Today programme really not covering itself in glory this morning with just how credulous it’s being about AI industry claims (not least because it’s given the guest editor spot to Mustafa Suleyman who runs an AI company)

Chris Philp repeatedly repeatedly and exclusively referring to Alaa Abd El-Fattah as “this scumbag” while calling for him to be stripped of his citizenship on the Today programme feels like a deliberate and dumb coarsening of rhetoric

"This is obvious, blatant and unlawful union-busting," says Foxglove's Stella Caram - important piece on TikTok by @mickeycarroll.bsky.social news.sky.com/story/tiktok...

'Dame @chionwurah.bsky.social , chair of the science and technology select committee, said she was "deeply" concerned about the cuts. "There is a real risk to the lives of TikTok users," she said.'

Really proud @foxglovelegal.bsky.social is supporting a group of moderators to sue TikTok after they were served redundancy notice a week before they were due to vote on unionisation news.sky.com/story/tiktok...

NHS exploring integrating AI into mental health care. Hopefully they're not planning to use the same AI that helps people develop psychosis and contributes to their suicide. www.ukauthority.com/articles/nhs...

Good news: earlier this year, we called on the European Commission to act over Google's theft of independent journalists' work to fuel 'AI Overviews'. Today they announced that they've opened an investigation: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

When asked for comment on the latest lawsuit alleging their product resulted in psychosis and death, an OpenAI spokesperson said, “Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to take.”

Now I don’t want to sound alarmist, but this sounds bad and I don’t think that chatbots should do that www.thetimes.com/us/news-toda...

EC has formally opened an investigation into Google for using publishers’ content without meaningful consent or compensation for its AI Overviews feature. Big win for civil society orgs like @foxglovelegal.bsky.social who’ve been asking for this. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

€120m is a pittance to Musk, and will spark exactly the same backlash from the US regime as a much higher fine against X. Why wouldn't the EC go harder?

increasingly desperately important to block american dark money coming in to fund fascist parties in the U.K. to do SLAPP suits

i don’t think we need to trade off two categories of harm against each other. AI can be bad in two ways simultaneously

Sundar Pichai on Today prog says Google’s UK operations will be “95% carbon-free in 2026”. Complete nonsense. Google will *buy lots of renewable energy* in 2026 but that doesn’t add more to the grid, it’s just greenwashing. Google’s new data centres are increasing the amount of gas we burn.

me and my friends would’ve killed Alexa+ with hammers i can tell you that much

monster energy has always been the anti-monopolist’s and anti-fascist’s drink of choice

One undercovered aspect of the Epstein emails is the work on reputation management. Working to ensure your Wiki article doesn’t mention anything untoward, and is instead “pretty tame” is well known in my industry but I don’t think its ubiquity or importance is broadly recognised.

well i for one am sure glad that they mitigated the serious mental health issues with their product in a way that they can be certain will have worked in the 3 months between this young man dying by suicide and sam altman claiming it's all fine now actually www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

'now that we have mitigated the serious mental health problems' - Sam Altman, 2 months after, and 24 days before, lawsuits claiming his product has killed someone's son www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

New polling: majority of Europeans in 5 countries (inc UK) agree that data centres should only be built if new renewable energy sources power them. beyondfossilfuels.org/2025/10/27/e...

“Amazon hides its water use” was a negative headline imagined in a strategy document about the consequences of Amazon hiding its water use. Now it’s the headline they’re getting, because Amazon hides its water use. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

UK's proposed AI age estimation tools "completely unaccountable," warns Foxglove's @tmsqrll.bsky.social: www.context.news/ai/uk-use-of...

NOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN ABLE TO MITIGATE THE SERIOUS MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES i am going to lose my entire fucking mind

is it slightly concerning that the most amoral people you have ever met in your life all seem to be simultaneously gravitating towards “responsible AI” like a school of terrible fish

Some other nuggets of complete insanity from this story: - This data centre is planned to be 5 gigawatts. That's 1/6 of the National Grid's *peak demand* added by a single project - It 'would pave the way for a British ChatGPT' - sorry, wtf?? www.thetimes.com/business-mon...

