New essay: humanoid robots are being normalized as interfaces for public control. A border crossing isn’t a neutral test environment, it’s a governance space. On the “first body in" pitch, interchangeable robot bodies, and how coercion gets reframed as optimization. jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

Ring has done this before. They partner with cops, get backlash, withdraw a bit, wait for it to calm down, and then go right back to working with cops. Don't believe this spin. www.theverge.com/news/878447/...

New essay: humanoid robots are being normalized as interfaces for public control. A border crossing isn’t a neutral test environment, it’s a governance space. On the “first body in" pitch, interchangeable robot bodies, and how coercion gets reframed as optimization. jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

Every business right now thinks its such an essential part of your life that you'd give them anything to keep using it and brother I am here to tell you I don't need a chat app that bad

Also: Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics” are fiction, a narrative device for his scifi world-building. The Laws are a literary constraint, not a real world robotics. science, or AI safety framework

To everyone just now finding out Isaac Asimov was rather famously a sex pest: He's been gone 34 years now, you can handle this truth, I believe in you

Anyway, should anyone like to hear the long form version I’ll be giving it in Hartford, CT next week. www.hartford.edu/unotes/2026/...

Watermelon is the best Jolly Rancher flavor. Green Apple tries hard, though.

BREAKING: The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

"Letters in the Mouth" is about genAI responsibility at the org level: delegated language that persists. When orgs deploy genAI designed to stay responsive and authoritative, they own the duty to set limits and stop, not hide behind disclaimers after harm. jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

"I don't know that I've seen before the president of the United States attempt to build a white supremacist army within the government....that is new, and I don't know what else to call it." Ta-Nehisi Coates joins @timmiller.bsky.social on today's Bulwark Podcast:

"Letters in the Mouth" is about genAI responsibility at the org level: delegated language that persists. When orgs deploy genAI designed to stay responsive and authoritative, they own the duty to set limits and stop, not hide behind disclaimers after harm. jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

New essay (no ads or paywall): "Letters in the Mouth." On generative AI, delegated action, and what happens when responsibility withdraws while systems keep speaking. The golem still helps explain failure when creator custody erodes. jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

ICE agents are America's failures, basically indistinguishable from lazy school shooters, losers who want to play Call of Duty on our streets against people who can't fight back. They have unlimited ammo and toss tear gas like they're pressing L1. They have to be defunded and jailed. All of them.

New essay (no ads or paywall): "Letters in the Mouth." On generative AI, delegated action, and what happens when responsibility withdraws while systems keep speaking. The golem still helps explain failure when creator custody erodes. jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

OpenAI's new "Education for Countries" program, which "will work with governments and university consortia to bring AI into education systems", is based on, well, a farcically self-serving understanding of "the history of technology" and an even worse view of education 🤢 openai.com/index/edu-fo...

"your AI tool is dangerous" is a wild take from the nonconsensual pornography guy

A reminder that the sun has hobbies, and one of them is world disruption.

It’s been reported locally, but I’m not sure how much national notice this has gotten. As part of this invasion by shithead goons, they are putting ICE agents in jetbridges and other parts of the airport at Minneapolis-Saint Paul. If you are flying Delta via MSP, you are putting yourself at risk.

Consider: Visa restrictions shaping who participates in AI research. Defunding of scholarship on algorithmic discrimination. Federal preemption of state AI laws. This is not deregulation.

Golem restock! Just finished painting a batch of rainbow golems, so they're finally back in stock after we sold out during Hanukkah. :D I'll be working on restocking the other variants over the next week! Question: would y'all want the option to add a keyring if it cost $3-5?

Beyond that, I return to @jgcarpenter.com, who I think had a smart formulation for platform policy workers on the right balance to take with AI videos that mock the dead. indicator.media/p/digital-de...

That doesn't mean nothing's changed. As @jgcarpenter.com told me "AI impersonation shifts desecration from depicting someone to ventriloquizing them [...] That’s not just cruelty; it’s an authored performance that borrows the authority of the person’s likeness.”

I joined the @cyborggoddess.bsky.social podcast to talk about how cultural assumptions, power, and interpretation shape the way robots are built, deployed, and understood, and what that reveals about us. cyborggoddess.opened.ca/podcast/s4e6...

