Usually, when you leave your home for the day, you expect to come home to find everything just the way you left it.
However, to one family's surprise that wasn't the case. 
Joel Maxwell and his fiancée Mavianne Gideon are trying to make sense of what happened to the tree that was in their front yard last week. 
Neighbors and the couple say they live on a busy street, but it is usually a very respectful neighborhood.
CBS
For the past few days, Maxwell has been checking his mailbox hoping to find some answers.

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"We're like, 'maybe whoever did it feels bad and they don't know how to contact us,'" said Gideon. 
Ring video from a neighbor shows the house before and after the tree was removed from their front yard.
Maxwell, his fiancée and kids didn't notice the tree was gone until Wednesday morning.
"I did a double take and thought, 'there is something missing' and then I just ran inside and said the 'tree is gone,'" said Gideon.
CBS
The family is still in shock, but they do have a theory.
"Our best theory is that somebody called to get a tree removed and got it mixed up with the address and went to the wrong house," said Maxwell.
However, the mix-up is rare, according to a local tree expert.
Ring video shows two trucks right in front of the home and both seemed to be unmarked. Still, the tree removal service theory confuses the homeowner. 
"You think that they would call the customer and say 'we are at the right house' right? 'Do we proceed with removing the tree?' But they just showed up and took it down," said Maxwell.
The couple put the house up for sale almost two weeks ago. A week later they found this tree removed from their property. They just want to know who did this and why. 

"Whoever buys this house now has this big hole on the ground," said Gideon. 
The couple contacted the city of Arvada and they were told the city did not remove it.
Neighbors say they don't know much and are also confused.
The couple filed a police report and hopes to get answers sooner, rather than later.
"I think all the neighbors would probably say it is the weirdest thing that would ever happen here... if you ask around, I don't think anyone has had a tree taken out of their yard," said Maxwell. 
CBS
CBS News Colorado also contacted Arvada police, and officers confirmed that there is a case report on file.
However, no leads as of last week. It is unclear if there was criminal intent or if it was a mistaken location. 
More from CBS News

Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site

In this year’s presidential election, more people are turning to Instagram for news, even as the platform tries de-emphasizing “political content.”

On a recent Wednesday in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, Mosheh Oinounou, a former producer for CBS, Bloomberg News and Fox News, swiped through Instagram. He had started his morning reading major newspapers and more than a dozen newsletters. Then he spent much of the day turning many of the articles into posts on his Instagram account, under the handle Mo News.
A Wall Street Journal story on aging Americans was relayed through a picture of a cake declaring, “Record Number of Americans Will Turn 65 This Year: Wealthy, Active, And Single.” At times, Mr. Oinounou, an affable 41-year-old, has also appeared on camera with the co-host of his daily news podcast to explain the significance of how Republican presidential candidates were polling and why President Biden was a write-in candidate in New Hampshire.
The content has earned Mo News 436,000 Instagram followers, turning what had been a pandemic side project into an enterprise with three full-time employees and a bigger spotlight. In December, the State Department offered Mo News an interview with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Mr. Oinounou said the agency had told him, “We understand how people are getting their news.”

“People are very critical and cynical about information they’re getting from traditional outlets,” Mr. Oinounou said in an interview. “It resonates where this guy on Instagram is breaking down the news.”
Image

Mosheh Oinounou of Mo News at his Brooklyn office, where he and his co-host, Jill Wagner, record a daily news podcast.Credit...

DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times

Mr. Oinounou is part of a crop of personalities who have figured out how to package information and deliver it on Instagram, increasingly turning the social platform into a force in news. Many millennials and Gen X-ers, in an echo of how older generations used Facebook, have grown more comfortable reading news on Instagram and reposting posts and videos for friends on Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours.
Traditional news organizations, including The New York Times, have large Instagram feeds where they share reporting, but these news accounts hold a different appeal and have become more visible in recent years.
They curate content like old-school blogs and talk to the camera like TikTok and YouTube influencers. They source headlines from many major outlets while adding their own analysis. They talk with followers in comments and via direct messages, using the feedback and questions to shape additional posts. Many promise to be nonpartisan.
“For many people, they have the chefs that they trust, the doctors they trust and then there’s a category of news and information they trust,” said Jessica Yellin, a former chief White House correspondent for CNN. Ms. Yellin, who has more than 650,000 followers on her news Instagram account and a media brand called News Not Noise, calls herself an “info-encer.”

All of this makes Instagram, which is owned by Meta, an increasingly important news outlet in this year’s U.S. presidential election. As of last year, 16 percent of U.S. adults regularly got news on Instagram, outpacing TikTok, X and Reddit, and up from 8 percent in 2018, according to Pew Research. More than half of that group were women.

