Great catching up with everyone at 4S in Toronto this past week!

www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...

Startups are hiring low-paid gig workers to train robots on manual labour

We got a firsthand look at what it’s like to record yourself for AI-powered humanoid robots to learn from

theglobeandmail.com

4S starts this week! Wednesday at 3:40pm, I'll be chairing "Technopower Landscapes: How Technoscientific Spacialization Structures Food Systems." Samyuktha Rameshkumar, Katie Rohrbaugh, Oluwatosin Obafunsho, and I will discuss how technopower shapes food production, logistics, and agriculture. 🌱🚚🤖

Heading back to Toronto soon for 4S! Come see me do at least 2 things (maybe more!): 1. Co-chair a Reactionary Technopolitics of Games open panel series (at 8 AM!!!) with Alex ross; 2. Co-present on GenAI teleologies of "Hot Girl" eugenics with Cate Alexander!

Restaurant owners: nothing makes me want to avoid your restaurant more than seeing pictures of AI food. First, it looks gross. Second, if you're cutting corners with your advertisements/menus, you're probably cutting corners with your food.

AI-generated food imagery at restaurants has some customers losing their appetites | CBC News

Diners have taken to social media to share photos of overly-shiny sandwiches and circular shrimp, lamenting the suspected use of AI. But some in the restaurant business say it's helped them reduce cos...

cbc.ca

Anyone can upload AI slop music to anyone's Spotify page. We tested it, and it's trivial to do: www.404media.co/spotify-ai-m...

I Hijacked a Real Artist's Spotify with AI Music. It Was Disturbingly Easy

A glaring loophole in digital music distribution makes it very easy to piggyback on the talent of real artists with AI generated music.

404media.co

Last week, Professor Julie Chen delivered the keynote at the 9th Annual Conference of the International Network on Digital Labour in Geneva, Switzerland. A full recording of the keynote is available online. www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/news/j...

Professor Julie Chen Delivers Keynote at INDL-9 | Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology

Last week, Professor Julie Chen was a keynote speaker at the 9th Annual Conference of the International Network on Digital Labour (INDL-9). Her presentation was entitled From Rengong (artificial/labor...

utm.utoronto.ca

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Used bookstores navigate 'suspicious' bulk orders amid AI book-shredding fears | CBC News

Used booksellers in Canada are navigating how to handle mysterious bulk orders, as suspicions grow that companies are buying up their old books so they can be scanned for AI training — and then trashe...

cbc.ca

Amazon is officially shutting down Mechanical Turk next month. It feels like the end of an era. I've written about the platform on and off for close to a decade. We wouldn't have the AI tools we do now if it weren't for the low-paid, largely invisible labor of MTurkers

If you’re planning to double down on buying Canadian after this weekend, here’s how to figure out what product labels can really tell you about an item’s origins www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/fro...

From made in Canada to product of Canada: How to make sense of Canadian labels

TORONTO - Shoppers have been caught up in the buy Canadian fervour since U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Sunday applying 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian

thecanadianpressnews.ca

There's no such thing as rogue AI, whenever you see this term the subject is actually rogue AI developers www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...

How AI Models From OpenAI and Anthropic Went Rogue

Watch to learn how an AI agent escaped “sandboxed” environments and hacked a separate company—leading to calls for regulation.

wsj.com

SCOOP: 404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it. What did we find? It ended up at an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. Yes. This is literally the logo outside the Amazon warehouse door. Read now:

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

Recurring cycle of offering AI features for free, fostering dependency, then charging a subscription.

Part of the problem might be that the robots look like smart dehumidifiers.

404 Media@404media.co · 2mo ago

Knightscope and other robotics companies are rethinking automated security following canceled contracts. One pivot? Human guards.

The schedule for 4S 2026 is out! I've landed on a very fun panel about technology and food. 🤖🥪

Anthropic @ our books:

Not terribly surprised given Walgreen’s penchant for surveillance and using facial recognition www.goodmanallen.com/walgreens-an...

