Gene Seroka has been executive director of the Port of Los Angeles since 2014. The seaport moves more cargo containers than any other in the nation. It has handled as many as 10 million containers in a year. Minus holidays, that works out to about 29,000 a day. Any one of them could hold 48,000 bananas or 24,000 tin cans or maybe 12,000 shoe boxes. Part of Seroka’s job is to explain what those numbers mean and why they are important to a Southern California audience consisting mostly of landlubbers.

“Every four cargo containers that we move creates one job,” Seroka said. “The more containers we move, the more jobs we create.” Many of those jobs are local. Regionally, an estimated 175,000 Southern California workers — employed at the harbors themselves as well as in related businesses such as trucking and warehouse storage — move freight valued at $469 billion a year, port data show.

COVID-19 put a massive dent in those numbers. During the pandemic shutdowns, Seroka began hosting monthly podcasts with maritime experts, in which he presciently warned about the dangerous confluence of a burgeoning supply-chain mess with overheated consumer demand. “Consumer buying has not let up,” said Seroka, who would become a familiar expert face on CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC and “60 Minutes.” “We are seeing a historic import surge.”

Seroka, 59, met twice with President Biden, ultimately helping forge a solution that helped draw down the dozens of ships anchored outside the port, a logjam that only exacerbated air quality woes at California’s single largest source of pollution.

Longer weekday hours and weekend hours of operation helped. So did Seroka’s decision to fine freight customers for leaving their cargo-filled containers at the port, where they were eating up space. Still, Seroka said emissions remain his biggest challenge: “How are we going to get this port to move from a predominantly fossil-fuel-[dependent industry] to zero-emission, clean manufacturing and clean energy all the way through that supply chain? Quite a task.”

Seroka lobbies for infrastructure funding in Washington, where he can tell any member of Congress which products coming through the port have been transported to their district. “The cargo that comes through this port reaches every congressional district in the nation,” he said.

Then there is Seroka the salesman, traveling Asia and Europe, flying as much as 400,000 miles a year in his crusade to convince shipping lines that delays are ephemeral and that his port is the most efficient in America and uses North America’s two largest railroad networks to cross the country.

“When it comes to return on investment for the American citizenry,” he said once, “all roads lead to Los Angeles.”

Rasmussen Reports used to be a fairly creditable and credible political polling organization, good enough to be included among the pollsters relied on by services such as FiveThirtyEight to give a broad-spectrum gauge of voter sentiment in the run-up to state and federal elections.

It’s true that Rasmussen had a detectable pro-Republican “house effect,” in polling parlance — but one that was consistent enough to compensate for in published polling averages.

But something has happened to Rasmussen in recent years. Not only have its results become more sharply partisan, favoring Republican and conservative politicians, but it also has increasingly promoted right-wing conspiracy theories on topics such as race relations, election results and — perhaps most troubling — COVID vaccines and COVID origins.

Earlier this month, Rasmussen tweeted the results of polls it conducted in June 2023 and last month, claiming to find that 1 in 5 Americans believe they know someone who died from a COVID vaccine.

There are many reasons to disregard any such poll asking people what they think about a scientifically validated fact — in this case, that the record shows overwhelmingly that the COVID vaccines widely used in the U.S. are safe and effective.

But Rasmussen has doubled down on its findings. In a series of tweets on June 9, it declared, first: “If the numbers implied by our COVID polling are correct, the vaccines killed more people worldwide than Jews killed in the Holocaust.”

Then it tweeted: “China lied. Fauci lied. People died.” And followed that with: “The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted.”

In other words, Rassmussen has morphed from a quantifier of public opinion into a participant in the spread of noxious propaganda. It still tries to validate its results by claiming that they’re “relevant, timely and accurate,” citing its “track record.”

But that track record has been sprouting gray hairs. The most recent election polling cited by the web page documenting its track record is from 2010.

