in 27.8% (N=1,614) of its citations, which translates
to nearly 3 out of every 10 cited sources being AI-generated.
Similarly, 14.7% (N=782) of Gemini’s cited sources were
found to be AI-generated, followed by Perplexity (N=472;
9.4%), and ChatGPT (N=765; 7.3%)."

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3/ AI search engines are more likely to cite AI-generated sources for queries about health and environmental issues like climate change.

A table from the paper: Number of unique AI-generated sources by topic and AI provider. The table shows that AI providers (copilot, chatgpt, gemini and perplexity) mostly used AI generated sources for queries related to health, politics and environment.

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3/ They found search summaries citing blatant AI-generated content like this

A screenshot from a website called "factually" which has, in its about page, text explicitly noting it is written by AI. A section from the site is highlighted: "Is it perfect? No. Accuracy is hard. Consistency is hard. We're working on it."

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 06/05/2026

I wanted to highlight this interesting paper by @ndiakopoulos.bsky.social and Mowafak Allaham about how often AI search engines cite AI-generated content Thread 1/

A screenshot of the header of the paper. It reads: "Synthetic Sources?: Auditing Generative Search Engine Citations for Evidence of
AI-Generated Sources
Mowafak Allaham, Nicholas Diakopoulos
Northwestern University"

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🥰 So proud to be a Pulitzer finalist in investigative reporting

A screenshot from the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting page showing the Staff of The New York Times won, with Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose and Brandon Roberts (me!) of ProPublica as finalists alongside Cynthia Dizikes and Joaquin Palomino of the SF Chronicle.

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 22/04/2026

I just updated 527 Explorer, which includes filings through the end of Q1 2026. 1.2M total new records detailing contributions, expenditures and other organizational information. projects.propublica.org/527-explorer/

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 13/03/2026

In case you don't know what a "transaction" is – officials must report any purchase, sale, or exchange of real property or securities (e.g., stocks) worth over $1k. These often come out in separate forms (278T) and are required to be filed within 45 days after a transaction occurs.

A screenshot from the ProPublica Team Trump Financials search tool, showing a section of President Trump's page with a title of "Transactions" at the top, followed by the text "officials are required to disclose the purchase, sale or exchange of property or securities in excess of $1,000." Beneath this is a table of financial transactions with description, value, transaction, endnote and lone no. headers. The first row has a description of "SPDR SERIES TRUST STATE STREET SPDR PORTFOLIO HIGH YIELD BOND ETF DISCRETIONARY ORDER J.P. MORGAN SECURITIES LLC MAKES A MARKET IN THIS SECURITY ROME: WHIPA" with a value of $500K - $1M and purchase date of 2026-01-21. The table continues with more transactions.

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9/ Pro tip: You can directly share disclosures you find with the line number link. Here's Pam Bondi's sale of $1-5M of Trump Media stock, which occurred on "Liberation Day" last spring: projects.propublica.org/trump-team-f... (She hasn’t answered our questions.) Share/tag any interesting rows!

A screenshot from a story about Pam Bondi's trades reads: "Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.

Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, fell 13% in the following days, before rebounding."

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8/ You can also see President Trump's debts. These include mortgages on properties like Trump Tower and Trump Villa. Also tens of millions of liabilities related to civil lawsuits by the New York Attorney General and E. Jean Carroll:

A screenshot of President Trump's page on ProPublica’s Trump Team Financials tool, showing the liabilities section. The table shows two rows detailing $1-5M in liabilities related to the E. Jean Carroll suit. The next row is highlighted and shows a litigation related liability, creditor: New York Attorney General, amount: "Over $50,000,000"

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7/ Trump's financial disclosure was more difficult to get. It came in a different format with a tiny, difficult to read font. We parsed the thousands of records, adding up to at least $1.4B in value, so you don't have to.

A screenshot from President Donald J Trump's form 278-T document. The screenshot shows a portion of the form containing "Filer's Name: Donald J Trump" and a red Note: "This is a public form. Do not include…" The text displayed is blurry and some letters appear to be corrupted. The lower case "a" in "Donald" is a pixelated blob with no definition.”

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6/ Caveat: The data we have isn't standardized, so companies can be spelled in many different ways. To help search for common things, we've prepared queries you can use, like this one for people with ties to SpaceX 👇 projects.propublica.org/trump-team-f...

A webpage for ProPublica’s Trump Team Financials tool, displaying 10 results for the prepared search query “SpaceX OR ‘Space Exploration Technologies.’”

