War of Attrition as a marketing strategy

FWIW, the jury is still out on Gen AI being good at text summaries. Because it shortens & emphasizes text based on distribution, not meaning, it’s less of a summary (ie, salient points highlighted) than a compression (ie, the most frequently asserted terms in the distribution). Not the same thing!

On delegation in AI agents: “Who really consents when an AI agent clicks? Who steers the choice? Who is accountable when things go wrong?” www.techpolicy.press/when-an-ai-a...

When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦

Colorado’s out of sync

Somebody scraped & shared every song on Spotify, with metadata — a boon for research into music and algorithms, but also, inevitably, what the training data is going to be for every AI music company in 2026. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Tech Policy Press Fellow Ariana Aboulafia highlights the perspectives of four professors teaching at the intersection of disability rights and technology on their experiences under the Trump Administration’s policies targeting higher education, including lost research support and chilled classrooms.

We should frame the drive behind AI music and art not as “making things” but to “see or hear things.” The “creativity” questions are entirely concerns about consumption, and the market impact of individualizing products to a single consumer’s personal desires rather than engaging with other people.

We should frame the drive behind AI music and art not as “making things” but to “see or hear things.” The “creativity” questions are entirely concerns about consumption, and the market impact of individualizing products to a single consumer’s personal desires rather than engaging with other people.

Post-doc positions: "Academic freedom is under pressure today. This requires rescue havens of free research. ... [we] invite early career researchers, whose work is restricted due to political pressure in the USA..." uni-freiburg.de/frias/call-f...

I'm really glad to see mainstream news attention to the problem of chatbots using "I/me" pronouns (there is no "I" there), but also frustrated to see Askell's flat out lie just platformed here. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t... by @kashhill.bsky.social >>

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

Reading "Stop Treating ‘AGI’ as the North-star Goal of AI Research" by Blili-Hamelin et al and particularly struck by this passage: icml.cc/virtual/2025... Short 🧵>>

I’m honestly pretty proud of this paper I wrote about fascism and the AI slop alt right pipeline link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I’ve summed up and contextualized all of these critical AI pieces & more in one place — “From AGI to Workslop: What I Read About AI in 2025.” mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-i-read-...

I've written up a year's worth of my projects including talks, papers, exhibitions, writing and artworks: tracking AI as governance, the politics of noisy channels, puppets, making & unmaking meaning with machines. A good intro to what I'm doing (and how). mail.cyberneticforests.com/some-things-...

Now seems like a good time to restate that I support trans rights unequivocally. Alongside local orgs, I have been donating to this one, which helps trans youth in red states move to states that protect their right to healthcare. www.transyouthequality.org

I know men of the male loneliness crisis demographic & their DoorDash addictions tell me that domestic labor is not their priority. I know it sounds like a joke, but men who aren’t washing sheets are not wishing someone would do it for them, they are thinking there is no reason to wash them.

Last week, hundreds of creative workers amassed at a public hearing for an AI transparency bill to testify how AI was corroding their lives. Days later, Disney cut a deal with OpenAI, and Trump moved to stamp out state AI laws. On art and labor in the age of AI and American authoritarianism:

Zohran: "I mean, think about when you fly.  We have made it such a difficult experience to go through TSA that there's now a financial incentive to sign up for a separate program that can move you through it quicker. We have monetized the dysfunction."

🎓🇪🇸 Fully funded PhD in Digital Humanities at King’s College London The King’s–Ramón Areces Foundation scholarship supports Spanish nationals with full tuition, an annual stipend (£22,780), and research funding. 📅 Deadline: 13 February 2026 #PhDFunding #DigitalHumanities www.kcl.ac.uk/study-legacy...

Gift link to an Interview with the Vanity Fair photographer who took photos of Trump’s staff. I’m struck by his response to the response: “If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it?” wapo.st/49ixYtq

I always said Truth Social’s nuclear fusion expertise was not a good fit for a social media company so this pivot comes as no surprise

Thinking you have a good idea because the LLM said “good idea!” is identical to thinking your gas pump is grateful because it thanked you

Happy to finally launch Disjunctions with an article from the editorial team! Stay tuned for our first issue, which we will start publishing in the new year.

"Generative AI is designed to create things that look real; predictive AI identifies what is real. A misunderstanding that generative systems are retrieving things when they are actually creating them has led to grave consequences"

Gen AI means that half-assed gets you 20% further than it used to, and so we see half-assery five times more often

i'm hiring a postdoc to map the age-verification space and do some audits if you’ve worked in this area, pls apply: aial.ie/hiring/postd... pls share widely

Interpassivity is the new LSD

84 per cent of the AI-generated podcasts from WaPo were not up to journalistic standards, according to its own internal report. The development cycle isn’t wrong, but undermining your brand’s reliability to chase a dream of hallucination-free GAI when nobody knows how to build it is a very bad bet.

I appreciate this: LLMs don’t change anything on their own, but the scientific community’s decisions about how they are applied into current systems of incentives certainly does. Arguably, it’s a technology for over-optimizing to metrics, in ways that render any metric fundamentally useless.

The Sunk-Cost Economy

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.

To encourage innovation, incentivize newsroom staff by not just tying their performance reviews to AI, but also a variety of other technologies, like bullhorns, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, egg whisks, and those cool Daft Punk visor helmets with the scrolling LEDs

84 per cent of the AI-generated podcasts from WaPo were not up to journalistic standards, according to its own internal report. The development cycle isn’t wrong, but undermining your brand’s reliability to chase a dream of hallucination-free GAI when nobody knows how to build it is a very bad bet.

Remember when ye olde Facebook claimed that video got way more engagement and we should all do video? And then it turned out they were counting 3 seconds of watching a video as a "view." 3 seconds is also how long it takes for a video to autoplay and get turned off by an annoyed user.

Every few years there's a bunch of "pivot to video" discourse about how creatives should all start making videos instead of doing text-based work. And every few years we discover again that the supposed "popularity" of video is based on fake audience numbers created by the video platforms.

Mozilla has announced that Firefox will become an AI browser, for some reason.

Vital new scene reporting from Jimmy Wu at Bay Area Current: on the rise of the EA, rationalist, and right-leaning journo/writer scene in the Bay Area. I unwittingly attended one of these happy hours ("writer and publisher meetup!") and met Curtis Yarvin's ex. bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new...

Disagreements about platforms & behaviors often give us X-ray glimpses into who adopts moralist claims & who attempts material analyses. I want to believe that materialist approaches are more effective (in addition to more accurate).

Blaming people for not using a platform is weird, but we should be super clear that even if critical voices were on X en masse, the platform throttles links and deprioritizes content that doesn’t enrage users. Even if you wanted to be there to make a difference, *you could not*.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Honestly thinking there is something wrong with me because I really can’t understand any responses to my posts lately. Might be some high and low context confusion in social media replies: everyone assumes I know their context but I’m sorting through multiple contexts?

Heroic

I've written up a year's worth of my projects including talks, papers, exhibitions, writing and artworks: tracking AI as governance, the politics of noisy channels, puppets, making & unmaking meaning with machines. A good intro to what I'm doing (and how). mail.cyberneticforests.com/some-things-...

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...

Multiple shootings at Brown University. I am so sick of this shit. wapo.st/4iVCRfj

I like this term from Brookings on the need to develop "Relational Infrastructure" as a response to AI "Rather than investing in simulated intimacy, we should ask: What would it look like to invest in relational infrastructure—systems, spaces, and supports that nurture genuine human connection?"

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

“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.”