Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

Forget Columbus Day (US) or Thanksgiving Day (Canada). It should be Indigenous Peoples' Day across Turtle Island. Celebrate Indigenous strength, resilience, and culture today instead of romanticizing settler history.

Whenever someone legitimizes harmful shit with the importance of achieving "dominance" you have a fascist at hand.

Hypervisible@hypervisible.blacksky.app · last mo.

“In a more than 3,000 word blog posted today, Amazon web services CEO Matt Garman pushed back on public concerns around the impact that data centers may have on jobs, power demands, and the environment, saying ‘our nation can’t afford to lose’ the race for AI dominance.”

Oof, this makes me feel ill. It’s epistimicide on an unfathomable scale, and we’re being led into it to the joyful beating of the drums of “progress.”

Hypervisible@hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

Eugenics 🤝 ai www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/h...

Resist the uncritical adoption of AI in education. openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · 2mo ago

They’ll keep telling us it’s inevitable but NYC and other large school systems are starting to say no to AI, recognizing it’s not a legitimate tool for k-12 learning. Even some universities are putting their foot down, like U Chicago (and some law schools) www.nyc.gov/mayors-offic...

This is about what I would expect. GenAI is a B or C student. For my part, this is driving a move away from graded homework and toward exams that test practical skills in a controlled environment.

DGM@notredale.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Here is the full chart with labeled axes. It is comparing homework scores to test scores. Below-average and average scorers for homework and exams appear at about the same frequency regardless of AI usage. The high homework scorers using AI, however, are not replicating that success at test time.

🎯

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4mo ago

The centrality of discernment to productive AI usage is obvious, and that's why I find the insistence that AI can be used as a teaching assistant (or worse, a *teacher*) so baffling. By definition, a student *isn't* an expert on the subject they're studying. 44/

Can you be a billionaire without also being a solipsist?

Amanda Marcotte@amandamarcotte.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Yup. When Musk says "no one" died, he's asserting that people of color are not people. Not that fact-checking is useless. But it needs to be paired with reminders that Musk is a racist who is asserting that non-white people aren't people. newrepublic.com/article/2135...

🎯

tante@tante.cc · 4mo ago

Even if you train an LLM just on fully validated, peer reviewed texts the LLM _will_ still generate fabrications. LLMs are _language_ models, not _knowledge models_.

😂

pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky”@pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The game of soccer has proved insufficient to resolve a game of soccer. We will play a different game instead.

I’m so grateful for the voice of @parismarx.com at this morning’s panel at FAccT’26 today. “There’s a real divide between what the government wants and what the public sees.”

🎯🎯🎯 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses’ cruel fantasies

The writer who coined the word ‘enshittification’ tells us why AI will never deliver what it promises – and why it still appeals so much to those in power

theguardian.com

Please Use AI

Is something “too dangerous” if it’s easy to slap on guardrails? Tigers are really dangerous. Tigers are at the zoo in my town. Don’t go in the tiger enclosure at the zoo. The zoo is pretty good at keeping you out. Under normal circumstances, tigers aren’t really something to be alarmed about.

I love running in lilac season: the sweetness in the air is magical.

Welcome to the Slopocene Epoch.

Timothy Caulfield@caulfieldtim.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Our A.I. world! 👇 More books, more scientific papers, more music... all created by A.I. Much of this is slop, polluting & confusing our information environment and making it more difficult to find quality content. wapo.st/4dncIVu via @washingtonpost.com

Particularly in the context of (appropriate) crackdowns on LLM-generated papers (e.g., on arXiv) and more and more tales of fabricated citations, two reminders: (1) LLMs do not "cite their sources" (2) Using an LLM to generate, complete, or fix LaTeX code can result in fabricated citations

In this metaphor, who is the shark and who is the diver?

I desire more in life than to be the “don’t summarise with AI”-guy on bluesky 😅 but reports like this keep coming in, so I’ll repeat ad nauseam, don’t summarise with ‘AI’! www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?

Author: Maarten Paulusse Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will b...

tue.nl

Ars Technica@arstechnica.com · 6mo ago

The fact that the Ontario government recommended AI summary systems with such obvious and potentially patient-harming flaws should give pause to any doctors (or their patients) making use of them.

This is crushing.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

"I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write."

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

Writing is “a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | Micah Nathan

The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words

theguardian.com

WTF, NYer. "If we agree that college primarily serves a credentialling process that stamps select young people as worthy of work..." We do not. So much for the bastion of erudite journalism. This is sensationalism, damaging our most vital institution: education. www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...

The National Science Foundation is the main source of funding for basic sciences in the US. For decades, they have supported a scientific R&D ecosystem in the US that has been an engine of economic growth and competitive advantage. Destroying the agency is no less than an act of sabotage.

AI is like if every website now emitted a smell when you clicked on it. Why? “It’s the future! So we installed it everywhere!”

Just imagine installing an OS and needing to acknowledge that “the software is not intended for use in California” because it does not comply with their age verification law. 🫠

Comfortably Numb@numb.comfortab.ly · 9mo ago

#fightlikenewsom 🙃 www.tomshardware.com/software/ope...

"What exactly do you expect Carney to do / not do?" A thread of 50 specific items (with links, and not in any particular order), a large fraction of which are in line with warning signs we pointed out early on and were told to be quiet, wait and see, or trust his 4D chess acumen. 1/??

“Amazon, Microsoft & Google ​have each recently abandoned construction of multibillion-dollar data centers over community opposition & now the companies are coming under shareholder pressure over ‌the environmental impact” Lose the passive voice—PEOPLE are doing this💫 www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Investors press Amazon, Microsoft and Google on water, power use in US data centers

Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google ​have each recently abandoned construction of multibillion-dollar data centers over community opposition and now the companies are coming under shareholder pres...

reuters.com

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

Algorithmic Bias

oecs.mit.edu

I certainly won't claim that all human scientific endeavors have always been good and noble and without any suffering to humankind. But I will say that the scientific impulse--the curiosity that drives us to work together to understand our universe--is one of my very favorite things about humanity.