OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

If you thought climate change was bad, allow me to introduce you to imate-clay ange-chay. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

This isn't even "an eye for an eye" this is "death for not doing anything, but we will say that you spit".

I’m confused. Did he not have to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day as a kid? Or memorize any of America’s founding documents? Or integral speeches? We, kids of the US, memorize so much about being indivisible, equal, divided we fall, together we strive for a more perfect union. 1/

🤖 This ad sounds like a threat.

Portlanders — show off your corner of war-ravaged Portland below.

#SixOnSaturday appreciating the first Saturday of autumn

There are credible reports that federal agents may be replaying the 2020 playbook and surging into Portland with the goal of provoking conflict and violence in my hometown. I am in close contact with state and local officials to monitor this activity.

🪶 🎃 It’s Halloween deco season for many — remember that those gauzy fake spider webs trap and kill birds. Don’t use them. OTOH, consider making a bird-feeder pumpkin or sticking decos on windows, which helps birds. More here: www.audubon.org/magazine/how...

“domestic terrorism priorities include … civil disorder.” Any protest might be designated as terrorism now, no? www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

OBAMA: It's fair to say that 80% of the world's problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won't let go. They build pyramids, and they put their names on everything. They get very anxious about it.

For their first project, my Kids and Society students have to create an infographic clarifying a common misconception about "kids these days." I'd prefer that they not use AI to create their projects, so I made my own infographic explaining why : )

I feel like it's impossible to do this to a person unless you don't really see them as a person.

For anyone dealing with Block List issues/with ideas about improving Block Lists: I filed a detailed enhancement request here, referencing other ideas that apply. github.com/bluesky-soci... . Curious to hear about other solutions and related experiences.

Been reading what academics say about using genAI tools in their writing & teaching and when I get to the part where someone says they‘re actively “co-intelligent” with their chatbots I often think: “Yep, I knew, cuz this piece has too many words and there are entire sentences that say nothing.”

✈️ You might’ve thought I left Seattle this week to be here in New York for UN week, but really it was just a plot to watch Kimmel. (Apparently still off air in my home city 🫤).

🤖 People have been creating Blocklists on Bsky to silence marginalized voices and creators under false labels, and the blocks remain even when the blocker is suspended. The onus is on the victims to try to rectify each one. github.com/bluesky-soci... github.com/bluesky-soci...

This probably won't reach the very people who should know, but apparently I've been put on all kinds of (mostly spam) block lists and lists accusing stuff I'm vocally against, leading to me being blocked when uncritically accepted without examination. Great way to erase voices eh.

Oh hey! Nobody told me today was the rapture! TIME TO EAT JUNK FOOD AND TOUCH MUSEUM STUFF!

🤖 I work in a field where neuroatypicalities abound — autism included — and I’ve come to understand this as a feature, not a bug, of the tech industry. It’s quite hard to warp my mind to see autism *writ large* as a problem that needs to be “fixed”. 🧵1/ www.politico.com/news/magazin...

🤖 Great piece about how GenAI generates amazing visuals. Critically, creators whose work powers GenAI want to be able to consent to having their work used. That core issue gets drowned in discussions about a related but distinct issue: copyright. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

1/3 Who really benefits from the AI data center boom, and what are we sacrificing in return? The public narrative is one of inevitable technological progress. But the reality on the ground for many communities is strained energy grids, drained water supplies, and rising utility costs.

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

🇺🇸 Let’s start a new nation, founded on the concept of free speech. We can conceive it based on liberty, and dedicate it to the proposition that all people are created equal. Too radical?

Huh wow turns out the people who wanted to misgender and deadname trans people and use racist slurs never cared about free speech, they just wanted to misgender and deadname trans people and use racist slurs

🤖 As AI-generated content is shared in movies/TV/across the web, there's one simple low-hanging fruit 🍇 to help know what's real: Visible watermarks. With others @hf.co, I've made sure it's trivially easy to add this disclosure to images, video, chatbot text. See how: huggingface.co/blog/waterma...

🤖 Albania has now made an AI system a public official. The idea is to stop "corruption" -- but this trades the issue of human corruption for opaque computer-created security flaws and discrimination. Hm. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

I reviewed If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a new book with an old argument for why AI will kill us all. To put it mildly, I didn't like it www.newscientist.com/article/2495...

🌱 #SixOnSaturday

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

🤖📰 Effective YESTERDAY: China has mandated a digital watermark for all AI-generated content. www.cac.gov.cn/2025-03/14/c... Translating in 🧵.

🌱 #SixOnSaturday

🪶 It's #WoodpeckerWednesday! Here's a Pileated Woodpecker checking out the new BirdBathCam and having a sip of water.

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

🪶 It’s #Steller’sJay #Saturjay ! Set up a bird cam at my bird bath, and got a visit from this Steller’s Jay. I love its messed up mohawk.

Letting Google set the narrative about the environmental costs of "AI" is like letting tobacco companies set the narrative about the effects of second-hand smoke by measuring the health effects of sitting through one neighbor smoking one cigarette.

🤖 "Every use of these systems builds the case for training the next one and building the next data center." Great post from @emilymbender.bsky.social on common reasons why people use Generative AI, and why it's still a problem. buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

🤖 In other news, it seems all those influencers telling you your workplace HAS to get on the AI bandwagon or will be left behind don't wholly know what they're talking about. fortune.com/2025/08/18/m...

🤖 Reading a local newspaper; heads-up that ICE surveillance is being further rolled out around town. If you've seen this thingie -- e.g., at Home Depot, Lowe's -- FYI it not only can be accessed by ICE, but also those thingies are appearing in other places around town, such as assisted housing. 🧵

🗺️ New blog post: Old Maps, New Terrain: Updating Labour Taxonomies for the AI Era For decades, labour taxonomies like O*NET helped us understand how tech changes work. But they were built before most work became digital-first, and long before generative AI could create whole professions in one step.

I'm preparing to publish the next installment of AI Killed My Job. This time, the focus will be on translators. If you or someone you know has had a translation job (including translator, interpreter, game localizer, etc) impacted by AI, and you'd like to share, please do: [email protected]

🌱 Purples for #SixOnSaturday

🤖 But sure, tell me how GenAI is great for children whose minds are still developing...

🤖 Dang, we are seeing increasing evidence of this: The use of generative AI negatively affecting critical thinking. www.bloomberg.com/news/article... Paging @emilymbender.bsky.social, one of the few people who started warning the public about this years ago...

🤖 What many already knew. Helpful proof, reporting, documentation from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social: Meta allowing sensual roleplay with kids, promoting discrimination, giving false medical info. But listen, there's a tech PR trick I need to draw your attention to here. 🧵 www.reuters.com/investigates...

🤖🪶 Realize this is a bit of a stretch, but does anyone have a recommended model for detecting birds from video? I don't need to identify them, I just need to object-detect them. (Yep, I realize I can use a SOTA off-the-shelf object detection model if no one has a fave for bird specifically.)

🤖 “this new EO effectively mandates the introduction of junk science”

California jury: Meta illegally accessed messages from Flo period-tracking app users...“intentionally eavesdropped and/or recorded” without permission. Meta denies it: “The plaintiffs’ claims are simply false.” Rotary phones really weren't all that bad....

NEW: a TTP report reveals how Google—which at one time spent the most on lobbying of any U.S. corporation—employed an obscure legal strategy that reduced the amount of lobbying spending it discloses under federal law by removing executive lobbying from disclosures.