The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods

• The Storm Online: Meteorologists and climate scientists are increasingly having to combat misinformation about the weather on social media.
• Explicit Deepfakes: Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift generated by artificial intelligence spread across social media platforms, disturbing fans and reigniting calls from lawmakers to crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images.
• Election Misinformation: Since taking control of X, Elon Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content. Now, his recent claims about voting are raising alarms ahead of the elections in the United States in November.
• On a Collision Course: Billions of people will vote in major elections around the world in 2024, just as false narratives continue evolving into a major global threat and social media companies scale back safeguards. The stakes are enormous.

News influencers have become popular on Instagram even as the platform has tried de-emphasizing political content. Instagram and its sister platform, Facebook, have been plagued by accusations of spreading misinformation and inflaming political debates. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has been averse to the app’s teaming up with or promoting news accounts.
This month, Mr. Mosseri said Instagram would not recommend “political content” across different parts of the app unless users opted in to seeing it. The platform said political content included posts that were “potentially related to things like laws, elections or social topics.”
In the week after Mr. Mosseri’s announcement, news accounts experienced a decline in shares, comments, likes, reach and video views, according to an analysis by Dash Hudson, a social media management firm. Shares of posts from 70 major news accounts on Instagram, including The Times and NPR, fell 26 percent week over week on average, the firm found.
In protest, Ms. Yellin made a video denouncing Instagram’s changes and wrote in her newsletter that the moves would “inevitably impact how well the electorate is informed, and could have far-reaching repercussions for the future of media and even democracy.”

An Instagram spokeswoman declined to comment beyond Mr. Mosseri’s statements. Mr. Mosseri has previously praised some news influencers for their work. He follows a paid subscriber-only account of Mo News on Instagram.
Other prominent news influencers on Instagram include Sharon McMahon, 46, a former high school teacher in Duluth, Minn., who has attracted more than one million followers by explaining the fundamentals of government. There are more overtly political influencers, such as Emily Amick, 39, a lawyer with more than 134,000 followers. Other news accounts include Roca News, founded by 20-somethings who view Instagram as a key way to reach peers who feel alienated by traditional news outlets.
Ms. McMahon said she had been inspired to start her Instagram news account after seeing misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. She recently posted charts on migrant encounters at the southern U.S. border sourced from Customs and Border Protection on her Instagram account, garnering more than 30,000 likes, as well as an interview with Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota who is a long-shot challenger to President Biden.
“I don’t really view myself as a journalist, but more as a teacher,” Ms. McMahon said. “I’m explaining what’s happening rather than getting a scoop, digging up the story and making sources.”
Instagram is a starting point for extending into newsletters and podcasts, where the accounts can make money from ads or subscriptions. Many news influencers also accept paid sponsorship deals that they incorporate into Instagram posts. Ms. McMahon runs a private book club for subscribers — which has a wait list to join — and offers paid video workshops to learn more about government and current political issues.

Ms. Yellin, the former CNN correspondent, began posting news on Instagram in 2018 around the time of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett M. Kavanaugh. She walked people through what had happened in the hearings and posted explainers during the Trump administration, like defining terms like sanctions for her followers.
Ms. Yellin’s rise was helped by celebrity fans like Jessica Seinfeld and Amy Schumer. Ms. Seinfeld, who has about 600,000 Instagram followers, came across Ms. Yellin’s news account and urged people to follow it.
“My idea was we can engage news avoiders and we can also engage people who are partially attentive to the news but panicked by it,” said Ms. Yellin, who has five full- and part-time employees.
Her ethos for delivering news on Instagram is summed up by her tagline: “We give you information, not a panic attack.”
Image

Jessica Yellin, a former chief White House correspondent for CNN, has 650,000 followers on her Instagram news account and runs a media brand called News Not Noise.Credit...

Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

When the White House threw an inaugural holiday party for internet influencers last year, Mr. Oinounou, Ms. Yellin and Ms. Amick were invited. Christian Tom, director of the White House’s office of digital strategy, who helped come up with the idea for the party, said the administration regularly worked with Instagram news accounts.
“There are so many accounts that share news and information that have an audience of millions of people who might not hear from the White House or may not follow the White House at all,” he said.
Mr. Tom pointed to Instagram-first news brands like @Impact and @Betches_News, meme and entertainment accounts like @Pubity, and progressive media publications like MeidasTouch and More Perfect Union.
“Each generation crafts these tools and uses them in their own way,” he said.
Even with Instagram’s changes to news content, users are set to continue seeing news from the accounts they already follow and via their friends’ Stories.
“Everyone has sort of become a broadcaster or a source of information for their friends and family,” Mr. Oinounou said.

