🧵 1/ It’s hard to find hope amidst so much collapse. But in the wreckage of today’s crises, people are also powering solutions — and The 51st, backed by the community of D.C., is one of them. Will you help us build a local newsroom that a billionaire can’t break?

sigh

I wanted to write more about this recent piece of art I love from a few weeks back. Quili.ai, or, a town's ambitious initiative to save its water from AI. Want a picture of a dog eating spaghetti? Ask Benji. 🧵 (h/t to @karenhao.bsky.social for posting about this initially)

@timnitgebru.bsky.social tells us how “frugal AI” is actually an old concept—what’s new is the billionaire pipe dream of building a machine god. www.themaybe.org/reframing-im...

Ok technically this is only half not in English but I will always take the opportunity to plug one of my fave artists, if you don't listen to Lana Lubany she's a Palestinian artist and her music is SICK www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q701...

aww everyone's honking and people are cheering in public and interacting with strangers

These companies are always lying about the extent of their automation because some things cannot be fully automated in principle futurism.com/advanced-tra...

I am so moved by the the love letters to Minneapolis woven through so many of the gut-wrenching accounts coming out of the city. The birder breaking down seeing the hawk in the beautiful old elm— reminds me of that iconic Andrea Gibson poem every time. "Let your heart break so your spirit doesn't".

Evaluating social impacts of technical systems, quantitatively or qualitatively, can feel Sisyphean at times. It's endlessly imperfect. But it's also a critical foundation for meaningful AI regulation. Happy to have gotten to contribute my small piece to the work: academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

They called it AI and now I gotta debate the definition of intelligence with my barber

A doomscroll break: While it feels like everything is burning down and I'm packing whistle kits, I'm reminded of one of our earlier workshops, themed around fire. Many things in nature rely on fire as part of their lifecycle. What if it all burns down? What do we want to grow in its place? 🧵

Trusted friends in Minneapolis tell me that this fund is supporting many people but does not have enough money. If you can give, please do: chuffed.org/project/1671...

No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.

It was such a delight to get to chat with Arielle on the Joy Report! We talk about the impact of AI on our world, and—most importantly—what we can be doing to build the future we want 🌱 Check out the full episode below! ⬇️ intersectionalenvironmentalist.substack.com/p/the-joy-re...

New virtual Possible Futures workshop coming up in just a few weeks! Grab your tickets now! ⬇️

I'm back with another possible future: This time, about rest. This thread is an invitation for anyone returning from a break feeling immediately re-burnt-out by the "welcome back, hope you're ready to hit the ground running!!" energy the new year can sometimes bring. 🧵 (stay for dog pics 🐶)

As promised, we have another free virtual Possible Futures event,(and our first official co-hosted event)! There are a lot of fun new things I'm excited to share :) Before you log off for the year, treat yourself and book in your first workshop of 2026! ⬇️

Today, DWI publishes a powerful essay by @mgasia.bsky.social, who works impersonating an AI sex companion: data-workers.org/michael/ This piece offers a rare glimpse into the psychological and economic realities behind one of the fastest-growing sectors: AI-assisted intimacy.

"nobody trained claude to do anything like this" except like. one bajillion sci fi books and undergrad philosophy essays they threw into the hopper

Today in "other things are possible": a story about some hackers and CO2 monitoring! I have some thoughts. 🧵 (and read to the end for some DAIR lore)

“LLMs aren’t going away” statements are wishes, not predictions, that they’re trying to make happen. Treat them as advocacy for a specific future, not observations of inevitability

The Possible Futures workshops are so centering for me. They always bring me back to what any of this is for. People approach this from so many angles, and still the same themes emerge: we want connection, belonging, healing, purpose, safety. 🧵

makes me sad to think about young readers' access to poetry, as a former super-into-poetry tween :( It seems like playing with form & subverting the expectations of the reader— as poems are wont to do!— would be almost definitionally incomprehensible with three-cueing.

Reminder that I'm running a workshop this Sunday in Seattle from 2-5pm! Come make art and imagine otherwise with me :) www.eventbrite.com/e/dair-prese...

(and as an aside, I could go rant about the observation many have made, that imo the obsession with making uncanny valley chatbots/robots that "feel real", "feel human", "feel authentic" is, at its core, about manifesting desires to dominate and control other humans, but I digress!!)

