The purported inevitability is one of the most frustrating things for me about AI, and I think this shows that I’m very much not alone in that feeling. (Also, mandatory Ellul reference).

Very glad for 404 Media’s podcast, because I somehow missed when they published this horrifying story.

This post is hard for me. I am deeply resentful of commercial AI products, and I don’t like the idea of letting companies off the hook (at least in moral terms—I get a lot more hesitant when we start talking about specific legal responses). That said, I know the post is written in good faith, and I do think it makes some productive points. I dunno.

Embarrassed to say that this gender dynamic of AI had never really occurred to me before. Interesting read.

Shouldn’t be reading this before bed because it isn’t calming me down.

I have tried not to think too much about AI bubbles, and Doctorow captures exactly why that is in this essay.

I wish I knew enough about photography to really appreciate the details here, but I’m bookmarking it anyway because it feels like a contemporary, unintentional echo of observations Ellul makes in The Humiliation of the Word.

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.

This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.

Audrey Watters once compellingly argued that metal detectors are edtech. I think we now have a responsibility to treat AI nudifier apps as edtech, too.

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.

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.

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.

Required reading, imo.

Oh look, they are capable of shame.

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.

An important read on OpenAI’s seeming selling out.

It takes a lot to get me on Anthropic’s side in any disagreement, but Pete Hegseth is a lot, so I guess this tracks.

Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.

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

Love that I get to worry about deepfake nudes, scramble to change the way I assess, and now pay more for tech—if it’s even available.

Important, helpful read.

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

Horrifying stories like this should be in our minds every time we think about AI.

This morning, while getting ready for the day, I spent some time catching up on podcasts, including Nilay Patel’s interview of Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekhar on a recent episode of Decoder (a podcast I’ve spent a lot more time listening to since it went ad free for subscribers). I ditched the Stack Exchange network a year and a half ago over digital labor concerns—I was literally being prevented from deleting my own content from the site, which is bonkers—and I’m honestly not sure why I bookmarked the interview for listening a few days ago. I think it was more than a hate listen, though: For all of my own feelings about generative AI, I make an effort to be open minded, and I was interested in the headline for the interview: “Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway.”