I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified. 

The ad bears all the hallmarks of the sloppiest of AI trash: weird artifacting, strange voices that don’t sync with the mouths talking, and inconsistent animation. It feels both surreal and of the moment and completely ancient. 

And then there’s the pregnant bill.

The Schoolhouse Rock! Bill is an iconic cartoon character that has been parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of pictures of the cartoon bill online, all available to be gobbled up by scrapers and turned into training data for AI.

For some reason, the bill in Cuomo’s ad has thick red lips (notably absent in the original) and appears to be pregnant. Adding to the discordant AI jank of the image, the pregnancy is only visible when the bill is standing up. Sometimes it’s leaning against the steps and in those shots it has the slim figure characteristic of its inspiration. But when the bill stands it looks positively inflated, almost as if the video generator used to make Cuomo’s ad was trained on MPREG fetish art of the bill and not the original cartoon itself. The thick and luscious red lips are present whether the bill is leaning or standing. 

Towards the end of the ad, an anthropomorphic phone with a ChatGPT logo wanders into the scene. Standing next to the pregnant bill, I could not but help but think that the phone is the father of whatever child the bill carried.

My observation led to an argument in the 404 Media Slack channel and opinions were split. “It does not seem pregnant to me,” said Emanuel Maiberg.

Jason Koebler, however, came to my defense. He circled the pregnant belly of the cartoon bill and shared it. “Baby is stored in the circle area,” he said.

Perplexed by all this, I reached out to Cuomo’s campaign for an explanation. I wanted a response to the ad and to get his thoughts on AI-generated political content. More importantly, I needed to know their opinion on the pregnancy. “Does that bill look pregnant to you?” I asked. “I think it looks pregnant, but my editors are split. I would love for the Campaign to weigh in.” Out of journalist due diligence, I also reached out to Mamdani’s press office. Neither campaign has responded to my request for it to weigh in on the pregnancy of the AI-generated cartoon bill.

This is not the first time the Cuomo campaign has used AI. An ad in early October featured a deepfaked Cuomo working as a train operator, stock trader, and a stagehand. A week ago, the Cuomo campaign released a long, racist video depicting criminals endorsing Mamdani. Critics called the ad racist. The campaign deleted it shortly after it was posted and blamed the whole thing on a junior staffer.

It is worth noting that Cuomo's AI slop is being deployed most likely because the candidate has been utterly incapable of generating any authentic excitement about his campaign in New York City or on the internet, and he is facing a digitally native, younger candidate who just seems effortlessly Good At the Internet and Posting.

This is, unfortunately, how a lot of politics works in 2025. Desperate campaigns and desperate presidents are in a slop-fueled arms race to make the most ridiculous possible ads and social media content. It looks cheap, is cheap, and is the realm of politicians who are totally out of ideas, but increasingly it feels like slop is the dominant aesthetic of our time.

Last night Trump directed the Pentagon to start testing nukes again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time the US has detonated a nuke in more than 30 years. The organization that would likely be responsible for this would be the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian workforce that oversees the American nuclear stockpile. Because of the current government shutdown, 1,400 NNSA workers are on furlough and the remaining 375 are working without pay.

America detonated its last nuke in 1992 as part of a general drawn down following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Four years later, it was the first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans nuclear explosions for civilian or military purposes. But Congress never ratified the treaty and the CTBT never entered into force. Despite this, there has not been a nuke tested by the United States since.

Trump threatened to resume nuclear testing during his first term but it never happened. At the time, officials at the Pentagon and NNSA said it would take them a few months to get tests running again should the President order them.

The NNSA has maintained the underground tunnels once used for testing since the 1990s and converted them into a different kind of space that verifies the reliability of existing nukes without blowing them up in what are called “virtual tests.” During a rare tour of the tunnel with journalists earlier this year, a nuclear weapons scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory told NPR that “our assessment is that there are no system questions that would be answered by a test, that would be worth the expense and the effort and the time.”

