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Iggy Pop, Jack White Say ‘Hey! Ho!’ To CBGB Festival

It has been 50 years since CBGB birthed the New York rock explosion led by Patti Smith, Talking Heads and the Ramones — a legacy that will be honored Sept. 27 at the first CBGB Festival. The event will be headlined by Iggy Pop and Jack White and will take place at Under the K Bridge Park, a new outdoor venue literally underneath the Kosciuszko Bridge roadway in Brooklyn.

The 21-band, three-stage lineup will also sport Sex Pistols with new singer Frank Carter, Johnny Marr, Marky Ramone, the Damned, Gorilla Biscuits, Melvins, Lambrini Girls, the Linda Lindas, Lunachicks, Scowl, Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law and Pinkshift. Attendees will be treated such hallowed memorabilia as the original CBGB’s bar and stage

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Tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday (May 16), and a trove of 350 GA tickets will be available only at the Music Hall of Williamsburg box office the next day for residents under 25. The “Young Punk” discounted ducats will sell for $73, in line with the year CBGB opened.

Pop hasn’t played a headlining show in New York in nine years, although he has appeared at such events as the annual Tibet House benefit and a symphonic celebration of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, which was held just days before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.

Other artists on the bill have longstanding connections to the music of the CBGB era, with White frequently covering Iggy and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and Marr featuring Pop’s “The Passenger” in his live set lists in 2024. Marky Ramone and the Damned are also no strangers to the original club, with the former having played it countless times with the Ramones and the latter among the first U.K. punk bands to visit in April 1977.

CBGB closed its doors on the Bowery in 2006 after a farewell concert by Smith. Its building is now occupied by a John Varvatos store, although the CBGB name has since been licensed for a restaurant at Newark International Airport.

In 2018, Target provoked the ire of New York music lovers by tweaking CBGB’s famous awning to celebrate the opening of a new retail location in Astor Place. The four-lettered acronym was swapped out for “TRGT” and “BANDS,” which referred not to music but complimentary Band-Aids and exercise bands with Target logos on them.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

USA TODAY’s Disclaimers on Its Automated Sports Stories Are Longer Than the Actual Articles

USA Today is publishing automated articles full of links to gambling sportsbooks, which may result in financial kickbacks for the publisher.

USA TODAY is publishing automated sports stories that serve as SEO-targeted vehicles for sports gambling ads, toeing ethical lines and blurring the boundaries between sports journalism and the rapidly growing sports betting industry, the rise of which has been linked to a tidal wave of gambling addiction.

At a quick glance, the posts — which list the day’s Major League Baseball (MLB) schedule in a minimal, bullet-pointed list — look like any other USA TODAY sports article. They have fairly normal headlines, underneath which are a USA TODAY editor’s name and headshot; then comes an opening few sentences and the skeletal list of professional baseball games slated for that day.

“Here is the full Major League Baseball schedule for May 5 and how to watch all the games,” reads the opening line of a typical post. It’s identical to the one in the post that came before it, and the one before that. The only thing that changes is the date, and of course, the schedule that follows. There are dozens of these articles, which date back to March of this year.

That’s not where the posts end, though. After scrolling through the short schedule, the reader is met with a barrage of prominent links to popular sports betting services, including Fanduel, BetMGM, Caesar’s, and Fanatics, each advertising sign-up bonuses and big deals.

“Bet $5, Get $250 in Bonus Bets If Your Bet Wins,” waves the Fanduel ad, while the Caesar’s promotion calls on potential gamblers to “Bet $1, Double Your Winnings Your Next 10 Bets.”

The links are covered in logos for credit cards, online payment portals, and banking apps.

Underneath those, multiple disclaimers appear. The first is a somewhat standard affiliate explainer stating that a USA TODAY team of “savvy editors independently handpicks all recommendations,” which in this case are the gambling platforms. The next vaguely denotes the use of automation technology to produce the story.

“This schedule was generated automatically using information from Stats Perform and a template written and reviewed by a USA TODAY Sports editor,” reads the disclaimer. “What did you think of it? Our News Automation and AI team would love to hear from you.”

And for the grand finale, following the automation caveat, is a two-paragraph, 330-word disclaimer warning that “gambling involves risk” and that readers should only gamble with “funds they can afford to use,” later noting that USA TODAY’s owner, the newspaper giant Gannett, may “earn revenue from sports betting operators for audience referrals to betting services.”

“All forms of betting carry financial risk and it is up to the individual to make bets with or without the assistance of information provided on this site,” it adds at another point, “and we cannot be held responsible for any loss that may be incurred as a result of following the betting tips provided on this site.”

In short, should you place a bet after following one of the Gannett-published links, the news publisher will likely get a financial kickback. And if you lose any money, they warn, that’s not on them.

It’s pretty wild: the actual body of the post doesn’t even crack 200 words, even when you include the headline. Combined, the disclaimers — nevermind the advertisements! — ring in at over 400 words, more than doubling the length of the actual article.

The caveats are a version of the fast-talk babble at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial, and to be clear, they should definitely be there.

