Wegmans in New York City has begun collecting biometric data on shoppers' eyes, voices and faces from anyone who enters its supermarkets

Uh oh

“Although the number of people afflicted with AI psychosis is unknown, it is believed to be in the tens of thousands.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-b...

"All the wrongful-death lawsuits against OpenAI quote disturbing responses from ChatGPT that appear to show it validating a person’s desire to self-harm... " www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... by @nitasha.bsky.social

“Other experts suggest that while chatbots may provide short-term comfort, sustained use can worsen isolation and foster unhealthy reliance on the technology.”

This is 404 Media's @jasonkoebler.bsky.social waving at himself through a Flock camera; one of 60 we learned was left exposed to the open internet. Not only could anyone with a link livestream it, but some admin portals were open with no login credentials required. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

🚨NEW: AI Data Center Gold Rush Driven by Thousands of Newcomers🚨 We analyzed thousands of data center operators. We found that newcomers are driving the AI gold rush - and it could have global economic consequences. 🎁: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

truly amazing how many different professions there are where everyone’s newest persistent headache is “AI zealots high on their own supply”

"Having an AI do it and fail half the time isn't exactly a winning alternative." www.extremetech.com/computing/mi...

Around half of San Francisco is without power right now and something like 1/3rd of intersections I drove through had waymos stopped in the middle of them making a dangerous situation even worse. Do not let Waymo into your city.

Somebody scraped & shared every song on Spotify, with metadata — a boon for research into music and algorithms, but also, inevitably, what the training data is going to be for every AI music company in 2026. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Lights out for autonomous vehicles

Was it time bandits?

We do not have to offer and I believe indeed should not offer any benefit of the doubt: Anything sold as "AI" should be presumed ineffective, exploitative, environmentally ruinous, bigotry-amplifying and otherwise until proven otherwise. /fin

Color me shocked.

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

When the AI boom began, copywriters were singled out as one of the jobs most vulnerable to AI. Now, three years later, I wanted to hear from workers on the frontlines of the industry, to hear what had actually taken place on the ground. For many, it was even worse than they'd feared.

"The gaffe occurred because an artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance system used by Lawton Chiles Middle School mistakenly flagged the clarinet as a weapon, according to ZeroEyes, the security company that runs the system and contracts with Lawton Chiles’s school district."

A break from Christmas content to enjoy this capybara eating a banana. From François Froger's 'A relation of a voyage ...' (London, 1698).

84 per cent of the AI-generated podcasts from WaPo were not up to journalistic standards, according to its own internal report. The development cycle isn’t wrong, but undermining your brand’s reliability to chase a dream of hallucination-free GAI when nobody knows how to build it is a very bad bet.

The only thing worse than bad peer reviews: generative AI peer reviews.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the lifespan of digital communities. People tend to think that social platforms are forever, just like people imagine web pages are forever. They are not! Just as most IRL social groups change or peter out over time, so do online social communities & group chats

What if this take is entirely wrong?

404 Media zine has apparently outsold American Canto. Help continue that trend here: 404media.myshopify.com/products/pre... www.404media.co/behind-the-b...

In the PSA, “Creepy-looking humans are cast as the voices and faces of real AI chatbots that have allegedly shared dangerous information with young users who engaged with them, like how to harm themselves and hide an eating disorder from their parents.”

🟡 NEW: The Washington Post’s top standards editor decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists. www.semafor.com/article/12/1...

When this "AI" bubble pops, the men pretending they weren't pushing the hype, like "critics" whose position is "AGI is real but LLMs aren't the way," who were in eugenicist and "AI existential risk"🙄 circles, will get specials discussing what they saw coming, when its the women who told you so.

Chief Justice John Roberts has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career—and he may soon achieve his goal, @davedaley3 argues. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Incredible book, if you haven’t seen it. I think about the “technologically precocious boy” all the time.

Artificial-intelligence chatbots can influence voters in major elections — and have a bigger effect on people’s political views than conventional campaigning and advertising go.nature.com/3XCIsgD

I know a twentysomething whose listening age was 82.

What if the Spotify Wrapped listening age is just a random number between 16 and 80?

Weird situation. AI adoption in the work world is stagnating, while higher-ed institutions are rushing to embrace it so that students will be prepared for…the work world?

New from 404 Media: ChatGPT told a violent stalker to continue running his misogynistic and threat-filled podcast despite the “haters,” and to visit more gyms to find women. The man stalked women in multiple states, including touching and following from work www.404media.co/chatgpt-spot...

Could be a solid step toward getting people pissed off enough to demand that surveillance pricing and surge pricing stop for good.

"cultural heritage workers are being pressured to embrace so-called “AI” in their work+ vendors are forcing AI features into library software. Slater's “Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library” demonstrates how gen AI is contrary to the library profession’s standards, goals,+ ethics."

NEW TWIST: data centers in farm country may accelerate nitrate contamination from agricultural sources with big implications for public health. Studies are needed to confirm or refute this finding. Lack of transparency, monitoring, regulations makes it tough. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

There is a movement to "prove that the datacenter water issues is fake". If you venture into Muskrat's hell site, you can see the community note these people put on this great piece of investigative journalism, accusing them of unfairly implicating datacenters. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

The enshitification of scientific publishing marches on. First arXiv had to clamp down on submissions thanks to a flood of AI-written papers. Now ICLR authors say their peer reviews were churned out by AI. Reviews full of hallucinated content that didn’t exist and offering useless, vague feedback.

“When researchers randomly displayed these flood risk estimates to 18M people browsing Redfin, those who saw the feature were more likely to search for homes w/ low flood risk, according to a working paper published in the Nat’l Bureau of Economic Research last Nov*.”🧪 * www.nber.org/papers/w33119

I’m curious what the new weather models will be adapted inappropriately for too.

Enshittification

NY’s new law requires companies to disclose when algorithms set prices. Though it doesn’t stop surveillance pricing, its real power may be giving researchers and watchdogs new ways to investigate algorithmic harms, argues Stephanie T. Nguyen, Fmr. Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.

Artist Tega Brain is fighting the internet’s enshittification by turning back the clock to before ChatGPT existed.

BRB inviting all my friends over for drinks and insurance forms.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Friends, there are several CS positions open at NYU; calling in my socio-technical researchers including HCI researchers cs.nyu.edu/dynamic/jobs...

This is an insane story because it's basically saying that the people we pay to predict the likelyhood of future events, for whom it is their main job, have looked at the present and decided that AI is only going to get worse, more often incorrect and create worse consequences for those errors.

Another incredibly important @kashhill piece on chatbots and delusions: What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/t...

Some stand-out reporting by my colleague @kashhill.bsky.social on OpenAI's tightroping this year between engaging more ChatGPT users and making them lose touch with reality www.nytimes.com/video/techno...