Meredith Broussard, PhD
@merbroussard.bsky.social
Critical AI, data journalism, literary nonfiction. Professor at NYU. Author, "More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech." meredithbroussard.com
I’ve been screening our documentary with organizing communities in the South. So far, the organizers mention data centers first at every single event. From racial justice orgs to old school activists who don’t usually think about tech policy. This has legs.
This just in: more than four thousand sexual assault lawsuits.
Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: ‘What Were You Wearing?’
The ride-hailing giant promised to handle legal claims “in a way that is best for the survivor.” Its lawyers are pursuing a far more aggressive strategy.
nytimes.com
New: Police in Wisconsin used Flock to create a pretext to search a man's car for weed. Their justification? He drove from Wisconsin to Michigan, a “known source state for marijuana as it is legal there,” and Flock showed he "travels to Michigan frequently." www.404media.co/cops-used-fl...
Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed
"The vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source state for marijuana as it is legal there," a probable cause justification reads.
404media.co
A great summary of all the police surveillance tech out there, mostly hidden from view, and how it will inevitably be abused. With a shoutout to @profferguson.bsky.social's book at the end! nyupress.org/978147983828...
Police Surveillance Technology: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
YouTube video by LastWeekTonight
youtube.com
I know about Flock being used to stalk women via cameras, and I know about the Uber god mode being used to stalk women via app. What's the third (etc) example that I can't remember right now?
Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com · 3d agoNew: We found 50 cops who misused Flock cameras and other license-plate readers for personal purposes, often to spy on their girlfriends or ex-wives. He "watched every single move I made. ... Who do you turn the chief of police in to?" wapo.st/3S6rTuo
“Bybee drove about two miles to a restaurant, picked up an order, and placed it in the Dot robot as it waited in the parking lot, she said. She took photos of each step to document the process, and the gig took five minutes, she said. DoorDash paid her about $5.”
DoorDash is paying people to load its delivery robots. It points to a shortcoming of automation
DoorDash is using gig workers to load orders into its Dot delivery robots, highlighting limitations in autonomous delivery technology.
businessinsider.com
Predictable. If the bar exam were a paper test, this would not be a problem. Have these bar organizers never been to a hotel conference where the WiFi crumbled under load? Why is WiFi infrastructure still so bad in so many places?
Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie@audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 6d agoI wrote about the hotass mess that hundreds of recent law grads in Washington are going through for no good reason! ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...
In any sector, in any work you do, with any concern for any tool, company or state you can’t believe you are powerless. It isn’t humility to think the problem is bigger than your power to solve it but rather ego. Humility is in seeing collective power, in joining the work others are already doing.
How a Network of Pink-Slime News Sites and Conservative Activists Went After Campus DEI, by Miranda Green. www.cjr.org/tow_center/h...
How a network of pink-slime sites and conservative activists went after campus DEI.
Using FOIA requests and hidden-camera videos, the groups targeted universities, leading to the firing of faculty and staff.
cjr.org
This is happening in just over 30 minutes!!! At 1PM ET We're going to show you how to pry records from the government. This one is especially focused on city councils. Subscribers get the link here: www.404media.co/our-new-foia... Not a sub? Sign up now to get in
Our New FOIA Forum! 7/30, 1PM ET
Join us for our latest FOIA Forum where we teach you how to pry records from the government.
404media.co
‘Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.’
Eli Valley@elivalley.bsky.social · 7d agoDystopia www.news.com.au/technology/o...
The goal is to satisfy the *emotions* behind every information need without providing real information.
Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · last wk.The cross-platform enshittification of search functionality is such an infuriating exercise of authoritarian creep. They would like to kill the inclination to find information & enforce satisfaction with be fed information.
Opened a new credit card? Here’s how that could inform ICE about where you live. @josephcox.bsky.social Read now: www.404media.co/you-opened-a...
This is a great point!! As with NFTs, many insurance companies are not insuring the products or outputs of generative AI because it is too risky. They are doing carve-outs for GenAI.
Karen K. Ho@karenho.bsky.social · 2w agoOne of the most interesting things I learned while reporting on art for three years was how many art insurance companies didn't insure stuff like this: www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22...
