So gross. I don’t think we can talk about generative AI without talking about this.

Shameful spending priorities:

Roughly 5.5% of that $200 billion could fund universal meals to all U.S. public school students for the year. The whole package could feed millions of children for decades. As Sen. Adam Schiff (CA) has pointed out, “A hospital costs about $100 million… If we’re spending a billion a day in Iran, we’re effectively dropping 10 hospitals a day on Iran.”

I wrote recently about how my concerns about (generative AI) are probably more about the broader Ellulian system of technique than the specifics of the technology. Here’s a passage from this article that makes a similar point better:

For some tasks, AI really is amazing; the tech behind things like machine-learning algorithms and large language models is ingenious, but the results always seem to be hawked the hardest by people and companies I don’t particularly like or trust. (Heck, Anthropic used one of my books to train its database, a sin for which it is now paying authors in court.) Give me the same sorts of tools but under my local control, governed by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit and trained on ethically sourced data, and I’d use them a lot more.

I follow Ben for other writing, but I very much appreciate this post.

Masnick’s fierce critique is all the more notable for how public he is that AI is good for some things, pushing back against grumpier folks (e.g., me).

Check this paragraph out, though:

What we actually have here is a marketing operation that used AI to automate the production of deceptive advertising at a scale and speed that would have been harder to achieve otherwise. Snake oil salesmen have existed forever. What AI gave Matthew Gallagher (and, I guess, his affiliates) was the ability to crank out fake doctors, fabricated testimonials, and deepfaked before-and-after photos faster than any human team could — and to do it cheap enough that a guy with $20,000 and no morals could build it from his house. That’s the actual AI story the Times should have written.

I think this will always be my favorite panel from all of Dumbing of Age.

Lots to think about here. In the context of Trump’s proposed budget, this stood out in particular:

Our military spending is not a partisan issue. Obama raised Bush’s military budget. Trump raised Obama’s budget. Biden raised Trump’s budget. What would King say to that? Probably exactly what he said in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

Doctorow has been arguing for a post-American internet/tech industry for a while, but this passage really landed for me:

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn’t need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won’t give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world’s majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world’s supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

Ugh, this sucks.

So much about this that I don’t like. The article makes a good case that there may be good reasons to ease up on nuclear power regulations, but the language of AI and VCs suggests to me that those good reasons aren’t the top priority.

So Doctorow already said this in the essay I linked to this morning, but it’s very striking how much this leak highlights Anthropic’s willingness to use our creative labor while simultaneously cracking down on any effort for others to do the same to them.

Didn’t expect from the headline that this would turn into an essay on copyright, but I’m glad it did:

Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding labor rights will gain much, for every worker, including our audiences. It’s an idea that our bosses – and AI hucksters – hate with every fiber of their beings.

The depressing thing is that this isn’t that far off from how OpenAI and Anthropic think.

Some good Lenten reflection in here.

Interesting article here. I don’t read WIRED (or The Verge, or…) for the product reviews, but it’s not hard to see how generative AI can create issues for them in that way.

Gotta admit that I was tempted to put “Brendan Carr is a dummy” on my protest sign today so I could find the other Vergecast listeners in town.

This is the first thing I’ve bothered reading about the router ban, and it is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to read.

Histoire fascinante—mais inquiétante.

Uh, this sucks.

Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.

That Marc Andreessen clip about having zero introspection sounds like it’s straight out of an Ellulian critique: There is no good or bad, there is only technique.

The Martian is a fun reread—except when its casual references to a functioning federal government and US media ecosystem briefly take me out of the narrative.

Reprehensible comments deserve swift condemnation, and Johnson is being even more disappointing than usual.

Terrible but hilarious.

The last line really lands.