“The Al is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you”

The fight against AI has to involve addressing the societal problems that AI is being used as a shitty bandaid for. Pointing out how it sucks is not always very compelling when the status quo sucks too.

So we’ve been cooking up some thoughts on Gen AI at @amnesty.org and I’m ecstatic to finally see it out in the world! Our 🗝️ conclusion: standalone gen AI systems, built on unlawful web scraping, constitute mass invasions of privacy by design & should be prohibited www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

It is so hard to argue against AI at work when you work at a very corporate job, because you end up quickly running into the brick wall that is Corporate Logic

We are going to win! This stuff can and will be brought to a halt. None of it is inevitable. Anthropic cannot afford to slow down. It has to grow to at least $100bn a year in revenue or it doesn’t have a hope in hell of paying its compute bills. Same for clammy little Altman.

As a science fiction writer I really fucking resent tech bros for ruining the phrase "artificial intelligence." 80 years of it being all about cool androids and interesting computers destroyed by five years of "Spicy autocorrect making everything shittier for money." NEVER FORGIVE.

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world 😍 airesistlist.org

Today @dairinstitute.bsky.social is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub. The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. labor.dair-institute.org

I saw someone referring to the booing of commencement speakers talking about AI as a tantrum from students who don’t understand technology. That made me think that I bet machine breaking was also perceived as a tantrum. Anyway, here’s some thoughts about the Luddites.

Here's an example of a linguistic fact that I think should be straightforward and obvious when pointed out, but which a lot of people seem surprisingly resistant to: Colloquial Latin never died. In fact it's spoken extremely widely across the world. 🧵

I did the same thing every time someone who I recognized came on 🤣 I annoyed my spouse being like "ooh I've read that person's work!" constantly

folx, I’ve been working on AI "ethics" for almost a decade now & hate to tell you there’s no such thing as "ethical AI" the only "ethical principle" that works is regulating the shit out of the industry & to take back control of our autonomy, fundamental rights, freedoms & right to exist w/out AI

The stink of desperation is so strong.

There is a big difference between "people who are 'scared' of AI and don't want to learn new things" and "people who have deep moral objections to AI's underpinnings, impacts, and the systems of power behind it." It's wild to me that institutions pushing AI adoption don't seem to understand this.

It's surprising how quickly Sanders has been taken the existential risk bait. It took less than a year for him to start doing events with Hinton and Tegmark. He should perhaps pause to consider how groups like FLI are so well-resourced, and what political function x-risk narratives serve.

What goes through my head every time I hear nonsense claims about imminent AGI

No public service (education, health care, public transit, postal service etc.) should be run like a business. Business only serves investors. Public services serve the people. All of them.

I have a lot of conversations with random people about AI and this is REALLY common.

One of the most successful things the tech industry has done since the 1990s is lead the citizenry to believe that because a technology can do something means that something can’t be legislated away. And since the 2010s they used their lobbying powers to defang the legislators who know otherwise.

I've been thinking a lot about "AI literacy" and how I think a lot of people who know a whole lot about AI (maybe even build it) don't have it. (At least based on what I think AI literacy should mean.) I know a lot of people think it means prompt engineering, but I'll propose instead...

As soon as you defend a product with "it isn't useless" you're doing the thing the maker wants you to do. NOTHING is useless. It's the lowest bar for anything that exists, including a rock. What you're looking for is "it is the best thing that exists for this concrete purpose" then we can talk.

I used to be good at Computer. Now Computer thinks it is good at me. But it actually isn’t??????

It has always struck me as deeply pathetic the way the ultra rich are TERRIFIED of having even slightly less money. Like they can't survive the hardship of having a less fancy private jet. It's just so immature. Grow up and learn to deal with mild inconvenience.

When faced with the exploitive reality of huge AI models, people often react with helplessness, comparing it to other exploitative industries (meat, fashion, etc) that they feel powerless to resist. But AI doesn't yet have society in a stranglehold and we still have the ability to reject it.

