Tim Cook wasn’t blameless before this, but now?

Wish I were better read on information ecosystems, because this seems important.

Facial recognition is always a scary technology, but it’s becoming even more so under the current administration.

Unsurprising, I guess, but still newsworthy.

CEOs’ silence is indication of a moral vacuum.

Heartbreaking read but better for it.

So, Apple will kick Patreon off the app store for not forking over 30% of its revenue, but it won’t do anything about Grok? Sounds about right.

The Onion delivers again.

Surveillance sucks.

Strategic ambiguity is as much an indicator of far right influences as any of these references. Gift link.

Good rage in this post.

Look, I’m open to the argument that there are legitimate, good uses of generative AI, but I think anyone making that argument needs to address stuff like this.

Beautiful interview with some enraging stories along the way.

FCNL is such a good prophetic voice.

Not particularly interested in watching the video footage myself (don’t need those nightmares), so I’m glad for journalists providing descriptions of the footage and how it stands in tension with DHS accounts. Abolish ICE. Gift link.

What a story:

What stayed with Amundson most, she said, was not the adrenaline of the moment but the realization that came while she was holding the agent’s head in her hands and keeping his airway open.

“I was hit so hard with the fact that this man would not do this for me,” she said.

Wish I’d had this to cite in some recent publications. What a great(?) example of saying the quiet part out loud:

One internal November 2020 presentation slide said acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.” Another undated slide deck suggested imagining a world where “Parents ask their children ‘Why aren’t you watching more YouTube?’” and “School Administrators shift budgets from Textbooks to YouTube subscriptions.”

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.