I concede that appeals to the environmental costs of AI sometimes feel knee-jerk and lacking nuance. However, you can always count on Musk to provide a clear example of the harms of AI, and this is a particularly compelling one.

20,000 accounts is a hell of a “bug.”

Don’t love the idea of AI as coparent, but gendered divisions of labor also suck.

I don’t mind being a broken record when pointing out Ellulian vibes. Check this paragraph out:

These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

Digital labor is, imo, the fundamental problem with AI, and I think this story shows why: It’s not just the AI use here that’s exploitative, it’s kind of everything.

Uh, no.

Don’t love this.

This piece hits hard.

Another good take on Leo and Tolkien.

What wild times we live in that it sounds plausible that the pope might me throwing shade at a billionnaire with LotR references.

Check this guy out:

He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

I think I like this pope.

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.