A month after my last skeet, the subreddit "My Boyfriend is AI" now has 88,000 members and is the subject of an MIT study that found that "AI companionship emerges unintentionally through functional use rather than deliberate seeking." arxiv.org/html/2509.11...

Once more for the people in the back

“AI safety requires more than just preventing obviously harmful outputs. Systems must be capable of understanding context, maintaining consistency across languages… and navigating the subtle boundary between helpful and harmful assistance,” write Jen Weedon, Theodora Skeadas, and Sarah Amos.

WORRYING CAN HELP YOU PREPARE

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,” as the from SF author Joanna Maciejewska memorably put it, “not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” These stories show what happens when it’s the other way around."

OpenAI has a new paper on how people use ChatGPT. I can't help but look at the categories and wonder which ones the various delusional spirals I've reported on slot into.

"Consider the implications if ChatGPT started saying “I don’t know” to even 30% of queries ... Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly."

so the trouble with humanoid robots as the next great tech hype is just that they're shit, they don't work and they have no applications spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-rob...

The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more. 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-darwin-aw...

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Talked to 23 people who suddenly have to pay huge tariffs or otherwise cannot get chainmail from Pakistan, yarn from France, retro computers from Japan, metal music from the Netherlands, DVDs from Germany, cosplay supplies, sunscreen, etc. www.404media.co/its-just-a-m...

Are you a journalist with a great idea for a high-impact story that "Follows the Money?" The McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism is offering grants of ≤ $15,000 & editorial support needed to produce deeply reported enterprise & investigative stories. Apply by Oct 13.

"The report is part of a trove of documents from inside Meta that was recently disclosed to Congress by two current and two former employees who allege that Meta suppressed research that might have illuminated potential safety risks to children and teens on the company’s [VR] devices and apps..."

The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. www.wired.com/story/i-hate...

Such a great crowd at @nypl.bsky.social for the @datasociety.bsky.social event last night! Thanks for coming out!

“The depictions in the media and from clinicians suggest that people are mainly experiencing delusions, and for that reason, clinicians prefer ‘AI-mediated delusions’ rather than the snappier but less accurate ‘AI psychosis’ to describe the phenomenon.”

We’re looking for a developer-journalist to join @propublica.org’s News Applications team. You would write code, analyze data, build interactives — all in the service of public interest journalism. Check it out: job-boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/j...

The application for the 2026 Tech Policy Press fellowship is open! If you are looking to inform technology policy through rigorous original reporting or policy analysis, we want to hear from you! Apply here: buff.ly/4d82iWg

Our series with the NYPL kicks off on Friday with a conversation about how AI is reshaping daily life, w @alicetiara.bsky.social, @merbroussard.bsky.social, Mimi Ọnụọha & @geomblog.bsky.social. In-person spots are sold out, but you can still RSVP for the livestream! www.showclix.com/event/unders...

Here are our Computation+Journalism (Dec. 11-12, Miami) keynote speakers: Homa Hosseinmardi (U.S), Yevheniia Drozdova (Ukraine),S Attila Bátorfy (Hungary) cplusj2025.com/speakers/ Full schedule coming soon. Register here: events.miami.edu/event/cplusj... #dataJournalism #dataViz #dataVisualization

Marcella Hazan’s famous tomato sauce is butter chicken sauce without the spices

“Any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/life...

You don’t say.

So, as you might know, I have been in the process of tracking the activities of DOGE staff across the federal government. And now I've built an auto-updating website to browse the data It's not done (lots more content to write), but news is moving fast, so here it is dogetrack.info Enjoy!

“How beavers could help fight wildfires” www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... - CBC News #Wildfires #Wildlife

We should all worry about the chaos at the CDC But there’s an even larger and longer-term health threat quietly unfolding For @theatlantic.com I wrote about how the Trump admin’s ‘AI Action Plan’ risks hardwiring bias and inequity into medicine for decades. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

Maybe one solution to the crisis of unaccountable wealth is that the rich will drive themselves to psychosis. futurism.com/openai-inves...

absolutely terrible news

Imagine how much money could have been saved just by going with an actual human to begin with www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

Rossiter coined the term "Matilda effect" for when women's scientific work is attributed to men. It was a twist on the "Matthew effect," famously attributed to Robert Merton, but actually studied jointly by Merton and his wife Harriet Zuckerman, who was denied co-authorship

“In the late 1960s, Dr. Rossiter was working on her Ph.D. at Yale, when a comment from one of her male professors puzzled her. Who, she had asked, were the women in science? There were none, he said. Another professor mumbled something about Marie Curie being the exception.”🙃

Some of the brightest lights I’ve known have been forced to eat shit repeatedly in their careers. And they were the “lucky” ones—in that they were able to stay in the game. Many more just got completely pushed out and we never know about them except as faceless statistics.

💰 Foreign influence often hides in plain sight. GIJN’s new guide helps journalists investigate lobbying across borders with tools, databases, and money-tracking tips. 🔎 Dive in:

have been also learning lately that data centers primarily draw water from public drinking water systems with huge implications for access, infrastructure quality, cost of buildout, and water rates for residential customers who already usually subsidize industrial use, in addition to capex

Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

Replacing human judgement with mathematical models to make things more "fair" and "consistent" is an idea that's been around for over a century, but we keep discovering (again and again) that these models fail due to their design and input while providing cover for systemic cruelty.

Amen to this. I wrote about this problem in "Artificial Unintelligence" in 2018; it's only gotten worse in the AI era.

I wrote an entire book on AI and suicide, and I can tell you that humans absolutely will build guardrails to prevent self-harm when pressured to do so. Google search certain terminology, and the suicide hotline pops up. Code is not autonomous. We can hold AI companies to the same standards.

I was the executive director of U.S. Open Data, a non-profit that I created at the behest of the Obama White House. I worked as one of the nation's leading experts in open data. Putting open data on the blockchain is a profoundly stupid idea that fails nearly every test of good open data.

AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.

a huge part of the problem with AI and delusional spirals at the moment is that the "AI safety" people were busy with their own fantasies of Skynet, AGI, and paperclip maximization being the danger and seem to have done zero due diligence on the *actual* risk factors of the product.

🚨BREAKING: We filed a lawsuit in California state court against OpenAI for defective product design and wrongful death after ChatGPT encouraged and aided a 16-year-old California boy’s suicide — including by providing detailed instructions on how to hang himself in the final hours of his life. 🧵

Sounds great.

The Computation+Journalism Symposium will take place on December 11-12 at the University of Miami. Join us: cplusj2025.com The deadline to submit a talk, workshop, or panel is September 7th: cplusj2025.com/submissions/ We've already announced several speakers. More coming soon!

The entire Social Security database, dumped on a random cloud server: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...