There was something about this content, though, that just felt off, no matter how many caveats Gannett was willing to heap on top of it.

Though the posts are housed under the USA TODAY sports section, and visually framed like any other article, they don’t actually show up on the section’s general landing page, nor do they crop up when you click the paper’s MLB-specific tab — signaling that the idea here seems to be that someone will find one of these posts by way of a search engine, perhaps while googling a query like “baseball games today,” and click.

To that end, it’s impossible to ignore that the Gannett editor bylining these articles, Richard Morin, is specifically referred to by the newspaper as an “Editor of Sports Betting Partnerships” — and not a reporter, editor, or producer explicitly tasked with covering baseball or broadcasting, or sports more generally. That detail raises even bigger questions about the primary purpose of this content: is it to inform readers, or to serve as many people as possible with lucrative sports betting affiliate links?

Through one lens, the USA TODAY content is just the latest — if journalistically depressing — manifestation of the near-inescapable inrush of sports betting advertising within the modern sports media landscape. As has been widely reported, the 2018 legalization of sports gambling resulted in its swift cultural explosion and normalization, including within a younger, college-aged demographic. Now you can bet on almost everything, from major American events like professional playoffs and college championships to wildly obscure competitions, and there’s almost always a betting platform willing to facilitate the wager. Digital sportsbooks, as a result, have become incredibly profitable — and they’ve used much of that cash to cement a dominant advertising presence in the sports media complex, where you’re hard pressed to watch a broadcast or look up game highlights without encountering celebrity-packed betting ads.

But the expansion and normalization of legal sports betting has also been met by a concerning uptick in sports gambling addiction. And these colder realities of sports gambling, and the ethical and moral quandaries they raise, have collided with sports journalism in a big way. The questions are endless: should journalists be allowed to bet on the sports they cover? Should publishers and broadcasters allow sportsbooks to sponsor or advertise journalism or broadcasts that involve actionable reporting or prediction-making that could influence a bettor’s decision? Is a sports publisher’s reliance on ad dollars from sportsbooks more akin to a food magazine running a Don Julio-sponsored advertorial about summertime tequila recipes, or is it more like a health website publishing an article about stress relievers and featuring referral links to purchase cigarettes at the bottom?

And in addition to all of that, USA TODAY’s sportsbook spoonfeeding poses yet another question: should efforts by news publishers to use AI or any kind of automation technology go anywhere near sports gambling, another landscape riddled with blurry ethical landmines?

To make sense of the Gannett articles, we reached out to Brian Moritz, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University who’s written extensively about sports betting’s seepage into the sports media complex. At one point in our conversation, when considering how to summarize his thoughts and feelings about Gannett’s automated betting referrals, he simply let out an audible groan.

It’s “straying on the line,” said Moritz, after reviewing the USA TODAY articles. On the one hand, he said, “there’s no real reporting here. It’s literally just: here are the games, and here are the links where you can bet on them if you so choose.”

Ethically speaking, Moritz said it would be more concerning to see Gannett automate articles that included actionable reporting or information that could influence a gambler’s choices. The hypothetical he used was an AI-generated article about Aaron Judge getting injured before a Yankee’s game and being unable to play — and slapping referral links to betting sites on that.

Still, he said, it’s a slippery slope. It’s certainly not journalism, and though it doesn’t represent a total collapse of journalistic ethics, it may well represent an erosion.

“Sports media wants to cover gambling because there’s an audience for it. People do it and it’s popular and it makes money,” the professor continued. “But again, looking at this list of ‘here’s the full schedule for April 27, how to watch all the games,’ and then the betting ads on it… this just feels to me — and before you even get to the word salad below — this just feels so sterile.”

It’s “almost a naked cash grab,” he added.

We reached out to Gannett with a list of questions about this story, including questions regarding how these posts are “automatically generated” and whether generative AI tools were involved. Gannett responded that the articles were “created through automation,” as opposed to generative AI, and doubled down on the claim that every automated post is reviewed by a Gannett journalist before publishing.

Asked whether these articles are considered editorial or advertorial, a spokesperson for Gannett stated that “as part of our affiliate model, we have strategic partnerships that reinforce our commitment to serving consumers with the content they need and want.”

“We will continue to seek out additional opportunities to monetize the vast array of content we already produce,” they added, “as we invest in our mission to support journalism.”

This isn’t Gannett’s first attempt to infuse automation into its sports reporting. Back in 2023, Gannett was forced to issue mass corrections after its newspapers were found publishing weird, botched AI-generated roundups of local high school sports scores.

Gannett was also at the center of Futurism‘s investigation into the third-party media contractor AdVon Commerce, which we found had published AI-generated articles bylined by fake AI writers at dozens of publications including USA TODAY’s since-shuttered commerce site Reviewed, as well as Sports Illustrated, The Los Angeles Times, many local newspapers owned by McClatchy, and more.

