“It is a curious fact that some of the very people who are ostensibly convinced of the inevitability of AI nonetheless lack the confidence you would think accompanied such conviction & instead seem bent on exerting their power & wealth to make certain that AI is imposed on society.”

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In this short essay, @lmsacasas.bsky.social provides a useful checklist for recognizing the Borg complex, and for deconstructing “manufactured inevitability.” A sort of guide for responding to the “banality of evil” as wonderfully captured by Arendt. open.substack.com/pub/theconvi...

Thought for the day… c/o @lmsacasas.bsky.social

It’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Everyone needs to see this. I can’t wait for Karoline Leavitt to call it “refreshing honesty, free from the performative faux-modesty of the radical woke left and their lack of transparency.”

Colossal Fragment by Lionel Smit Halter Ranch Winery Paso Robles, California Photo by Neil Turkewitz

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My family is still recovering from Thanksgiving!

The bill needed 60 votes to pass, but only four Republicans broke with their party and voted to extend the subsidies that millions rely on: Josh Hawley, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan, and Susan Collins, resulting in a total of just 51 votes in favor. trib.al/6MSW0cH

Racism is literally a national security threat…

“Let it be known, if you target Americans—anywhere in the world—you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you & ruthlessly kill you.” —Pete Hegseth Hegseth added: “Targeting Americans is the sole prerogative of this Administration.” /s

These dudes think they’re brave & patriotic. This is Trump’s legacy—the cultivation of cruelty and calling it valor.

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“You are no hero, you abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again,” Judge Matthew Barrett told her. ⚖️🔥⚖️🔥⚖️🔥⚖️🔥⚖️🔥⚖️

Some held out hope for a correction. They lament that what's been lost is the human touch; the copywriters who take the time to learn what a small business is really about, to develop a unique voice suited to a client. AI, meanwhile, is homogenous and dull. But for now, things are dire.

When the AI boom began, copywriters were singled out as one of the jobs most vulnerable to AI. Now, three years later, I wanted to hear from workers on the frontlines of the industry, to hear what had actually taken place on the ground. For many, it was even worse than they'd feared.

“LLMs are… a reflection of the ideal of the purely ‘boundaried’ human: isolated within language, with no capacity to be touched or altered by challenging experiences, & free from any capacity for, obligation, or participation in, the emotionally exhausting lives of the people it engages with.”

Your periodic reminder of the observations made by the now deceased OpenAI whistleblower, Suchir Balaji: “None of the four factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data.”

“Trump’s EO—presented as ‘Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI’—isn’t a national standard at all. It’s a blueprint for stripping states of their power, protecting Big Tech from accountability, & centralizing AI authority in the hands of unelected political operatives & venture capitalists.”

“It clarifies the AI © war isn’t about keeping iconic characters out of models anymore. It’s about finding the right price to keep them in.” WTF @wired.com? Did you really say “© war?” You know this is 2025 right? Moreover, for large corp’s, this was always about price. For many artists, it’s not.

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Don’t go quietly into the night. Resist. Forcefully. Unapologetically. Loudly. @garymarcus.bsky.social

A truly embarrassing article. All those words w/o a single mention of the theft of creators’ works at the ❤️ of AI—& burying the lede—“Americans believe AI will worsen our abilities to think creatively, form meaningful relationships with other people, make difficult decisions, & solve problems.”

Helps some people compose emails faster though, so impossible to say if it’s bad or good.

I usually start the day by trying to spread happiness, but this morning I’m heartbroken. After 14 years together, we lost the sweetest dog ever. Our world got less soft at a time we need softness the most. But as my very dear brother says—“how lucky we are, to know the company of animals.” 🕊️

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This 👇🏽

If the President wins this case, consumers will suffer severe harm, as corporations will be able to use political influence with an admin to insulate themselves from enforcement for any activity, however harmful, & companies an admin dislikes could be more likely to be targets of enforcement.

Question: what would be even worse than Netflix acquiring Warner? Answer: 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

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This is perfect. What are we doing with AI? We’re not outsourcing work—we’re outsourcing joy. Outsourcing personal development. Outsourcing the journey and pretending we will arrive at the same destination.

A marvelous tour d’horizon from @eryk.bsky.social about the various strands of critical thinking (i.e. hype-free) about AI. Huge thanks Eryk for doing this. Very helpful. Here’s one of my favorite bits.

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“For me, the purpose of doing this work is mostly to act as a provocation and give people examples of how you can refuse this stuff, to furnish one’s imaginary for what a politics of refusal could look like.” @tega.bsky.social @404media.co

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"When there’s no war, you aren’t committing war crimes when you kill people indiscriminately. You’re just a straight-up murderer."

This by @prisonculture.bsky.social is spot on. And I’d add that not only is inaction a comfortable default, but there are many companies actively selling “learned helplessness” to cultivate the appearance of inevitability & the futility of resistance—most notably AI companies & their VC backers.

“The @chicagotribune.com alleges that Perplexity’s technology unlawfully scrapes & reproduces its articles, presenting them in summarized forms that deprive the newspaper of traffic & revenue.” And today the @nytimes.com filed their own, similar, complaint against Perplexity, also focused on RAG.

“Perplexity uses our content to power its product through a process called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time.” @nytimes.com

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Part of me hopes that Trump will give Sacks what he wants on preemption of state laws on AI safety. It would spectacularly backfire & effectively preempt the possibility of a Trump aligned politician from ever holding office again. …perchance to dream.

Some thoughts about AI governance and learning from our past failures with internet governance. We all need to wake up, reject the learned helplessness that Silicon Valley is selling, & demand the kind of accountability needed to construct a world more in line with our humanity.

“Academic freedom in a democracy dies not through troops taking direct control of campus, but in thousands of bureaucratic changes and risk-averse decisions – each justified as temporary, each rationalised as necessary.”

Stop the internet…we have a winner! 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

This is amazing! Brava @ellecordova.bsky.social (But I must admit that I now live in fear of a hyphenated life)

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“one of the few clear intuitions I have about our current technological milieu: that the arc of artificial intelligence bends toward demoralization.” one of my favorite writers/thinkers reemerges out of the wilderness. @lmsacasas.bsky.social, I missed you.