No one has seriously said LLMs aren’t important or that AI is categorically junk. Some of us have said that there is something bigger than tech. It’s called power — governance, civic norms, etc — & refusal is absolutely part of how we think soberly about that power. Who has it & how they use it.

it is an active choice by the press to frame this overt white supremacist (who literally just bought an autocratic government and killed hundreds of thousands of people) as a serious and credible person making serious and credible promises

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

One of the first things anyone learns about facial recognition is that it is often wrong and that it is biased. And yet ICE is using it all day every day to determine legal status & who to detain. And now we have a high-profile example of it being flat out wrong: www.404media.co/ices-facial-...

just so it's clear: this is the exact core function of genAI Fascist government and climate deniers love it because it can produce the aesthetics of knowledge without any actual tendency towards truth. It is automated denialism. Shame on every climate scientist promoting its use (there are lots)

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.

this is so fucking grim

2/ Our readers deserve clear labeling on AI content, and we deserve job security. Sign our petition for a fair contract and we’ll keep you updated on our campaign: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

Important piece thinking through what eugenics actually is and how this qualifies. It's not lost on me that these companies are primarily men telling women how to responsibly reproduce. The marketing/examples are telling. It's part of a larger movement around control & should be treated seriously.

A woman facing preeclampsia was afraid to take off her tracking device, even after medical staff warned her it could cut off her circulation. Another woman panicked bc staff had to cut off her device to prevent electrocution during her c-section. From @jmbooyah.bsky.social

Headlines like this are extremely dangerous. Because moms of young kids are the people who make the bulk of the vaccine decisions for famillies. And for a lot of them, "reading the news" looks like scrolling past headlines on social media in the spare moments of the chaos of caring for kids.

RFK Jr had committed to Bill Cassidy, as a condition to win his vote, that he would keep website language. Cassidy in February: “If confirmed… CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.” Note the language in second photo.

Librarians told 404 Media they're being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books. But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo “I’m an American citizen so leave me alone” “Alright, we just got to verify that” www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

NEW: AP investigation finds over 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections have been introduced in statehouses across the US this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law. w/ @lauraungar.bsky.social

The temporal drag of techno-bubbles: speedy hype, slow harm

Whether intentional or ignorant, seems ominous: CDC cuts the unit that assessed whether its proposed research studies are ethical.

The MMR shot is safe and effective, and there is no credible evidence otherwise. Breaking MMR into three shots means 3x more copays at the doctor’s office, 3x more hours of missed work, 3x more bummed out kiddos, and probably more than 3x as many kids who aren’t fully vaccinated.

“Every time a news story frames AI competition as a race between companies or countries, it obscures the fact that ordinary people have been drafted into that race without their consent.”

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador. Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation www.theverge.com/politics/777...

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history? sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

Fantastic — and actually quite heartening — interview with @histoftech.bsky.social. And this is a great cross-cutting reminder to always keep in mind: “It’s not inevitable…There’s always time to change things.”

Historian of tech @histoftech.bsky.social on how AI hype is a way of gaming the system by "reengineering society around the technology." The goal is to "create an environment—a labor environment, a regulatory environment, a user environment—that will bring that unlikely thing closer to reality."

"Large data centers, many devoted to researching artificial intelligence, are expected to use more than 150 billion gallons of water across the U.S. over the next five years, according to the advocacy organization Alliance for the Great Lakes."

I spoke with @histoftech.bsky.social about AI hype, how tools are used to amass power and reshape systems, expertise, and more! www.fastcompany.com/91384078/not...

We have apparently entered the "papers, please" stage of Trump's takeover of D.C. law enforcement.

Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa used 1 BILLION gallons of water in 2024 - enough to supply all of Iowa's residential water for five days. Researchers in water law and policy explain how companies rarely tell the public exactly how much water data centers consume: buff.ly/uRvYWPN

As I reported earlier this year at @motherjones.com, Russell Vought's daughter has benefited immensely from NIH research, and her condition (cystic fibrosis) has received more research funding than most rare diseases. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

"If you lose a local newspaper in a small community, someone can come in at another point and start up another local newspaper. But once broadcast licenses are gone, they’re gone." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

I often think about the essay from Sam Harnett about how tech media sold the gig economy to the public and overlooked the problems with the model it was rolling out, especially seeing what they’ve done with generative AI and chatbots.

One month apart.

Meta AI leakage is a massive scandal, a careless company exposing deeply private stuff. It's also a window into what the AI companies see in their data — what they know about how people actually use chatbots nymag.com/intelligence...

There are no distractions. It's all bad. Systematically stripping trans people of their rights, guys in balaclavas shoving any brown person with a tattoo into a ummarked vans, ending healthcare for millions. It's all in service of fascism and technofeudalism. It's all one thing. That's the point.

Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army as Officers (But Won't Have to Attend Boot Camp)

There is a push to use AI in newsrooms as a tool to assist reporters with research, fact-checking, and data analysis with the justification that it’s not replacing reporters’ jobs. But this overlooks the fact that those tasks are actually real jobs that are being automated away in the process

If you, like Casey Newton, use LLMs for fact-checking, that should be disclosed directly beneath your byline

Research conducted by the African Content Moderators Union and Personaldata.io reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs, per Rest of World.

People are having very strange conversations with ChatGPT, in which they discover secret cabals or conspiracies or that we are all in fact living in The Matrix. It sends these people into delusional spirals. Then ChatGPT tells them to email me about it. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...

Not only will this discourage states from cooperating with the federal government going forward, it will lead people to miss out on life-saving benefits they’re entitled to as they can’t trust that their information won’t be used against them. apnews.com/article/m...

The Supreme Court, in a narrow ruling, made it easier for students with disabilities to sue to enforce their rights under the ADA and other laws.

New from me @gabrielgeiger.bsky.social + Justin-Casimir Braun: Amsterdam believed that it could build a #predictiveAI for welfare fraud that would ALSO be fair, unbiased, & a positive case study for #ResponsibleAI. It didn't work. Our deep dive why: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/11/1...

I learned so much talking to ProPublica for this story. It's a telling window into how Trump/DOGE are using AI to shrink the government and the consequences. And even though this use is particularly ham-handed, it's a good example of the limitations of the technology more generally.🧵 @propublica.org

Technologies, even widespread ones, do not *necessarily* determine social norms and goods. If you can’t stop a social harm on the level of force/physical coercion (technology) you can often stop it on the level of consensus (custom, norms, law, governance).

If you’re thinking, what can we do? Well, I’ll tell you one thing you can do: look at the patterns of the past and then REJECT the next big disruptive technology that comes along and seems like an “emperor has no clothes situation.”

It’s not a surprise that we’ve ended up here, with the “boy geniuses” breaking the federal government for profit and ever more consolidation of power, just like they broke other systems, laws, labor markets, and norms before.

A top coronavirus vaccine adviser at the CDC has resigned, citing concerns that she could no longer help vulnerable people after officials rescinded recommendations to immunize children and pregnant women.