@Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine has been doing powerful reporting on the carnage across many professions, thanks to AI and bosses eager to use its slop instead of paying humans. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forc...

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Cátedra Google-USP: o lobo invade galinheiro? outraspalavras.net/outrasmidias...

A Reuters investigation reveals the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp made billions of dollars last year from Chinese ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content. www.reuters.com/investigation...

AI imagery is the equivalent of Plato’s prisoner being bored of sunlight, clambering down into a cave, shackling himself to a rock to watch shadows cast by firelight and forgetting that the world above exists.

Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what Repro Uncensored call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years.

Remember that guy who argued with me for half a day that poor people in food deserts would be fine just using Walmart delivery? Anyway.

Two weeks ago I said that there were likely millions of uninstalled Blackwell GPUs sitting in warehouses as there is neither the data center capacity nor the power to turn them on. Michael Burry is looking into it and it looks like he’s got evidence I’m right. www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

Every year in my class I show my students the gender shades project and they are like but it has been fixed now… right?

Hopeful that this becomes a genuine populist movement that puts the brakes on #BigTech’s Extractive Rampage: “As the price of electricity has risen, more American customers have fallen behind on their utility bills, or have had their power cut off.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/u...

An ongoing concern of mine is not that GenAI will replace teachers but the technology will - as described in the article - deskill teachers "under the banner of efficiency" while also providing those in power with means to deprofessionalize teachers too.

NEW from me: the Trump administration is moving new chemicals that have some link to data centers to the front of the line for approvals — creating huge loopholes to push all kinds of chemicals through, experts tell me, under potential political pressure

Everyone knows data centers use a ton of water. What hardly anyone knows: they can poison the water that remains. And in eastern Oregon, Amazon is doing exactly that.

Highly recommend setting aside some time to read the full investigation into Oregon's AI-fueled toxic drinking water crisis by @rollingstone.com and @thefern.org It’s one of the most important pieces of accountability reporting I’ve seen this year

If you are interested in the methodology behind the Data Workers' Inquiry Project (@dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social), this is the paper for you. Research doesn't have to be exploitative.👇🏽

Hey authors! Check to see if Anthropic stole your book to train their slop generator on. You’re entitled to $1500 per stolen Work. Look up your work, and if you’re in the database, file a claim secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/

The facilities suck up land, water, and power—driving up prices for all—and many locals are fed up. The latest from our friends at @wired.com:

Because the whole point of the AI industry is not to produce things or facilitate things, but to insist that people believe that it will produce and facilitate things. So long as you can keep up the belief, the money machine keeps churning

WHAT IN THE WHAT IS THIS?

The student surveillance company proctorio which boomed during the pandemic had sued this university employee for critical tweets it said shared confidential info but just exposed their sketchy practices. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Hold up

This screenshot shows Google's "Smart features" privacy setting. When enabled, this setting allows Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Meet to analyze your email, chat messages, and video content. Go to your Gmail, settings, scroll down, and uncheck.

In case you need a reason not to be a Google-certified educator:

in general, and especially now…

“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion” futurism.com/artificial-i...

The rapid proliferation of services powered by artificial intelligence, ranging from the genuinely useful to the frivolous to the unnecessary, has a common element: the need for vast amounts of electricity and water for the data centers that make them possible.

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

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to our analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%. (Published February)

So the $20,000 humanoid robot housekeeper actually just webcams your house to a random person in a call center with an Xbox controller www.wsj.com/tech/persona... @joannastern.bsky.social

Seems like a good time to remind ourselves that in 1931, when Mussolini forced academics to sign an oath of allegiance to the fascist regime, only twelve refused.

Stop overrelying on "AI" for important shit. Like, honestly, stop using it for important shit at all, but definitely stop uncritically trusting it at the level of the GODDAM FEDERAL JUDICIARY.

ME: Teams can't possibly get any worse. MICROSOFT: Hold my beer www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/mi...

Absolutely obsessed with framing your employees sleeping on the floor as a humble brag “Look how hard my team works” no dude you’re just bad at project management. Competent companies ship products without cosplaying being homeless

I interviewed Paulina Borsook, who warned of tech culture's toxic underbelly over 30 years ago. She wrote a prescient and scathing book, "Cyberselfish." It tanked her career, but a new generation is discovering her work as tech fascism tries to kill democracy 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-k...

Worth listening to @techwontsave.us on how news is increasingly consumed through social media and now "AI" platforms www.techwontsave.us/episode/288_... and then reading this BBC piece...

This person is one hundred percent correct and it’s scary af. We will never “media literacy” our way out of this as a society. We are about to reap the whirlwind when it comes to misinformation, disinformation, and informational warfare.

Wrote a thing on the hot summer of uni AI adoption for @defector.com A huge thanks to @nathankhensley.bsky.social and @anniemcc.bsky.social. @brandyjensen.bsky.social is a legend. And anything smart in hear is thanks to hours of discussion, texting, and draft reading by @smosment.bsky.social

sigh

Microsoft has been illegally tracking students and schoolgoers via its 365 Education platform, officials in Austria have ruled www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-ne...

The scenario in which there are oligarchs powerful enough to succeed at their AI con and force LLMs onto the rest of society is the outright fascist and dystopian scenario. That higher ed has largely capitulated to the scam means it had already been deskilled. We need to understand how and why.

“Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function(…) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios.” — @olivia.science

And that pushing questions of judgment off to automation is bad: Weizenbaum 1976 - archive.org/details/comp... See also Benjamin 2019 - aas.princeton.edu/publications...

Yikes

Convo last week -- Them: It's hard to talk about this stuff ("AI") without using anthropomorphizing language Me: It's really not, actually Some further reflections >>

Disinformation comes in many forms—memes, headlines, manipulated images. The game *Cat Park* uses play to show how easily narratives can be shaped. A reminder of why media literacy matters. #Disinformation #MediaLiteracy #CatPark #CriticalThinking www.netopia.eu/busting-fake...

“There's barely any regulation in place,” said Geoff White, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.." This statement refers to data centres, but could apply to the entire AI industry. The centralization of power is obvious, but "innovation," they say. www.cbc.ca/news/ai-data...

In times of dearth tech turn to their most reliable cash cow: desperately horny creeps

"A recent Stanford University academic paper found that early-career workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a decline in employment... ...He said the occupations most exposed to AI include junior roles in software development, sales, marketing & customer service."

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1 Trickle-down economics was always a sham. Nothing has ever trickled down.