“Unregulated digital technologies, mass surveillance, and weak privacy laws have created a health privacy crisis.” A new report from @epic.org finds that health data is routinely repurposed for surveillance and enforcement, deterring patients from seeking care. www.wired.com/story/survei...

Both "very much worth reading in full," new policy pieces by @alondra.bsky.social and D&S’s @brianjchen.bsky.social "paint a compelling portrait of how the federal government under Trump is working to grow its power with AI," says @bcmerchant.bsky.social . www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/what-trump...

The NYTimes dug into the massive output of sexualized AI images generated and publicly shared by X's chatbot, Grok, and found what experts say was “industrial-scale abuse.” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

The Tigray genocide was, in part, actively facilitated through social media platforms, @nuredinali.bsky.social writes, and inadequate content moderation was part of the problem. On Points, he lays out how better moderation can make a difference, and what it requires. datasociety.net/points/how-t...

Join us online TODAY at *3pm* ET (please note corrected time)!

Check out Brian’s really great new brief! Here’s one of the parts I loved: he articulates so well the way in which data center capital expenditures connect to the fights around the imposition of AI in the workplace.

"We should understand billionaires’ imagined tech futures as projections of their hopes and fears," writes D&S advisor @ethanz.bsky.social. In "waxing lyrical about space," they are signaling their desire "to exit a world of connection and consequences.” www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

THRILLED that Brian Chen's new policy brief, "The Big AI State: How the Trump Administration is Shaping US Industrial Policy toward 'Global Technological Dominance'" is live! Trump is not "deregulating"; his admin is intervening in the market BIG TIME to bolster AI. datasociety.net/library/the-...

🚨 New! The US govt is engaging in extraordinary market intervention to bolster the AI sector. In this brief, Policy Director brianjchen.bsky.social analyzes major priorities of the Trump admin’s AI agenda and proposes alternative directions to shape tech innovation. datasociety.net/library/the-...

What the Trump administration “has advanced is not the absence of AI regulation but its rearrangement,” @alondra.bsky.social writes. What we’re seeing is not deregulation but “hyper-regulation by other means.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In an excerpt from his new book "Silicon Empires," @nsrnicek.bsky.social looks at how Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI — once united in opposition to military use of their AI tools — came around to working with the Pentagon. www.wired.com/story/book-e...

Adding to the logical reasons for opposing data centers, @mathonan.com sees an emotional one: a feeling of powerlessness in the face of seemingly inescapable AI. “You can’t stop Google,” he writes. “But maybe, just maybe, you can stop a Google data center.” www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1...

Policy Manager @serena124.bsky.social tells @politico.com she’s watching how tech policy unfolds in the era of NYC Mayor Mamdani, including whether his election might embolden lawmakers to stand up to corporate interests. subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026...

The tech industry is seizing on Pittsburgh’s industrial history to sell its AI future. "The endurance of communities forced to survive the boom & bust cycles of other industrial times is now recast as ‘grit,’” write Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes & @cellllla.bsky.social. datasociety.net/points/data-...

"There’s a lot of national narrative around AI and data centers, but on the ground these fights are very simple: who gets sacrificed, and whose communities are treated as expendable," says Robby Maynor of @selc.bsky.social. capitalbnews.org/data-center-...

I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures". Open panel submissions portal is open! ls! Deadline: 2nd February 2026 www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

Ads are starting to show up in chatbot conversations. It's easy to imagine how this "could turn unwelcome or creepy" in exchanges "that feel like intimate personal spaces and that also save gobs of your private data." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Google has removed some of its AI health summaries after a Guardian investigation found some contained false and misleading information, including about crucial liver function tests. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

New research undermines the idea that AI products “learn,” contradicting the industry’s basic explanation for how its technology works and raising what could be a massive legal liability: "The whole industry is staked on a shaky metaphor." www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Sam Nelson’s death joins a growing list of tragedies connected to AI chatbots. From ChatGPT, Sam was “getting advice as trustworthy as a Reddit comment, but it was packaged like he was talking with an empathetic doctor.” www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

"Using AI to reveal the identities of people pictured in grainy or incomplete photos is becoming a reflex response after high-profile acts of violence. But AI-manipulated or AI-generated faces are untethered to reality." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

“While limiting AI image generation to paid users may marginally reduce volume and improve traceability, the abuse has not been stopped. It has simply been placed behind a paywall, allowing X to profit from harm.” www.wired.com/story/x-didn...

Anthropomorphizing language conceals the limitations of AI, promoting misplaced trust. @emilymbender.bsky.social & @nannainie.bsky.social suggest focusing on a system’s functionalities: instead of saying a model is “good at” something, say what it is “good for." www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-t...

Jan 22 @ 2pm ET: For our first event of 2026, we’re taking a close look at Trump administration AI policy. Join us online as @alondra.bsky.social @edwardongwesojr.com & @telliotter.bsky.social talk to D&S's Brian J. Chen about the admin’s actions & their consequences. datasociety.net/events/one-y...

Full video and audio of this event are now available on our website! datasociety.net/events/clima...