Right now, the NNSA might be hard pressed to find someone to conduct the test. It employs around 2,000 people and the shutdown has seen 1,400 of them furloughed and 375 working without pay. The civilian nuclear workforce was already having a tough year. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 350 NNSA employees only to scramble and rehire all but 28 when they realized how essential they were to nuclear safety. But uncertainty continued and in April the Department of Energy declared 500 NNSA employees “non-essential” and at risk of termination.

That’s a lot of chaos for a government agency charged with ensuring the safety and effectiveness of America’s nuclear weapons. The NNSA is currently in the middle of a massive project to “modernize” America’s nukes, an effort that will cost trillions of dollars. Part of modernization means producing new plutonium pits, the core of a nuclear warhead. That’s a complicated and technical process and no one is sure how much it’ll cost and how dangerous it’ll be. 

And now, it may have to resume nuclear testing while understaffed. 

“We have run out of federal funds for federal workers,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press conference announcing furlough on October 20. “This has never happened before…we have never furloughed workers in the NNSA. This should not happen. But this was as long as we could stretch the funds for federal workers. We were able to do some gymnastics and stretch it further for the contractors.”

Three days later, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) said the furlough was making the world less safe. “NNSA facilities are charged with maintaining nuclear security in accordance with long-standing policy and the law,” she said in a press release. “Undermining the agency’s workforce at such a challenging time diminishes our nuclear deterrence, emboldens international adversaries, and makes Nevadans less safe. Secretary Wright, Administrator Williams, and Congressional Republicans need to stop playing politics, rescind the furlough notice, and reopen the government.”

Trump announced the nuclear tests in a post on Truth Social, a platform where he announces a lot of things that ultimately end up not happening. “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post said.

Matt Korda, a nuclear expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that the President’s Truth social post was confusing and riddled with misconceptions. Russia has more nuclear weapons than America. Nuclear modernization is ongoing and will take trillions of dollars and many years to complete. Over the weekend, Putin announced that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile and on Tuesday he said the country had done the same with a nuclear-powered undersea drone. Russia withdrew from the CTBT in 2023, but neither recent test involved a nuclear explosion. Russia last blew up a nuke in 1990 and China conducted its most recent test in 1996. Both have said they would resume nuclear testing should America do it. Korda said it's unclear what, exactly, Trump means. He could be talking about anything from test firing non-nuclear equipped ICBMs to underground testing to detonating nukes in the desert. “We’ll have to wait and see until either this Truth Social post dissipates and becomes a bunch of nothing or it actually gets turned into policy. Then we’ll have something more concrete to respond to,” Korda said.

Worse, he thinks the resumption of testing would be bad for US national security. “It actually puts the US at a strategic disadvantage,” Korda said. “This moratorium on not testing nuclear weapons benefits the United States because the United States has, by far, the most advanced modeling and simulation equipment…by every measure this is a terrible idea.”

The end of nuclear detonation tests has spurred 30 years of innovation in the field of computer modeling. Subcritical computer modeling happens in the NNSA-maintained underground tunnels where detonations were once a common occurrence. The Los Alamos National Laboratories and other American nuclear labs are building massive super computers that are, in part, the result of decades of work spurred by the end of detonations and the embrace of simulation. 

Detonating a nuclear weapon—whether above ground or below—is disastrous for the environment. There are people alive in the United States today who are living with cancer and other health conditions caused by American nuclear testing. Live tests make the world more anxious, less safe, and encourage other nuclear powers to do their own. It also uses up a nuke, something America has said it wants to build more of.

“There’s no upside to this,” Korda said. He added that he felt bad for the furloughed NNSA workers. “People find out about significant policy changes through Truth social posts. So it’s entirely possible that the people who would be tasked with carrying out this decision are learning about it in the same way we are all learning about it. They probably have the exact same kinds of questions that we do.”

Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material.

The leak follows others obtained and verified by 404 Media over the last 18 months. Those leaks impacted both Cellebrite and its competitor Grayshift, now owned by Magnet Forensics. Both companies constantly hunt for techniques to unlock phones law enforcement have physical access to.

