A growing backlash against AI data centers is spilling into local politics, with residents in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections against officials who approved projects. "People are standing up and saying, 'Sorry, we don't want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,'" Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in an interview. "'If you can't have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.'" The New York Times reports: In Festus, Mo., critics of a local data center project gathered enough signatures in May to force a vote to remove the mayor and City Council members who had approved a $6 billion data center, though the effort is tied up in legal wrangling. In Mason, Mich., residents will vote in November over whether to recall a City Council member over a vote to create zoning rules for data centers. Voters in Yukon, Okla., will also decide in November whether to recall their mayor after the town moved to sell land to a data center developer. And residents of Independence, a city of 121,000 that is 10 miles from Kansas City, will vote on whether to remove Mr. Perkins on Sept. 1. Some local officials have already lost their jobs in the face of data center concerns in regularly scheduled elections. Last year, two members of the Georgia Public Service Commission lost their seats amid concern about data centers' driving up electricity prices. A Virginia state delegate, Geary Higgins, also lost his job last year after his opponent branded him "Data Center Geary." [...] Independence would be one of the first municipalities to hold a data-center-motivated recall election. A judge this month rejected a legal challenge by Mr. Perkins and others, who argued the recall violated Missouri's Constitution.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were "five to eight years" behind and lacked a "middle school" education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system's test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren't sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley's mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared. Over the weekend, journalists at Berkeley's student newspaper, the Daily Californian, noticed the op-ed's language sounded like AI. According to Berkeley sophomore Francis Luo, they ran it through AI-detection software Pangram, which claimed 33% of the op-ed had been generated or assisted by AI. In response, Stankova admitted she had used AI software to "help edit the piece" but that the article was "the result of several hundred person-hours of intensive human work, of which about 80 hours are my own." Stankova said by email she had used AI to locate "numerous documents and articles related to the initiative" but that "all analysis is the result of the team members." When asked about their AI usage policy, the Standard -- which published the op-ed -- shared this statement by email: "While AI may assist, our expectation is that humans are behind every article we publish and take responsibility for every word. Our understanding in working with the author of this op ed was -- and continues to be -- that this piece reflects her and her colleagues' extensive original analysis, research and expertise." Should the op-ed have been entirely written without artificial assistance or is the use of AI a distraction from the argument at hand? That's the question at the heart of the debate playing out online. According to the op-ed, Stankova and her peers found that the number of students with a "severe deficit" in their readiness for a calculus I class had tripled after the University of California adopted test-blind admissions. Some students were allegedly five to eight years behind and struggling with basic algebra and fractions, among other concepts. Much of that decline, Stankova argues, is from the removal of standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, which served as important benchmarks for identifying whether applicants were prepared for Berkeley-level coursework.

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