Walgreens and Kroger Sued for Using Cameras with Facial Recognition - Goodman Allen Donnelly

by Anthony Tacconi Most shoppers at Walgreens and Kroger would be unaware that these companies have been quietly rolling out facial scanning and recognition technology at many of their stores. Walgree...

goodmanallen.com

Jenny Cohn@jennycohn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Palantir Stock Surges 7% on New Deals with Walgreens and Heineken” 3/12/25 Walgreens?? finance.yahoo.com/news/palanti...

This is good news! There's a federal surveillance pricing ban in the pipeline, but who knows when/if it will materialize. www.thestar.com/news/gta/can...

Can Toronto ban ‘surveillance pricing’ in city grocery stores? Mayor Olivia Chow wants to try

Toronto’s mayor has asked staff for a report on the options the city has to restrict the AI-fuelled retail practice.

thestar.com

AI companies buying tons of old books as training material because they aren't filled with AI slop. @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social breaks down what's going on. Watch the full episode here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xSe...

Dipping back into my early fieldwork on retail automation in Toronto. This is the first Robo Cafe in the city, which opened during the pandemic lockdowns in fall of 2020.

I've been seeing AI-generated flyers and signage pop up in Toronto. Most of is embarrassingly obvious.

404 Media@404media.co · 3mo ago

Have you seen these ChatGPT ahh flyers? Well, we at 404 Media see them everywhere. “It might feel like you’re ‘saving time and money,’ but you’re actually slowly turning your brand into something generic like all the other brands out there using AI tools.”

This month, professor Kate Maddalena & co-author Jeremy Tirrell released "Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption." The book explores how Gothic tropes infiltrate wellness discourse and influence our cultural obsession with food, health, and bodily control. www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/news/k...

Kate Maddalena Releases a New Book with Jeremy Tirrell | Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology

This month, ICCIT Professor Kate Maddalena and her co-author Jeremy Tirrell have released Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption. Their new book, published by the University of Alabama Press, ...

utm.utoronto.ca

Ebay, Amazon, and Etsy are unable to stop the flood of AI-generated seed scams.

Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist

Ebay, Amazon, and Etsy are unable to stop the flood of AI-generated seed scams.

404media.co

Game Over? Not! 🎮👾 CGSA 2026 concludes its *20TH YEAR* as a gathering for game scholars, makers, & enthusiasts. THANK YOU to Marc Lajeunesse, coordinator of @tag-centre.bsky.social at Concordia University for hosting (3 times!) our members from & beyond Canada🍁 👀 Stay tuned for next year’s CGSA!

Your every-once-in-a-while reminder that there is a Labour & Technology Scholars starter pack on Bluesky. If you'd like to be added, send me a message. go.bsky.app/UMaa7T3

One of the problems with how we do digital policy in Canada is we pass laws based on what sounds good (protect children! protect privacy! make big tech pay for links!) without understanding the implications of these laws or how they’re all supposed to fit together

Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · 4mo ago

So we're going to get legislation making privacy a fundamental right at the same time as we get legislation forcing us to ID ourselves to use social media platforms and online services?

Piece in CCPA with @marxist.af on surveillance pricing. We gathered industry webinars and earnings calls to study how firms are using AI to set individualized prices. We found that surveillance pricing is built on existing market power and infrastructure. www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc...

“Surveillance pricing” is already here—Canada needs laws to stop it | CCPA

Driven by big tech and corporate concentration, companies are using surveillance to warp prices and extract from consumers

policyalternatives.ca

The ban on surveillance pricing is probably the best thing to come out of Canada's National AI Strategy. I'm so glad Doug Ford was overruled on this one. globalnews.ca/news/1180426...

Doug Ford nixes idea of grocery surveillance pricing ban in Ontario | Globalnews.ca

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is nixing the idea of banning so-called surveillance pricing on groceries, as Manitoba has proposed.

globalnews.ca