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5/ On each appointee's page, we also make their ethics agreements docs available. Here, NASA Administrator Jared Taylor Isaacman details the steps he will take to avoid conflicts with SpaceX, which NASA has significant deals with.

Section 10 of an ethics agreement document signed by NASA Administrator Jared Taylor Isaacman, which states: “I am the Managing Member of RookX, LLC, which has contracts with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) for space flight services. Upon confirmation, I will terminate all agreements that RookX, LLC has with SpaceX, and all monies that have been paid to SpaceX for services not completed will be refunded to RookX, LLC.”

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4/ With our tool, you can find other appointees who hold crypto, like Kenneth Howery, ambassador to Denmark, who holds a variety of bitcoin forks and other cryptocurrencies.

Screenshot of a table showing multiple crypto holdings of Kenneth Howery, Trump’s ambassador to Denmark. These include employee assets of $4M-$25M in Bitcoin, $25M-$50M in Ethereum and more.

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2/ Political appointees are required to file disclosures detailing their finances and efforts to eliminate conflicts of interest. We've gathered over 3,000 of these forms and made them searchable.

Screenshot of a section of ProPublica's Trump Team Financials tool titled "Wealthiest Officials: Based on minimum reported asset values." The rows are the wealthiest officials in the tool, ordered by lower bound net worth, as reported by the officials in their documents. The table reads: "Stephen Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Secretary, Department of Defense, $2B; Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, White House, $1.4B; Warren Stephens, Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Department of State, $1.1B; John Phelan, Secretary of the Navy, Department of Defense, $791M; Howard Lutnick, Secretary, Department of Commerce, $723M; West Cuthbert, Associate Deputy Secretary, Department of Health & Human Services, $605M; Melinda Hildebrand, Ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica, Department of State, $603M"

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 05/02/2026

THREAD: We just released a tool that allows you to search billions of dollars in wealth, ties to the most powerful companies in the country, and details of the personal finances of President Trump and over 1,500 of his appointees. Here’s how it works 1/

Screenshot of ProPublica webpage titled “Explore Financial Disclosures From President Trump and 1,500 of His Appointees,” accompanied by this blurb: “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team. The documents disclose positions officials have held outside government, their assets and their debts, among other things.” A search bar prompts the user to search for a person or financial holding.

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It's 2026, an election year (💀). That means its time to update ProPublica's 527 Explorer! This latest update brings us current through 2025, adding 460k new records. I'll be updating more frequently this year. Follow for updates & LMK what you do w/ it projects.propublica.org/527-explorer/

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 04/02/2026

Interesting piece about abuse of generative AI in contract bid protests: "Federal procurement is not prepared to deal with contractors like Oready, LLC (Oready), which has misused GenAI to file a barrage of seventeen pro se protests and appeals over eight months" content.ncmahq.org/contractmana...

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 23/01/2026

Some examples of what you can do with this: - Find out which countries make the most generics - Compare across drugs and companies - Quickly find how many drug makers put detailed manufacturing info on their labels - Cross-reference other data like the FDA Inspections dashboard and facilities list

A screenshot of a table with headers: country code, count, percent and a histogram bar. Country code "IN" is the top row with 26k count (55%) of the total.

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10/ To search for a prescription, you will need two pieces of information: the drug name and company name. Sometimes this is the manufacturer or “MFR” on the label – regardless of if they actually made the medication or not. Here we are searching for Gabapentin by Cipla.

An orange prescription bottle for Gabapentin, 100 mg capsules, manufactured by Cipla.

Screenshot of Rx Inspector search fields. Users can input a drug name and company name to search for their specific drug.

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8/ Further back is a different story. In 2009 an inspection found the facility conditions were unacceptable. The FDA soon after banned the import of drugs from it. A year and a half later, an FDA inspection found less serious issues that could be resolved. The import ban was lifted soon after.

Screenshot of Rx Inspector facility page for one Apotex Inc. factory. It shows that in 2009, the FDA ruled the facility was in an "unacceptable state of compliance," then banned the import of medications from the facility. In 2011, the FDA determined the facility could correct issues voluntarily and then lifted its import ban.

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7/ The Rx Inspector facility page shows that recent inspections resulted in the FDA determining an acceptable state. This is a good outcome for a facility inspection.

Screenshot of Rx Inspector facility page for one Apotex Inc. factory. It shows that FDA inspections from 2018 through 2025 determined the facility was in an acceptable state.

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6/ But by using Rx Inspector, we can now find the Quallent Atorvastatin medication’s factory. This Apotex facility has the same Canadian postal code that was written on the label.

