Kate

Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' gets the monster right for the age of AI Too bad he lets the founders off easy.

In the age of AI, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein gets the monster right:

-Preening college dropout founder desperate to troll and provoke
-Secures financing from war profiteer
-Unethically harvests key materials for startup from people living and dead without consent
-Takes 0 responsibility

As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...

What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history?

sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

By the end of the spring semester, Gwen reached a breaking point with AI. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to be a Yale student,” she said. She thought that she was throwing away her education and the scholarship paying to support it. She decided to quit using ChatGPT altogether. She didn’t ask AI to help her sentences flow or to strike the right tone. She didn’t even use it to brainstorm. “I think that’s a skill you need to have on your own. That’s the core of being original, anyway.” Gwen recalled completing her final assignments without AI, sitting in the middle of a crowded library so that she felt watched. “I struggled. And they weren’t very good.” It was only then, she said, that she started to understand just how much learning she had missed out on. ∎

New feature article from TNJ (nation's best student magazine): Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...

Remember the recent middle-of-the-night apartment building raid where children were dragged outside naked & zip-tied in the street while black & Latino residents were _sorted by race_ and piled into separate vans while their apartments were ransacked & robbed? That raid? So it resulted in 0 arrests.

They asked a Google AI for Ed engineer “how he planned to enact his vision of the future, one where AI filled classrooms rather than emptied them. ‘The professors themselves,’ he said, would be responsible for figuring that out.”
They promise utopian and make others responsible for delivering it.

HEADLINE: CREATIVE WORKS CAN NO LONGER BE MINED BY AI WITHOUT CONSENT IN AUSTRALIA NEW REGULATIONS PROTECT ARTISTS' RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF AI

See, look, U.S.A., it's this easy

(and should have been done immediately upon the knowledge that these cheats and grifters were STEALING our work)

literally the last person on earth we need to be consulting for opinions on the intersection between technology and the human spirit

It literally has a disclosure on its Steam page. It didn't "slip through", man. You tried to charge people for a thing that's got slop in it and they're mad.

I have an extension to add a pop-up on the Steam page for it but I really think it should be by default top-of-page.

For real, check this out. Evil.

AI in education is treated as the future of education when it actually represents very old ideas of individualized learning

We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA.

Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.

i spoke to LOADS of people about this very recently, and the only people using it regularly were the dipshits in charge

There are no words for how evil this is

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?

students: no AI

I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.

New from me: I went deep on the way that generative AI and chatbots act as wormholes, pushing us deeper into our own minds. They threaten to compound the problems of algorithmic targeting that have festered unaddressed for years and years—what comes next may be even more alienating and isolating (🎁)

I’m so mad that real artists had their work stolen, ground into AI slurry, packaged and sold to people who will claim they’re making art but not caring about the necks they’re standing on to do so - about as opposite of ‘art’ as you can get

The Coca-Cola Christmas ad, made with AI, used at least eight AI models known to be trained on copyrighted work without permission.

This is a huge middle finger to the artists whose work these models exploit, at scale, for huge commercial gain.

YouTube video by Y Oslo Y Oslo - How to draw an orange, Mike Monteiro

This talk from @monteiro.bsky.social is fantastic.

"We are born with hearts that want to make a mark on the world. This ability is not lost, it is taken from us."

A few more quotes in the thread ⬇️. There is much more in the full talk.

h/t @tante.cc

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH2d...

"According to Nick Clegg, AI would die if the tech oligarchs couldn't steal our work--I am okay with that. If requiring consent kills something, that thing deserves to die."

What Esther said. Two things: loads of women in computational fields call out AI exactly because we know all about this stuff.

And the second, those who mock and snicker are playing with words here. When it suits them AI means everything and other times it means AI products they sell for money.

Remember when we kept getting stories about how NFT’s were changing Black womens lives and good for minorities

And the. The bubble burst?

"I think there will be fun things that people are going to be doing in the cars that are not just driving. It's making drinks, it's telling stories, it's being the local guy," - Lyft CEO

“Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration." - @hypervisible.blacksky.app

The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work The web archive Common Crawl has been quietly funneling paywalled articles to AI companies—and lying to publishers about it.

A little-known nonprofit has been lying to news publishers while funneling millions of paywalled articles to tech companies for AI training. Read my investigation in The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

DHS Gives Local Cops a Facial Recognition App To Find Immigrants The app, called Mobile Identify and available on the Google Play Store, is specifically for local and regional law enforcement agencies working with ICE on immigration enforcement.

We've found DHS is giving local cops a new facial recognition app to find immigrants. Point camera at face, tells the cop to detain person or not. The app is available on Google's Play Store. Google took down apps that report ICE sightings but now hosts this app

www.404media.co/cbp-quietly-...

We’re Losing the Thread on AI in Education A call for systematic preparation in an increasingly reactive landscape

I know it is infuriating to faculty at Ohio State that their institution is being converted into a para-governmental incubator for technofeudal collaborationist hackery like this.

We’ll worry about AI slop, cognitive atrophy, AI psychosis, etc. AFTER we compel every teacher & student to use it. 🤬

what the “misuse” framing does is shift the onus on individual users when shit goes wrong leaving AI developers and vendors off the hook

2/

i’ve said this before but lemme say it again. it makes absolutely 0 sense to talk about “misuse” of llms because there is no clear use or purpose for llms to begin with. genAI is a purposeless tech floating around looking for uptake

1/

I Can't Help Feeling Like a Creep Wearing Meta's New Gen 2 Glasses Meta's new display-less smart glasses are quite good, but the vibes are off.

“I'm not saying these are glasses for creeps, but I can't help but feel like one while wearing them.”

Reader, they are for creeps.