“You can Teams meeting with them. They tell everything. Still cannot extract esim on Pixel. Ask anything,” a user called rogueFed wrote on the GrapheneOS forum on Wednesday, speaking about what they learned about Cellebrite capabilities. GrapheneOS is a security- and privacy-focused Android-based operating system.

rogueFed then posted two screenshots of the Microsoft Teams call. The first was a Cellebrite Support Matrix, which lays out whether the company’s tech can, or can’t, unlock certain phones and under what conditions. The second screenshot was of a Cellebrite employee. 

According to another of rogueFed’s posts, the meeting took place in October. The meeting appears to have been a sales call. The employee is a “pre sales expert,” according to a profile available online.

The Support Matrix is focused on modern Google Pixel devices, including the Pixel 9 series. The screenshot does not include details on the Pixel 10, which is Google’s latest device. It discusses Cellebrite’s capabilities regarding ‘before first unlock’, or BFU, when a piece of phone unlocking tech tries to open a device before someone has typed in the phone’s passcode for the first time since being turned on. It also shows Cellebrite’s capabilities against after first unlock, or AFU, devices.  

The Support Matrix also shows Cellebrite’s capabilities against Pixel devices running GrapheneOS, with some differences between phones running that operating system and stock Android. Cellebrite does support, for example, Pixel 9 devices BFU. Meanwhile the screenshot indicates Cellebrite cannot unlock Pixel 9 devices running GrapheneOS BFU.

In a statement, Victor Cooper, senior director of corporate communications and content strategy at Cellebrite, told 404 Media “We do not disclose or publicize the specific capabilities of our technology. This practice is central to our security strategy, as revealing such details could provide potential criminals or malicious actors with an unintended advantage.” Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

GrapheneOS is a long running project which makes sizable security changes to an Android device. “GrapheneOS is focused on substance rather than branding and marketing. It doesn't take the typical approach of piling on a bunch of insecure features depending on the adversaries not knowing about them and regressing actual privacy/security. It's a very technical project building privacy and security into the OS rather than including assorted unhelpful frills or bundling subjective third party apps choices,” the project’s website reads.

As well as being used by the privacy and security conscious, criminals also turn to GrapheneOS. After the FBI secretly ran its own backdoored encrypted phone company for criminals, some drug traffickers and the people who sell technology to the underworld shifted to using GrapheneOS devices with Signal installed, according to interviews with phone sellers.

In their forum post, rogueFed wrote that the “meeting focused specific on GrapheneOS bypass capability.”

They added “very fresh info more coming.”

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books. 

“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”

The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.

Upon learning of her company’s closure, Jennifer Kennedy, a customer services account manager with Baker & Taylor, broke the news on October 6 on r/Libraries Reddit community. 

“I just wanted the libraries to know,” Kennedy told 404 Media. “I didn’t want them to be held hostage waiting for books that would never come. I respect them too much for all this nonsense.”

Kennedy’s post prompted other current and former B&T employees to confirm the announcement and express concern for the competitors about to be inundated with requests from the libraries who would be scrambling for new suppliers. 

B&T in Memoriam

Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing. 

But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through. 

On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know. 

Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.  

“Some libraries didn’t realize we are much closed as of right now,” Kennedy added.

B&T did not respond when asked for comment. 

Kennedy has been with B&T for 16 years. At a time when it's uncommon to remain with one company more than a few years, that’s exactly what many of B&T’s employees have been able to do, until now. The same was true of the libraries who did business with them. Andrew Harant, director of Cuyahoga Falls Library had to consider the library's longstanding business relationship with the company against the roughly 20 percent of books the library had ordered from the beginning of the year they had never received.

“For us, that was about 1,500 items,” which Harant told 404 Media that for a small library is a lot of books they were ordering and not receiving. 

Release dates for new books come and go on B&T’s main software platform for viewing and managing orders, Title Source 360. Better known as TS360, Harant realized the platform was updating preordered books never received to on backorder, which was “not sustainable”.