Screenshot of Rx Inspector results for Apotex Inc. factories. One of the facility addresses highlighted here is 150 Signet Drive Toronto, Ontario, M9L 1T9, Canada.

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5/ Last month, we published the results of our attempt to find where a bottle of Quallent Atorvastatin medication was made. The trail left off with a vague label reference to Apotex and a Canadian postal code. A dead end. www.propublica.org/article/fda-...

Screenshot of prescription information for a bottle of Quallent Pharmaceuticals Health LLC's Atorvastatin calcium tablets, which comes in 10 mg, 20 mg, 40 mg, and 80 mg. It's manufactured by Apotex Inc. in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M9L 1T9

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 07/10/2025

THREAD: The FDA has made it difficult to find where medications are made. Today we're changing that with our latest tool. With Rx Inspector, it’s possible to see your drug’s manufacturing facility and what the FDA found during its inspections. Here's how you can use it. 1/

Screenshot of Rx Inspector webpage, where users can look up where their generic prescription drugs were made. A blue button prompts people to "begin your search." The background illustration shows a man inspecting a giant red and white pill capsule.

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I feel like "generate new ideas" is pretty debatable here 🤣

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 25/09/2025

I thought this was funny. "AI adoption is expected to yield significant benefits ... Realizing these benefits depends on continued AI innovation and public adoption." Kind of a chicken and egg logic here. As if AI isn't good enough for many tasks because we're not all using it yet? 🤔

AI adoption is expected to yield significant benefits,
including greater efficiency, improved safety and reliability, expanded access to services,
and enhanced economic competitiveness. Realizing these benefits depends on continued
AI innovation and public adoption.

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 25/09/2025

Office of Science and Technology Policy is requesting federal rules/guidelines/etc "that unnecessarily hinder" the development, deployment, and adoption of AI. The list of "not appropriate" assumptions is interesting because AI experts will tell you many of these are critical to responsible AI use.

Quote from the Federal Register document
"These assumptions include, but are not limited to:
• Decision-Making and Explainability – Decisions are made, documented, and
explained, in ways where the processes and rationale are traceable to a human
actor.
• Liability and Accountability – Allocation of legal responsibility and remedial
frameworks rests with human actors or clearly identifiable organizational
decision points.
• Human Oversight and Intervention – Prescriptive requirements for human
oversight, review, intervention, or continuous supervision in operational
processes.
• Data Practices – Data collection, retention, provenance, sharing, and permitted
uses cases that do not account for the scale, reuse, or training dynamics
characteristic of AI systems.
• Testing, Validation, and Certification – Approaches to testing, approval, and
post-market oversight designed for static products or human-delivered
services, rather than adaptive or continuously learning systems."

Quote from the Federal Register document:

This RFI seeks to identify Federal regulations that hinder AI development,
deployment, or adoption, particularly due to rules established before current AI
capabilities were anticipated. OSTP is especially interested in regulations that, while
serving important purposes, contain requirements or assumptions incompatible with how
AI systems function or could function. Respondents are encouraged to identify
regulations across all sectors where the underlying assumptions, technical requirements,
or compliance frameworks may create unnecessary barriers to beneficial AI applications,
even if the core policy objectives remain valid

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 12/09/2025

FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee are accepting comments in advance of their meeting around "Generative Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Digital Mental Health Medical Devices" aka AI therapists (cringe every time I write that)

Quote from the federal register
There is an increasing demand for mental
health services in the US and insufficient access to mental health care providers. These new
devices may be one way to help address this gap in care for people, potentially improving
outcomes and access.

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 10/09/2025

In case you needed more evidence you can't just blindly copy and run code written by AI: I just asked a llama3.2 model how to sort by create date and it gave me a command which would have deleted every file from the directory (after sorting) 😅

Screenshot of a LLM session. LLM was asked "wow to sort a directory in linux by create date?"
Response: "find /path/to/directory -type f -print0 | sort -t '-' -k 1,1n -r | xargs -0 rm"
This would have deleted all the files in the dir

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 09/09/2025

For reference, a 2024 VoiceBrain CRADA with Dept of Homeland Security was focused around capturing, transcribing and doing AI analytics around airport radio traffic for TSA in Oakland. www.prnewswire.com/news-release...