Every person on Bluesky should know: * Every post on Bluesky is PUBLIC forever * Every post on Bluesky is archived by ICE, NSA, and many other agencies * Even if you delete a post, it’s already been captured * Judges don’t care if you were “kidding” or being ironic www.404media.co/the-200-site...

Behind schedule, but S4E6 of Cyborg Goddess is up!! I interview @jgcarpenter.com about her fascinating research into our relationships with robots, and something she calls 'the human gaze'. Get it here, or wherever you get your podcasts. #feminism #robots cyborggoddess.opened.ca/podcast/s4e6...

He seems to know nothing about fiction or science. Wrote about the problem here: Orga is not Mecha: How Literal Readings of Fiction are Damaging the World

Giving this talk in Feb: www.humanities.utoronto.ca/events/where...

Every tech CEO misunderstands their so-called favorite stories, especially the parts about restraint, ethics, collective governance, and not having emperors.

Are we doing starter packs again? Include me in your niche #AI-critical, #mediaTheory, #HAI, #ethics, #UXR lineups, please and thank you. <3

When visibility in enforcement encounters arrives late, selectively, or through informal recordings rather than accountable systems, it doesn’t clarify what happened, it narrows who gets to interpret it.. "Visibility Without Consent" (no paywall): jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

Enforcement footage doesn’t just document events, it structures interpretation. It invites viewer interpretation without context, shifting scrutiny onto recorded people while institutions remain opaque. "Visibility Without Consent" (no paywall): jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

Note that the sudden rise in "nudification" is not an advance in the tech itself, it's a design choice by Musk / xAI. LMMs trained with nude images have been able to do this for years; Grok is the first time a major company has chosen to enhance this functionality for users rather than restrict it.

“She sparkled.” May her memory be a blessing.

When visibility in enforcement encounters arrives late, selectively, or through informal recordings rather than accountable systems, it doesn’t clarify what happened, it narrows who gets to interpret it.. "Visibility Without Consent" (no paywall): jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

Enforcement footage doesn’t just document events, it structures interpretation. It invites viewer interpretation without context, shifting scrutiny onto recorded people while institutions remain opaque. "Visibility Without Consent" (no paywall): jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...” A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today. lithub.com/renee-nicole...

This @iethics.bsky.social panel conversation on autonomous weapons is up! Accountability, human oversight limits, & consequences of lethal decisions delegated to systems optimized for speed. These questions are no longer theoretical, & not confined to military contexts. youtu.be/3lJhGbVIjSg?...

Walz: "I saw an individual at the scene identify themselves as medical personnel and ask to provide aid, and an ICE agent said 'I do not care.' That lack of humanity was chilling to me."

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant “This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

On innercalling w/ Dr. Victoria Ranade, we unpacked how AI is designed to engage us, why it shouldn’t be treated as therapy or emotional counsel, and what we lose when we outsource understanding and decision-making to systems that optimize engagement, not wellbeing. open.spotify.com/episode/5GhJ...

ChatGPT Health doesn’t replace healthcare; it consolidates health data and inserts an always-on AI interpretive layer between patients and care. New post (no paywall), "ChatGPT Health and the Expansion of Infrastructural Intimacy": jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

ChatGPT Health doesn’t replace healthcare; it consolidates health data and inserts an always-on AI interpretive layer between patients and care. New post (no paywall), "ChatGPT Health and the Expansion of Infrastructural Intimacy": jgcarpenter.com/blog.html?bl...

Minnesota Public Radio says today marks the first and only shooting and homicide in Minneapolis in the year 2026

“Meet without meeting” and “be in two places at once” are not worker benefits. They’re managerial fantasies that erase absence, rest, and limits while keeping output intact. This is a labor fantasy where workers never fully log off, never fully leave, and never quite stop meeting even when absent.

Her name is Renee Nicole Good. May her memory be a blessing.

It's not just that the new ICE agents are untrained and incompetent, it's that the people drawn to this job in this environment are people who get off on cruelty. It's a position tailor made for sadists. Kind, decent people are not applying.

NEW: Border Patrol agents used Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and a plainclothes videographer to covertly record protesters and arrests in Evanston, I found. It's "disturbing," @epic.org told me. Also @stopspyingny.bsky.social, @eff.org, @aclu.org of Illinois.

NEWS: In a heartbreaking video, after ICE shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, a woman who was in the same SUV cries out: “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do." “We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head,” the distraught woman sobs. www.advocate.com/news/minneso...