This recent history in mind, maybe it’s unsurprising to see Gannett publish its unholy lovechild of sports betting, SEO-hunting, and automation. Even so, reflected Moritz, Gannett is a major publisher of news, and its historic USA TODAY paper was a genuine innovator in the world of sports journalism in the pre-internet ’80s and ’90s. And while these posts might not constitute a complete fall from grace, they’re a bleak signpost in USA TODAY‘s decades-long history. (Maybe “McPaper” was a fitting nickname after all.)

“Sports journalism is good. Sports journalism can be great. It can do incredible stories, not just the big stuff — the little stuff that connects us to our teams, that connects us to our homes… that’s why we love sports,” said Moritz. “And when I look at a page like this on USA TODAY, which was a revolutionary sports news page back when it started… to see it become this list of games and ads for sportsbooks is just sad.”

“It’s like, ‘oh, this is where we are now,'” said Moritz. “This is not what sports journalism should be aspiring to.”

More on automation in journalism: Newspaper Fires Two AI Reporters After Bizarre Behavior

The post USA TODAY’s Disclaimers on Its Automated Sports Stories Are Longer Than the Actual Articles appeared first on Futurism.

Eric Clapton’s ‘Unplugged’ and the Peak Dad Rock Moment

Eric Clapton, performing on stage, Kuip, Rotterdam, Netherlands, June 19, 1992. (Credit: Niels van Iperen/Getty Images)

“See if you can spot this one,” Eric Clapton told the small audience in a Windsor television studio in January 1992, just before he began playing a dramatically different arrangement of one of his signature songs. Three seconds into the slower but still somewhat identifiable version of the opening riff of his 1970 Derek and the Dominos classic “Layla,” there was a small murmur of recognition in the audience and one guy, eager to signal to Clapton that he indeed spotted this one, yelled “Yeah!” 30 seconds later, there was a bigger cheer after Clapton sang the first line, and another small cheer when he got to the chorus.

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When MTV Unplugged debuted in 1989, the acoustic concert series was primarily a showcase for smaller acts, and the first episode was split between Squeeze, Syd Straw, and Cars guitarist Elliot Easton’s solo work. Over the next couple of years, however, the series attracted bigger names like Aerosmith and Paul McCartney while helping raise the profiles of new bands like Pearl Jam, becoming the most popular prestigious outlet for live music on television. 

Clapton’s appearance had the highest ratings of any Unplugged episode when it first aired in March 1992. And while the British guitarist was reluctant to release the performance on CD—he’d just released an electric live album, 24 Nights, in October 1991—Clapton eventually relented, and his Unplugged album, released in August ’92, was a blockbuster.

Eric Clapton’s Unplugged eventually sold 26 million copies worldwide, including over 10 million in the U.S. alone. It’s the biggest live album of all time, overshadowing past behemoths like Frampton Comes Alive! and Bruce Springsteen’s Live/1975-85. Unplugged also won three Grammys in 1993, becoming only the third live album to win Album of the Year (Clapton also played on one of the two previous winners, George Harrison’s 1971 release The Concert for Bangladesh).

An expanded 90-minute version of the episode, Eric Clapton Unplugged… Over 30 Years Later, was released in select movie theaters in January. And on May 9, Clapton is releasing Unplugged: Enhanced Edition, a double CD featuring the remixed and remastered album with never-before-heard interviews with the guitarist from the day of the taping. Listening back to the album that was once ubiquitous both in pop culture and in my mother’s Delaware condo, however, I thought about how much Clapton’s once-towering place in the rock canon has shrunk in the last 30 years. 

June 20, 1967. (Credit: Eric Harlow/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

I don’t remember what grade I was in, but I was in elementary school in the early ’90s one day when my fellow students and I had a classroom activity in which we built structures by gluing sugar cubes together. As a nascent music geek, I decided to make a wall and write the words “CLAPTON IS GOD” on it, recreating the famous graffiti scrawled on a wall in London in the mid-’60s. Clapton was a member of the Yardbirds at the time, and that graffiti slogan became part of the British guitarist’s profile legend as he went on to make classics with Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos, and as a solo artist.

Now, I didn’t think Clapton was God. Even at that young age, I preferred Jimi Hendrix, and when I listened to Clapton’s guitar solos, I found him a little boring compared to flashier contemporary lead guitarists I loved like Slash and Mike McCready. These days, I hold his influences like Buddy Guy and B.B. King in higher esteem than Clapton, and if I want to listen to a great ’70s record by a white blues guitarist, I’m more likely to reach for something by Duane Allman or Lowell George. But as a prepubescent kid, I was already obsessed enough with rock music, and conversant enough in my Boomer parents’ favorite oldies, that I was familiar with Clapton’s reputation and the “CLAPTON IS GOD” wall, more as a meme than a belief system.

Clapton’s elite status in the rock establishment continued unchallenged until at least 2000, when he became the first (and still only) person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times: with the Yardbirds, with Cream, and as a solo artist. Slowhand’s grip on the monoculture has noticeably loosened since then, however.