More recently, 538, now owned by ABC News, dropped Rasmussen from its polling averages in March. ABC took that step after Rasmussen failed to respond suitably to a questionnaire 538 submitted asking Rasmussen to explicate its polling methodology. Rasmussen published ABC’s query on its website under the headline, “ABC News: ‘Answer Our Questions — Or Else!’”

I asked Rasmussen Reports by phone and email to comment on its tweet and its polling, but received no response.

Rasmussen’s veer to the far right has been noticeable for several years. Founded in 2003 by pollster Scott Rasmussen, the firm’s forecasts received high marks for accuracy in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. But it fell short in 2012, predicting victories for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in several states that Obama won.

As my colleague James Rainey observed in the aftermath, the Rasmussen polls had been used by conservative media outlets “to prop up a narrative in the final days of the campaign that Romney had momentum and a good chance of winning the White House.”

In 2013, Scott Rasmussen left the firm due to unspecified business disagreements with its owner, the private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners.

In recent years, the firm has resembled a pollster-for-hire appealing to conservative organizations and authors. During the Trump administration, it became known for “a social media presence that embraced false claims that spread widely on the right,” Philip Bump of the Washington Post observed in March.

The firm’s treatment of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, in which Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake, is a good example. In March 2023, Rasmussen reported the results of a poll it had conducted four months after the election, purportedly finding (according to a headline on its website) that “most Arizona voters believe election ‘irregularities’ affected outcome.”

According to Rasmussen, 51% of Arizona voters chose Lake and only 43% voted for Hobbs. The poll placed the election turnout at 92%; actually it was 62.6%.

On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen’s lead pollster, said its results showed that “people in Arizona, by and large, think that cheating happened.” That unsupported assertion, of course, is the core of the long, fruitless campaign to overturn the election by Lake — who gleefully cited the Rasmussen results.

Rasmussen polls on COVID vaccines and other such topics aren’t entirely worthless. They may not tell us anything useful about scientific research or electoral results, but they do offer a window into how propaganda and claptrap have penetrated deeply into our political discourse, at least within the right-wing fever swamp.

That brings us back to its polling on COVID and COVID vaccines. Rasmussen’s methodology seems to include wording its questions as if they are stating a fact, no matter how dubious. For its May 2024 poll of 1,250 American adults, for instance, it asked, “Do you know someone personally who died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine?” Rasmussen reported that 19% replied in the affirmative; the poll had a margin of error of 3%.

Such questions have obvious flaws. The most important is that most respondents have no way of knowing whether an acquaintance’s death was related to the vaccine; nor does Rasmussen, which conducts its polls with robot calls, have any way of authenticating the respondent’s answer.

Blaming the COVID vaccines for a tide of undocumented injuries and deaths is a popular theme in the anti-vaccine community.

For them, it has the virtue of being suggestive and unverifiable; with nearly 700 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines having been administered in the U.S. alone, the law of large numbers implies that “by random chance alone … there will be a large number of people who die within, say, 30 days of being vaccinated even if the vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with their deaths,” in the words of veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski.

It’s not unusual for the death or illness of a prominent entertainer or athlete to provoke swarms of anti-vaxxers to assert that the victim must have been recently vaccinated. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who I earlier identified as “the most dangerous quack in America” and a “card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia,” misrepresented published research to claim that the COVID vaccine presented an elevated threat of cardiac problems for young men.

The research said no such thing; on the contrary, it said that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, indeed, lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19 itself.

Despite all that, conjectures by laypersons that the illness or death of acquaintances can be traced to the vaccines are legion. One promoter of the idea, economist Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University, even concluded from an anonymous database of 2,840 respondents compiled by a third-party survey firm that the number of respondents who said they knew someone who had died from the vaccine meant that the number of deaths from the vaccine in the U.S. “may be as high as 278,000.”

Skidmore’s paper citing that statistic was retracted last year by the peer-reviewed journal that had published it.