“We’re no longer just talking about errors of omission, where the owner of a major social media platform might not devote sufficient resources to mitigating these harms....[Musk] appears to be actively enabling harm-making tools, and then laughing about it.” www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

The current AI systems are “patient, amoral, and fantastic at mimicry, making them among the greatest tools in history for generating mis- and disinformation.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

As tech companies try to sell us on the idea that life itself is an inconvenience, "an orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape," @kjezermorton.bsky.social writes. www.thecut.com/article/broo...

What a year! In 2025, our work both anticipated and responded to the big conversations about technology's impacts on people and society, and helped make sense of this moment. Check out our year-in-review for some of the highlights. We'll be back with more in 2026! datasociety.net/points/our-y...

This was the year that AI-generated images and videos became, sometimes, indistinguishable from real ones. But as @chaykak.bsky.social writes, “if 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

“What AI imperils is not human creativity itself but the ability to make a living from creative endeavor,” Caitlin Petre and @jticona.bsky.social write. “The AI industry claims that it wants to democratize creativity, but the real goal is dominance.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/o...

In new research, experts warn that the AI technology powering new toys is so novel and poorly tested that nobody knows how they may affect young children. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

As the shine started to come off generative AI, 2025 has been a year of reckoning. @willdouglasheaven.bsky.social offers four ways to think about the state of AI as this year comes to a close, framing it as “the start of a much-needed hype correction.” www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1...

“What is lost when we entrust Spotify’s systems of data collection and interpretation to do our year-end reflections for us? What...are we not writing and sharing when we hand over that labor to tech companies who would prefer to automate our thinking?” www.theguardian.com/music/2025/d...

Merriam-Webster’s president says the spike in searches for the word “slop” this year reflects that people have grown more aware of fake or shoddy content, and that they want the opposite: “It’s almost a defiant word when it comes to AI.” apnews.com/article/merr...

In OpenAI's decidedly "techno-optimistic spin," Vauhini Vara sees the company attempting “to redefine how objectivity functions in the first place” — in a way that favors their own algorithms, as they strive to get people to trust their product. www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025...

“If the last decade was shaped by viral lies and doctored videos, the next will be shaped by a subtler force: [AI] messages that sound reasonable, familiar, and just persuasive enough to change hearts and minds,” warn Tal Feldman and Aneesh Pappu. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/05/1...

Last week, Jon Penney, Sarah Brayne, & I discussed the role of AI and surveillance in transforming and scaling restrictions on academic freedom & speech. @jessicapriest.bsky.social has an excellent story on how gen AI is being used to do so in Texas universities www.texastribune.org/2025/12/15/t...

The public overwhelmingly supports regulating AI. Yet the Trump admin is acting unilaterally to stop state governors, legislators, and AGs from protecting people from algorithmic discrimination, AI's impacts on workers, and the environmental impacts of data centers. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/t...

An AI-powered quote-detection tool could help journalists identify when coverage leans too heavily on a single type of source and "ensure that the voices shaping our understanding of the world are as diverse and accurate as the realities they aim to represent.” www.cjr.org/tow_center/t...

"The world that ChatGPT built is a world defined by a particular type of precarity," @cwarzel.bsky.social writes, reflecting on the destabilizing promise of imminent if uncertain transformation. "It is a world that is perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop." www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

🚨 New today! In "Turning the Tide: Climate Action In and Against Tech," @tamigraph.bsky.social examines how, in a time of AI ascendance and data center accelerationism, climate-conscious tech workers and larger coalitions have attempted to reform the industry. 1/3 datasociety.net/library/turn...

AI on the Ground Program Director Ranjit Singh considers the stakes of AI sovereignty, the tension between default settings and local autonomy, and who gets to decide what happens inside the systems that people come to depend on. datasociety.net/points/rethi...

This promises to be an amazing talk by D&S researcher @briana-v.bsky.social!

In our comment to the FDA, we draw on our ongoing research to focus on what people’s actual, everyday use of chatbots for mental and emotional support means for the FDA’s approach to generative AI-enabled digital mental health medical devices. datasociety.net/announcement...

Indian startups are building AI tools to ensure the digital representation of so-called low-resource languages like Tulu, Bodo, and Kashmiri, report Tauseef Ahmad and Sajid Raina in @restofworld.org. That work involves building digital data sets nearly from scratch. restofworld.org/2025/chatgpt...

We're navigating a moment where people are trying to make sense of the stories they're being told about AI, as they reckon with the technology’s place in the cultural conversation and in their own lives, D&S Executive Director Janet Haven tells @alixdunn.com. www.youtube.com/shorts/q3dxb...

On #ComputerSaysMaybe, D&S Executive Director Janet Haven and Board President @cmcilwain.bsky.social sat down with @alixdunn.com to discuss the tech industry’s co-opting of academia, how giving the reins to tech oligarchs hurts people, and why independent research is essential. youtu.be/xUJbo0KmbOk

Marking the third anniversary of ChatGPT's launch, Lila Schroff looks at how relying on chatbots has upended some people's ability to make decisions. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Monday is the last day to apply for this workshop!