I am getting so bored of these studies. By asking questions students learn skills, build rapport with profs & classmates, all of which actually matters. Dare I say, the content of an email answer isn't actually the only skill-relevant thing that comes from asking profs and classmates questions. 😭

Imagine how many faculty they could’ve hired. The administrators who argued for this have consistently argued against paying their faculty a living wage.

Litigation and lawsuits are extremely imperfect. And, I am very here for the use of litigation as one angle to disrupt corporate surveillance networks, where governments consistently fail, or are complicit in building them.

The preliminary ruling of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is a sobering reminder that the harms of colonialism are not confined to Canada’s past. (🧵1/4)

This is what I mean when I say that students often just need a permission structure to refuse AI. If you discuss the environmental, equity, political, economic, etc problems with them, many (in my experience) just say no. (And many are annoyed that universities are shoving it down their throats.)

magic beans for everyone!

Said with a grain of salt because this is a new story about just the draft strategy but… it remains unclear to me what the liberal government means when it refers to “AI” The focus of this strategy seems to get more generic over time. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

“If there is a failure of surveillance, it's never that the technology itself can't solve the problems…It's that we just don't have enough of it, right?"

🥰 ultra vires 🏀❤️

University administrators two years ago: we can’t allow social justice movements to change the university as we know it University administrators today: in order to accommodate the new probabilistic bullshit generator no one likes we must change everything about the university

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

Wrote about the proliferation of metaphors of "empire" and "colonialism" to describe digital capitalism and what it might get wrong about both empires and digital capitalism. I suggest there are three missing Cs: comprador, creole, counter-colonization. www.theideasletter.org/essay/digita...

“the Supreme Court of Canada has created a new tort of intimate partner violence that will allow people to sue for damages when they have been subject to abuse in a relationship.” www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

“For three years, everything that happened in the entryway of Willie Banks’ Westbrook home was captured by his neighbor’s security camera.” “What he didn’t realize until recently was that a state drug officer was using the camera feed to watch him in real time without first obtaining a warrant.”

The only good A.I. would be one that finds the phrase “pick your brain” in people’s emails and replaces it with something less gross like “get your input” or “hear your thoughts.”

A new Amnesty International briefing connects the approval of two Canadian-owned lithium mining projects to Indigenous rights violations in Nevada.

OpenAI was sued this week over a mass shooting in Florida and the overdose death of a college student in California. They are among two dozen cases filed in the last year that claim ChatGPT should be subject to consumer product safety laws: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/t...

We don’t actually have to do this.

"Digital asbestos will save healthcare!" Erm...

This is what we mean when we say that "AI safety" is a eugenicist project. They fear an ultra-powerful AGI that may kill us all. Meanwhile, this Colossus 1 data center is already killing Black people in Memphis.

The Canadian Senate is undertaking a study on "the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights and economic security in Canada." I was grateful to speak to intersections b/w hype, capital, colonialism, racism, surveillance, and labour (intro 16:12) senparlvu.parl.gc.ca/harmony/en/p...

"Refusal of dangerous products must always be an option"

The Canadian Senate is undertaking a study on "the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights and economic security in Canada." I was grateful to speak to intersections b/w hype, capital, colonialism, racism, surveillance, and labour (intro 16:12) senparlvu.parl.gc.ca/harmony/en/p...

Jack..

the best part of post-tenure academia has been having the career space to slow down. the damage done by the contraction of tenure track positions + poor security/working conditions of non tenure track faculty + quantification of academic contributions is incalculable

New Project Greenlight downtown slogan just dropped:

lolsob🥲 “Hey you by the car on the sidewalk – this area is private property,” the camera said authoritatively. “Yeah, you and your light blue sweater and dark blue pants, I saw you standing there. This means you too. Move out there or police will be called!” windsorstar.com/news/local-n...

"OpenAI ***did not adhere to Canadian privacy laws*** when it trained its immensely popular ChatGPT tool, resulting in the collection and use of sensitive personal information, according to a joint investigation.” 👀 (*emphasis is mine) www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Imagining all the tuition fees that could have been covered.

"For our administrations, then, AI is another method to privatize the public good of education, not just in the sense of who owns the institution but in the social atomization of the collective educational enterprise," writes Daniel Greene.

This has been the case forever. Already been dystopia. From a submission my colleagues at @citizenlab.ca did nearly 10 years ago, for the UN Special Rapporteur on on violence against women. You know it's bad when a whole skin-crawling term exists for it. citizenlab.ca/wp-content/u... Also, >>

💯 And layer into this how many involved in the development of Big Tech products are present in the Epstein files.

"zoomers pine for the world presented in the x-files" is an incredible example of, like. artwork that explicitly mourns the dissolution of institutions and civic life being later held up as an example of strong institutions and civic life

👀

Art.

For a government so keen on AI, I will say, this will undermine safety nets that can minimize the harms flowing from ramped up use of bots. So this is among many many things, antagonistic to any broader vision of « AI safety » Big Tech automation is extremely unsafe under austerity politics.

We're not starting at operations and talking about AI, which would make sense. We're starting at AI, then talking about operations, which doesn't. newsletter 5: time-and-space-studios.ghost.io/meeting-hype...

New from @ntusikov.bsky.social and me. Carney's reckless decision to introduce AI, in all its flavours, into government while simultaneously slashing the public service is a recipe for disaster. We know this because it's happened elsewhere, including in Canada. It's a matter of when, not if.

Among many other things, generative AI is a labor rights issue. Professors are right to reject it and students are right to join the rebellion.

Oh no a huge number of professional scientists are copy-pasting fabricated information into their work, how can we possibly figure out how to stop this www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I'm glad the conversation about FIFA-mandated surveillance and mission creep is continuing. Grateful to have an opportunity to speak with CBC about new details Vancouver has shared re data access & retention. But... www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

I do wish it was better understood by now—especially by folks in the media—that these "warnings" from large AI corporations in fact function as "advertisements" www.axios.com/2025/04/22/a...

Removing AI from schools is still best for students While we welcome governments in Manitoba and BC taking seriously the harm AI can do to children. We argue that age verification is still not the best solution for creating an environment where students can thrive. www.aicaution.ca/news/removin...

They’re basically admitting that creating nonconsensual deepfakes of women is not an unintended outcome of this technology but rather its main selling point, which some of us recognized all along

In news that absolutely everyone predicted…

The industry pitch on repeat is that Gen AI is the holy grail for scientific discovery, curing cancer, abundant wealth redistribution. While the gen ai industry worsens every crisis it “will solve.“ And how many lawyers and law-makers are sold on the holy grail pitch in the name of “innovation.”

genAI is the biggest threat currently destroying scientific research

Meet “ASU Atomic,” a subscription platform that claims to offer customized learning modules for fee-paying users. None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used.

I'll say it again, one of the worst things this rampant push to cram "generative AI" into everything has done is make people suspect bright kids of cheating when they're just nerdy or bookish or neurodivergent, sanding down their unique edges to fit into people's lowered, homogenized expectations.