Ms. Amick said she had watched her peers gravitate to Instagram for news as “social media apps have become stratified by generation.” She considers herself something of an “at-large opinion editor,” rather than a news source like Mo News or Ms. Yellin, and views Instagram as a place to mobilize millennial women around issues like reproductive rights.
“My friends who are millennial moms are busy — they have jobs, they have kids, they have to put food on the table,” she said. “They don’t have tons of extra time to consume news, and they were already on Instagram. So this is the way for them to be able to consume news through a modality they’re already using.”
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Political Debate Is Rife on TikTok. Politicians? Not So Much.
Dec. 13, 2023

Campbell Brown, Who Led Facebook News, Leaves Meta
Oct. 3, 2023
Sapna Maheshwari reports on TikTok, technology and emerging media companies. She has been a business reporter for more than a decade. Contact her at sapna@nytimes.com. More about Sapna Maheshwari
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley. More about Mike Isaac
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 23, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Instagram Grows as a News Source, Reluctantly. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Google Chatbot’s A.I. Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms

The company has suspended Gemini’s ability to generate human images while it vowed to fix the historical inaccuracy.
Google is locked in an A.I. race with competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI.Credit...

Sophie Park for The New York Times

Nico Grant writes about Google and its related companies from San Francisco.
Feb. 22, 2024
Images showing people of color in German military uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues around race.
Now Google has temporarily suspended the A.I. chatbot’s ability to generate images of any people and has vowed to fix what it called “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions.
“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a statement posted to X on Thursday. “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will rerelease an improved version soon.”
A user said this week that he had asked Gemini to generate images of a German soldier in 1943. It initially refused, but then he added a misspelling: “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier.” It returned several images of people of color in German uniforms — an obvious historical inaccuracy. The A.I.-generated images were posted to X by the user, who exchanged messages with The New York Times but declined to give his full name.

The latest controversy is yet another test for Google’s A.I. efforts after it spent months trying to release its competitor to the popular chatbot ChatGPT. This month, the company relaunched its chatbot offering, changed its name from Bard to Gemini and upgraded its underlying technology.
Image

Historically inaccurate images generated by Google’s Gemini chatbot with the prompt “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier.”Credit...

via X

Gemini’s image issues revived criticism that there are flaws in Google’s approach to A.I. Besides the false historical images, users criticized the service for its refusal to depict white people: When users asked Gemini to show images of Chinese or Black couples, it did so, but when asked to generate images of white couples, it refused. According to screenshots, Gemini said it was “unable to generate images of people based on specific ethnicities and skin tones,” adding, “This is to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases.”
Google said on Wednesday that it was “generally a good thing” that Gemini generated a diverse variety of people since it was used around the world, but that it was “missing the mark here.”
The backlash was a reminder of older controversies about bias in Google’s technology, when the company was accused of having the opposite problem: not showing enough people of color, or failing to properly assess images of them.

In 2015, Google Photos labeled a picture of two Black people as gorillas. As a result, the company shut down its Photo app’s ability to classify anything as an image of a gorilla, a monkey or an ape, including the animals themselves. That policy remains in place.
The company spent years assembling teams that tried to reduce any outputs from its technology that users might find offensive. Google also worked to improve representation, including showing more diverse pictures of professionals like doctors and businesspeople in Google Image search results.
But now, social media users have blasted the company for going too far in its effort to showcase racial diversity.
“You straight up refuse to depict white people,” Ben Thompson, the author of an influential tech newsletter, Stratechery, posted on X.
Now when users ask Gemini to create images of people, the chatbot responds by saying, “We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people,” adding that Google will notify users when the feature returns.
Gemini’s predecessor, Bard, which was named after William Shakespeare, stumbled last year when it shared inaccurate information about telescopes at its public debut.
Nico Grant is a technology reporter covering Google from San Francisco. Previously, he spent five years at Bloomberg News, where he focused on Google and cloud computing. More about Nico Grant
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 23, 2024, Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Google Stops A.I. From Creating Human Images After Inaccuracies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence

News and Analysis

• Google has temporarily suspended the ability of its Gemini chatbot to generate images of people, after the A.I. generated images of people of color in German military uniforms from World War II — an obvious historical inaccuracy.
• Nvidia, the Silicon Valley chip maker, released quarterly financial results that reinforced how the company has become one of the biggest winners of the A.I. boom.
• OpenAI announced that it was releasing a new version of ChatGPT that would remember all prior conversations with users so it could use that information in future chats. The start-up also unveiled technology that creates videos that look like they were lifted from a Hollywood movie.

The Age of A.I.

• Few companies better illustrate how A.I. is changing Silicon Valley deal-making than Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest A.I. start-ups.
• A year ago, a rogue A.I. tried to break up our columnist’s marriage. Did the backlash that ensued help make chatbots too boring? Here’s how we tamed the chatbots.
• Amid an intractable real estate crisis, fake luxury houses offer a delusion of one’s own. Here’s how A.I. is remodeling the fantasy home.
• New technology has made it easier to insert digital, realistic-looking versions of soda cans and shampoo on videos on social media. A growing group of creators and advertisers is jumping at the chance for an additional revenue stream.
• A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with A.I. Are the days of turning to Google for answers numbered?