Gina Helfrich

I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.

"Holly said she was most surprised at Microsoft’s capacity for massive hypocrisy on climate. 'We kept thinking we must be missing something. But the more contracts we saw, the more we realized Microsoft just wants to make money, with no guardrails or accountability mechanisms in place.'”

A watch frozen forever at 8:15am, the moment an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945.

A watch frozen forever at 8:15am, the moment an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on Monday August 6th 1945.

#Hiroshima #August6th #HiroshimaPeaceMemorialMuseum #広島 #HiroshimaDay

Very excited to be recruiting for a Communication and Impact Officer to work with me, @ewaluger.bsky.social and the whole @braiduk.bsky.social team in Edinburgh through late 2028! Opportunity is Grade 7 and applications close 1st Sept

The Illusion of Connection

From Facebook getting us to assign “friendship” to casual acquaintances, to LinkedIn encouraging us to call a stack of business cards “a network,” social media has completely reshaped how we define and maintain relationships. And not for the better.

We think of the White House as a big mansion, but the point is it's not a palace. It's a house. It's modest, one of the smallest residences for a head of state. The east and west wings are deliberately minimal and unobtrusive. It's not Versailles or Buckingham. It symbolizes civic republicanism.

AI and Fraternity, Abeba Birhane, AI Accountability Lab I envision a future where human dignity, justice, peace, kindness, care, respect, accountability, and rights and freedoms serve as the north stars that guide AI development and use. Realising these ideals can’t happen without intentional tireless work, dialogues, and confrontations of ugly realities – even if they are uncomfortable to deal with. This starts with deciphering hype from reality. Pervasive narratives portray AI as a magical, fully autonomous entity approaching a God-like omnipotence and omniscience. In reality, audits of AI systems reveal a consistent failure to deliver on grandiose promises and suffer from all kinds of shortcomings, issues often swept under the rug. AI in general, and GenAI in particular, encodes and exacerbates historical stereotypes, entrenches harmful societal norms, and amplifies injustice. A robust body of evidence demonstrates that — from hiring, welfare allocation, medical care allocation to anything in between — deployment of AI is widening inequity, disproportionately impacting people at the margins of society and concentrating power and influence in the hands of few. Major actors—including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI—have willingly aligned with authoritarian regimes and proactively abandoned their pledges to fact-check, prevent misinformation, respect diversity and equity, refrain from using AI for weapons development, while retaliating against critique. The aforementioned vision can’t and won’t happen without confrontation of these uncomfortable facts. This is precisely why we need active resistance and refusal of unreliable and harmful AI systems; clearly laid out regulation and enforcement; and shepherding of the AI industry towards transparency and accountability of responsible bodies. "Machine agency" must be in service of human agency and empowerment, a coexistence that isn't a continuation of modern tech corporations’ inequality-widening,

so I am one of the 12 people (including the “god-fathers of AI”) that will be at the Vatican this September for a two full-day working group on the Future of AI

here is my Vatican approved short provocation on 'AI and Fraternity' for the working group

Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice? The basilar ganglia does not exist.

NEW: Google dubbed an error from its healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini, a typo. Experts say it demonstrates the risks of AI in medicine.
www.theverge.com/health/71804...

So Long to Tech’s Dream Job

Five-ish years ago, @lizthegrey.com told me tech workers needed to organize because the tech giants would automate their jobs, the market would flood with talent and they would lose bargaining power. I thought it was unlikely. Here’s a story about me being wrong. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

Non-Texans will not appreciate what an ice cold diss this is. Honestly, perfection.

Texas House Democrats offer a brief response to Gov. Greg Abbott's threat of arrest and expulsion: "Come and take it."

Just to say that every age-verification is an identity verification.

This creates the long held, never-possible dream of surveillance agencies everywhere of a full, Govt-backed record of Internet habits linked to ID.

All major Las Vegas Strip casinos are now unionized in historic labor victory The Culinary Workers Union representing 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada has achieved a historic victory on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Culinary Workers Union representing 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada has achieved a historic victory on the Las Vegas Strip. For the first time in its 90-year history, all major casinos on the Strip are unionized.

