Join us on Wednesday, October 8, for SciCafe: Mapping the Costs of AI. Kate Crawford (@katecrawford.bsky.social), research professor at the University of Southern California, will explore the environmental and human cost of AI systems. SciCafe is 21+ and free with RSVP. Get tickets: bit.ly/4nB7w33

This video is really important. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/o... It connects the dots between A.I. and climate disasters and is just a perfectly crafted piece of investigation and exposition. @katecrawford.bsky.social

"Metabolic images are visual material made by consuming billions of other images to be broken down and absorbed by #AI models via a gargantuan infrastructure that absorbs energy and water, and excretes media, atmospheric carbon, and other pollutants." — @katecrawford.bsky.social

If you're in Paris, don’t miss The world through AI at Jeu de Paume ! The exhibition is brillant and goes beyond generative AI hype. Special mention to Calculating Empire by Crawford & Joler — a mind-blowing map of technological power. #art #AI #Paris @katecrawford.bsky.social

"Multiple studies have shown that AI systems degenerate when they are fed on too much of their own outputs—a phenomenon researchers call MAD (Model Autophagy Disease) [...] AI will eat itself, then gradually collapse into nonsense and noise [...] The researchers compare it to mad cow disease."

"The current approach to AI cannot sustain itself indefinitely. The question becomes not whether current AI slop economies will destroy themselves, but when." By @katecrawford.bsky.social www.e-flux.com/architecture...

New essay now online: "EATING THE FUTURE: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop." AI consumes planetary resources and excretes slop, polluting environmental & information ecologies. It's a new metabolic rift - disrupting the cycles that sustain both humans and AI alike. www.e-flux.com/architecture...

Back in print in the latest @wired.it with an interview with the brilliant @katecrawford.bsky.social. At a time when the AI industry reveals its imperialist, extractivist drive, we need critical perspectives and counter-narratives more than ever.

Seems like a good time to re-up @katecrawford.bsky.social‬'s brilliant coining: "hallucitations".

Register to join this timely discussion on June 2, in person or on line, with @katecrawford.bsky.social @hofrench.bsky.social @tamigraph.bsky.social and @triofrancos.bsky.social, hosted by my Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study www.ias.edu/events/raree...

The EPA is being rolled back to the 1980s. Think big hair, WHAM, and Exxon hiding the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving climate change.

The ‘can machines do creative writing’ thing is mostly a distraction from the use of the machines to go through text and images to cancel grants and put people on deportation lists

We've gone from climate change denial to climate change criminalization. First they defund the science, now the FBI is prosecuting groups like Habitat for Humanity for fraud. newrepublic.com/post/192660/...

Meta *removed* @gilduran.com's article because it was about "topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures..." 👀

And now for the latest in fresh hell...

Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes. It’s genuinely shocking that this appears to be what’s going on right here. 1/

Generated AI plants are thriving online, with fake "seeds" selling on Amazon - people gravitating to impossible flora while real plants vanish. We're enchanted with simulacra as actual biodiversity disappears. @giovannialoi.bsky.social cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/02...

Rare earths are central to the US administration's capture strategy: from Ukraine to Greenland. When people exclude the mineral dependencies of AI (as with most everything else) they're missing the story www.ft.com/content/65ee...

Next up in our Institute’s Colloquium Series “History of Science in Public”: Kate Crawford @katecrawford.bsky.social will talk on "Mapping #AI: How to See Planetary-Scale #ArtificialIntelligence.” 🗓️ Mar 25, 2025 (14:00 CET) 🔗 bitly.cx/m0KeS 📍 relocated: MPIWG Main conference room #HistSci #SciComm

The more vexing ai alignment problem as stated by @katecrawford.bsky.social "What we saw at the summit was a different type of alignment problem, which was a misalignment from very concentrated corporate power and the interests of civil society in general.”

JD Vance is proclaiming to the world that the US's AI industry will dominate, Elon Musk and DOGE are hollowing out the government with an AI-first strategy, and Silicon Valley's is stuck on a growth-at-all-costs AI approach. As @katecrawford.bsky.social put it: 'AI is in its empire era'

The International Energy Agency just increased its prior growth predictions for energy demand. Data centers are one of the major drivers. Here's why that's significant: www.theverge.com/news/614356/...

The AI Summit ends in rupture. AI accelerationists want pure expansion—more capital, energy, private infrastructure, no guard rails. Public interest camp supports labor, sustainability, shared data. safety, and oversight. The gap never looked wider. AI is in its empire era.

Whoa! Calculating Empires made the front cover of Saturday's El PAIS newspaper. Far-ranging interview on the interconnections of politics, theory, and technology in our work and personal lives: from the Serbian protests to the AI Summit. @elpais.com @minipetite.bsky.social elpais.com/babelia/2025...

This week the first provisions of the AI Act take effect. Prohibited AI systems include: emotion recognition in schools & work (a victory there), social rating systems, predictive policing for individuals & real-time facial recognition in public spaces. www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/ar...

New @sashamtl.bsky.social @strubell.bsky.social @katecrawford.bsky.social paper is a v v good read -->>> "many of the purported “solutions” to climate challenges via AI remain tethered to profit-driven imperatives rather than broader systemic transformations" arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16548

DeepSeek forces a rethink of the compute & energy costs of AI models. In a new paper with @sashamtl.bsky.social @strubell.bsky.social, we look at the full environmental impacts of AI – both direct and indirect – and what 𝐉e𝐯𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐱 means for AI and climate. A thread 🧵

Hallucination administration

Including the interview with @katecrawford.bsky.social - and the terrific idea of AI as a “metabolic technology”

My prediction in @wired.com: 2025 is the year of AI agents. The coming psychopolitical regime "directs the environments where our ideas are born, developed, and expressed. Its power lies in its intimacy—it infiltrates our subjectivity. We will be playing an imitation game that ultimately plays us."

Super excited to have a short paper — "Critical Provocations for Synthetic Data"* (co-authored with Jeremy Seeman) — in this new Surveillance & Society dialogue! *A little homage to @zephoria.bsky.social and @katecrawford.bsky.social :)

Latest issue of Aperture explores how #AI is transforming #photography and our broader culture of images. @paglen.studio and @katecrawford.bsky.social demystify the “intelligence” of AI and outline its threats to privacy, democracy, and the planet. Worth a read, for sure aperture.org/magazines/ap...

In case you havenʼt seen it yet, this website is such a great resource for all of us researchers and teachers working on and discussing technology and society: Calculating Empires – A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 calculatingempires.net

"92 million low-income people in the U.S. states—everyone whose income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line—have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI" www.techtonicjustice.org/reports/ines... this is a damning report

We are organizing a third Salon with Linda Dounia Rebeiz to talk about her work and vision of #AI, #Art and #Technocapitalism. 🗓️ Dec 4, 5pm CEST 📻 Online, info and registration here: www.eventbrite.com/e/regaining-... 👥 w/ Gonzalo Ramos, Jenny Williams, @katecrawford.bsky.social & Vera Liao

When I was 5, I loved science, which I took to be planets and magnets and chemicals and shit. Soon I realized science was a collective human activity, and these were just the objects of its attention. Anyway, whenever I read an OpEd on how science isn't political, I think "Are you 5 years old?"

Reading: new study of 2,132 US data centers from 2023-24. They now account for more than 4% of total US electricity consumption, with 56% coming from fossil fuels. Virginia, Texas, and Oregon had the highest CO2 emissions. arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09786

Hey friends. Activating my account here because... well, yeah.