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/

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

I was lucky to write the lead article for a special issue of Academe on AI in the Corporate University. In "What does AI do?" I offer a provisional balance sheet of this technology's effects on our work, our finances, and our management, in a moment of rising fascist attacks on higher education.

The hyperzipper

Trump administration maybe getting a little scared of what its "let AI run rampant" policy might mean www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

Game over for New Orleans in decades, according to a new study. Especially galling, recent politically motivated decisions by the governor and SCOTUS have accelerated this timeline. History will look back on so much of this period as, WTF were they thinking? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Wow, they actually *retracted* this so-called meta-analysis about ChatGPT effects on learning performance, though it got massive metrics and social media attention before that. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No. You need websites that are designed to serve human readers, quality, authenticity and trust not commodified programmatic scale. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/b...

“Trump slurs Black people” would be a very easy story to put together

We need more boring, predictable speeches on time-tested virtues that nevertheless are blistering critiques of the current administration

New investigative stories by @wired.com and @nytimes.com show why watchdog journalism is so important right now, with proliferating AI technologies and a legal system increasingly dictated from the top by right-wing partisan actors www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u... www.wired.com/story/madiso...

Pro tip: don’t lay off all the copy editors, you numpties. That’s how you end up with horror. (Also get you a less credulous skyline writer)

Maybe there’s more here but AP’s strategy sounds an awful lot like “we’re downsizing on journalists and pivoting to video and AI,” which is no strategy at all apnews.com/article/news...

​In an ordinary presidency, by now the CoS, Defense Secretary, and Secretary of State/National Security Adviser would have been fired in disgrace and replaced. But the operating principle of Trump II is Trump gets to do whatever he wants and no one can say otherwise, so this just continues on and on

Category confusion that results from putting extremists in key positions. What in past administrations would have been a "public servant resigns on principle" story is ... still that, but the "principle" in question is based on a mix of accurate observation and anti-Semitism.

As it was during COVID, Trump's need to run his mouth on camera several times a day does a not-insignificant amount of damage to US strategic goals, to the efforts of people working for the US government, to his own political standing, and to public understanding

Great thread on journalism.

Not clear what's going on here but the entire DC "scoop economy" depends on the scoops being accurate and "U.S. officials" knowing that and sticking to it

As LLM use expands, “the models’ outputs…are reabsorbed into human discourse & shape users’ own expression & reasoning and, in turn, influence the data used to train future models, transforming homogenization from a passive bias into a structurally reinforced influence.” www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

For 15 years I’ve been in the part of media tasked with generating “audience-friendly” work, and never once has pageviews been my primary measure of a story’s success (even if I’m very good at generating them). Thinking the way these people do is so small-minded. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/b...

I can lean on my actual experience to yell at everyone that this won't work! You can't identify emerging customer needs by aggregating data from the past! We tried this already with personas and again with big data! This is like the stupid business version of the problem of induction.

Strongly suggests that what everybody thought was going on with DOGE – indeed, seemed like one of the basic, unspoken animating ideas behind DOGE – massive personal data theft by private entities – was actually happening www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

THREAD: I got laid off from NYMag/Vulture after 14 years. The family lost 75% of income + medical. Now mzs.press bookstore, once a side project. is do-or-die for Judith & I. I feel weird telling you this because others are doing much worse. But if you could like or share this, we'd be so grateful!

I wrote about Trump's fantasy of omnipotence and invulnerability crashing against the material reality of a interdependent world. This insane, heedless war will ruin us all. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...

dario amodei is clearly the most thoughtful person running an AI company today. he talks with evident genuine concern about risks and safety and supports limited regulation. but ultimately, i have my doubts abt his approach to public control.

This is a major PR coup for Anthropic. In rejecting the DoD's demands that it allow the surveilling of Americans and autonomous killing, it gets immediate claim to the moral high ground, which other AI co's won't take. Anthropic is the AI company that *won't* kill and surveil you.

This is an all-timer in headlines where the use of the passive voice obscures a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM with the basic premise of the story

Great conversation with @andreapitzer.bsky.social today on @jamellebouie.net’s newsletter messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/rend...

Jesse Jackson reading "Green Eggs and Ham" is so wonderful. RIP

This is the story of AI development from the beginning; researchers develop/deploy tools that mimic human capabilities, with little understanding of those capabilities or the potential harms of mucking around with them

“I am not a crook.”

"There are still plenty of places to read about literature.…But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares....The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits." www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

I still cannot get over this detail reported by the Financial Times: www.ft.com/content/5fa6...

Wondering if what happened in the New Orleans newspaper wars could play out in DC: 1. Owner destroying established newspaper 2. Rival alt-publication starts backed by local $$ 3. Established paper fails 4. Owner gives up, sells name/brand to alt-publication, institution continues

I can say without any fear of contradiction that I know as much or more than anyone in modern American journalism about the absolute, no excuses necessity of operating in the black. In many cases much more since if you’re a big player there are lots of creative ways to operate ….

Struck by this NYT framing of Harvard’s purported rationale for standing up to Trump. Such factors play a role, but come on – this suggests the NYT/reporters/editors have no clue about what is actually at stake in this fight www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

Let's check in on how the national media doing in balancing the tension between reporting the news objectively while recognizing the long record of bad faith arguments, actions and arrests by the current administration.

That this same poll finds Trump approval at 37%—while approval of his *policies* is at Bush II nadir levels of 27%—reminds us once again that his appeal has little to do w policy. I'd add that it also suggests a technocratic view of politics as fundamentally about policy cannot make sense of Trump.

see the robot hit a child, but in a laudable way

Non-media people may not appreciate the depth of contempt that media people have for things like this. Interviewing his mom on national TV! It doesn't get more pathetic than that.

There was some actual good news today www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/t...

SCOOP: Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti WIRED obtained Slack conversations + an updated internal Palantir wiki defending the company's work for ICE to outraged workers. More here: www.wired.com/story/palant...

Sulzberger has to be joking us here. "Crisis of Confidence" no what

1/2 I actually thought we had seen the end of "guy in a diner" stories, for cliche and self-parody reasons if nothing else. This one has the minor twist of "guys in a bar" So close to @nytpitchbot.bsky.social's work (just read the opening grafs) that I wonder if this could be quiet homage to him

The Times went to non urban Minnesota to ask people why they dislike urban Minneapolis. If someone were to ask me to teach a journalism school course on helicopter reporting, this story - so cliche it’s almost hard to believe they really did this - would immediately go on the syllabus.

Especially now, news orgs should pause and reconsider before going with the "Trump says" headline and story framing (what most people see) Things "Trump says" are usually not true, or at best represent some fantasy that might have some unpredictable impact on reality – now the case with Venezuela

@attackerman.bsky.social's destruction of Bari Weiss here is so vicious because it is so spectacularly well-informed; this one is an earner, folks www.forever-wars.com/watching-bar...

“Moral exhilaration” – the excitement and sense of affirmation in standing up to/rejecting Trumpism even at great personal or institutional cost – feels good! May it continue to spread www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/a...