Texas governor threatens Democrats who left state to prevent congressional map vote – US politics live Greg Abbott says he will try to remove Democrats unless they return to allow vote to take place on redrawing the US House map to favour Republicans

Do you know which state has the largest number of Black residents?

TEXAS (nearly 4 million)

Trump’s demand that TX redistrict & the Republican legislature’s acquiescence is an attack on Black representation. Stand with Texas Dems.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/live...

“The same way the Manhattan project was compelling.” 🤦‍♀️

This month we #ChuckZuck from our devices and our lives! Choose a Zuckerverse product and delete it. Reclaim your data. Reclaim your life. Instructions and more here -- follow along! Let's do this TOGETHER!

the problem with letting democrats backslide their support of trans rights whether it be trans in sports or using bathrooms is we’ve seen “compromise” in the UK labor party. they gave into “reasonable” TERF demands and it destroyed the labor party and all rights for trans people

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices....

ICYMI: Amazon still doing Amazon things

The company is not only reintroducing new versions of old features that allow police to access footage from Ring users

Amazon is introducing a new Ring feature that will allow police to request *livestream* access to our home security devices.

@eff.org

Post from "The Rundown" July 18 at 5:30 PM · DuckDuckGo has introduced a new feature allowing users to filter out AI-generated images from search results, addressing growing concerns over synthetic content overwhelming authentic visuals online. The filter can be activated through a dropdown in the Images tab, search settings, or by using a dedicated AI-free domain: noai.duckduckgo.com. The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin’s Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress AI-generated imagery. While not perfect, it significantly reduces synthetic content visibility. This move sets DuckDuckGo apart from competitors like Google and Bing by giving users direct control over their exposure to AI-generated material. Source: TechCrunch

DuckDuckGo has added a feature to filter out AI images from search results.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Want to get back at that prof who gave you an A- on an exam? Or maybe you don't think people of color or women should be professors?

Make up a story about antisemitism, plop it into an anonymous student evaluation, and watch as your prof's life is upturned faster than you can spell "fascism."

The company that needed two years and billions of dollars to create cartoon avatars with legs has announced that it's *this close* to creating a machine god.

Matthew Abtahi was the director of Northwestern’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center until he was fired in April.

Northwestern’s legal counsel advised him to remove information on all-gender bathrooms as well as references to national nonprofits like the Trevor Project and Trans Lifeline.

The BBC News website has pages & pages of coverage related to farmers protesting inheritance tax, including events where only a few hundred turn out.

In London yesterday 100,000 people marched for trans rights, and nothing.

Imagine if it was 100,000 anti immigrant activists, they'd cover that.

The U.S. government will do nothing except to give Israel more weapons and more money.

Europeans, please get your governments to intervene to end these atrocities. 🙏🏼

I have yet to read a single story about men adopting AI at work (without being told) at a higher rate than women that presents it as anything other than men being smart. Not one story about how it implies they're lazier and less ethical.
Because that's not the narrative that's being pushed about AI.

Of course we can always do better and try to be more responsible travelers. But at the end of the day, what we need to do is force the rich guys to change their behavior. (3/3)

And deflects attention from where it ought to be. Private jets accounted for more carbon than *every commercial flight out of Healthrow* last year. Look what Zuck is doing in Hawaii. (2/3)

Re environmental impact, I really view it like the campaign to get people to recycle, to use paper straws instead of plastic, etc. - which is to say it’s individualizing a problem that should be solved by those most responsible. (1/3)

a scholar with high standing in his field, should be "counterbalanced" by a columnist notorious for his incendiary, click-mongering, and manifestly ideological takes. And this is before we address the perversity of treating the legal designation of genocide as something to debate in the Opinion section. (Alt text continued in reply)

I truly intended this just as an email and not a public thing but fuck it we ball. The New York Times is not alone in its culpability but it is deeply culpable and its near-monopoly status in our blighted American media ecosystem allows it to do what it does.