IDK man we've seen enough to easily conclude AI has no inherent ethics, concrete philosophy, or creative writing abilities. The most compelling use of AI does computational biology at an okay level. The most widespread use is likely in computer science. I think AI is a humanities job market miracle

The disparity between fields and rigor of peer-review is wild. I've been scrutinized for citing the wrong edition of a particular book, meanwhile some people are just having AI write the whole damn lit review apparently.

AI industry folks desperately need to read this. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Law enforcement has more tools than ever to track your movements and access your communications. Here’s how to protect your privacy if you plan to protest. www.wired.com/story/how-to...

Apple out with a new paper that, not coincidentally, explains why they’ve stayed out of the LLM mania. The “illusion of thinking” — what I and many, many others have been saying for ages, only to get the “nuh uh” from the mentally ill AI chudbro crowd. This is why “agents” will fail, btw.

On moving fast and breaking things . . . again: social media’s lessons for generative AI governance www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Current tech is a collection of guys in hotdog costumes saying they have a new thing to save you from the old thing. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"Imagine what would happen if most climate science were done by researchers who worked in fossil fuel companies. That’s what’s happening with AI" @karenhao.bsky.social on the role of tech firms in society & the importance of independent research in democracy www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

These people can't stop reinventing phrenology

this is why "diverse" training datasets doesn't inherently mean those communities end up being the primary beneficiaries of the technology

to summarise the study, there is negligible productivity and time gain from AI chatbot use and the only driving factor for mass deployment is fabricated fear of being left behind from the "AI revolution"

AI-generated slop on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube has become a barometer of political fame, just as it has of pop culture celebrity — and some lawmakers are starting to worry.

The AI revolution: opening new frontiers in bullying. This technology should not be easily accessible by the public, it serves no purpose, provides no benefit.

The hype cycle, while purporting to be all grown-up and hard-headed, is just another coping strategy for those invested in technological determinism.

welcome to the future, now your error-prone software can call the cops (this is an Anthropic employee talking about Claude Opus 4)

My firm belief is that the reason they are so bad at presenting compelling use cases is that they are trying to sell an empty container built for their purposes but not for actual users.

"...some issues... require not just a knowledge of law or of technology, but of both. That is, some problems cannot be discussed purely on technical grounds or purely on legal grounds; the crux of the matter lies in the intersection" AI "safety " work requires sociology! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Good article pushing back on algorithmic radicalization hypotheses. Users play a role in their own curation. “They’re trying to influence me to gain the more acceptable viewpoint”: The algorithmic imaginaries of politically activated social media users journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

46% of 16 to 21 year olds say they would rather a world without internet, and 70% say they feel worse about themselves after using social media. It’s long past time governments stepped in to address the consequences of leaving the internet to the private sector.

New study finds that AI chatbots were nearly five times more likely to contain broad generalizations about scientific research compared to humans. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

NEWS: The courts have decided against DOGE and the US government in their legal battle to take full control of the United States Institute of Peace, including a headquarters building with an estimated value of $500 million. www.wired.com/story/usip-d...

"The tool put those users’ posts through a large language model, gave each a “radical score,” and provided its reason for doing so." The person quoted here says they have no social science background, and doesn't even define what "radical" means...

I was on WGBH today at the Boston Public Library to talk about #TeslaTakedown and the state of modern media. I laid out the political stakes of the battle ahead: Oligarchs vs. Fascists youtu.be/pagjozs8dAA?...

I spoke to an expert in authoritarianism, who explained to me that things like this are extremely meaningful and they help protect democracy, even if there’s not a straight line between this and actual legislating

has anyone done analysis comparing the pace of wealth and market growth of big tech compared to other major industries (like automotive, supermarket chains, tobacco, etc) in the past?

Hell yeah Ithaca & co

Boston University is building a database of datasets that have been scrubbed from agency's sites: findlostdata.org

Stand Up for Science rallies will be held in DC and state capitals on March 7th. Share with friends. Sign-up here to get email updates with details: www.eventbrite.com/e/stand-up-f...

I'm presenting at a conference about gender and AI later this month. The hosting university took the conference website offline, demanding that the organizers change the language and scope. The organizers declined, and are now moving forward with only independent resources. #sociology #academicsky

Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the US. The decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rightsholders.

Get in dorks, we're going protesting. STAND UP FOR SCIENCE. MARCH 7th 12-4pm. DC AND YOUR STATE CAPITALS. Because science is for everyone!!! More information to come.

"Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It turns out that didn't fare any better than "Don't Be Evil."

I’m starting to suspect that the entire field of computer science might have been a mistake…

Some notes on Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” the false authority of LLMs, and why you can’t argue that the author is dead if you’re using AI to reanimate the corpse. mail.cyberneticforests.com/data-prior-t...

If you can read this stuff and say it's not theological, you yourself may be a very deep Believer. Just in the sense of the fish that doesn't know it is soaking wet.

"humans are bad at X too so llms being inaccurate, producing misleading or mediocre output should be okay… even be celebrated" LLMs: regression to the mediocre

The tech bro fascination with eugenics is so on brand. The idea that you could make accurate, actionable predictions from individual genotypes (with all their complex, non-linear interactions) from averaged, linearly modeled population-level genomic statistics is just another big data fantasy

"Researchers trained medical AI models on over 25,000 knee X-rays. They then essentially worked backwards, tasking the deep learning programs to find commonalities that predicted nonsensical traits, such as which knee-owners clearly drank beer or ate refried beans—which is patently absurd."

"There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly" without whom, current sota systems can simply not operate. this is one of the reasons why debates around x-risks that assume autonomy of AI fall flat due to their reductive & unrealistic approachs of what AI is

Friends, this week marks a monumental step forward in my path towards pushing for a greater ecology of accountability in the age of AI. Thrilled to officially announce the AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) @theaial.bsky.social at Trinity College Dublin is launching today, Thursday Nov 28, 2024 aial.ie

"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

1000s of papers on “AI fairness” and this is the actual reality of how algorithms harm people.

Econ department and BU after the college of arts and sciences decides to halt PhD admissions for all social sciences except Econ.

This is the kind of stuff I show undergrads to make multiple correspondence analysis cool.

Grading AI Ethics papers and nearly 40% came back as being heavily AI written. I have a lot of problems with "AI checking" tools but something is going on here. I don't think 40% just asked ChatGPT to write it for them. I suspect it's Grammerly suggestions. Anyone have experience navigating this?

Dusting off my best work