Lisa LeVasseur
@lalevasseur.bsky.social
Founder of Inter Safety Labs, measuring invisible tech harms.
Love this framing @tressiemcphd.bsky.social data politics doesn’t happen without data economics. Central to this must also be acknowledging the immorality of personal data as a market/good. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...
Opinion | A Reading List for Our Age of A.I. (Gift Article)
A.I. is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.
nytimes.com
This got me to finally read the entire New Yorker article on the Tates and... yeah. I don't see how what they're doing is any different than what everyone has accused Jeffrey Epstein of doing. Except they're *more public* about admitting to what they're doing AND getting young men to join in.
David Roberts@volts.wtf · 4d agoHowever horrible you think the Tate brothers are, I promise, it's worse than that. It's insane that Dems aren't making a bigger deal of the GOP embracing these grotesque monsters.
The anthropomorphization of "AI" is literally PR speak handed down by "AI" companies that want you to think it's magic and also to think that they're not responsible for problems.
most tech outlets spent the week burying the lede that this was a completely avoidable error (or intentional marketing decision) by a human being, and not a malevolent self aware cyber consciousness that slipped its leash
OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human Error
If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies.
wired.com
As good as many of you said. I really appreciate the unambiguous point that this primarily a racist moral panic before unpacking the nuanced second-order explanations. dannykatch.substack.com/p/we-used-to...
We used to be able to buy things in this country
Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy
dannykatch.substack.com
A good thread. Data brokers are a symptom though. The disease is regarding personal info as a good/product. It’s a morally bankrupt pov that society must reject.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 2w agoData brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from collecting, retaining and processing our data to deepfake porn and phishing scams; racial discrimination in hiring and ICE roundups of migrants; targeted election interference and identity theft: pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/p... 1/
It's especially instructive to compare this process to the steps you have to take in order to "opt in" to having a data broker open a file on you and stuff it full of your sensitive, personal information, which is then sold to all comers: * Step one: Exist. * Step two: There is no step two. 40/
The coverage on this OpenAI incident is abysmal. Use of the terms "rogue" and "loss of human control" lead to groupthink as people lack the critical skills to understand the difference between "autonomy" and faulty reward functions in AI on a task it was directed and given access to do.
Oh! They gave millions to Trump lol. people.com/taylor-farms...
Taylor Farms Met with Trump White House Days Before FDA Backtrack on Cyclosporiasis Findings, Sparking Controversy
Executives at lettuce supplier Taylor Farms met with Trump White House officials days before the FDA walked back a ‘false positive’ detection of the cyclosporiasis parasite that is causing ‘explosive’...
people.com
In terms of "product safety", ISL's site has some excellent framing here, that puts the focus squarely where it should be: "We believe everyone deserves to know a product’s safety risks."
How about a jet-lagged live posting while I read? Trying to read this because I keep getting tagged in posts about it, but the first paragraph already contains synthetic text (a quote from Claude). I will skip that bit and persevere... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Could AI be conscious?
Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implications
theguardian.com
So it’s either corruption and deceit or incompetence? The Sophie’s choice no one wants.
Reuters@reuters.com · 3w agoFDA says sample of iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms tested positive for cyclospora reut.rs/4wf6n5w
AI labs: “hey, what if we could take the Dunning-Kruger effect, bottle it in software, and sell it to every workplace, government office, and school on the planet? Now that’s innovation!”
René Walter@rawx.bsky.social · 2w agoAI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident: "Some participants who would have answered correctly on their own asked the AI and became wrong." Superpersuasion by dull tone has punch. I still suspect this is the same psych mechanism that reduces belief in conspiracies.
Could this be the world’s way of telling us that iceberg lettuce is more of a pathogenic carrier and less of an actual vegetable? (it doesn’t have any actual nutritional value on its most hygienic day, does it?)
This is exactly it -- if you make a kid use generative "A.i." or an LLM, you're telling them they're not good enough. That their own minds and ideas and experiences and abilities are not enough. That's a terrible, thoughtless, cruel thing to do. Shame on Kaepernick and everyone involved in Lumi.
DEAN WON!!!@deansnuggles.bsky.social · 3w agomy daughter (11) spends hours every week drawing comics. her art (and storytelling) has improved exponentially in the last year! I can't imagine how harmful it will be to tell kids their art isn't good enough, they need to use a theft-engine instead. we'd lose a whole generation of artists!
Hey so, if you use Waymo driverless car services, you are aiding and abetting fascism. Waymo helps ICE agents locate people to terrorize and abduct. The company willingly shares all facial recognition, license plate and GPS data with ICE and other law enforcement agencies—no subpoena required.
Waymo Self-Driving Jaguar at Traffic Light
ALT: Waymo Self-Driving Jaguar at Traffic Light
static.klipy.com
In case folks - patients or medical professionals - might find it useful, here's an edited version of a letter I sent to my own physician(s) about the reasons I refuse the use of ambient scribes.
A letter to my doctor
On the refusal of ambient AI scribes
kconrad.substack.com
Cannot fucking believe an external 4TB SSD drive that cost me $200 last year is now $1100. Had to check receipts to make sure. They’re really out there trying to keep you from having a PC, phone, or a gaming console so they can have hallucinating, polluting chatbots that drop bombs on kids’ schools.
"The FAA is working with Palantir to see if AI can help prevent collisions and close calls on airport runways" is a sentence that makes me never want to get on an airplane again.
He kept coming back, repeatedly (in the way AI often loops) to this idea of AI (specifically Claude) representing "a position without an address", and it became increasingly clear to me that there was some odd mystification happening. Of course LLM products have an address. It's a corporate address.
Second, what LLMs do is make papier-mâché of their input. So you could put in the best, most carefully curated sources in the world and what would come out would still be some kind of slurry. >>
@melanie-ensign.bsky.social and I had an illuminating chat a few weeks ago about my Product Safety Resistance Playbook. Her words convinced me that I *am* being too nice to manufacturers. Wrote about it here: product-safety-for-the-information-age.ghost.io/melanie-says...
Abolition is the only sane response.
Electronic Frontier Foundation@eff.org · 2mo ago"We didn't anticipate that spying on everybody would become the number one business model of the internet," EFF’s Cindy Cohn told @nytimes.com's Hard Fork podcast. "The minute we stop this business model, the better." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/...
more countries need to follow this example
The Internet Ethics program--Markkula Center for Applied Ethics@iethics.bsky.social · 2mo ago"Landmark German ruling declares Google's #AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers": the-decoder.com/landmark-ger... #ethics #law #internet #tech #business h/t @garymarcus.bsky.social
Revised definition of digital products here product-safety-for-the-information-age.ghost.io/what-are-dig... If we can agree on digital products, we can work towards reasonable digital product safety standards. current “Governance” is crap. we can do better.
What are digital products?
So much product safety and liability thinking hinges on the acceptance of the idea of digital products. Here is my latest thinking on them. (this is a highly edited version of a section of this paper:...
product-safety-for-the-information-age.ghost.io
