Yes, the goal is to divert funds allocated in the public budget for education and healthcare to Big Tech (i.e. military companies), disguising this as innovation.
Charles Logan@charleswlogan.bsky.social · 3d agoWelcoming GenAI into schools continues to be, IMO, an untenable position, unless I suppose your goal is to drive out educators, in which case, the strategy is working as intended.
Bold to assume future generations won't just ask an LLM how to safely remove the digital asbestos and get told to eat it.
AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster. 1/
As usual, @doctorow.pluralistic.net came up with the perfect metaphor to describe AI and the destruction of knowledge: "AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generation". zenodo.org/records/1754...
AI and the destruction of knowledge
So-called 'artificial intelligence' is simply software - usually proprietary - that runs on computers.‘Artificial intelligence’1. is a marketing term;2. stands for a family of scams;3. is a social, cu...
zenodo.org
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 7d agoAI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster. 1/
"Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes..."
AI Economics for Dummies
“Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 bi...
buff.ly
Pervert glasses are also harasser glasses
Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social · last wk.NEW: Teen boys are using smart glasses — mainly Meta's AI Glasses — to film themselves harassing classmates at school, following girls around and "rizzing" them or "ragebaiting" them w/ insults. In several videos we reviewed, girls plead w/ the poster to stop filming. futurism.com/artificial-i...
As 'guardrails' and their indeterminism are doing the rounds with the latest CoPilot fail (h/t @irisvanrooij.bsky.social) I am thinking of @sarahciston.com's work on "how large model guardrails are socially produced and technically enforced through language" (Ciston 2026)
Hel Eline@hel.eurosky.social · last wk.lol
"You can only critically assess the output of an Al chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don't develop these skills by using Al. Before you can be critical of an Al summary, you have to learn to understand a text without having it summarized by an Al tool."
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 10mo agoI am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b... @apache.be you rule 🖤
We are not productive if we actually read the paper.
New: An "expert witness" in a $61 million lawsuit over an industrial explosion that killed three people and destroyed 200 homes used ChatGPT to write his report for the court. He prompted ChatGPT to "show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding" www.404media.co/show-how-3m-...
“Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to the thing they are building.” It’s a myth, a self-affirming form of sense making: they take the action to build it, but insist on describing it as if they are passive witnesses to an inevitable force.
The System From Nowhere
When Accountability Goes Rogue 💡I recently spoke with Dr. Zena Assaad for her podcast, Responsible Bytes. Video is above, below is an essay adapted from the conversation. "The system from nowhere" i...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
"AI" isn't one thing that is simultaneously and autonomously allegedly solving long-standing math problems, predicting the shape of folded proteins, making you a shopping list, and helping you "do research". >>
The plagiarism machines break the chains of provenance of ideas and rest on a misconception of science as mere accumulation of objectively available facts. See: www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis... >>
Episode 31: Science Is a Human Endeavor (feat. Molly Crockett and Lisa Messeri), April 15 2024 - Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
Will AI someday do all our scientific research for us? Not likely. Drs. Molly Crockett and Lisa Messeri join for a takedown of the hype of "self-driving labs" and why such misrepresentations also harm...
buzzsprout.com
Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08...
Doctor forced to apologise after AI makes 'scary' error about illegal drugs
Artificial Intelligence is listening to many people's medical appointments, but it is not always hearing things correctly.
abc.net.au
"AI is the idea that we can just give up on having a theoretical basis for the world and switch to these theory-free inferences. It's very hard to unwind false positives when you don't have a theory, because you don't know how to test it." - @doctorow.pluralistic.net www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRm...
Cory Doctorow On Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy
YouTube video by The Smart Cookies Podcast
youtube.com
exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!
Dr Katie Twomey@k2mey.eurosky.social · 3w agoArguing that LLMs are anything more than a load of numbers going into a complicated mathematical function and spitting some more numbers out. Yes they simulate. But they simulate *language*. They do not simulate the cognitive processes underlying communication.
Sometimes the basic "war for oil" explanation suffices: www.ft.com/content/0e56...
The US has collected about $13bn of Venezuela’s oil money. Where is it?
Washington has given diverging accounts of where the earthquake-shattered country’s funds are going
ft.com
🧵 About AI-translation and stamppot My mom is an English teacher and translator. She might have translated some of your favorite books (Dinosaur Therapy, anyone? 🙃) But she grieves the fact that her work has never been more frustrating, due to AI.
If you feel you have to jump on the AI train to not become irrelevant, don't fall for this narrative. It's a scam. You ARE relevant. You know your craft, you know what good work looks like. Trust your expertise. Resistance against AI hype can be that simple. Not easy (!!) but simple nonetheless. ❤️🧵
We have more data about ourselves than ever. So why is everything converging on the same? In my new post I use data on high streets, Billboard hits, a million films and my own AI personas to expose the algorithms behind the sameness and how to regulate them. laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperatur...
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.
laurenleek.substack.com
Potemkin pillage: “Artillery shells displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere, three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic.“ www.propublica.org/article/gene...
Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing
General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a...
propublica.org
Heavily armed West Bank settlers empty Palestinians’ water tanks during a period of extreme heat and in the midst of a water crisis Source: t.me/azzamaddas/1...
“We’re living in the effects of the casino economy,” Paulina Borsook says. “Until that changes, how are we going to change Silicon Valley? If there’s a big crash in AI, that may give us a real corrective. Because it’s all made of papier-mache and spit.” www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
A tech prophet finally gets her second coming
In 2000, Paulina Borsook published a book foretelling the anti-government sentiments of the tech world. Now that it’s too late, people are ready to listen.
motherjones.com
Free Newsletter: OpenAI and Anthropic are now load-bearing, unprofitable and unsustainable AI labs that represent the majority of Microsoft, Google and Amazon's future revenue growth. Without hundreds of billions in funding, the era of hypergrowth ends. www.wheresyoured.at/dont-look-up/
Don't Look Up
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, in...
wheresyoured.at
Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy: www.thecanary.co/trending/202... 63/
UK private contractor Palantir was 'founded to kill communists'
The UK government's relationship with Palantir was already controversial, now it looks positively genocidal
thecanary.co
