Required reading, imo.

Good observations on how messed up these prediction markets are.

The headline isn’t what I would have chosen, but there’s a lot worth reflecting on in here.

Who could possibly have predicted this?

So many horrifying details crammed into a single article. Grateful to be a 404 Media subscriber and angry at ed tech AI grift.

Ring sucks and is creepy. Here’s the killer paragraph from this story;

Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.

Unsurprising, I guess, but still newsworthy.

Surveillance sucks.

Another story that speaks to the power of Ellul’s “image vs. word” distinction. It must be trustworthy because it comes from a machine…

This shooting is making me panicky, and I’m honestly trying to not read any more about it, but this is important.

Oof, this line:

what is clear to me from following this Telegram community for a couple of years now is that nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators

Excellent writing on what’s going on over at Twitter.

Flock continues to suck.

Sometimes, AI news gets so depressing that it loops back around to hilarious.

Easy to dunk on Grokipedia, but this article gets at some ideas that I think are particularly important. If I had more time for blogging this semester, I’d write something up on Ellul’s image vs. word dichotomy and how it aligns with Koebler’s thoughts here.

Booooooo. That Wikipedia is being mined by AI scrapers and negatively affected by AI search is such a perfect encapsulation of my concerns about generative AI.

Look, maybe this is a genuine misstep on OpenAI’s part, but it still feels to me like the company started with the guardrails off so that it could use this kind of user backlash to push the Overton Window in conversations with rightsholders.

Also, remember that we small potatoes rightsholders will never be able to have our voices heard like Disney or Nintendo.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

Platformizing AI video generation in the way OpenAI is doing right now just makes me grumpier than I already am.

This never occurred to me, but distupting interlibrary loan is a mortal sin.

I continue to believe that cracking down on intellectual property is not the right way to resist AI, but Koebler does a great job of describing how maddening it is that big companies are going to get away with worse infringement than individual people taking advantage of fair use.

Don’t know if this is better or worse than what I worried about.

More money for libraries, less for LLMs.

Did not realize that dashcam surveillance was a thing. I hate that it is, and I hate that Flock is going here.

What a wild, depressing story. I feel like I ought to use this to teach the concept of platforms to my students—it neatly sums up the intervention in normal human activity by someone who thinks they have a buck to make.