I am hiring a qualitative postdoc to start this fall for the @datasociety.bsky.social project AI-Enabled Scams as a Systemic Security Challenge. Fully remote but must be US-based. Interested in youth, scams, hustle/financial/consumer culture? More here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...

Post-Doctoral Fellow, AI-Enabled Scams as a Systemic Security Challenge

Remote

job-boards.greenhouse.io

🚨 Job alert: We're hiring a senior researcher for our AI Civics program! This subject-matter expert will be a lead contributor to our ambitious work on civic action and community control over AI. Learn more and apply by July 30! job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...

Senior Researcher, AI Civics

Remote - NYC

job-boards.greenhouse.io

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...

journals.sagepub.com

Where does the “it’s not x, it’s y” come from? It’s not only training data: LLMs are trained to use language to arrive at “answers.” Whatever we’re incentivizing and disincentivizing in our use of language when we resist “sounding like AI” has big implications for students, and for human thought.

It's Not Just X. It's Y.

Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs a...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

Excellent new research from @cdt.org @mluria.bsky.social analyzes the dark patterns applicable to AI chatbots, including general-purpose systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and “companion” platforms (Replika, Character.AI): cdt.org/insights/dar...

Dark Patterns in AI Chatbots: A Taxonomy to Inform Better Design

In this report, CDT Research draws on prior work in human-computer interaction and deceptive design disciplines to investigate how established dark patterns documented in other digital technology cont...

cdt.org

🌟 NEW PREPRINT 🌟 After six months of following people using chatbots for socioemotional health & 1 year of participatory engagements, we're proud to release a longitudinal qualitative study on how people use general-purpose LLMs and what it demands of AI governance: arxiv.org/abs/2605.23787

Engagement-Optimized Care: When LLMs become Mental Health Infrastructure

General-purpose LLMs are increasingly functioning as mental health infrastructure due to gaps in care left by provider shortages, inadequate insurance coverage, social isolation, and stigma around for...

arxiv.org

"The field has glossed over the fact that our methods of evaluating these models are deeply unscientific and they are more driven by ideology and policy." Great interview with Rumman Chowdhury on AI governance: www.nosmallendeavor.com/rumman-chowd...

Rumman Chowdhury: Why the Real AI Crisis Is Moral, Not Technical

nosmallendeavor.com

"Why is it so normal for law enforcement — those who are supposed to be keepers of law and order — to kill Americans? And why is the only question at the end of the day how much their victims deserved to die?" Read more from @sarahjeong.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/policy/86745...

"Boredom feels like a trap not because it is a static experience, but because it is an all-encompassing way of being; a fog that dissipates attention and dissolves meaning." I liked this essay on boredom (and where it leads us) from @emptysetmagazine.bsky.social www.emptysetmag.com/articles/ent...

Entropic Boredom

How did the internet get this boring? And where is boredom leading us?

emptysetmag.com

A new brief from @brianjchen.bsky.social argues that this admin's AI strategy dumps "downside risks onto the American public while actively accelerating AI’s impact on workers, job quality, climate." Instead, we should "reclaim innovation as an essential public good." datasociety.net/library/the-...

The Big AI State

In analyzing major priorities of the Trump administration’s AI agenda, this policy brief finds that the US government is engaging in extraordinary levels of market intervention in order to bolster the...

datasociety.net

This piece opens with an anecdote about Louise Glück laboring over lines of a poem she rewrites for years, reminding us that artistic ego, "the stubborn belief that we—despite our cosmic insignificance—can create something original" is a bulwark against the ease of genAI. lithub.com/against-gene...

Against Generative AI: Is Art the Last Refuge of Our Humanity?

None of this is supposed to be easy. Not writing, not life, not love. Louise Glück’s debut, Firstborn, was published in 1968. One poem that didn’t make the cut was “The House on Marshland.” Glück s…

lithub.com

Been working on this one for a while — it's a little bit of history of a key foundation of internet technology, and a little bit of an explainer about how people _actually_ invent things. This is the amazing (true!) story of how Markdown took over the world. www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/h...

How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com

Great toolkit from @ainowinstitute.bsky.social on how to stop and restrict data center development. It’s helpfully organized into local and state policy recommendations: ainowinstitute.org/publications...

North Star Data Center Policy Toolkit: State and Local Policy Interventions to Stop Rampant AI Data Center Expansion - AI Now Institute

This policy toolkit is primarily geared toward stopping, slowing, and restricting rampant data center development in the US at the local and state level. Our approach recognizes the extractive relatio...

ainowinstitute.org

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant “This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or t...

404media.co

“Much of our storytelling today is individualized and limited in form—therapeutic, gamified…At other times, a prevailing mood of irony ridicules the very desire for narrative coherence.” Great @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social piece on the evolution of narrative forms: lareviewofbooks.org/article/when...

When Story Loses the Plot | Los Angeles Review of Books

Hannah H. Kim ponders the plotless narrative as a tool for meaning-making.

lareviewofbooks.org

Great piece by @livgar.bsky.social and @briana-v.bsky.social on their @datasociety.bsky.social research into our relationships with AI chatbots. The "auto-intimacy" of chatbot interactions suggests we use tech "to curate the conditions under which we can be honest." datasociety.net/points/all-t...

