Frank Pasquale

“The position of fiction is plummeting irretrievably while other forms of storytelling are damaging or misusing the tools of narrative.”
thebaffler.com/odds-and-end...

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

“AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality.”

Under RFK Jr., CDC promotes false vaccines-autism link it once discredited The CDC’s website now says health authorities ignored evidence of a potential connection between vaccines and autism, despite dozens of studies showing no link.

The revisions show that the “CDC cannot currently be trusted as a scientific voice,” said Demetre Daskalakis, who formerly led the agency’s center responsible for respiratory viruses and immunizations. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

“Just 18 per cent of voters supported the effort to stop states regulating AI. Research by Pew in September found that about half of Americans feared AI would be detrimental to forming relationships.”
www.ft.com/content/e087...

Judges have become ‘human filters’ as AI in Australian courts reaches ‘unsustainable phase’, chief justice says Stephen Gageler warns the speed of AI’s development could be outstripping people’s ability to ‘comprehend its potential risks and rewards’

Judges have become ‘human filters’ as AI in Australian courts reaches ‘unsustainable phase’, chief justice says www.theguardian.com/law/2025/nov...

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads Philosophers are fond of saying that their field boosts critical thinking. Two of them decided to put that claim to the test.

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads

Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning. theconversation.com/studying-phi... #philosophy #skills #thinking #PhilosophySky #philsky

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

"Rather than relying on the unsupervised inferences of large models, the system develops a basis in clear “if A, then B” judgements, thereby refining its AI solutions and industrial operating system."
www.sinification.com/p/chinas-str...

Democrats’ Wile E. Coyote Problem For two decades, Democrats thought they could outrun the broken operating systems of government through managerial excellence. It didn’t work before, and it won’t work now.

“Complicated budget scoring and procedural arcana haven’t stopped yawning deficits, but they have made the process so cumbersome and unintuitive that agencies and Congress have given up.”
hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/democrats-...

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

“Our first point of contact with most information is rarely the information itself but some lossily compressed derivative that’s already been processed and strained through a dozen layers of reinterpretation.”
nymag.com/intelligence...

The Real China Model Beijing’s enduring formula for wealth and power.

Its “most subtle piece of deep infrastructure is its more than 70-million-person industrial workforce. Thanks to intense buildup of complex manufacturing supply chains, Chinese factory managers, engineers, and workers have decades of process knowledge.”
www.foreignaffairs.com/china/real-c...

“Good politics also requires…a healthy public sphere, in which at least the most egregiously bad ideas and bad actors are subject to sufficient scrutiny that they are weeded out.”
chrisdillow.substack.com/p/on-incompe...

“Under Josef Stalin, Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko advanced pseudoscientific doctrines to align with party ideology, while orchestrating the purge of biologists and geneticists who upheld empirical standards.”
techpolicy.press/how-politica...

Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?

“Theirs is one of at least six defamation cases filed in the United States in the past two years over content produced by A.I. tools that generate text and images.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/b... @nytimes.com #ArtificialIntelligence

“Strategic pursuit of societal ignorance is a threat to achievements in areas ranging from public health to the rule of law and international stability.”
techpolicy.press/the-united-s...

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Is a Warning The centibillionaire’s Wikipedia clone is ridiculous. It’s also a glimpse of the future.

Here comes a “world mediated not just by publications or social networks but by omnipurpose AI products that assure us they’re ‘maximally truth-seeking’ or ‘objective’ as they simply tell” algorithmically personalized audiences what they want to hear.
nymag.com/intelligence...

Can anything halt the decline of German industry? Europe’s manufacturing champion is in free fall. Economists are suggesting radical steps to save what is left

“On average, Chinese capital goods are 30 per cent cheaper than those of Europeans.”
www.ft.com/content/239e...

Irish watchdog opens content moderation probe on Elon Musk's X | Euractiv The investigation focuses on how the social media platform handles user appeals against content moderation decisions under the bloc's Digital Services Act

Twitter is being investigated by Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán focusing on how the social media platform handles user appeals against content moderation decisions under Digital Services Act
www.euractiv.com/news/irish-w...

“In every case prior to the collapse [of an empire] there is a slow growth in inequality, oligarchy, corruption and factionalism between elites over the surplus of lootable resources.”
www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

Entropic Boredom How did the internet get this boring? And where is boredom leading us?

“In a heat death–type narrative of the internet’s demise, we are all infected and rendered senseless by the machine-driven decay of online content into meaninglessness. Human culture is sucked into the vortex of online collapse, and thought ceases to exist.”
www.emptysetmag.com/articles/ent...

Today's decision in GEMA v. OpenAI by a German court holds that ChatGPT infringes copyright when it memorizes song lyrics. The opinion cites my paper with @afedercooper.bsky.social on memorization in generative models, and its analysis tracks ours.

drive.google.com/file/d/1dUaD...

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | Eric Reinhart A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare – with consequences for the basis of society itself

“The 21st-century algorithmic gaze dissolves both patient and doctor alike into never-ending streams of automated data.”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

“Governments are saying 'well, we don't want to step in too soon and regulate AI'. That's exactly what they said about the internet - and look at the harm it's done to so many kids.”
www.bbc.com/news/article...

First time holding my book 🥹 Thanks UCLA!

“AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.”
www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

AI summaries has got to be one of the biggest concerns about professional AI use:

1) people love summaries and will assume accuracy;

2) AI summaries often look authoritative (even citing sources);

3) if you take time to check the sources, they often don’t say what AI says in the summary

“You’re a winner, baby!” 🥳😜

Honored to have won the best “Food Issues” book from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP).

This from Ted is also usefully read in conjunction with the just-released statement from the MLA advocating for faculty representation on ed tech policy-making committees: www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...