With Pattie Boyd at the premiere of Ken Russell’s film version of The Who’s rock opera ‘Tommy’ at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, March 26, 1975. (Credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images)

In 1998, VH1 ran a special called The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, featuring a list that had been voted on by a large electorate of recording artists and music industry professionals. In 2010, VH1 ran the poll again and presented another special with a new version of the list. The Beatles were unsurprisingly No. 1 on both lists, but lots of ’60s acts like the Byrds and the Four Tops dropped off the later edition to make way for younger artists like Radiohead and Beyonce. Eric Clapton was the highest ranked artist on the 1998 list, at No. 15 between Marvin Gaye and John Lennon, who fell out of the top 100 in 2010. Cream fared better, making a small drop from No. 52 to No. 61. 

Last month, Consequence published a list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time that once again served notice of Clapton’s eroding status. Plenty of his contemporaries, including two other Yardbirds alumni, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, were in the top 10, while Clapton was down at No. 45. 

To be fair, there are reasons for Clapton’s diminished status that aren’t entirely musical. In a drunken onstage rant in 1976, Clapton endorsed far-right British politician Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant policies while dropping a series of racist slurs. Public disgust at Clapton’s remarks was one of the catalyzing events that led to the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement in the punk scene. And Clapton has continued to court controversy in recent years, recording a series of songs with Van Morrison in 2020 and 2021 that railed against public policies that mitigated the spread of COVID-19 like quarantines, masking, and vaccines.

1989. (Credit: Luciano Viti/Getty Images)

To his credit, Clapton has expressed remorse about his 1976 comments. “When I realized what I said, I just was so disgusted with myself,” he said in the 2017 documentary Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars. “I was so ashamed of who I was, I was becoming not only chauvinistic but fascistic too. I was kind of a semi-racist.” Clapton has also shown some progressive politics in other respects, including vocal support of Palestine, and he released the 2024 concert film To Save a Child to raise relief aid for children in Gaza.

The acoustic reinvention of “Layla” was the biggest hit from Unplugged, peaking at No. 11 on the Hot 100, only one spot lower than the original had reached in 1972. But the album also boosted Clapton’s single “Tears in Heaven,” released a few months earlier as part of Clapton’s soundtrack for the otherwise forgotten Jason Patric crime drama Rush. “Tears” had just entered the Top 10 days before the Unplugged episode aired, and peaked at No. 2 soon after, while both the episode and videos excerpted from it were being regularly aired on MTV. 

“Tears in Heaven” was Clapton’s mournful response to his 4-year-old son Conor’s accidental death in 1991. That tragedy loomed large over Clapton’s massive success with Unplugged, and softened his image after years of being known for his divisive politics and struggles with alcoholism and addiction.

During the ‘Money and Cigarettes tour at Brendan Byrne Arena (later renamed Meadowlands Arena), East Rutherford, New Jersey, February 22, 1983. (Credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)

While many artists simply played an acoustic greatest hits set for Unplugged with maybe one cover or obscurity, Clapton went off the beaten path for his episode. More than half of his Unplugged is dedicated to songs by his blues heroes including Bo Diddley, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters. Clapton wasn’t an especially prolific songwriter—he’d co-written only two songs on his most recent studio album at the time, 1989’s Journeyman. So it’s a little surprising that he debuted four previously unreleased original songs during the Unplugged taping, including “Lonely Stranger” and the opening instrumental “Signe.” 

Two of the songs left out of the MTV broadcast and original album that were restored in the expanded re-releases, “My Father’s Eyes” and “Circus,” eventually appeared on 1998’s Pilgrim, Clapton’s only proper album of original material released that decade. Pilgrim was an overlong, overhyped, overproduced flop, and those songs already sounded as good as they were ever going to get in that Windsor television studio in 1992.

Also in 1992, Mariah Carey’s cover of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” became the first and only No. 1 single from an Unplugged performance, and the series remained a pop culture staple for the next several years. Jodeci and 10,000 Maniacs also scored major chart hits with Unplugged covers, another Grammy for Album of the Year went to Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged, and Nirvana’s revelatory Unplugged in New York became the most beloved and enduring album to come out of the series, taking on greater significance in the band’s brief career after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide.

Onstage during Day 2 of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival at Crypto.com Arena on September 24, 2023 in Los Angeles. (Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Crossroads Guitar Festival)

The Unplugged phenomenon came along at a time when the image-conscious artificiality that’s for better or worse always part of pop music had become particularly malignant. MTV played a large role in that, constantly airing Milli Vanilli and C+C Music Factory videos that, it was later revealed, featured lip syncing performances by people that weren’t actually singing the songs. Giving audiences a chance to appreciate artists that could really play and really sing in a back-to-basics format was a necessary corrective, even if it probably also extended the dominance of the dad rock canon for another decade. 

