Big Ellulian “image vs. word” vibes here.

There are lots of stories circulating on social media that I try wait to read a full article on before I get angry about them. Here’s the article, and it’s as bad (worse?) as every post I’ve seen about it on Bluesky.

The Columbia Heights Public School district says federal agents have detained four of its students in four separate incidents over the last two weeks. One child is a 5-year old boy who attends a district elementary school and was used as “bait” to draw family members out of their home.

Holy crap, these numbers. This passage really stood out:

“This is industrial-scale abuse of women and girls,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which conducts research on online hate and disinformation. “There have been nudifying tools, but they have never had the distribution, ease of use or the integration into a large platform that Elon Musk did with Grok.”

I don’t use this line a lot, but if Biden ever slipped up like this…

I guess I should be reading this for the jokes, but I hadn’t realized Academia.edu had done this, and I’m so angry at the inspiration for the jokes that I haven’t made it any further.

A few thoughts:

First, it is almost comically mean to use the results of a project collecting AI tells to get LLMs to not sound like that. Like, of all the digital labor exploitations of AI, this might be the pettiest.

Second, AI detection is hard, and for all my concerns with AI, I think this is another good example of why policing its use can do more harm than good. I don’t blame the Wikipedia community for doing this project, but I would never recommend this approach in a classroom.

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

The whole post is good, but the first two paragraphs hit on something particularly important.

He is the shallowest man on earth.

Good read this morning.

Good overview of an enraging story.

Non, mais franchement : Quelle honte, ce pays dont je suis citoyen.

Some very important reminders in here.

Depressing read, but makes me glad I’m renewing my WIRED subscription.

The Onion is what’s going to get us through this.

Chef’s kiss.

It’s a sign of how crazy everything is right now that this is just one of sevral political developments contributing to my current anxiety.

This is such a perfectly dumb oversight.

What an embarassment.

Grok continues to disgust.

This is a very cathartic read.

Glad to see that pure xenophobia is alive and well here in the Commonwealth

Glad a family member gifted me another year of The Onion in print, because it sure sounds like I’m going to need it to get through 2026.

Depressing read with interesting details about why Grok is bad at this.

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