okay, now let's hear from people who don't have millions of dollars in tech company stocks still vesting

Make your 2025 words-of-the-year nominations for the only vote that matters! bit.ly/2025WOTYNOMS

The 2026 annual meeting conference schedule for New Orleans is announced: americandialect.org/2026-sked/ Also includes words-of-the-year information!

Wow -- look at OpenAI trying to shift responsibility to the users: 🧵>> www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/art...

Seeing this bubble grow from the front row and yelling into the void as we head towards 2008 part deux is making me lose my mind.

Wow -- look at OpenAI trying to shift responsibility to the users: 🧵>> www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/art...

"'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/

Sora 2 is not being “misused” when people use it to produce racist, transphobic, misogynistic, & otherwise vile images—it exists to make it easier to put these images out into the world. Calling it a “misuse” is a grave misunderstanding of what these companies are up to, & lets OpenAI off the hook.

When @alexhanna.bsky.social and I started working on The AI Con, one of our hopes was that it would sit on bookstore shelves and lists of books to read next to all of the ridiculous hype and give people a chance to cut through the noise. thecon.ai 🧵>>

Multiple things can be true at the same time: 1. The ability to block other accounts at will is important. 2. Sharing blocklists can help us efficiently clean out hatemongers 3. People who use social media well (e.g. @mmitchell.bsky.social ) can end up lumped by thoughtless blocklist creators >>

When @alexhanna.bsky.social and I started working on The AI Con, one of our hopes was that it would sit on bookstore shelves and lists of books to read next to all of the ridiculous hype and give people a chance to cut through the noise. thecon.ai 🧵>>

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.)"

Every day it feels more and more like a zombie apocalypse over on LinkedIn, in which you start a conversation with someone who you hope is an ordinary person and then a couple of turns in discover that they have surrendered their brains to the "AI" mass delusion.

i’ve said this before but lemme say it again. it makes absolutely 0 sense to talk about “misuse” of llms because there is no clear use or purpose for llms to begin with. genAI is a purposeless tech floating around looking for uptake 1/

This thread was in response to someone who definitely should have known better saying that because AI was making his workload unmanageable he was within his rights to feed anyone’s preprint research into any llm he chose (& tell others working w/him to do it too) in order to reduce AI’s impact. 😕

"Have you ever actually talked to an AI... I mean really talked to one?" There's something really perverse about these kinds of replies. I don't know or want to pathologize these people, but it's a mix of hubris, a lack of self-reflection, and bizarre notions of expertise.

Every day it feels more and more like a zombie apocalypse over on LinkedIn, in which you start a conversation with someone who you hope is an ordinary person and then a couple of turns in discover that they have surrendered their brains to the "AI" mass delusion.

apparently we’re getting sidetracked worrying about the cognitive decline that comes from reliance on AI & the impossibility of real research when students have to wade through a sea of AI slop. What is the foundational work we are skipping over? Training teachers to shove AI down students’ throats

"By insisting on the term 'automation,' Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding." Erik J. Larson discusses "The AI Con" by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

A dishwasher is already a robot that does your dishes

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 65: www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis... … in which @deccamuldowney.bsky.social joins me and @alexhanna.bsky.social to talk about what it means to actually do journalism. Thanks to Ozzy Llinas Goodman for production!

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."

A nice review of an excellent book "In the end, 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."

🎧 NEW: Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast episode 65 - 'Crunching The Numbers' 📈 @emilymbender.bsky.social & @alexhanna.bsky.social talk to journalist @deccamuldowney.bsky.social about how so-called AI tools are infiltrating newsrooms, particularly when it comes to data analysis. 🔗 Below ⬇️

oh we talked about this point last night in reading group lol

it's such a clarifying frame. "intelligence" = creative, thoughtful, adaptable, human "automated" = automatic, unthinking, inflexible, machine also "intelligence" implies new, different, unprecedented "automation" connects it clearly to its historical context

"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."

"The new Luddites aren’t afraid of AI. They’re afraid of the people who profit from pretending it’s intelligent." Erik J. Larson reviews "The AI Con" by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 65: www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis... … in which @deccamuldowney.bsky.social joins me and @alexhanna.bsky.social to talk about what it means to actually do journalism. Thanks to Ozzy Llinas Goodman for production!

The extent to which AI FOMO is warping people's decisions is rather stunning, actually. I can see why the Anthropics and Googles would want this, but the other tech co managers going along with it ...

It seems like the only way tech companies are able to compel AI usage is by coercion in performance review processes? (via The Information "AI Agenda" newsletter)

POSSIBLE FUTURES WORKSHOP 🗣️ Looking for a fun, hopeful activity to stretch your imaginative muscle? 🌻 If you’re in the Seattle area, @dylnbkr.bsky.social will be hosting a free in person Possible Futures workshop on November 16 @ 2pm PST. 🪴 RSVP at www.eventbrite.com/e/dair-prese... to attend.

Mildly amused + mildly annoyed a people whose reaction to folks sharing the Wired piece about Zitron & pulling out the info that Zitron reps DoNotPay ... is to say: That wasn't a secret. You could have found it by just clicking through to his website! >>

Friends choose your so-called "critics" carefully. Its not a binary. If people do circular citations and happen to never cite the women who laid the groundwork for decades and pay the price, there's a problem.

"If you access the public’s savings at scale, you should meet the public’s disclosure standards." ... seems like a good principle to minimize harmful bubbles www.techpolicy.press/ai-isnt-a-su...

Join us today!

There is SO MUCH FRESH HELL -- but I am doing my best to get down to a list of 25-30 items for tomorrow's live stream. It all deserves to be debunked, but also we only have an hour...

Join us tomorrow!

In the >6 months since our last all-hell ep the nonsense has been piling up faster than ever. Join us for the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, as @alexhanna.bsky.social and I celebrate spooky season with another all-hell extravaganza! Mon, Oct 27 at noon PT, twitch.tv/dair_institute

I am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b... @apache.be you rule 🖤

In the >6 months since our last all-hell ep the nonsense has been piling up faster than ever. Join us for the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, as @alexhanna.bsky.social and I celebrate spooky season with another all-hell extravaganza! Mon, Oct 27 at noon PT, twitch.tv/dair_institute

Great points by @emilymbender.bsky.social on our meeting last week. It was also sad to hear the push for speed by quite a number of people present at the meeting. This trope that there is no time to lose and "we're missing the boat" only contributes more to the sloppy thinking about the tech

New on the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter: Thoughts on traveling far to encounter yet more AI hype buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

We were so lucky to have Emily's voice in the room. If you're interested to watch our panel, you can find the link here: www.mindandlife.org/events/minds...

And watch the video on the report: peertube.dair-institute.org/w/iwAD2shBwG...

DAIR’s (@dairinstitute.bsky.social) latest report offers a chilling glimpse into how Amazon is using technology to ramp up surveillance of delivery drivers, violating existing workers' rights and creating unsafe working conditions. www.dair-institute.org/projects/dri...

New on the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter: Thoughts on traveling far to encounter yet more AI hype buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Huge thanks to @mjcrockett.bsky.social and @lmesseri.bsky.social for digging into all that work to produce this survey and their insights. The problems that cogsci research is facing are real, but "AI surrogates" are not a solution.