These days, artists over 45 aren’t regularly sweeping the Grammys like they once did, and it’s been a long time since a live album got an Album of the Year nod. It’s probably for the best that white British blues guitarists aren’t so central to the mainstream’s concept of good music anymore, but there are still millions of fans who can listen to Unplugged and remember the last time that Clapton was God.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Ibiza’s New [UNVRS] Club Unveils Massive Lineup for “Once-in-a-Lifetime” Opening Party

Reinvention is ritual in Ibiza, and its newest nightlife destination, [UNVRS], arrives not merely as another venue but as a game-changer poised to reshape what club culture looks, sounds and feels like on the legendary party island.

Set to open its doors at the end of this month, the hi-tech [UNVRS], the latest venture from Yann Pissenem’s The Night League, is readying a launch of epic proportions. Equal parts club, arena and immersive installation, the venue will make its long-awaited debut with a “once-in-a-lifetime” opening party, per a press release.

Promising “scale, spectacle and storytelling,” the launch event is dubbed “[UNVRS] – The Opening.” Built by the same creative minds behind Ushuaïa and Hï Ibiza, the venue aims to blend the intimacy of a club with the reach and resonance of an arena-sized production.

“With everything we’ve built with Ushuaïa and Hï Ibiza, I hope [UNVRS] becomes a defining cultural icon in Ibiza’s legacy—a place that sets a new global standard and continues to lead the world in sound, creativity, innovation and experience,” Pissenem said. “I want to encourage every clubber and guest who shares our passion to feel part of what begins now. This is a new chapter in the island’s story.”

The opening party with Michael Bibi,, Carl Cox b2b Jamie Jones, Joseph Capriati b2b The Martinez Brothers and more is just the beginning. The [UNVRS] summer calendar includes high-profile residencies from Anyma, Eric Prydz, David Guetta, FISHER, elrow.

Tickets for “[UNVRS] – The Opening” on May 30th are on sale now. Check out the full lineup below.

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Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country

The media giant Gannett is using AI to "automatically generate" content about lottery scores and tickets in local newspapers across the US.

The media giant Gannett, the largest owner of American local newspapers and the publisher of USA Today, is using AI to churn out a nationwide torrent of automated articles about lottery results that often pointedly direct readers toward a gambling site with which Gannett has a financial relationship, giving the company a financial kickback when readers visit it.

Gannett appears to have started publishing the automated gambling posts around February of this year, with the articles published en masse by dozens of local newspapers across many US states — an eyebrow-raising editorial move, especially during an explosive rise in gambling addiction that Gannett itself has covered extensively.

In many cases, the posts are outfitted with vague bylines, attributed to simply a paper’s “Staff” or “Staff reports.” Other times, the posts are attributed to a Gannett editor or digital producer, suggesting at first glance that the articles were written by humans.

Until you get to the foot of each post, that is.

Though the information provided varies slightly from post to post and state to state, the content is extremely formulaic. And at the very bottom of each post, there’s a similar disclaimer that each “results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu” — a compiler of lottery data with a website straight out of web 1.0 — and a “template” that was “written and reviewed” by a Gannett journalist in a given market.

Take a recent post about Illinois Powerball Pick 3 results, published May 7 in The Peoria Journal Star. The article is bylined by a longtime Gannett employee named Chris Sims, who’s listed on LinkedIn as a digital producer for the newspaper giant.

At the bottom of the article is the disclaimer fessing up to the use of automation technology to churn out the article, as well as the claim that AI was used in tandem with a template “written and reviewed by an Illinois editor”:

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by an Illinois editor. You can send feedback using this form. Our News Automation and AI team would love to hear from you. Take this survey and share your thoughts with us.

That editor would have to be Sims. Right? After all, why else would a journalistic institution slap a journalist’s name at the top of an article, if not to insinuate that said journalist was directly involved in its writing or reviewing?

But further digging muddies the water. Sims’ opening line — emphasis ours — reads as follows:

The Illinois Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 7, 2025, results for each game.

Simple, but direct — and presumably from a template written by Sims, if the disclaimer is to be believed.

But here’s the opening line from another, similar post about the May 7 Powerball drawings over in Texas, which was published by the Gannett-owned newspaper The El Paso Times and bylined by a different Gannett journalist named Maria Cortes Gonzalez:

The Texas Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 7, 2025, results for each game.

Gonzalez works for an entirely different market from Sims. And though the opening lines of each article are nearly identical, the disclaimer listed at the bottom of the Gonzalez-bylined article claims that it was “generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Texas editor,” and not an editor from Illinois.

The pattern continues over in Colorado, where an article published by The Coloradoan about the May 7 Colorado Powerball results features the same lede:

The Colorado Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 7, 2025, results for each game.

In this instance, the Coloradoan article was simply attributed to “Coloradoan Staff.” Its disclaimer, however, names yet another Gannett employee as author of the post’s template, declaring that the “results page” was generated using TinBu data and a “template written and reviewed by Fort Collins Coloradoan planner Holly Engelman.”

The pattern continues at newspapers across the country, from California, to Georgia, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and beyond. (It’s also worth pointing out that all winning numbers can be found by googling the name of a state and “lottery numbers,” meaning the articles are providing zero original value that can’t be found with a simple web search.)

