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Football appeared a sideshow for much of the last afternoon of a tournament nurtured to indulge the cult of the individual

It ended almost as Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump had planned. Earlier on a seemingly endless World Cup final day, the trophy had, in a scene perfectly of a piece with the event’s excess, been let out of a Louis Vuitton trunk. Now they shuffled up to the podium together and presented it to a beaming Rodri, fumbling the moment slightly when Trump lingered for Spain’s team photo. Within moments they had made their exit, golden glitter sparkling on a bobbly pitch and the reverberations from a football event of unprecedented scale pulsing far beyond this concreted mini-state in New Jersey.

How to make sense of a heady, intoxicating, often deeply strange tournament that at once appeared totally welcoming and chillingly distant? It concluded with a disorientating fever dream beneath a bright blue American sky, football appearing a sideshow for much of the afternoon even if the game did not exactly help itself. Anyone straining for a parable could, if they wanted, take pleasure in Spain’s success. This was ultimately the triumph of a collective idea in a World Cup nurtured to indulge the cult of the individual.

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Research during Hungary election shows AI recommended parties not running and gave highly volatile answers to identical prompts

AI chatbots provide inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable guidance to voters asking which party they should back, a study suggests, often recommending the wrong party, not mentioning the right one, or listing parties not even running.

“The results raise serious concerns about the reliability of general-purpose AI systems in electoral contexts,” the study , published by the civil liberties group Liberties and based on research during this year’s Hungarian parliamentary elections, concluded.

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