“Misuse”

I write about this in the book. Increasingly, the proposition from these companies is “let us surveil you constantly.” That’s it! That’s the deal. In return you get the (supposed) benefit of a machine that “knows” you, whatever that’s supposed to mean. finance.yahoo.com/technology/a...

💀 Pygmalion displacement 💀 doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Of course AI does this for businesses; it’s what businesses already do while pretending not to do it.

Is there truly no way of making image recognition assistive technologies for the vision impaired, without having them built and deployed by the creepiest, most viciously abusive pervert-enabling company to ever exist? Can we not imagine there may be another option here

Just straight up running Doomer commercials now.

and for what it's worth, my work does ask people to ask those questions, e.g. bsky.app/profile/oliv...

always blame the computer dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

It's George Lucas, guys.

"First one is free" is always the sign of an ethical business model.

absolutely nope, but "free" for a year and then what?

No.

Designers talk a big game about "empathy" for users. But empathy without respect is nothing more than pity. As Big Tech goes all-in on AI to accelerate its feature pipelines, the disrespect for users that's baked into these systems naturally scales up with it. Now it has reached the breaking point.

steer-by-wire really shouldn't be a marketable feature for a car

Yes, and I've been talking about this for a long time. I also think the fissures are like an onion. Peel back the first layer and it fractally divides academics along the simpler "do you use AI?" to the correlationist "do you think the way things look and the way things are in essence overlap?" 1/

😬

This is poised to become a far bigger problem as companies promote always on, always watching devices as a path to a more optimized you.

“OpenAI is hiring a dedicated product manager in San Francisco to build experiences for families, caregivers, and older adults across its products.”

jony ive vs openai prediction strengthens

this is interesting but i'm reluctant to get very attached to these analytical methods. a lot of computing researchers live for puzzles; if you tell them LLM outputs are identifiable by certain rhetorical cliches or structural tendencies, they'll work the puzzle until they make a system that doesn't

People like to assert that we are in a post-shame world, but widespread and vocal disapproval of anti-social behavior still has an effect. It may not deter the worst people, but it might prevent widespread adoption.

Please consider not saying that some AI models or some statistical models are good, useful, beneficial, whatever else positive, in science if it's not your research area. It's ok not to know things. It's ok not to both side things. It's ok to ask colleagues who are experts.

Gonna reference @lukestark.bsky.social like I always do. Facial recognition is the “plutonium of ai.” There’s no “benign” use, particularly where Facebook is involved.

well, really > More than 130,000 American veterans are legally blind and will be eligible for Ray-Ban Meta glasses. about.fb.com/news/2026/06...

Ooh this one maybe even tops the other in arrogance 😎 bsky.app/profile/phil...

> Meta’s AI glasses have a growing reputation as a creepy technology. The company hopes to change that opinion by announcing an update that will disable the camera if the LED light that indicates the glasses are recording has been tampered with. techcrunch.com/2026/07/08/m...

> Meta’s AI glasses have a growing reputation as a creepy technology. The company hopes to change that opinion by announcing an update that will disable the camera if the LED light that indicates the glasses are recording has been tampered with. techcrunch.com/2026/07/08/m...

You can't tell the world you use AI for *just this small thing* without contributing to the legitimacy for the whole AI industry. You also can't use AI for *just this small thing* and think that you won't become the next *just this small thing*.

While I don't disagree obviously that we need to learn from this, the fact we've done it before within AI & related fields & generally with tobacco / petroleum means we have to start planning how we will shift the material conditions to make learning possible now. We must start excavation now. 1/

Pervert glasses that record sometimes are the incremental step to pervert glasses that record all the time.

A quick thought on whether there's less 'need' for greenwashing in the lets-not-mention-climate era

When asking AI to edit changes the meaning of the text. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

what's the point

I have a foolproof way to make sure that your papers contain absolutely no fake references . . . . . read the papers you cite.

Given Nigel Farage is always in the news and resigned today to trigger a by-election and whatever else... Here's something to heal our psyche about his previous party UKIP and how (trust me watch it) they really "just want nothing everywhere" www.dailymotion.com/video/x5vzbk0 This will heal you

“Beginning on July 20, all eyewear or headwear that contains cameras, microphones or other recording technology will not be allowed inside any Unified Court System facilities, according to a memo from the Office of Court Administration.”

People really underestimate the danger the "Effective Altruism" movement is to our global political landscape. With all the money they have access to they get to buy seats and every table where bigger narratives are formed pushing their inhumane politics.

Every global "Tech4Good" event, every meeting about digital "souvereignity", every summit about innovation has EA folks there poisoning the conversation with their eugenicist, corporatist, colonialist drivel. And politics is eating it up.

The only way to make slop seem somewhat valuable is to reduce ability for people to feel an imbalance in the value to cost ratio. Enterprise SaaS is THE BEST way to do that.

New preprint! So honoured to have worked with Ishani Ray on providing vital critique on "AI literacy" & correctives for those interested in understanding why "just use the newest version of an LLM" is nonsense Contra Literacy-Laundering: Mechanistic Critical AI Literacy doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 1/

Disclosure Day was like watching a Steven Spielberg UI component library

the engineering around this is actually very interesting but the people responsible for it don’t talk about it bc it would break the illusion and the illusion is what sells

I also like how funding quite a few smaller movies to see if one of them can become a breakaway success... doesn't need "AI." Studios could just do that–in fact, *have* done that in the past before this age of over-optimized IP mega-blockbusters.

llms only “exist” to give one reply at a turn you: x llm: y then the whole process starts over. there is no continuity. each reply is 100% fresh. the context of your previous “conversation” is included, hidden from you, in every request you make. continuity is an illusion

> studios should take the $100 million they spend on a single film and put it toward 50 films, in order to increase their output and their chances of getting a hit Plausible as an enterprise subscription, marketed as an employee salve-as-a-service. techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/r...

Any product which is not designed for an *anchoring* purpose is doomed to chase revenue how ever it can. Your *just this small thing* which AI seems helpful for is an accident.

a product taking up space (in the abstract) nudges us to consider how much we need, or want, it. SaaS products are a perfect evasion of any sense of taking up space.

this guy is the co-founder of Airbnb

A random selection of pencil drawings for sale. All are either £200 or less. I’d humbly suggest that these are criminally good value for money, but I’m not sure it’s my place to say so. #F1 #WEC #GT3 #Aviation #pleaseRP