Some of the posts go further than simply providing lottery results, and offer extra information on where and how to purchase tickets — and often recommend that readers shop lotto stubs from an online platform called Jackpocket, which struck a deal with Gannett in 2023 and is referred to in many automatically-generated Gannett articles as the “official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network.” Jackpocket, which is owned by the digital gambling giant DraftKings, recently came under investigation in Texas after a massive lottery win drew lawmaker scrutiny over the fairness of tickets bought through the third-party lottery platform.

To say that mixing automated journalism with SEO-targeted lottery articles that generate revenue when readers become gamblers themselves is pushing the limits of editorial ethics is putting it mildly, especially given the muddiness of the template attributions.

When we contacted Gannett for comment, the company confirmed through a spokesperson that it uses a “natural language generation” tool to produce the articles.

Regarding the similarities between articles across regions, the spokesperson said that a singular Gannett journalist drafted an original template and distributed it across markets, where market editors edited the draft as they saw fit. The spokesperson also denied that bylining the automated articles with the names of editorial staffers might be misleading to readers, arguing that including the editorial bylines encourages transparency, and stated that all of the automated posts are double-checked by humans before publishing.

Gannett also maintained that the articles are editorial — and not advertorial, as the links to Jackpocket might suggest. The spokesperson claimed that the lottery provider wasn’t involved in the creation of any of the content we found, and affiliate links were only added in states where Jackpocket, which isn’t available in all 50 states, legally operates.

In a written statement, the spokesperson doubled down on Gannett’s commitment to automation.

“By leveraging automation in our newsroom, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting,” the spokesperson told us in a statement. “With human oversight at every step, this reporting meets our high standards for quality and accuracy to provide our audiences more valuable content which they’ve always associated with Gannett and the USA TODAY Network.”

The disclosure that appears on the articles — “Gannett may earn revenue for audience referrals to Jackpocket services” — seems to imply that not all gambling articles earn money when readers start gambling. A spokesperson didn’t clarify.

This is hardly Gannett’s first brush with AI content.

Back in June of 2023, the company’s chief product officer, Renn Turiano, told Reuters that Gannett planned to experiment with AI, though he swore that it would do so responsibly — and, importantly, would avoid publishing content “automatically, without oversight.” But those promises quickly unraveled, and in August, USA Today, The Columbus Dispatch, and other Gannett papers were caught publishing horrendously sloppy AI-generated write-ups about local high school sports scores. It was an embarrassment for the publisher, which was forced to issue mass corrections.

Then, in September of 2023, Gannett came under fire once again after journalists at the company’s since-shuttered commerce site, Reviewed, publicly accused its owner of publishing AI-generated shopping content bylined by fake writers. At the time, Gannett defended the content; it claimed that it hadn’t been created using AI, but had been written by freelancers who worked for a third-party media contractor identified as AdVon Commerce.

A months-long Futurism investigation into AdVon later revealed that the company was using a proprietary AI tool to generate content for its many publishing clients, including Gannett, Sports Illustrated, many local newspapers belonging to the McClatchy media network, and more — and bylined its content with fake writers with AI-generated headshots and made-up bios designed to give the bogus content more perceived legitimacy. (AdVon has contested our reporting, but our investigation found many discrepancies in its account.)

Gannett also caused controversy amongst staffers last year when it updated contracts to allow for the use of AI to generate “news content,” and has since rolled out an AI tool that summarizes articles into bullet points.

And now, with its mass-generated lottery content, it seems that the publisher’s AI train has continued to chug right along. After Gannett’s many AI controversies — and the copious AI journalism scandals we’ve seen in the publishing industry writ large — automated, SEO-targeted lottery updates feel like the logical next stop.

Update: This article incorrectly attributed an article published in the Gannett-owned newspaper The El Paso Times to The Austin American-Statesman, and said that The Austin American-Statesman was owned by Gannett. The Austin American-Statesman was sold by Gannett to Hearst in February 2025.

More on Gannett and AI: Gannett Sports Writer on Botched AI-Generated Sports Articles: “Embarrassing”

The post Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country appeared first on Futurism.

The Vernon Spring Finds Clarity in Haze

The Vernon Spring (Credit: Saoirse Fitzpatric)

Sam Beste has played with Amy Winehouse, Beth Orton, and MF Doom, but as the Vernon Spring, the British pianist-composer-producer takes a more experimental route. 

On his second album, Under a Familiar Sun, Beste layers, loops, and strings together field recordings, vocal samples, spoken word, and spare piano melodies, forming an allusive/elusive collage. Beste keeps things short—the album’s 12 tracks average about three minutes in length, but the collision of widely different elements can often make each piece seem like several songs superimposed over each other. The rampant multiplicity never feels schizophrenic or jarring—the tracks often run together or float into each other, with sparse motifs recurring throughout. While the constant shifts can make this music hard to pin down, it carries an emotive warmth that keeps its mysteries approachable. 