All the Lonely People

Researchers Livia Garofalo and Briana Vecchione reflect on what studying AI chatbots reveals about emotional attachment to machines, the power of illusion, and the norms and expectations that define c...

datasociety.net

Two years into Europe’s Digital Services Act, data access for researchers is on life support, write Mark Scott and LK Seiling. Yet an alternative future is possible—one built on openness, interoperability, and platforms that treat data access as a civic and scientific good.

In Critical Condition – How To Stabilize Researcher Data Access? | TechPolicy.Press

Mark Scott and LK Seiling discuss the struggle for researcher access to social media data and an alternative future where transparency is seen as a civic good.

techpolicy.press

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event

Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

theatlantic.com

@tamigraph.bsky.social and I get to some mythbusting today about data centers and the supposed future they bring. Long story short: 😬

alice e marwick@alicetiara.bsky.social · last yr.

Data Centers Aren't the Future of American Prosperity- @tamigraph.bsky.social & @mwoluchem.bsky.social bust the myths of data centers: they don't massively increase jobs, they don't increase clean energy investment, and they don't benefit local communities! OH SNAP datasociety.net/library/data...

“…what we are left with is a structure of feeling that is now a part of AI as an artifact, the aspirations pinned to its potentials, which are directing its adoption into spheres of intellectual inquiry where it may have little or even nothing to offer.” www.artforum.com/features/gen...

MACHINE YEARNING

Sonja Drimmer critically examines art historians’ recent embrace of generative AI as a tool for humanities research.

artforum.com

And while you’re at it - also read @bcmerchant.bsky.social's excellent AI Now report AI Generated Business, on how OpenAI has used narratives around AGI (front and center in this report) to inflate its business proposition: ainowinstitute.org/publications...

AI Generated Business: The Rise of AGI and the Rush to Find a Working Revenue Model

By Brian Merchant In This Article Introduction OpenAI and the Generative AI Boom Silicon Valley Mythology, Distilled and Accelerated From “Safe AI” to AGI — and the Hype-Led Business Model Genesis Mar...

ainowinstitute.org

thebulletin.org/2025/07/ai-f...

AI for good, with caveats: How a keynote speaker was censored during an international artificial intelligence summit

Q&A with Abeba Birhane on how she was censored during the AI for good summit and how the industry can do better.

thebulletin.org

Amazing group of AI auditing scholars and practitioners at the AI Accountability Lab @aial.ie, led by @abeba.bsky.social ✨

AI Accountability Lab @aial.ie · last yr.

We are thrilled to finally introduce our lab members aial.ie/people/ 1/

NEW: 911 audio and EMS records from ICE detention centers reveal a surge in medical emergencies — including staff sexual assaults, suicide attempts, and head injuries. Records also show calls over severe pregnancy complications. Free to read: www.wired.com/story/ice-de... w/ @dell.bsky.social

'They're Not Breathing': Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls

Records of hundreds of emergency calls from ICE detention centers obtained by WIRED—including audio recordings—show a system inundated by life-threatening incidents, delayed treatment, and overcrowdin...

wired.com

While existing disability rights statutes do provide some legal recourse against AI-enabled discrimination, state-level regulation remains a vital avenue for harm mitigation. The proposed federal moratorium on state AI laws threatens those very protections, Ariana Aboulafia and Travis Hall write.

The Proposed AI Moratorium Will Harm People with Disabilities. Here’s How. | TechPolicy.Press

A proposed 10-year federal moratorium on state AI laws could expose people with disabilities to harm, Ariana Aboulafia and Travis Hall write.

techpolicy.press

NEW: A protester was shot and killed at the Salt Lake City 'No Kings' march. A man is in police custody, booked on suspicion of murder—but not the one who fired the gun. From video, witnesses and interviews, @schotthappens.com and I tried to piece together what really happened Saturday. Our report-

What actually happened at the Salt Lake City ‘No Kings’ shooting?

One man is dead. Another is in jail—but not the one who fired his gun.

thehandbasket.co

Most reporting on AI examines worst-case systems deployed under the guise of efficiency. But what would a good faith effort at Ethical AI look like? For two years, we’ve been looking over the shoulder of a city trying to do things differently.

Federal data misuse is accelerating, but state and local governments can still act, argue Reem Suleiman, Esra’a Al Shafei, and Brian Hofer. “Before DHS, ICE, or others come knocking, governments should run, not walk! — through this triage checklist to protect the privacy of the most vulnerable.”

Public Sector Triage of the Federal Government’s Data Hemorrhage | TechPolicy.Press

Reem Suleiman, Esra’a Al Shafei, and Brian Hofer urge state and local governments to take action to protect the public amid a federal data-sharing crisis.

techpolicy.press

I'm biased, but this report is a must-read for anyone looking to understand the state of AI in 2025. It explains how AI is entrenching power for big tech and the oligarch class, speeding deregulation, dislodging human expertise and threatening workers—and how there's still time to refuse all that.