“(T)he way someone makes the argument – how nice they look, how erudite they sound, how polite they seem – has long taken precedent over the actual argument itself… as long as the tone is cheerful, there's no need to examine the ugliness of the words.” campaign-trails.ghost.io/the-white-ci...

New, w/ @mulchy.bsky.social & @djbyrnes1.bsky.social: ICE shot & killed an immigrant in the Chicago suburbs yesterday. Then they immediately gave a misleading account of events. Chicago erupted in chaos and a father who lived here for decades is dead. This is what really happened:

The ELSI model is a great paradigm to adopt moving forward. I wonder if adoption could be further catalyzed by identifying reactive interventions, like the Data Workers' Inquiry, that give voice to those experiencing AI-related harms. This work seems like a natural foundation worth building on.

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Oh one other thing. Google "imperial boomerang." Just trust me. It's relevant.

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

BREAKING: Gov. JB Pritzker says the Trump administration has sent the Texas National Guard to Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago, awaiting orders to deploy to Chicago. Trump administration officials will target Mexican Independence Day (Sept. 16) celebrations. @wttw.bsky.social

“Ghassemi and her MIT colleagues found that AI systems were more likely to leave female patients untreated.”

We need to know what humans do before we argue that machines can do it just the same. There can’t be AI literacy without a literacy in being human: how we make meaning in work and life, distinguishing the artificial from the imaginary from the true. mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...

Oh good, more luxury surveillance tools (as @hypervisible.blacksky.app calls them) to smash as if they were 19th century power looms

A cognitively impaired New Jersey man grew infatuated with a Meta chatbot originally created in partnership with celebrity influencer Kendall Jenner. His fatal attraction shines a light on Meta's guidelines for its AI chatbots reut.rs/45DQIRj @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social

TL;DR: A significant cybersecurity breach of the US Courts records system has been revealed, following an attack discovered over a month ago, with details of the exposure and responsible parties still murky.

Science fiction teaches technology can't solve our problems, only enable better/worse solutions with major tradeoffs. Unfortunately, us fans have a bad history of focusing on all the cool technology, missing what authors are trying to tell us about technology. Broken Earth trilogy adaptation when?

This story is pretty wild. Sources suggest Microsoft execs in US are concerned Israel-based employees, some of whom are reservists or veterans of the IDF’s Unit 8200 (aka eavesdropping unit), were not “fully transparent” about IDF’s use of Microsoft products in recent review

A “woke-free” AI plan is not neutral; it is a blueprint for perpetuating the inequities the US has long struggled to overcome, writes Danielle Adrianna Davis, Esq., Director of Technology Policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years. Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

🤖 Wow! Illinois just banned generative AI for therapy! Notably, it appears *the model itself* is banned from portraying itself as a therapist, or else *the model* will be fined....?? I have thoughts. 🧵 idfpr.illinois.gov/content/dam/...

The civil service can not recover from this without legal and criminal consequences for Trump, Musk and Republican members of Congress who let it happen. A couple “good” election cycles won’t cut it.

Statement from members of Standing Together For Nutrition Consortium on Gaza, Sudan, S. Sudan, & Yemen. "Widespread starvation is deliberately used as a weapon of war...These famines are not only claiming lives today, but they are also inflicting irreversible intergenerational trauma and damage."

I don't know if this is the way. But our lack of a collective coordinated response is allowing people who hate knowledge to slowly kill higher ed.

💫 Just out! A tour de force by my colleague @olivia.science, new paper 📝: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? 🧮 ⏰ 🧠 Keywords: AI; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; ANN; technology; cognition; human-centred AI Link to the paper on arXiv: lnkd.in/e9nHGkMK 1/n

Worth noting this is backed up by a large-scale randomized control trial testing this hypothesis in Chicago, published in 2014: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

B'tselem, today: "[T]he unequivocal conclusion [is] that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. www.btselem.org/publications...

Anyone compare the entire budget of Arts & Humanities versus the Department of Biology, alone? Hard time seeing why you'd even try to balance your budget by cutting programs that cost so little, unless you went on a STEM infrastructure spending spree that you now have to justify. Oh wait...

The White House released its AI Action plan this morning. We know where it came from: straight from Big Tech. But there’s another path available to us: we and over 100 other orgs called for a People’s AI Action Plan. Read it here: peoplesaiaction.com apnews.com/article/trum...