VoiceBrain's AI software captures millions of daily voice communications and converts them into actionable data in real-time. The VoiceBrain platform can be deployed in less than 15 minutes and integrates seamlessly with existing two-way radios, requiring no material modifications to hardware or infrastructure. As VoiceBrain analyzes transmissions, it extracts key content and delivers alerts and notifications about critical situations as they arise. This transforms radio communications into a valuable dataset that enhances decision-making, operational efficiency, safety, and security. Additionally, VoiceBrain's capability to analyze thousands of hours of data in seconds empowers customers to conduct queries, generate summaries, and prepare reports with unprecedented speed and accuracy, optimizing time and standardizing processes.

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 09/09/2025

US Coast Guard partnering with AI voice transcription + analytics company VoiceBrain in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). "Eliminating human error and fatigue" but nothing about the new machine errors it will introduce. public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-17361.pdf

Additionally, VoiceBrain's integration into existing and future multicast communication
systems provides an opportunity to streamline and enhance the process of maritime response by
eliminating human error and fatigue.

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 07/09/2025

The AI fake journalist saga continues ... Business Insider alone has retracted 40 articles now wapo.st/4p9E7hz Editors who've published a pitch from someone they never talked to nor saw and paid via PayPal have been put on notice 😅

Quote from the story: Nine essays with the byline Tim Stevensen also contain contradictions. In one article, he claims his daughters are in their twenties and his son is a teenager; in another one published this year he says they’re 11, 13 and 15.

Quote from story:
Wired only discovered that piece was fraudulent because the person who submitted the work was unwilling to provide information sufficient for its payment system, insisting to be paid through PayPal or check. Wired wrote that it has taken steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again, without specifying what they were.

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Brandon Roberts @bxroberts.org · 18/07/2025

Proposed Dept of Education rule change around "Advancing Artificial Intelligence in Education". Is this backed by anything other than vibes? www.federalregister.gov/public-inspe...

From a Department of Education proposed rule change: "AI tools have the potential to support personalized instruction, increase classroom engagement, and improve student outcomes."

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We have several iterations of the script. In what appears to be an early one they used gpt-4-turbo (superseded by OpenAI GPT-4o) and, in a more recent script, o3-mini was used with the default "reasoning" setting and a timeout of 30s.

A screenshot of AI analysis model instantiation using gpt-4-turbo

A screenshot of AI analysis model instantiation using o3-mini

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10/ When we reached out to the VA press secretary, he told us that contract decisions go through multiple reviews by employees, and also the VA would not cancel crucial contracts without a contingency plan:

A quote from the ProPublica article reads: The VA is reviewing all of its 76,000 contracts to ensure each of them benefits veterans and is a good use of taxpayer money, he said. Decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff, he wrote.

Kasperowicz said that the VA will not cancel contracts for work that provides services to veterans or that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place. He added that contracts that are “wasteful, duplicative or involve services VA has the ability to perform itself” will typically be terminated.

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8/ The VA is also standing behind its use of AI to identify “munchable” contracts, calling it “a commonsense precedent.” Documents released to ProPublica indicate they may even be looking at using it for other VA operations, such as processing disability claims.

A screenshot from the ProPublica article reads – The VA is standing behind its use of AI to examine contracts, calling it “a commonsense precedent.” And documents obtained by ProPublica suggest the VA is looking at additional ways AI can be deployed. A March email from a top VA official to DOGE stated:

Today, VA receives over 2 million disability claims per year, and the average time for a decision is 130 days. We believe that key technical improvements (including AI and other automation), combined with Veteran-first process/culture changes pushed from our Secretary’s office could dramatically improve this. A small existing pilot in this space has resulted in 3% of recent claims being processed in less than 30 days. Our mission is to figure out how to grow from 3% to 30% and then upwards such that only the most complex claims take more than a few days.

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4/ Even Sahil Lavingia, the programmer, agreed there were problems. This is what he told us:

A screenshot from the ProPublica article reads: “I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

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3/ Second, the DOGE AI tool’s underlying instructions were deeply flawed. The system was programmed to make intricate judgments based on the first few pages of each VA contract — about 2,500 words — which contain only sparse summary information.

A section of the DOGE artificial intelligence prompt with the text: “Then, evaluate if this contract is ‘munchable’ based on these criteria:
- If this is a contract modification, mark it as N/A for munchable status
- If this is an IDIQ contract:
* For medical devices/equipment: NOT MUNCHABLE
* For recruiting/staffing: MUNCHABLE
* For other services: Consider termination if not core medical/benefits
- Level 0: Direct patient care (e.g., bedside nurse) - NOT MUNCHABLE
- Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced - NOT MUNCHABLE
- Level 2+: Multiple layers removed from veterans care - MUNCHABLE
- Services that could easily be replaced by in-house W2 employees - MUNCHABLE”

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