In September, Cuyahoga Falls Library canceled all outstanding orders with B&T. 

“We needed to step up and make sure that we’re getting the books for our patrons that they needed,” he said. 

Cuyahoga Falls Library was fortunate to have an existing account with the other main distributor on the scene, Ingram Content Group. This has been true for many of the libraries 404 Media reached out to for this story.

“The easier part is re-ordering the book,” Shellie Cocking, Chief of Collections and Technical Services for the San Francisco Public Library, told 404 Media. “The harder part is replacing the tools you use to order books.”

Integrated Fallout

Of the ancillary services B&T offered customers, TS360 was Cocking’s favorite. It helped her  streamline collection development tasks, for instance, anticipating how popular a title might be or determining how many quantities of a book to purchase, which for larger libraries with dozens of branches, could be complicated to figure out manually. Once titles were ordered in TS360, B&T shared a Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) record that was automatically shared with the library’s API integration using data derived from B&T’s record set. This product, BTCat, was the subject of a lawsuit brought by OCLC earlier this year. 

OCLC owns WorldCat, the global union catalog of library collections that lets anyone see what libraries own what items. OCLC alleged in a U.S. district court filing that B&T misused their proprietary bibliographic records to populate its own competing cataloguing database. OCLC also accused B&T of inserted clauses into its contracts where there was overlap with the businesses and customers, requiring libraries to grant B&T access to their cataloging records so the libraries could then license the records back to B&T for BTCat. B&T has denied these claims, accusing OCLC of stifling fair competition in an already consolidated marketplace.

Marshall Breeding, an independent consultant who monitors library vendor mergers has been following all of this rather closely. He says B&T's closure creates a number of bottlenecks for libraries, the primary one being whether suppliers like Ingram or Brodart can absorb thousands of libraries as customers all at once. 

“Maybe, maybe not,” Breeding told 404 Media. “It’s going to take them a while to set up the business relationships and technical things that have to be set up for libraries to automatically order books from the providers.”

But one thing is evident. 

“Libraries are kind of in a weaker position just scrambling to find a vendor at all,” he added. 

Less competition in the market makes for more challenging working conditions all around. Just ask Erin Hughes, director of the Wood Ridge Memorial Library in New Jersey, made the move over to Ingram after a series of negative experiences with B&T in 2021 from late and damaged deliveries to customer service calls that went poorly, to say the least. Hughes worries her experience with B&T will happen again, only this time with Ingram. 

Since the Reddit announcement, she's noticed it's a little more difficult to get a rep on the phone and the number of shipments to the library is smaller. But the other way Hughes is seeing the problem play out involves the consortium her library belongs to. While she may have foregone B&T years ago, her network hasn't, which affects the operability of InterLibrary Loan lending.

“The resource sharing is going to be off for a bit,” Hughes told 404 Media. 

Amazon Incoming

If Ingram’s service stagnates due to the B&T cluster, Hughes says she'll use Amazon, which recently launched its own online library hub, offering competitive pricing. One downside, says Hughes, is that it's Amazon. 

“No, we do have a little bit of pause around Amazon,” she added. “But we’re at a point now where Ingram actually does supply most of the books for Amazon. So we’re already in the devil’s pocket. It’s all connected. It’s all integrated. And as much as I personally don’t care for the whole thing, I don’t really see a lot of other options.” 

It's hard not to think this outcome was predictable and also preventable. We know what happens when private equity gets involved with businesses not expected to generate high growth or returns, as well as what happens when there's too little market competition in any given sector. It can't be a cautionary tale because market consolidation is in itself a cautionary tale. 

But it’s also worth acknowledging how the timing could not be worse. Library use is way up right now, which is indicative of the times. People are buying less for various reasons. People also seem to like the idea of putting a little friction between their media consumption habits and Big Brother, even at the expense of a little convenience.

“We kind of made our own bed a little bit because we didn’t branch out,” said Hughes. “We didn’t find other solutions to this, and we were relying essentially on two giant companies, one of which folded so quick it was not even funny.”