"the solution is still the one that can succeed: to build a new cultural order, a new civilization. To do so, academics must embrace an unusual new role: as knowledge workers, they must seize the means of knowledge production." www.publicbooks.org/academics-mu...

While there is value to foresight and anticipating risks, writes Tech Policy Press fellow @eryk.bsky.social, could the language used by AI risk communities to describe the technology contribute to the very problems it aims to curb?

Any organization considering the risks of AI should make room for those who believe the greatest risk is believing in it. In my latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, I propose that AI skeptics play a crucial role in discussing “AI safety.” www.techpolicy.press/the-ai-safet...

Wrote more about Benjamin Bratton's paranoid imagination of a media studies cabal holding back AI progress in Europe. mail.cyberneticforests.com/is-the-media...

"European academic discourse did not create that dynamic: labor insecurity and the AI industry did." mail.cyberneticforests.com/is-the-media...

I suspect an overlooked aspect of online discourse is the role played by thousands of people pretending to believe things and then arguing about them. Much of the anti-clanker convo feels that way to me. But maybe I am too optimistic.

Hey, “The (Former) People’s Republic of Skeuomorphica” came out five years ago today. It’s a song about the politics of interfaces and it did very well on Spotify charts in South America after being added to a popular Rhumba playlist.

"The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from the more old-fashioned appeal to the past." --Hannah Arendt

A helpful read for thinking about the need to push back against false dichotomies—maker/taker, builder/critic, innovator/regulator—that are currently being used to further marginalize the humanities.

Accdg to Bratton, "the intellectuals + artists of this critique industry have seized the public's imagination with its scrutiny of AI, which permeate universities and the arts. Such questions stand in the way of progress." Glad Eryk articulated critiques *within media studies* about StackTheory™️

Bratton "focuses considerable ire on those who point out issues rather than those who create flawed systems .. He is punching down, but something makes him believe he is punching up." Good essay by @eryk.bsky.social on the tired, sarcastic contrarianism of power positioning itself as the opposition

we've invented a magical machine that just tells people, "you are awesome and need no one else" 24/7. the future is here, today.

Me, on the day AI becomes fully self-aware: "Huh! Totally did not expect that."

On "AI slurs" (clanker, etc) -- on one depressing level, I worry that slurs for machines humanize them b/c assigning slurs is what people do to people. But I understand the impulse, because we assign slurs to dehumanize. But if you tell me to "kick a clanker" and am gonna feel bad for it.

"any philosophy of technology that is severed from the material impacts of the technology is interesting, but limited in utility: a thought exercise....A great deal of suffering arises when we act on our solitary imaginations of the world, rather than working toward clarity through dialogue."

«You may think you are seeing an endless sea of interviews and social media posts about Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. But Bratton must be tuned to a different channel, one committed to nonstop praise and media attention to Kate Crawford, Emily Bender and Abeba Birhane.»

Wrote more about Benjamin Bratton's paranoid imagination of a media studies cabal holding back AI progress in Europe. mail.cyberneticforests.com/is-the-media...

So this weekend I arrived & officially started my doctoral studies as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, in Digital Humanities under supervision of Leo Impett. It’s exciting!

Interesting article/paper. I'm much less anti-AI than a lot of people on my feed. But pretty skeptical it can simulate human behavior effectively for social scientific purposes -- at least in cases where variation among humans, rather than acting like an average human, is what's important.

“The media studies cabal is holding back AI”

Billionaire-owned “philosopher” Benjamin Bratton finally coming out as full technofash in this declaration of alliance with JD Vance & a16z — here’s his scathing rejection of those who “stand in the way” of corporate AI agendas nobody wants. www.noemamag.com/is-european-...

Weird when “media studies” is portrayed as a powerful anti-AI lobby. “AI progress” has not been “blocked” — look at stock valuations or US policy! Media scholars are not cited in AI regulation or invited to Trump’s inauguration. It’s a weird cabal to invent and blame for a world that doesn’t exist!

Billionaire-owned “philosopher” Benjamin Bratton finally coming out as full technofash in this declaration of alliance with JD Vance & a16z — here’s his scathing rejection of those who “stand in the way” of corporate AI agendas nobody wants. www.noemamag.com/is-european-...

I like to give Land the respect he deserves by mischaracterizing hyperstition as a better, more useful concept without acknowledging him, which is to say: a hype-fueled superstition that drives people to act in ways that make the superstition “socially true.” That’s not Land’s, though, b/c this is ⬇️

Hadn't seen this "Cartography of Generative AI" before. From Estampa, a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

My hot take is that Gen Z humor is dad-joke level wholesome jokes made terrifying by the fact it all takes place on social media platforms and this self-awareness is part of the joke

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions. Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased! osf.io/preprints/ps... Thread 🧵

Interesting use of image recognition AI (vs generative AI) here in aiding forensic analysis, notably, there was “a mountain” of additional evidence to support the claim.

Fabian Gröger used AI to turn his own memories into images, made real photo prints from them, and showed them to his mother—he then captured this encounter on film. fg.hs-wismar.de/en/projects/...

The sad thing is that if they'd used 438,000,001 Minecraft blocks they would have hit true AGI

The sad thing is that if they'd used 438,000,001 Minecraft blocks they would have hit true AGI

People are saying

Last week, I joined @justinhendrix.bsky.social and Maddy Dwyer @cdt.org to discuss DOGE, AI, and government "efficiency" initiatives for the @techpolicypress.bsky.social podcast. It's a rather grim topic, but I enjoyed making sense of it with Justin and Maddy. www.techpolicy.press/following-do...

An extensive set of links about the many and legion problems with generative AI, now updated with more on labor issues, incorrect outputs, and a new section on ways in which the bubble may burst catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

Delete TikTok. It is more going to be part of the US surveillance state, which I guarantee will include countries beyond its borders. I'm pretty sure they're already doing it with Meta and X, so kick those out, too.

“The use of these new technologies revealed a perennial truth: There is a difference between what they can actually do and how a culture chooses to conceive of their abilities. That bridge is where we find the magical thinking.”

"Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather than a problem of desire (or the material conditions that shape desire)." www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

With X’s GrokAI now being welcomed into the federal government, here’s a piece I wrote when I predicted that X’s GrokAI would be welcomed into the federal government — and a reminder that this means Elon Musk will maintain significant power, now from a distance. www.techpolicy.press/musk-ai-and-...

The choice of “impact” to describe the neoliberal fixation on metricizing what used to be called “prestige” so it can be preserved is very telling.

Hey, some think tank or nonprofit, make a librarian-shaped job for me to come make training materials about online information and crisis response literacy

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂

lyft driver is a young kid listening to an AI generated track with no clear end that is just an old weary man saying grind mindset bromides nonstop. deeply poisoned country. which should be in charge of the world btw

a lot of sharp observations in here from @himself.bsky.social www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-villag...

Unfortunately, the FT did this "analysis" with ... ChatGPT. They don't note this in the article. They do admit it in an FT podcast! www.ft.com/content/9232...

There seems to be a phenomenon on Bluesky where if you talk about AI, even critically, in a way that isn't obviously disparaging, you're marked as an AI bro and blocked. The result is that leading AI ethicists are now "AI Bros" 🙄

A study has found that AI 'workslop', where coworkers use AI and their colleagues have to spend time fixing it, is taking over workplaces. Workers said that they thought of their colleagues who filed low-quality AI work as "less creative, capable, and reliable." www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

This is good

apropos of recent posts, I was invited to give a talk to my faculty about "social impacts of AI" on Monday and I have decided to stop being coy about it