Normally "here's an AI robot that talks to kids to teach them a language" would be a hard no from me. But I found one that I think is great, and I want to talk about why. The SkoBot is a language revitalization robot, led by Ashinaabe engineer @danielleboyer.bsky.social Here's what I like: 🧵

This stuff gets me. My (STEM) school advertised itself as a brave holdout on grade inflation, boasting that they had incoming classes of all valedictorians w/ perfect SAT scores & had an average GPA of 3.0. The mentality around "weeding people out" and putting them in their place was SO bad!

This is what it can look like when research is rooted in lived experience. A key piece of context on this report is that DAIR researcher Adrienne Williams is a former Amazon delivery driver and organizer herself, and the report builds on many in-depth interviews. ⬇️

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.

Like, support vector machines and random forests are "AI" when it's convenient for these companies to try and skirt accountability, but when it comes time to do marketing, suddenly "AI" emerged in like 2022 and needs the power resources of a small country to do anything at all.

Thrilled to see this from the folks around a programming language so dear to my heart 🐍 Nice to see some good news of resistance out there.

Wrote this yesterday chanda.bearblog.dev/knowledge-is...

I like to say, "turning researchers into fighters and fighters into researchers," following General Baker from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

🚨NEW🚨 from DAIR: Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility. Read the full report here: drive.google.com/file/d/1yBxy...

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Happy Birthday Ursula K Le Guin

We're seeing lots of headlines about the catastrophic impact of massive data center expansion. But what else could data centers look like? In my perpetual quest to seek out alternative technofutures, I want to highlight the really cool work of Keolu Fox. 🧵

Another in-person workshop is coming up, and we have a bigger venue this time! If you're in Seattle, come make art with me! 😁 (as a total aside, I'm extremely excited to work with this venue, it's a really cool all-ages art space that also sells incredible mead.)

I was raised by self-employed musicians, 100% wfh. Huge quality of life boost with kids: both worked, but they could still bring a forgotten lunch to school, bring me to doctor's appts, stay home with me when I was sick, etc. I now realize how impactful it was that someone was just *around* for me.

@danmcquillan.bsky.social puts it so well: "Wherever AI is proposed as 'the answer', is already a seam that needs unstitching, a structural problem where those who are directly involved should be at the forefront of determining what needs to be changed instead." danmcquillan.org/decomputing_...

These past few weeks, I’ve done a lot of public engagement, and it’s reminded me how hard science communication can be!

Saw this article linked by @wonkish.bsky.social in the replies here and wanted to expand on it a little, because this really does feel like a place where a tech solution *is* warranted to help address a major problem. 🧵 www.theverge.com/2024/8/21/24...

YES. Similarly, I was recently in a conversation where somebody suggested that perhaps this administration was trying to bar all AI regulation because they don't want to hinder scientific progress. Yeah great point, they sure do love pure science!

I looked into my scrying pool and asked when it would be good to apply to YC for my SaaS agentic AI startup

A small detail they did here that I'm thinking a lot about in my own work: talking about "AI use disclaimers" in their work. I've been toying with adding a little handwritten "a human wrote this" image at the bottom of my email signature with a link to more information. Are other folks doing this?

Just added our first guest zine to the DAIR Zine Library: it's Identity 2.0's AI-Z: conversations about resistance and generative AI. Check it out!! >>> zines.dair-institute.org/ai-z <<< from: www.identity20.org

Whatever you do, please don’t stop reading. Read for joy. Read for education. Read for resistance. Read banned books. Read books by marginalized authors. Read about experiences that differ from your own. Just. Keep. Reading.

Idk if everyone has seen this already, but I'm really impressed by the resources being compiled over at against-a-i.com. Assignment ideas, background reading, syllabus language, start-of-the-school-year speeches... Shout out to @annakornbluh.bsky.social @ehayot.bsky.social, this is rad.

Fascinating to be included here. I stand by what I said— it is natural for anyone to be drawn to escapism and fantastical thinking in response to fear and uncertainty. Billionaires are not immune. I'll add: Their fantasies aren't better, worthier, or truer than yours. apnews.com/article/arti...

tl;dr - I don't think coaching people on how to use ai is an effective form of harm reduction - I think we should use different messages for the people pushing AI and the people they're pushing it on - People who know better shouldn't use it or encourage others to use it