The report highlights "the need to establish...bottom-up shared governance to guide decisions around [AI in higher ed]" & "fostering solidaristic strategies" across higher ed, industrial sectors, civil society & grassroots organizations. Full report here: www.aaup.org/reports-publ... 8/9

Today, the AAUP released a new report, "Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions." The report calls for policies that prioritize economic security, faculty working & student learning conditions as AI tech accelerates. www.aaup.org/news/new-rep... 🧵1/9

BIG NEWS: After a long investigation we have uncovered that Axon's Draft One--a program that uses genAI to write police reports based on body-worn camera audio--is *designed* not to retain the data on which parts were written by an officer and which parts were written by AI. A looming disaster.

A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology.

Strong evidence for a captured apex court. Compiled by the excellent Adam Bonica.

E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

US Citizen detained by ICE: Clearly it didn't matter I was a citizen, or a veteran, or that I identified who I was. They ignored everything I said, and they broke my window and they dragged me out. I let them know that I was a veteran and I wasn't doing anything wrong, I'm just trying to get to work

Supposedly this is part of a bid for the U.S. to beat China in the AI race. Ironically, regulating the content and “political bias” of AI is exactly what China has already been doing with their AI laws.

NEWS: Trump's cuts to NPR, PBS and foreign aid clear Congress House gives final passage by a vote of 216-213. The Senate passed it yesterday 51-48. With Republican votes only. Democrats all voted NO. This now goes to Trump for his signature. www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...

🤖 At #ICML? Come check out our position poster "Stop treating ‘AGI’ as the north-star goal of AI research", wherein we challenge the “it goes without saying” narrative that AGI is a great goal for AI research. Tomorrow (Thursday the 17th) between 11 and 13:30. I’ll be there with @graziul.bsky.social

Waiting for someone to explain the obsession with LotR names. Is there an explanation? Is it connected to Tolkien in any way? @separkinson.bsky.social do you know of anything that maps these names to the Silmarillion or Middle Earth more broadly?

"In an era of media fatigue, Andor provides a useful vehicle to think seriously about what it means and takes to challenge power and offers realistic scenarios to consider the moral imperatives involved." If you think Andor is irrelevant to current politics, you aren't paying attention to either.

NEW: In an unprecedented move, the NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding. NIH staff were told to select others aligned with the Trump administration and told to expect placements by political appointees.

Media outlets can't pivot to AI to save themselves. It's not a business strategy and it's not going to work. The only path forward is for journalists to lean into their humanity, to do things AI can't, and to make clear they are writing for people, not algorithms: www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

This isn’t even an AI post as much as it is another anecdote in how social relations in America have been put through a blender of extreme market extraction at the same time that govt/charitable support for 3rd spaces, extracurriculars, social clubs, etc have fallen to their lowest point in decades.

Florida is committing "enforced disappearance," a very serious violation of international human rights law. www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i... www.ohchr.org/en/special-p...

My work found such spaces are key to friendships not because of what they do but because of what they allow - gathering together to "fart around" as Vonnegut would say. People focus on libraries but it's just as true for other venues, and this re-purposing of space can be an act of self-liberation.

Stop asking billionaires questions, recording their answers and sharing their uninformed and/or racist and/or otherwise bigoted and nonsense ideas as journalism. It’s ridiculous. They are the most boring people. Oh wah I am a white man who has more money than I can spend and I’m so mad about it!

The NYT did an article on this just a week ago, with good graphics - "For most students, affirmative action was not enough". The barrier to higher ed in the US is not admissions - it's preparation, support, and cost. Andreessen is fixated on his own grievances. 2/ www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Marc Andreessen's rant to WaPo shows not only his racism but his bizarre fixation on elite universities. He whines: "DEI and immigration" have "cut.. the children of theTrump voter base out of...higher education." No: the colleges that educate MOST students in the US admit over 3/4 of applicants. 1/

They fired the people answering calls for help. Hundreds of them. During the crisis.

Law enforcement has more tools than ever to track your movements and access your communications. Here’s how to protect your privacy if you plan to protest.

This is not a freedom day. In @thetriibe.com’s RESHAPE newsletter I share excerpts from a call a had with a law professor about how we can dismantle ICE. I think news outlets should seek out solutions and then build narratives that can make liberation more possible. thetriibe.com/reshape/how-...