Kaitlin Stack Whitney

“why do you hate technology” as though “technology” were some discrete entity divorced entirely from the context of what it does and what it creates, rather than a category so broad as to constitute reality itself

“Confusion” doesn’t begin to describe our emerging predicament. Seventy-two percent of American teens have turned to A.I. for companionship. A.I. therapists, coaches and lovers are also on the rise. Yet few people realize that some of the frontline technologists building this new world seem deeply ambivalent about what they’re doing. They are so torn, in fact, that some privately admit they don’t plan to use A.I. intimacy tools. “Zero percent of my emotional needs are met by A.I.,” an executive who ran a team mitigating safety risks at a top lab told me. “I’m in it up to my eyeballs at work, and I’m careful.” Many others said the same thing: Even as they build A.I. tools, they hope they never feel the need to turn to machines for emotional support. As a researcher who develops cutting-edge capabilities for artificial emotion put it, “that would be a dark day.”

Developers I spoke to said the same incentives that make bots irresistible can stand in the way of reasonable safeguards, making outright abstention the only sure way to stay safe. Some described feeling stuck between protecting users and raising profits: They support guardrails in theory, but don’t want to compromise the product experience in practice. It’s little wonder the protections that do get built can seem largely symbolic — you have to squint to see the fine-print notice that “ChatGPT can make mistakes” or that Character.AI is “not a real person.” “I’ve seen the way people operate in this space,” said one engineer who worked at a number of tech companies. “They’re here to make money. It’s a business at the end of the day.”

But even if companies can curb serious dependence on A.I. companions — an open question — many of the developers I spoke with were troubled by even moderate use of these apps. That’s because people who manage to resist full-blown digital companions can still find themselves hooked on A.I.-mediated love. When machines draft texts, craft vows and tell people how to process their own emotions, every relationship turns into “a throuple,” a founder of a conversational A.I. business said. “We’re all polyamorous now. It’s you, me and the A.I.”

A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.

only saw 1 with, an NFL commercial (and they were delayed/not synced!)

can't find a single *local* #ROC TV or print clip covering this! (plz send if you see one!) more info: www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

and the national anthem was signed by Fred Beam- super accomplished artist, performer and staff w/ Sunshine 2.0 here in #ROC at NTID 🙌

great performances! (folks who didn't watch the [sadly separate] signed stream may not know that the halftime show was signed in Puerto Rican Sign Language by a Puerto Rican deaf interpreter who tours with Bad Bunny!)

👀

Every morning I wake up with a hollow anger that I have been enrolled, as a university worker, into a long-term objective of “enhancing” AI integration (“where appropriate”) into my undergraduate teaching

just finished @thewaroncars.bsky.social 'Life After Cars' - so good, myth-busting and oriented towards action + community building. excited to co-host a book club discussion w/ local walk/bike grp at library next month and dream up next steps for our (car-centric 😭) town

reciting those Frost poems memorized in elementary school

My glove-clad arm holds a cross country ski pole and the tips of two skis are in the foreground, with a snowy flat trail between trees ahead

how your email finds me (until everything starts up again tmw...)

congrats 👏 🎉

Yeah curly hair wet vs dry bounce back is a trip - usually keep it shorter but had for a few yrs seeing how long could grow it out w/o feeling the urge to chop it off 😅 - happy new year!

Happy new year!!

not exactly a resolution but read a lot of poetry + cut off a foot of hair to welcome in the new year

Rua M Williams's Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI, publushed by palgrave macmillan, is held in front of rainbow glass. The cover is deep pink with orange vines.

This book is titled “Disabling Intelligences” for many reasons. First, because so-called “AI” is built from historical commitments to the excision of disability from the classification of humanity.
link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9…

every book its reader perhaps but this one cannot stay here

this book was published fairly recently (after 2015) and is part of an apparently popular homeschooling curriculum.

Unit 1 is "People of Greatness" and *the first story* is disinfo about the civil war. you can guess which people they imagined were great

kid#2 found a US history book in the little free lib nearby. it seemed ... off from even the first page. looked up the pub-- turns out it's a phonics reader published by a higher ed institution that doesn't allow women to wear pants on campus

👀👀👀

OTD in 1950, Judy Wajcman was born. A pioneering sociologist and feminist theorist, Wajcman reshaped the philosophy and sociology of technology by showing how technological systems are deeply entwined with gender, power, and social organization.
1/

Here's one of them - www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Faculty tried to ask about storage, AI training, etc - let alone privacy, surveillance etc in classroom. (And not all students wanted it! It can't draw proofs for example!)

but/and this locally got sticky about datatification meeting austerity politics of accommodations. Previously was a move here to take away all notetaking accommodations (which was a paid student who uploaded notes) and replace with third party recording software.

I keep a running list on office white board of new stories that involve subtitles, transcripts and access copies being scraped/used for AI or surveillance! Absolutely!

tis the season (meals based around chex mix)

just walking around in the snow listening to madi diaz tracks

A snowy frozen urban pond with bare tree silhouettes and blue sky. The sun is the top right corner.

the pond is frozen