wow! excited to dive into this. in philosophy i studied a lot of care ethics, looking at the ways in which our social structures rely on (usually unpaid and unrecognized) care labour. love to see tangible ways of addressing how people caring for each other lift up systems everywhere.

New_ Public@newpublic.org · 2w ago

The Community·Computer Interaction Lab published a toolkit of 23 design patterns naming the small, often invisible ways people care for one another in online communities, “inspired by cultural practices … that offer a way of seeing what usually stays in the background.” c-cilab.com/care-pattern...

US AI labs: "Scraping the entire open internet without consent is fair use! It's transformative!" Also US AI labs when someone distills their models: "Wait no not like that, that's intellectual property theft" New post on why distillation is just the industry looking in the mirror:

The Great AI Double Standard

Distillation Is a Mirror; the US Labs Just Hate What They See

joanwestenberg.com

Quick stats about young people and AI companion usage around the world

Young people are using ChatGPT for companionship, much more than they use specific chatbots like Replika or Character(.)ai + other things we know from India, USA, and UK www.nehanandakumar.com/tech-ethics-...

AI Companions and Young People: What We Know From Other Countries

What do we know about how young people use AI companions? As Canada builds towards regulating AI chatbots, here is what we know from research in the UK, USA, and India.

nehanandakumar.com

yup. left instagram a while back and i no longer know which of my high school acquaintances is getting married. nothing but wins.

aaron@aaron.mn · 4w ago

I promise your friends will still call you if you delete Instagram. You’ll stop keeping up though stories and have more meaningful conversations. You don’t need to be there.

"I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me?" When these companies sell convenience, they reframe the ordinary as inconvenient,and the inconvenient as intolerable.We can't let them imagine our lives for us.

Paris Marx@parismarx.com · 4w ago

For the first time in my life, I downloaded a ride-hailing app in May. It didn’t take long to see how they’re designed to give users a false sense of control that makes it easy to overlook their flaws and be discouraged from using taxis. How else have tech services changed how we see the world?

big fan of "conversation simulators" "people are growing attached to chatbots": vague, mysterious "people are growing attached to conversation simulators": yeah no we need to stop that

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last mo.

For more on how to talk about tech sold as "AI" in more precise terms: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Very nice initiative. I've found that writing fiction helps you focus on the small details-- the building blocks of any major change that are easy to miss when thinking in terms of big ideas.

Metagov@metagov.bsky.social · last mo.

The Protopian Prize Fiction Contest is especially geared towards people who might not normally think of themselves as “writers” or “fiction writers”! Watch our full contest launch video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Z9... #fiction #fictionwriters #writing #storytellers #future #technology

+1, ChatGPT can't "ignore" guardrails. The guardrails just aren't good enough.

Emma Evans@trance.bsky.social · last mo.

ChatGPT is not sociopathic, nor psychopathic. It's a glorified chatbot with shitty guardrails. It'd be like saying your car is a sociopath because you found out you could disable the brakes via the control panel and omgerd you went off a cliff

Happy Pride from Niagra Falls too :D

The government says its Bill C-34 exemption process for the social media ban creates incentives to comply. But the bill gets it backward. With no standards and no exemption for years, nearly all Canadians will have to age verify before safeguards are in place.

Soft Ban or Hard Verification Requirement?: Why Bill C-34's Social Media Ban Exemption Gets the Incentives Wrong and Comes Too Late to Matter - Michael Geist

The debate over Bill C-34’s social media ban for those under sixteen has largely focused on the impact on users, including mandated age verification for millions, the privacy risks of verification…

michaelgeist.ca

The Two Weeks That Reshaped Canada’s Digital Policy: my Globe essay tries to make sense of the wildest Canadian digital policy stretch in memory with the CRTC streaming reversal, AI strategy, C-34, C-36, and lawful access. What is the government doing? www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/bc5ccfd...

How do we make sense of a digital strategy seemingly in disarray?

Those focused on digital policy are left struggling to make sense of the dizzying pace of change in Ottawa

theglobeandmail.com

Yeah, using AI promises to make life easier, and things are often overwhelming and hard. But then ig we should just use that as a chance to figure out what in our lives are worth keeping, and if they are, then they're probably worth putting in effort for...?

Amanda Silberling@amanda.omg.lol · 2mo ago

in which i am tantalized by the promise of an AI assistant that will do everything for me but then @kasulke.co reminds me that maybe there is value to doing things ourselves, even if it is not as ~efficient~ techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/h...

I am also concerned about the "protect the kids" narrative underlying the push for these policies. This very idea is used to push anti-LGBTQIA+ measures, saying "think about the kids!" as a reason against gender-neutral bathrooms, queer-inclusive curricula etc.

Michael Geist@mgeist.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy? Does the ban actually work? Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban? Why is mandated age verification a privacy risk? If the ban is “temporary,” why does it matter? If not a ban, then what?

