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

currently almost 2 hours into listening/waiting to give comment and it's been 🔥🔥🔥

The first in-person Possible Futures workshop was amazing! As I run more of these, it strikes me how many themes are so consistent: desire for ecological restoration. Connection. Autonomy. Privacy. Dignity. Leisure. Peace. Again and again, we find common ground and shared visions. 🌱

I would rather listen to 10,000 hours of annoying dudes yammering about nonsense from their garage-turned-podcast-studio tbh

DAIR is returning from a brief, institution-wide summer break, which I used as an excuse to take a break from social media as well. 10/10 would recommend.

This is profoundly bad. The data generated by NASA feeds research in many, MANY disciplines. I, for instance, am a historian, and my dissertation (now book project) uses satellite imagery as a major source for exploring the historical relationship between people and the environment.

ALL Haymarket Books are 40% off through August 22nd! ✊🏾✊🏿✊🏽

the final insult of AI is going to be forcing us all to become linux guys. we're all going to be like oh yeah downloading stuff on linux is super easy you just juice the tarball and compile the pulp in the sudo command line. not like windows where you have to click on things

unironically this. nobody is stopping these people from getting behind the most outlandish conceivable ideas! don't limit yourself!

This, very much. I have about two decades of professional tech background and I definitely understand *how* GenAI works. It is in part because I understand how it works that I would rather stick my face in a box fan than use GenAI.

Came back from a neighborhood organizing meeting where we spent some time doing imagination work. What really struck me was the somatic focus this facilitator used to open the workshop: 🧵

This from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social hit me over the head like a mallet of truth. This is the thing. This is what I’ve been trying to warn people about perfectly crystallized. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

Noooo, not the "your personal carbon footprint" argument, are you serious 😭

I'm so humbled, it is officially fully booked*! Thank you so much to everyone who registered, I'm really excited to create with you 🥹 If you missed it this time around, don't worry. More are in the works! *but please feel free to join the waitlist if you're still interested!

🤖 Thanks to the many experts who responded to me to help me unpack the new landmark AI bill from Illinois! Sharing a thread of my summary of what I've learned about it and how significant it is (It's significant!!) 🧵 statescoop.com/illinois-ban...

what drives me nuts about people using chatGPT for math in particular is that wolframalpha has existed for a fucking decade and a half and people act like it never existed

Was just served this ad, great news for any researchers recently out of work! 🙃