Perplexity’s CEO is just the latest tech leader to tell the public their jobs will be sacrificed on the altar of the glorious AI future. It’s a compelling narrative, but it distracts us from the real impact of AI: not to take the human out of the loop, but to take away their power and cut their pay

The desperate campaign to push AI down our throats is just what Nestlé did with baby formula, or Monsanto with patended seeds. Manufactured Intermediation—inserting a corporate tollbooth into a process that used to be self-sustaining, using a low initial barrier to entry to destroy the alternative.

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto https://theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-home-claims-he-was-following-chatgpt-recipe-for-risotto/

you can’t build democracy on a tech stack that is fundamentally anti-democratic

This is the part people don't seem to get. (And I'm not sure what I mean by "people" here, maybe like "in my social media comments saying things like 'humans get things wrong all the time!' or 'LLMs are more accurate every day!'") Many. People. Assume. Accuracy. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...

A cute little icon my friend and I designed to represent the concept of AI for our illustrations and such. It is a (stochastic) parrot puppet bursting out of a black box.

The White House’s new national AI policy framework appears to suggest certain harms are an acceptable cost, writes Sydney Saubestre from New America’s Open Technology Institute. That is a choice—a choice about whose reality gets treated as a policy problem and whose gets treated as an externality.

I recently saw an explanation for why you shouldn't blindly trust the accuracy of genAI (good) but then they said "you should only use AI for questions like 'what is 23°C in F?'". Using an LLM, an INCREDIBLY resource intensive system, to answer something so basic is genuinely horrifying.

Alt headline: "Unsatisfied with lighting money on fire, investors release it into vacuum of space"

I just saw Project Hail Mary and while I really enjoyed it, the way the translation was handled was yet another example of the complexity of language being ignored. It was distracting at moments that should have been emotional!

What is marketed as AI “innovation” is, in practice, a consolidation of global labor hierarchies and a commodification of African knowledge, write Marché Arends and Kathryn Cleary, drawing on their year-long investigation supported by the Pulitzer Center and published by Africa Uncensored.

I hear so much "well now that these products are here, you can't unopen that box" and like, yes, the technology exists, but people underestimate the resources needed. We CAN say no and make more stupid, harmful AI products go the way of Sora.

I have been thinking a lot about the way that a lot of problems with generative AI is that it is trying to do things via the medium of language and language is honestly just a really bad medium for this.

Perhaps it’s been everywhere, but I had not heard the phrase ‘the caring majority’ used before, and it captures something profoundly important. It is a concept that can ground a genuinely new kind of politics.

One of the many, many things genAI destroys is human collaboration. It actively creates loners, guys spinning off into the deep end with literally no one around them to go "hey what the fuck are you talking about" or "hey this sounds like the thing I've been working on" or "check out this book"

I'm no artist, but hopefully this gets the point across. A comic in three panels.

A silly little comic based on the opening section of AI Snake Oil by @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social.

Data labeling is notoriously brutal and underpaid work. Workers sometimes earn as little as a few dollars a day, work under algorithmic management, and, because they’re sometimes trying to train AI what not to do or show, they are often shown graphic, violent, or sexual content for hours at a time.

Does anyone know of any work looking into the way companies advertise data work jobs (specifically to people in the US/Canada/Europe) and if that has changed in the last few years.

the number of people i know -- all of whom should know better -- who are doing exactly this

“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

I'm trying to be less of a perfectionist and post more often, so here is a quick write up of sources I did to help a college student I know whose essay got incorrectly flagged as AI generated by an "AI detector". open.substack.com/pub/aylatayl...

Tech companies act like their products are something out of Star Trek, but they are not and pretending that they are is dangerous. open.substack.com/pub/aylatayl...

Data workers are essential to many AI efforts, but in my experience (on both sides of the equation) most data scientists and ML developers have no idea how to actually work with them. open.substack.com/pub/aylatayl...