“The Al is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you”

The_Lady_Red@theladyred.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Why are we still arguing about the Industrial Revolution? I my column today I make the case for reading the novels of the age, rather than the arguments in tech circles about output per hour, real wage growth, etc. www.ft.com/content/f837...

With people relying on AI chatbots for advice on personal struggles, how does this shape our collective understanding of mental wellness? Do we see it as a state of having the answers we need, or moving forward despite uncertainty, feeling that we have been heard or actually being heard by someone?

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Teens are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for advice and mental health questions, writes Dr. Caroline Figueroa. Policymakers are focused on acute harms, but the bigger concern may be emotional dependency on AI itself— and ensuring teens receive the human support they need.

computer should not say “I”

Worth thinking about, especially on the heels of the Angus Reid findings that 2/3 Canadians prioritize heavy AI regulation even if that means slower progress. A related question: progress towards what kind of world? angusreid.org/ai-regulatio...

Canadians call for heavy AI regulation, but three-quarters doubt any government can keep up with the technology - Angus Reid Institute

[wpcode id="85268"]

angusreid.org

Ethan Lou@ethanlou.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ottawa wants ‘AI for all.’ But do all Canadians want AI in their lives? The latest from the Globe's business commentary, by Viet Vu, André Côté:

These tools will once again be sold as the inevitable future, as if it were unnecessary to ask questions about trust. But it is not—we shouldn't mistake marketing campaigns for facts.

New_ Public@newpublic.org · 2mo ago

Here’s what the model makers don’t understand yet: these AI tools require your trust. They rely on you connecting your sensitive apps and accounts.

One of the big concerns I have about AI chatbots, in addition to their impact on our skills, is the impact they have on our self-trust. The entire AI sales pitch is that whatever you do on your own can be done better with AI. The moment that is the reason someone opens ChatGPT/Claude/etc.. (1/...)

Alex Hanna@alexhanna.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The youth know what’s up. Check out @janus.bsky.social's article in @theverge.com. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Quiet part loud!

404 Media@404media.co · 2mo ago

SCOOP: An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned.

Glad to see research studying the inclusive development of AI. Not so glad to see what the findings say. queertech.org/en/resources...

Canada’s Tech Industry: New Report Finds Alarming Gap in Responsible AI Development Readiness

Canada’s Tech Industry: New Report Finds Alarming Gap in Responsible AI Development Readiness

queertech.org

Agreed. And we should reconsider the "Anti-AI" or "AI critic" framing of those not jumping on the bandwagon. Are we opposing the technologies grouped under AI, or how these technologies are currently being developed and deployed? Why let tech companies dictate what AI is?

New_ Public@newpublic.org · 2mo ago

Is AI inherently parasitic? newpublic.substack.com/p/what-eli-s...

Where does the “it’s not x, it’s y” come from? It’s not only training data: LLMs are trained to use language to arrive at “answers.” Whatever we’re incentivizing and disincentivizing in our use of language when we resist “sounding like AI” has big implications for students, and for human thought.

It's Not Just X. It's Y.

Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs a...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

Great article on how emotional dependence on AI chatbots interferes with our ability to bond with people. Thinking about how anthropomorphic chatbot design contributes to this, even outside of companionship-centric use cases. open.substack.com/pub/centerfo...

The Attachment Economy Is Here. We’re Not Ready.

Key Takeaways from Our Conversation with Dr. Zak Stein

open.substack.com

We need concepts to articulate how chatbots keep people hooked before the public discourse is hijacked by the language of personal responsibility-- shifting the blame of addictive design from those it benefits to those it harms. This research is a great step in that direction.

Sam Cole@samleecole.bsky.social · 2mo ago

new @cdt.org study out this morning looks at how chatbots deploy manipulative "dark patterns" to get people to offer up more than they bargained for: www.404media.co/new-study-re...

It's hard to imagine YouTube's core business being displaced by AI, but at the same time, 20 years ago it was hard to imagine everyone would turn to YouTube as a foundational reference library

New_ Public@newpublic.org · 3mo ago

We did an analysis of which social media apps are vulnerable to being replaced by AI. See which apps have less exposure to AI disruption, and which are, as the kids say… cooked.

Been writing on Ellipsus for a year now-- one of the few places not suggesting that I Write With AI ✨

Ellipsus@ellipsus.com · 2mo ago

If you don’t know what writers actually feel about AI, you haven’t been paying attention to us. (Lucky you, we have a survey and a blog post about it: ellipsus.com/blog/survey-...) TL;DR: The writing world is not in the grips of "AI fever." @nymag.com - want to know more? We’re available.

It is often said that a “wave” or “tsunami” of technological change is heading our way. These metaphors are powerful because they shape our sense of what is reasonable, and what is unreasonable. What does AI as a "wave" imply is a reasonable course of action? (1/...)