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A few songs stick out from the fluid haze, such as “The Breadline,” featuring a mellow monologue by poet Max Porter and a strong undercurrent of political discontent, or the intricate “Esrever Ni Rehtaf.” By far the longest song on the album at seven minutes, “Esrever” weaves together rustling subterranean electronics, drifty vocals (from singer-astrophysicist aden), and blurred-raindrop piano notes, cohering into a kind of amniotic ambience. And though Beste is working in a more open-ended mode, hints of his pop past do surface. “Other Tongues” begins with a fluttery electronic barrage but soon morphs into a hesitant ballad with (possibly sampled) female vocals, while the title track strikes a careful balance between soul-tinged piano hooks and lithe cascades of abstraction and furry crackle. By threading gentle drones and snippets of percussion through new jack swing piano and intermittent vocals from Iko Niche, “Mustafa” somehow manages to conjure the ghost of Motown, faint and attenuated but still weirdly powerful.

Beste often appears to be rifling through a series of ideas, as on opening song “Norton,” which toggles between hip-hop-adjacent beats and an array of vocal samples from what sound like remnants of R&B hits from older days. The elegiac simplicity of “Requiem for Reem,” on the other hand, delivers a straightforward shot of emotion with only Beste’s murmuring piano melody resting on a pillow of reverb and cottony feedback. There’s a scrapbook element to these songs, as if Beste is shuffling through memories and then arranging them into some private order. Sometimes he lingers and focuses, and that’s when recognizable shapes and feelings emerge. But such clarity is brief and soon dissolves into the organic flow. On Under a Familiar Sun, Sam Beste has taken ghostly ambiguity and made it sound like the most natural thing in the world. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Primus Gonna Have Themselves a New Drummer

The future Primus, from John Hoffman's audition process. L-R: Let Lalonde, John Hoffman, Les Claypool. (Credit: Cage Claypool)

In late October of 2024, Primus and their fans were shocked when longtime drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander abruptly announced that he was leaving the trio. Primus—which also features ubiquitous bassist/singer Les Claypool and guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde—had been here before. This was the third time Alexander quit the band. He was the drummer on their early records—their 1989 debut EP Suck On This, 1990’s Frizzle Fry, 1991’s Sailing The Seas Of Cheese, 1993’s Pork Soda, and 1995’s Tales From The Punchbowl. He left in 1996 and was replaced by Bryan “Brain” Mantia, who had played in an early incarnation of Primus. Alexander rejoined in 2003, leaving again in 2010. Jay Lane, another early Primus member, took his place. Lane left, and Alexander rejoined in 2013, staying for eleven years. 

Lalonde, Claypool, and Hoffman. (Credit: Danny Miller)

This time, the band went outside their circle to replace Alexander. As Claypool recalls, laughing, “Well, [Alexander quitting] kind of came from out of the blue, so we weren’t prepared for any of this!” Still sounding a bit surprised, he says, “The first thing I did was call [Tool drummer] Danny Carey, because he’s a good friend and he can play those drums! He recommended a few people, but then Ler and I thought, ‘We don’t have anybody in the wings like we had before, let’s see who’s out there,’ and we started going down the wormhole of YouTube. That led to the ‘Interstellar Drum Derby.’”  

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The multi-part “Interstellar Drum Derby” clocks in at over three hours and features cameos from Fred Armisen, Danny Carey, and Maynard James Keenan, and Stewart Copeland of the Police. 

Spoiler alert: the winner was a relative unknown named John Hoffman from Shreveport, Louisiana. Actually, it’s not much of a spoiler: he’s on the cover of Modern Drummer magazine, having made his very high-profile debut with the band at Tool’s Live in the Sand festival, which took place in the Dominican Republic on March 8. Hoffman is currently on his first tour with the band, as part of the Sessanta 2.0 trek, which sees Primus and two of Maynard James Keenan’s bands (A Perfect Circle and Puscifer) sharing the stage and switching off songs all night long. 

In Tim Alexander’s statement explaining why he quit, he mentioned that he’d lost his passion for playing and that touring had left him “feeling empty.” He said that he told the band, “They deserve someone who wants to be there.” John Hoffman is someone who very much wants to be there. 

“This is something my friends and I talked about when we were kids: ‘What if I could be the drummer of Primus?’” Hoffman says excitedly from a stop on the tour. “It never seemed like an actual possibility! I remember going to Tower Records to buy [1999’s] Antipop the day it came out. A lot of that stuff doesn’t get played as much,” he notes, referring to that album and 1997’s The Brown Album. “I’m hoping to get them to bring back some of that stuff to the live shows.”

His choice to play a rather deep cut from The Brown Album, “Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread,” impressed Claypool and LaLonde during his audition. And that song made the setlist at the Live In The Sand Festival. The band shared the performance of that song on YouTube. 

The video is titled “Hoffer’s First Gig.” It’s sort of an unofficial rite of passage in Les Claypool’s world that everyone around him has nicknames: “Ler,” “Herb,” former Primus drummer Jay Lane is “Jayski,” and his frequent collaborator Sean Ono Lennon is “Shiner.” 

