Here's my new essay "Autonomous Refusal in Lethal Weapons," which examines an overlooked facet of all autonomous weapons, their inherent capacity to "refuse" orders, and explains how this could undermine human compliance with legal and moral obligations in warfare. www.sdu.dk/-/media/cws/...

I've been off all screens for a month—glorious, highly recommend—so this is a bit behind, but @technologyreview.com's latest issue has a story of mine on Europe's odd fixation with new instruments of annihilation. Gift link: ter.li/8ma6me

Holy hell. An internal Meta AI safety policy document sated that “It is acceptable [for a chatbot] to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” Meta only removed that line (and others like it) after Reuters contacted them for comment. www.reuters.com/investigates...

Maybe this won’t come as a surprise but this tech is built, in part, on models made by OpenAI (CLIP) and Meta (DINOv2). So there’s that, too.

In a new note for @economist.com I wrote about an effort to arm drones with a formidable new surveillance power: facial recognition. www.economist.com/science-and-...

If you still had any doubt that the idea of "AGI" was 100% a marketing ploy, watch as all these guys stop using it now that it's no longer profitable to do so. www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/s...

Someone needs to make a manual on the do's and don'ts of writing about predictive policing. eg. never say something like "spot future killers." There's no such thing as a future killer.

"at a disadvantage" is an awfully strange way of saying "happy and free."

Imagine if a college in 2010 announced that it was going to accept the reality that a bunch of its students were paying people from Craigslist to write their essays.

The new definition of insanity is training a chatbot on the whole of the Internet and expecting it not to repeat the Web's ugly biases.

sports🤝surveillance www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Creativity and critical thinking might take a hit. But there are ways to soften the blow

For this week's @economist.com I investigate how heavy AI use can degrade our cognitive abilities. The science on this question is still very new. But the evidence so far is troubling, to put it mildly. www.economist.com/science-and-...

I'm trying to imagine what we would have thought in 2016 if the DoD had given Microsoft $200 million for Tay, the chatbot that went full bigot on Twitter within hours of being launched, a mere week after the debacle. Our heads would have exploded.

Media outlets can't pivot to AI to save themselves. It's not a business strategy and it's not going to work. The only path forward is for journalists to lean into their humanity, to do things AI can't, and to make clear they are writing for people, not algorithms: www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

Someone should tell the people who did this that making music with your own hands and voice is way more fun. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A lot of fans say they're not as good live. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Friendly reminder that there's no point talking about using a technology "for good" if you don't let people talk about how it's also being used for bad.

Those who predicted the AI revolution decades ago were right about a lot of things but they never counted on just how racist a lot of these machines would turn out to be

If you're wondering why people who work on AI ethics look a little tired, maybe it's because they've spent a decade watching AI do really racist stuff. They can be forgiven for being a bit grumpy.

My takeaway from the Grok white genocide debacle is that it has been nine years since Microsoft Tay and tech companies still have zero idea how to get their chatbots say what they want them to say.

It’s dangerous for LLMs to generate terms such as “I understand your point,” “my intention was” and “I apologize.” None of these words represent the actual reason the system did what it did.

Friendly reminder that 99.999% of what tech leaders say about AI is not expertise. It's content.

The DoD is starting to get into FPV drones. They're only about fifteen years behind hobbyist drone racers, and three years behind the Ukrainians. aviationweek.com/defense/airc...

On a podcast five years ago I was asked if I'm more afraid of killer robots or sex robots. I said sex robots. This is precisely why.

Edible AI slop.

I can assure you that a bunch of tech giants using AI to battle each other for your attention is not a story that ends well.

I know some drone experts who sounded crazy a decade ago who are feeling VERY validated today. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/w...

As the original designer of the most addictive cigarette ever created, I now realize that humanity deserves better. That is why I am a proud to to be partnering with The Even More Addictive Cigarette Corp. to usher in a new era in very addictive cigarettes. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Not only your drunk college photos but also quite a few books and speeches that make a compelling case for why autonomous drone targeting probably wouldn’t be great for humanity.

In most industries, companies create and distribute products as a function of consumer demand. AI is not most industries.

Remember the NJ Drone Panic. Those were the days...

Repeat after me: If it can't be jailbroken, it's not AI.

You want me to ask authors for permission before using their work to train my AI? In this economy???

Regardless of whether you think AI training is copyright infringement, there's one indisputable fact that we should all acknowledge: every powerful industry has at some point made exactly the same "this will kill us" argument about regulations that did not, in fact, end up killing them.

Everyone in AI complains that the law lags behind the tech. But now that a law is actually coming into force suddenly everyone wants to "stop the clock." Funny that.

Imagine exactly this same story but instead of a tech company making films that examine the potential benefits of AI it's a tobacco company making films that examine the potential benefits of smoking. www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Google doesn't know it yet, but it's getting itself into the horror movie business.

It is a terrifying sign of the times that people in AI can say something like "technology brings writers closer to their ideas" and newspapers will repeat those words, without caveat, as though they make any sense whatsoever. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/b...

The tech world's obsession with using AI to plan parties is so weird.

Tipping your hat to ChatGPT and Grammarly in the Acknowledgments 🤦‍♂️ www.arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10066

It's easy to dunk on people for using AI when they shouldn't, but we really should be asking how we got to a point where the urge to use AI is so strong that it causes people to completely lose sight of the obvious risks of doing so.

Has anyone made a list of generative AI fails? Specifically I'm talking about cases like this where respected institutions and figures secretly use AI, don't check its work, and then get found out in a super embarrassing public way. If not, I think it might be time to start one.

Great example of a bad anthropomorphic headline. If a cat can't be charged with the crime of smuggling, then it is not capable of the act of smuggling. Similarly, AI can't harass, plagiarize, target, or lie—only humans can do those things. Any headline that suggests otherwise is misleading.

So UBS doesn't think that an analyst talking to a client is a "productive task." I wonder if UBS's clients agree.

Friendly reminder that if a tech company wants to collect information about you that you wouldn't even share with your closest friends, it's because they have a plan to monetize that information.

My other takeaway from the Grok thing is that no single human being should ever have the power to change a widely used chatbot's system prompts.

My takeaway from the Grok white genocide debacle is that it has been nine years since Microsoft Tay and tech companies still have zero idea how to get their chatbots say what they want them to say.

The craziest thing about this is that he admits to using AI for all this stuff. My guy, do you really think this is something to be proud of?