Rasmussen’s promotion of its vaccine-related balderdash is replete with weasel words, as if the firm is opting for plausible deniability.

In its tweet stating that “If the numbers implied by our COVID polling are correct, the vaccines killed more people worldwide than Jews killed in the Holocaust,” for instance, the word “if” carries a lot of baggage — not that its invocation of the Holocaust is defensible under the circumstances.

Similarly, its tweet, “China lied. Fauci lied. People died” refers to a question on its June 23 poll about COVID, in which it asks respondents to agree or disagree with that phrase. (This is known as “JAQing,” for “just asking questions.”)

As for its tweet stating, “The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted,” that’s cast as a comment on a tweet by the former CBS and Fox reporter-turned-conspiracy-monger Lara Logan. She had written, “Pointing out how [Anthony] Fauci was seen by many as one of the worst mass killers in history — is what got me taken off the air at Fox. It was true then — and it is true now.”

Leave aside that the U.S. government has not staged a “take over of medicine,” much less that government action in healthcare has been “deadly.”

Make no mistake: Rasmussen is responsible for these tweets, and deserves blame helping to foment a mass delusion about the vaccines that may have cost the lives of vaccine resisters. If it ever had a reputation for trustworthiness, it doesn’t have it any longer.

For four years, Jacob Hilton worked for one of the most influential startups in the Bay Area — OpenAI. His research helped test and improve the truthfulness of AI models such as ChatGPT. He believes artificial intelligence can benefit society, but he also recognizes the serious risks if the technology is left unchecked.

Hilton was among 13 current and former OpenAI and Google employees who this month signed an open letter that called for more whistleblower protections, citing broad confidentiality agreements as problematic.

“The basic situation is that employees, the people closest to the technology, they’re also the ones with the most to lose from being retaliated against for speaking up,” says Hilton, 33, now a researcher at the nonprofit Alignment Research Center, who lives in Berkeley.

California legislators are rushing to address such concerns through roughly 50 AI-related bills, many of which aim to place safeguards around the rapidly evolving technology, which lawmakers say could cause societal harm.

However, groups representing large tech companies argue that the proposed legislation could stifle innovation and creativity, causing California to lose its competitive edgeand dramatically change how AI is developed in the state.

The effects of artificial intelligence on employment, society and culture are wide reaching, and that’s reflected in the number of bills circulating the Legislature . They cover a range of AI-related fears, including job replacement, data security and racial discrimination.

One bill, co-sponsored by the Teamsters, aims to mandate human oversight on driver-less heavy-duty trucks. A bill backed by the Service Employees International Union attempts to ban the automation or replacement of jobs by AI systems at call centers that provide public benefit services, such as Medi-Cal. Another bill, written by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), would require companies developing large AI models to do safety testing.

The plethora of bills come after politicians were criticized for not cracking down hard enough on social media companies until it was too late. During the Biden administration, federal and state Democrats have become more aggressive in going after big tech firms.

“We’ve seen with other technologies that we don’t do anything until well after there’s a big problem,” Wiener said. “Social media had contributed many good things to society … but we know there have been significant downsides to social media, and we did nothing to reduce or to mitigate those harms. And now we’re playing catch-up. I prefer not to play catch-up.”

The push comes as AI tools are quickly progressing. They read bedtime stories to children, sort drive through orders at fast food locations and help make music videos. While some tech enthusiasts enthuse about AI’s potential benefits, others fear job losses and safety issues.

“It caught almost everybody by surprise, including many of the experts, in how rapidly [the tech is] progressing,” said Dan Hendrycks, director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit Center for AI Safety. “If we just delay and don’t do anything for several years, then we may be waiting until it’s too late.”

Wiener’s bill, SB1047, which is backed by the Center for AI Safety, calls for companies building large AI models to conduct safety testing and have the ability to turn off models that they directly control.

The bill’s proponents say it would protect against situations such as AI being used to create biological weapons or shut down the electrical grid, for example. The bill also would require AI companies to implement ways for employees to file anonymous concerns. The state attorney general could sue to enforce safety rules.