'will Teesside be developed into a 5GW (!) Data Centre or a Blue Hydrogen Plant' is a real Alien vs Predator situation huh www.thetimes.com/business-mon...

initial take on “chatfishing”: wow PUAs in the fucking mud, turns out women want to be listened to 2nd take: maybe PUA market isn’t dead - you turn up to a date who expects you to be witty & empathetic but you don’t have those skills because you chatfished 3rd take: who the fuck finds chatGPT witty

‘My Government Must Quit Twitter and Call Out Elon Musk’s Far-Right Hate’ Labour MP Noah Law explains why it’s time for Keir Starmer to start treating the billionaire X owner as the ‘foreign extremist’ he now is bylinetimes.com/2025/09/15/m...

“free speech” is just an empty signifier at this point and has been for at least 20 years (i am not a historian please don’t be mad if its way longer i am only a man)

“It’s alarming that the Environment Agency has been handing out licences for datacentres to extract hundreds of millions of litres of water from the environment – while failing to keep track of the total.” observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

finally some good fuckin news www.ft.com/content/8f8b...

farewell Peter Kyle, I will miss coming up with new and imaginative ways to say you’re getting your wallet inspected by big tech

Judge Mehta had a real opportunity to make significant change to the market here, and he’s basically blown it. I doubt we’ll see a similar chance to break up the monopolies for a long time.

We’ve come a long way since the reasonably strong response to the Southport race riots, huh

let the body keep the score let the body keep the score let the body keep the score let the body keep the SCOOOOOOOOOOOOORE

this isn’t even the correct version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory for the uk!! “they’re importing voters” is the US version!!!! my man can’t even keep his white supremacist conspiracy bollocks straight

On the 30th August. Criminal.

This was entirely expected. The vast increase in energy demand that coming from data centres cannot be satisfied by renewables, or even existing grid infrastructure. So they are building new fossil fuel on-site generation. It's madness.

chatGPT will report you to the police but somehow OpenAI isn't capable of intervening when someone is an active suicide risk??

working on a thesis that the earnestness of AI chatbots is fundamentally antithetical to the bri'ish mind

"Future historians will surely debate at great length whether it was economics or media culture or simple incompetence that led the Starmer government’s moral compass to break. But they surely won’t debate who, out of the Taliban or the people who fled from their regime, were actually the baddies."

The question here, as with other cases of tech-enabled suicide, isn't so much 'did ChatGPT kill this boy?', it's 'why did he engage with ChatGPT to the exclusion of anyone/thing else?'. And the answer - in my view - is that ChatGPT, as w/ nearly all social media today, is designed to be addictive.

getting to the age now where seeing anyone posting a smiling photo with a parent on the gram prompts a quick caption read to make sure the parent hasn’t died

i think the problem with age verification discourse is mostly just americabrain: american journalists simply cannot understand that other countries' governments are not acting or legislating for the same reasons as theirs

TikTok now planning to lay off its UK-based moderators after doing so in Germany. They claim they're replacing w/ AI, but we all know AI can't moderate sufficiently well to do that. More than likely they'll offshore it to places w/ cheaper labour, like Meta before them. www.ft.com/content/d277...

The UK Government is forcing through a huge expansion of data centres without considering the serious cost in terms of water, energy and climate emissions. Foxglove and @globalactionplan.bsky.social are fighting back: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

if the mood sours on genAI, and the capital expenditure faucets are turned off, what happens to all the currently planned hyperscaler data centres? is the plan that we just let them sit as glorified shacks, totems to a time of untrammelled AI optimism?

we should absolutely co-opt the platforms that fascists have built for themselves to attempt to reach their audiences. but letting fascists have access to *your* audience, whoever that might be, is silly

Along with @globalactionplan.bsky.social we @foxglovelegal.bsky.social have launched a challenge to Rayner’s decision to overrule the local planning authority & push through a data centre at Woodlands Park without any need for an Environmental Impact Assessment. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

google has delightfully informed me that the Data (Use and Access) Bill appears in Season 8, Episode 254 of that long-running TV show, 'House of Lords'