I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses

I led a report about the environmental and resource parts of this! Companies intentionally conflate wildly different machine learning applications: using a sprinkling of good to justify a tsunami of bad ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/b...

John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 4d ago

There is a certain level of obtuseness in (some) "AI" apologists when they flounce up to point out what "AI" is good for in science, etc, while eliding the fact that almost none of that use is driving the current market capitalization, environmental degradation and resource hogging of the field

We're in the era of incompetence & cybercrimes headlined as "unprecedented model capabilities gone rogue." So OpenAI & Anthropic are trying to one up each other with such incompetence because the "press release as a service" performing media & clueless politicians parrot pre IPO CEO talking points.

There is no meaningful use case for Google’s new “faking satellite imagery with AI” product.

Doremus Schafer@doremus-schafer.bsky.social · 6d ago

Google put out a five-point bullet list of supposed use cases, it is, uh, not wildly convincing. My 'favorite' is 'have the stochastic parrot show your students what historical sites looked like in olden days'. blog.google/products-and...

For anyone in the Chicago area: I am going to be running a workshop on Aug 1st at 3pm at the Bucktown-Wicker Park Library about How To Say No to AI! www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-say...

How To Say NO to AI

A community workshop on how to resist the narrative that AI is inevitable.

eventbrite.com

The thing about social media age restrictions is that it treats today’s internet as an inevitability we all just have to deal with. The internet (and the WORLD) wasn’t like this until like four dudes were allowed to own & monetize as much tech real estate as they wanted. Fix THAT problem.

A phenomenon I've noticed recently is people trying to occupy some untenable middleground wrt to the use of systems sold as "AI" -- this is a position where people try to recognize the harms of this tech but also hold space for "responsible" or "ethical" use. 🧵>>

llms don't and can't love, hate, feel, care, think, imagine, dream, hope, fear, believe, reflect, aspire, wonder, empathize,... fix your your anthropomorphising language

Nathan J Robinson: Instead of discussing how Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, we should talk about how he killed hundreds of thousands of people through his dismantling of food and medical aid to poor countries www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elo...

How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

Former USAID global health official Nicholas Enrich explains the catastrophic human toll of DOGE's cuts to the agency.

currentaffairs.org

“The Al is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you”

The_Lady_Red@theladyred.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

The fight against AI has to involve addressing the societal problems that AI is being used as a shitty bandaid for. Pointing out how it sucks is not always very compelling when the status quo sucks too.

So we’ve been cooking up some thoughts on Gen AI at @amnesty.org and I’m ecstatic to finally see it out in the world! Our 🗝️ conclusion: standalone gen AI systems, built on unlawful web scraping, constitute mass invasions of privacy by design & should be prohibited www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

It is so hard to argue against AI at work when you work at a very corporate job, because you end up quickly running into the brick wall that is Corporate Logic

We are going to win! This stuff can and will be brought to a halt. None of it is inevitable. Anthropic cannot afford to slow down. It has to grow to at least $100bn a year in revenue or it doesn’t have a hope in hell of paying its compute bills. Same for clammy little Altman.

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · 2mo ago

Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly. www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-and...

As a science fiction writer I really fucking resent tech bros for ruining the phrase "artificial intelligence." 80 years of it being all about cool androids and interesting computers destroyed by five years of "Spicy autocorrect making everything shittier for money." NEVER FORGIVE.

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world 😍 airesistlist.org

Today @dairinstitute.bsky.social is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub. The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. labor.dair-institute.org

I saw someone referring to the booing of commencement speakers talking about AI as a tantrum from students who don’t understand technology. That made me think that I bet machine breaking was also perceived as a tantrum. Anyway, here’s some thoughts about the Luddites.

Here's an example of a linguistic fact that I think should be straightforward and obvious when pointed out, but which a lot of people seem surprisingly resistant to: Colloquial Latin never died. In fact it's spoken extremely widely across the world. 🧵

I did the same thing every time someone who I recognized came on 🤣 I annoyed my spouse being like "ooh I've read that person's work!" constantly

folx, I’ve been working on AI "ethics" for almost a decade now & hate to tell you there’s no such thing as "ethical AI" the only "ethical principle" that works is regulating the shit out of the industry & to take back control of our autonomy, fundamental rights, freedoms & right to exist w/out AI

The stink of desperation is so strong.

There is a big difference between "people who are 'scared' of AI and don't want to learn new things" and "people who have deep moral objections to AI's underpinnings, impacts, and the systems of power behind it." It's wild to me that institutions pushing AI adoption don't seem to understand this.

It's surprising how quickly Sanders has been taken the existential risk bait. It took less than a year for him to start doing events with Hinton and Tegmark. He should perhaps pause to consider how groups like FLI are so well-resourced, and what political function x-risk narratives serve.

Senator Bernie Sanders@sanders.senate.gov · 3mo ago

The world’s leading scientists are warning that AI could “end civilization as we know it.” 97% of Americans believe AI safety should be subject to rules. When will our government wake up?! We need global cooperation — before it’s too late.

What goes through my head every time I hear nonsense claims about imminent AGI

No public service (education, health care, public transit, postal service etc.) should be run like a business. Business only serves investors. Public services serve the people. All of them.

David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Don’t run universities like a business run it as a public good

I have a lot of conversations with random people about AI and this is REALLY common.

Celeste Ng@pronounced-ing.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Had convos w/ multiple people in the past 4 days who DID NOT KNOW that 1. AI doesn't "think" or know anything; it's a probability machine 2. It was created using massive amounts of work stolen from actual people including me 3. The environmental costs are astronomical Spread the word, every time!

One of the most successful things the tech industry has done since the 1990s is lead the citizenry to believe that because a technology can do something means that something can’t be legislated away. And since the 2010s they used their lobbying powers to defang the legislators who know otherwise.

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We could literally legislate this out of existence.

I've been thinking a lot about "AI literacy" and how I think a lot of people who know a whole lot about AI (maybe even build it) don't have it. (At least based on what I think AI literacy should mean.) I know a lot of people think it means prompt engineering, but I'll propose instead...

As soon as you defend a product with "it isn't useless" you're doing the thing the maker wants you to do. NOTHING is useless. It's the lowest bar for anything that exists, including a rock. What you're looking for is "it is the best thing that exists for this concrete purpose" then we can talk.