“All my friends tend to have nicknames,” he explains. “When I get comfortable with somebody, they end up with a nickname. I feel odd calling someone by their proper name if I really know them well.”

Hoffman wasn’t the obvious choice for the gig, according to Claypool speaking by phone from the tour. “We had over 6,100 submissions. Our friend Tim Soya, who has known us forever, watched every single video. Ler watched almost every single video. They went through and picked the best of them, and I watched those. We had four folders: the one-star folder meant you were really good, two stars meant you were exceptional, three stars meant ‘Oh my god, this person’s amazing,’ and four stars meant that this person had to get an audition. I think Hoffer was in the two-star folder.”

He continues. “But then I posted, ‘Hey, we’re getting a lot of people playing Primus songs, it’s hard to see what personality folks have. Please resubmit with some of your own stuff.’ (this is the post where he made the announcement: https://www.instagram.com/p/DDaRkGlTgVZ/ ) Hoffer resubmitted, and it killed us, so he got an audition.” That video not only featured Hoffman playing along with Primus songs, but also famous TV themes, including Seinfeld, Barney Miller, and The Jetsons. “It was very clever,” Claypool says.  

“We didn’t think that he’d make it to the finals because the day he played, Ler was dealing with all of this fire shit, because his house had just burned down [in the Los Angeles fires]. He just wasn’t in a great mood. He didn’t feel that audition like I did. Even up to the end, we thought that Gergo [Borlai, another auditioning drummer] was going to get it.”

Claypool, who is also a drummer, had some issues with Hoffman’s playing at the first audition. As Hoffman recalls, “Les said, ‘You had a good audition and we were all very impressed, but you need to go home and work on your double bass [drumming] and get that tight.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I’m on it!’ So the next time I got with Les, and we jammed, he said, ‘Man, you’ve been working on your double bass.’ I said, ‘Yep, I sure have: I came to win!’” 

“He did his homework!” Claypool agrees. “And part of the final audition was that we spent the day in the recording studio working on this brand new song that I had written, ‘Little Lord Fentanyl.’ We just released it [on May 2]: that’s directly from the audition.” Maynard James Keenan is featured on the song, and they’re performing it together at the Sessanta shows. (Claypool notes that the Primus/Tool bond dates back to 1993 when both bands were on the Lollapalooza tour. Tool was a new band at the time, or as Claypool puts it, “They were the low scrotum on the totem!”) 

“Little Lord Fentanyl” is a pretty heavy song, musically and lyrically. Claypool notes, “I really pushed the notion that this person is a victim of the abuse of pharmaceuticals, not street drugs. But that’s been happening with a lot of people, and I’ve had friends who had this happen. Not just with fentanyl, but opiates. They have an injury, they have a surgery, and the next thing you know, they’re addicted to this shit and it takes them forever to get off of it.”

Hoffman’s ascent is a much happier topic to discuss than the drug epidemic. As the rookie says, “I went from sending in an audition video to becoming the drummer for one of the greatest bands of all time.” Claypool enjoys watching Hoffman experience rock stardom, and says it’s given the band a new blast of energy.  

“He’s meeting famous people, he’s on the tour bus, he’s staying in these nice hotel rooms, we’re drinking fancy wine, he has a real drum tech… It’s very endearing, and it’s rejuvenating for us as a band. We’re jaded old bastards; all of the sudden, there’s this fresh perspective! And it’s really a wonderful thing. It’s been a shot in the arm for this band, for sure.”

“I draw the parallel to the first time I took my kids to Disneyland,” Claypool explains. “I went to Disneyland one time when I was like 8 or 9 years old, and it was the greatest experience of my life. When I was older, Ler and I would go all the time. Sometimes in various altered states! But when I got to take my kids for the first time, it was like reliving that excitement through their eyes. It was a wonderful thing. That’s the way it is with Hoffer.”  

John Hoffman. (Credit: Cage Claypool)

The band’s new dynamic changed Claypool’s summer plans: he notes that Alexander had initially committed to the Sessanta tour, which stretches through early June.  “I was going to do a Frog Brigade [his solo band] summer tour or a Claypool Lennon Delirium [his band with Sean Lennon] tour. We’ve got a Delirium album that we’ve been working on for three years that we’re trying to finish up. Then all of this happened, and now the focus is back in Primus-land. Especially now that we have this guy who is all fired up. Plus, I couldn’t leave Ler high and dry like that, either. It’s just a different dynamic now than it was eight months ago.” A month after Sessanta ends, Primus is headlining their own tour. 

A new Primus album is “probably very likely,” he says. “There’s an enthusiasm now that’s infectious, and when you have that, you have to take advantage of it. But I also have the Delirium album: it’s a big concept record, and it’s a pretty ‘out-there’ concept. I’m kind of hoping to do a new Primus record in the next year and get the Delirium record out and maybe do a tour next summer with both bands.”  

The Sessanta Tour, with A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, ends June 7. Primus kicks off their headlining tour on July 5; that tour ends August 8. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.