Meanwhile, ChatGPT guided this teen on how to maximize his drug “trips” until he died from it. www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

Meanwhile, ChatGPT guided this teen on how to maximize his drug “trips” until he died from it. www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

#8 Episode 54: “AI” Agents, A Single Point of Failure with @mmitchell.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis... >>

ChatGPT names Hannah Arendt as its favourite philosopher whilst Grok prefers Nietzsche www.thetimes.com/article/e346...

ancient sea cow!

Good read on predictive AI and gen AI

For many, the end of the year is an opportunity to catch up on reading or to purchase books as gifts. In 2025, a number of authors joined the Tech Policy Press podcast, providing fresh insights into how technology interacts with people, politics, and power. Check out the list:

One of my deep psycholinguistic concerns about AI chatbots is the use of self-referential language--chatbots using pronouns like "I"/"me"--which subliminally assert a sentient mind ("It says 'I think', therefore, it is"). @kashhill.bsky.social brilliantly unpacks: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t...

"Generative AI is designed to create things that look real; predictive AI identifies what is real. A misunderstanding that generative systems are retrieving things when they are actually creating them has led to grave consequences"

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Was really challenging to participate in this, but I think I was able to pen something real, important, and personal to my experience in AI. Remember that GenAI is not *all* of AI nor all of what it should be. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1...

And look, here's the thing, AI *can be* amazing. But the hype over generative large language models obscures the really profound, meaningful breakthroughs, as @mmitchell.bsky.social breaks down for us here: www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1...

Yikes. Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that Meta had a “17x” strike policy for accounts engaged in the "trafficking of humans for sex...You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation...”’ Much more in the reporting below.

"Data are no longer things to be accounted for by a theoretical model...but rather inputs to the process of creating models". Many in LLM-ML don't care about the problems they are actually building models of: "the nature of languages...how we work with language...and the specific contexts [of use]."

Pro tip: If the person providing a different interpretation is not speaking for Moneyed Interests and is an expert in their field, they’re an “independent scholar”—not just a “skeptic” (ffs!)

#SixOnSaturday 🌱

Tech for good. 😊

just started having recency bias and i love it. easily the best bias

Highly personalised and personable, Advanced AI Assistants may soon become the primary way that most people access the internet. Our research explores the challenges that could arise if their adoption is not carefully managed in the public interest. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/dilem...

Nice piece, and consistent with our findings that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online www.science.org/doi/full/10....

If you have been framing your work as involving/in relation to "AI", what do you mean by "AI"? How would you describe your work without using that phrase? >>

Thanks to @uwnews.uw.edu for covering my + @aylincaliskan.bsky.social's recent work published at AIES 2025! www.washington.edu/news/2025/11...

There's this form of behavioral engineering/coercion going on to use AI when you're not even trying to. Ex: Enterprise Google Slides replaced "Upload an Image", with "Generate an Image" (right?), requiring extra work +adaptation to sidestep the AI-as-default push. It drives me bonkers.

Love the phrases "Cognitive Cost" and "Executive Function Theft" to pinpoint how exhausting it is to be constantly bombarded with apps telling you to use AI. I've been calling it "Corporate pressure" and "Force feeding". It's quite a lot right now. Seems a bit desperate tbh.

We're surveying researchers about name changes in academic publishing. If you've changed your name and dealt with updating publications, we want to hear your experience. Any reason counts: transition, marriage, cultural reasons, etc. forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP

In this 2025 study, more than half of LLM responses cited fake sources or links. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

🪶 Golden-crowned Kinglets at the water spout.

Vince Gilligan on AI: “AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires.”

Holy shit. Noam Shazeer, one of the original authors on the "Attention is All You Need" paper and Character.AI founder, came out as major transphobe. Like Trumpian levels of "this is child mutilation" of transphobia. (via The Information)

New Yorker author describing gradient descent and oblivious to the existence of local minima: "(The algorithm could be compared to a hiker navigating from a mountaintop to a valley; a simple strategy for eventually finding one’s way is to insure that every step moves downhill.)"

"'Luddite' isn’t an insult—it’s a warning and a word of caution. One we must return to, repeatedly, if we’re to resist the constant drumbeat of consumerism dressed up as science and progress." Erik J. Larson reviews "The AI Con": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

This.

When deception’s more profitable than honesty, users lose. Internal documents suggest that Meta earns $3.5B(!) every 6 mo. from scam ads, revealing a deeper systemic problem: the economic incentive to tolerate “higher legal risk” content still outweighs any penalty. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

I thought this headline was from some small newspaper and went to tag @nytpitchbot.bsky.social to share smthn even more ridiculous than the usual satirical NY Times pitches, but…Nope, this is actually from @nytimes.com

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week. @wired.com #ICE www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

In the US, today is the day: Vote!

Teen Vogue took young people seriously. It's impossible to overstate how important, how rare, and how profoundly needed that is.

Australian scientist who alerted world that COVID is airborne wins top science prize When the WHO falsely claimed in March 2020 that COVID wasn’t airborne, Professor Lidia Morawska took action—organising 239 scientists worldwide to warn about SARS-CoV-2 airborne spread and urge global recognition.

In the past, I've really appreciated @teenvogue.com's clear-eyed insights into the world. It now seems they're making moves to get rid of that kind of work. And leaning into systemic discrimination to boot. From below: There are no longer any Black women or trans employees there.

“Grocery stores throw out far more food than is shoplifted. Why don't shoplifters just take the food from the dumpster then. Because they have cameras on the dumpsters and security will be sent out when they see them on the monitors.” ~ mastodon.social/@AlSweigart/... Grapes of Wrath 1939:

"The AI Con reminds us that the fight over AI is not only about technology. It’s also about language, labor, and the stories we choose to tell about the future, which we can humanize rather than surrender to the myriad ways mass automation dehumanizes." lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Really appreciate this review of our book (w/ @alexhanna.bsky.social) "By insisting on the term “automation,” Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding." "…a demystifying, often hilarious lexicon that cuts through the fog of hype."

Started a thread in the other place and bringing it over here - I really think we should be more vocal about the opportunities that lay at the intersection of these two options! So I'm starting a live thread of new roles as I become aware of them - feel free to add / extend / share :

🤖 Did you know your voice might be cloned without your consent from just *one sentence* of audio? That's not great. So with @frimelle.bsky.social, we brainstormed a new idea for developers who want to curb malicious use: ✨The Voice Consent Gate.✨ Details, code, here: huggingface.co/blog/voice-c...

The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/

we've got @evangreer.bsky.social @janus.bsky.social @fightforthefuture.org on @teenvogue.com: "Online censorship is one of many levers of state power right wingers are pulling to try and snuff out queer and trans existence... But instead of fighting back, some Dems are helping them at the controls"

In a sold-out talk at the Graduate Center, @karenhao.bsky.social, the author of "Empire of AI," questioned the nirvana notions of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others in Silicon Valley who are racing to create an artificial general intelligence model

Screensnapshot of our times. Corporate pressure to use AI creates bad outcomes with real-life consequences; seeking to unpack the problem yields more pressure to indulge in the very thing causing the problem.

YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A PLANT

The outer circle (tech) in which the Venn diagram sits really matters here - including what « tech » is and and whether/how it’s defined (and narrowed/assumed to inevitably lead to AGI). I’m so grateful for your leadership on these issues, @mmitchell.bsky.social , for this very reason!