“Very powerful technology brings both benefits and risks, and I want to make sure that the benefits of AI profoundly outweigh the risks,” Wiener said.

Opponents of the bill, including TechNet, a trade group that counts tech companies including Meta, Google and OpenAI among its members, say policymakers should move cautiously . Meta and OpenAI did not return a request for comment. Google declined to comment.

“Moving too quickly has its own sort of consequences, potentially stifling and tamping down some of the benefits that can come with this technology,” said Dylan Hoffman, executive director for California and the Southwest for TechNet.

The bill passed the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee on Tuesday and will next go to the Assembly Judiciary Committee and Assembly Appropriations Committee, and if it passes, to the Assembly floor.

Proponents of Wiener’s bill say they’re responding to the public’s wishes. In a poll of 800 potential voters in California commissioned by the Center for AI Safety Action Fund, 86% of participants said it was an important priority for the state to develop AI safety regulations. According to the poll, 77% of participants supported the proposal to subject AI systems to safety testing.

“The status quo right now is that, when it comes to safety and security, we’re relying on voluntary public commitments made by these companies,” said Hilton, the former OpenAI employee. “But part of the problem is that there isn’t a good accountability mechanism.”

Another bill with sweeping implications for workplaces is AB 2930, which seeks to prevent “algorithmic discrimination,” or when automated systems put certain people at a disadvantage based on their race, gender or sexual orientation when it comes to hiring, pay and termination.

“We see example after example in the AI space where outputs are biased,” said Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda).

The anti-discrimination bill failed in last year’s legislative session, with major opposition from tech companies. Reintroduced this year, the measure initially had backing from high-profile tech companies Workday and Microsoft, although they have wavered in their support, expressing concerns over amendments that would put more responsibility on firms developing AI products to curb bias.

“Usually, you don’t have industries saying, ‘Regulate me’, but various communities don’t trust AI, and what this effort is trying to do is build trust in these AI systems, which I think is really beneficial for industry,” Bauer-Kahan said.

Some labor and data privacy advocates worry that language in the proposed anti-discrimination legislation is too weak. Opponents say it’s too broad.

Chandler Morse, head of public policy at Workday, said the company supports AB 2930 as introduced. “We are currently evaluating our position on the new amendments,” Morse said.

Microsoft declined to comment.

The threat of AI is also a rallying cry for Hollywood unions. The Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists negotiated AI protections for their members during last year’s strikes, but the risks of the tech go beyond the scope of union contracts, said actors guild National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland.

“We need public policy to catch up and to start putting these norms in place so that there is less of a Wild West kind of environment going on with AI,” Crabtree-Ireland said.

SAG-AFTRA has helped draft three federal bills related to deepfakes (misleading images and videos often involving celebrity likenesses), along with two measures in California, including AB 2602, that would strengthen worker control over use of their digital image. The legislation, if approved, would require that workers be represented by their union or legal counsel for agreements involving AI-generated likenesses to be legally binding.

Tech companies urge caution against overregulation. Todd O’Boyle, of the tech industry group Chamber of Progress, said California AI companies may opt to move elsewhere if government oversight becomes overbearing. It’s important for legislators to “not let fears of speculative harms drive policymaking when we’ve got this transformative, technological innovation that stands to create so much prosperity in its earliest days,” he said.

When regulations are put in place, it’s hard to roll them back, warned Aaron Levie, chief executive of the Redwood City-based cloud computing company Box, which is incorporating AI into its products.

“We need to actually have more powerful models that do even more and are more capable,” Levie said, “and then let’s start to assess the risk incrementally from there.”

But Crabtree-Ireland said tech companies are trying to slow-roll regulation by making the issues seem more complicated than they are and by saying they need to be solved in one comprehensive public policy proposal.

“We reject that completely,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “We don’t think everything about AI has to be solved all at once.”