This is a really important point. It's very easy to just point to the AI and blame it for your failures. This was OpenAI's model, and they designed the parameters of the tests.
Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 2w agoWired sets the frame that the model “escaped containment,” but from an accountability perspective, OpenAI left a door open by failing to properly isolate their system. Real headline: “OpenAI’s security failure leads to cyberattack against another AI company.”
openai.com/supply/produ... OpenAI selling t-shirts that say "Good research takes time" has a lot of layers to it as a bit
Good Research Tee
A statement piece for the Research department. The Good Research Tee embodies our principles of patience, process, and doing things intentionally. All good things take time–including and especially re...
openai.com
companies are sourcing millions of printed books for AI labs that scan them for training data, then destroy them. printed books are more valuable because they're free of AI slop, and AI labs know destroying them is an "optics problem." www.404media.co/ai-companies...
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
404media.co
Unfettered access to chatbots can harm educational outcomes Using AI while solving problems improves performance by 48% (GPT base). When access to AI was taken away, students actually performed worse than those who never had access (17% reduction in grades) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
This World Cup's AI, sensors and VAR are celebrated as making the game smarter—but behind them sits a hidden labor chain, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Tatiana Dias. She traces who does the work.
Soccer's Tech Revolution Has a Labor Chain
AI has transformed the game into monetized data, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Tatiana Dias.
techpolicy.press
From me, and the WIRED leadership team. Proud of WIRED today and every day, and we’re not slowing down on our reporting about MSG or anything else.
WIRED@wired.com · 3w agoA statement from WIRED leadership.
NEW: We reported two years ago that Chicago police had made 200,000 secret traffic stops, failing to disclose them as required by law. Chicago police then admitted the problem, & promised to 'fix' it in a legislative hearing. We just investigated again: The problem... got WORSE.
Chicago Police Promised to 'Fix' Secret Traffic Stops. A Year Later, the Problem Has Only Gotten Worse. - Bolts
This story was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Injustice Watch, a nonprofit news organization in Chicago focused on issues of equity and justice in the court system. In... Read More
boltsmag.org
The tech industry wants us to believe its products are inevitable and we have no ability to stop them. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. It was great to chat with @thomas-dekeyser.bsky.social about how tech refusal is something we’ve done for hundreds of years — and continues today.
Tech Won’t Save Us@techwontsave.us · 3w agoBefore the Luddites and the arrival of capitalism, it wasn’t just workers pushing back against technology; governments did too. This week @thomas-dekeyser.bsky.social joins @parismarx.com to discuss how refusal of technology has a very long history. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/337_...
Cameras and microphones in a room full of minors, run by a company whose other product line is intimacy tech, should trigger way more scrutiny than "trust us, it's closed." What happens to interaction logs? Who audits that? What's the retention policy? None of that is answered in the reporting. 11/
i love when a press release headline sounds like it was written by an aggrieved fish
This Anthropic job ad sounds like it was written by AI and lightly polished by a human— but not well enough. Brand surfaces? Really?
Jane Rosenzweig@janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 3w agoAnthropic will pay a human $265,000-$295,000 for this role which suggests among other things that they think someone human should still know how to write and also that the someone who can still write is worth paying $$ and at least on those things we agree.
As I said on Techtonic: Watch what you say in a (Google) Waymo self-driving car, because you're being spied on. If Google doesn't like what it sees or hears, you could be delivered to the police. Full episode: techtonic.fm/episodes/202... More Techtonic: techtonic.fm
In an excerpt in @wired.com, the authors of "Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI" examine one of ELIZA’s earliest interactions and how it laid the groundwork for human relationships with computers for decades to come. www.wired.com/story/invent...
The Chatbot That Foretold Why People Share Secrets With ChatGPT
In the 1960s an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created a chatbot called ELIZA. The conversations people had with it set precedents for the chatbots to come.
wired.com
Thanks and yeah, I meant in that essay that "nobody knows" almost always turns out to mean "I consider the people who knew to be nobody," when it comes to the powerful. But nobody is nobody, as many abusers find out with regret.
