Kin

Pre-print for anyone interested in critical perspectives on AI development:

'Whose Needs are being Met? Looking at Agency, Authority and Social Risk in Relation to Forbes’ Top 50 AI Companies': papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Review - Molly Joyce, State Change: musical notes meet medical notes Molly Joyce is an American performer and composer whose work explores disability as creative material. Her latest album, State Change uses surgical records as musical lyrics and utilises various adapt...

I imagine this as an almost out-of-body experience that comes from reading what others have written about you. And it is not ‘you’ as a complex being of emotions, experiences, opinions, relationships, fears and desires. It is you as a physical, material body made of flesh and bone.

Review - Molly Joyce, State Change: musical notes meet medical notes Molly Joyce is an American performer and composer whose work explores disability as creative material. Her latest album, State Change uses surgical records as musical lyrics and utilises various adapt...

How might medical professionals better understand patient experience through music? I really enjoyed writing about this concept album from Molly Joyce in which she uses medical notes written about her after being in a car accident that nearly resulted in the amputation of one hand.

Kin>% on Digital Fatalism, Hidden Labor, and the Politics of AI — DIGITAL ARTS BLOG Kin>% (cell_less) is a UK-based PhD artist-researcher whose practice investigates narratives of technological inevitability and the ways algorithmic systems make decisions for and about us. Working ac...

A nice little interview with me on Digital Arts Blog plus a few photos of my work Dissimulation, a three-screen video installation about hidden labour in AI: www.digitalartsblog.com/artist-spotl...

Space Racism: How the Right Captured Science Fiction Before Musk and Thiel, a shadow history throws the often idealistic hopes of progressive science-fiction cultures into stark and unstable relief

Speculative futures can come from the left or the right. An interesting article on different approaches to sci-fi and how Musk, Thiel etc are attempting to 'turn its contents into tools for their own forms of memetic warfare'. artreview.com/space-racism...

Reform MPs completely absent from Commons statement on 'grooming gangs' Farage himself has a notably terrible Commons attendance record. But the lack of Reform MPs at the statement is particularly egregious.

Reform MPs completely absent from Commons statement on ‘grooming gangs'. This speaks volumes. There are MPs working hard to tackle child exploitation whereas Reform can't even be bothered to turn up. thecanary.co/uk/news/2025...
@thecanaryuk.bsky.social

The fundamental flaws of the rhetoric of AI inevitability Review of Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity…

AI inevitability isn’t destiny — it’s rhetoric. Read my review of Becker’s More Everything Forever. His critique shows how Longtermism rests on speculative futures and 'troubling moral arithmetic' rather than grounded evidence. medium.com/@kin.artcoll...

Dissimulation The metaphor of the ‘black box’ is commonly used to describe systems in which the inputs and outputs are known but the inner mechanisms are not. ‘Artificial intelligence’ technologies are an exampl…

What is inside the black box of AI? My latest video installation is an exposé of the hidden labour that goes into making AI, specifically click-work and data-labelling which is outsourced by hugely profitable US companies often to low-paid, precarious workers. cell-less.com/2025/09/10/d...

Schools and universities should be making research like this mandatory reading before the term starts.

The fundamental flaws of the rhetoric of AI inevitability Review of Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity…

Digging into the 'troubling moral arithmetic' of Longtermism, this is my review of Adam Becker's latest book More Everything Forever (Basic Books): medium.com/@kin.artcoll...

US cash turned Tommy Robinson into the poster boy of UK f... Outside the Old Bailey in 2018, a reinvented Tommy Robinson flashed his perfect new teeth to 2,000 diehard supporters at a “free Tommy” rally on a stage ...

Billionaires interfering with our democracy. Who would have thought it? 🙄

Digital Fatalism: Eleanor Dare Podcast Episode · Digital Fatalism · 05/20/2025 · 26m

Really enjoyed recording this last podcast episode with Dr Eleanor Dare whose recent work includes the AI Forensics project at @camdighum.bsky.social

We talk about AI and power, impossibly huge datasets, deskilling and the impacts of ChatGPT in education contexts #ai #bigtech #technews

23andMe sold out of bankruptcy to Regeneron Drugmaker’s takeover could raise privacy concerns among genetics start-up’s 15mn users

And.... it finally happened. #23andMe is a perfect #privacy example to learn from. When companies who amass troves of very personal data go bankrupt, the data gets sold or acquired by other companies, further complicating already questionable "consent" practices.

Surely this is the existential risk from AI. The idea that we're advancing our intelligence as a species as well as creating a super-intelligence is one of the biggest cons out there.

Without critical thinking skills and the ability to make meaning for ourselves, what the hell are we?

The Dissolve ‘Dissolving black boxes’ (interactive installation/moving image) was an Everyday Algorithms micro-commission, supported by The NewBridge Project and curated by Shelly Knotts. The metaph…

Some photos/videos from my recent commission at NewBridge Project, Newcastle, thinking through algorithm-related issues like visibility/black-boxing/agency/public engagement through the metaphor of 'dissolving': cell-less.com/2025/05/02/t...

I'd be interested in the 'specifically generatively AI' - could you expand? Is the trust not similarly broken with AI-decision-making in systems like healthcare/welfare/policing, or maybe it's specific forms of trust that you're alluding to?

There are 4 episodes in my podcast series interviewing artists/researchers about narratives of inevitability in technology discourses, automated decision-making and ideologies of the tech industry. It's very niche but if you're into this kind of thing, listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...

"A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs." restofworld.org/2025/big-tec...

the ACM CHI conference has fully embraced AI snake-oil this year. this is the world-leading conference on human-computer interaction. absolutely unacceptable. if the conference won't remove these and distance itself from pseudoscience, the HCI community loses all credibility

Brilliant news!! @disabilityarts.bsky.social

Great attendance at the wave of protests yesterday in Newcastle. Why is the government cutting support for disabled people yet increasing spending on defence/military? It can't go unchallenged. #WelfareNotWarfare spread the message.

Well this is kind of cool... An interactive website teaching about Dark Patterns on the internet neal.fun/dark-patterns/

Suspended for Pro-Palestine Speech: My statement on Yale Law School’s embrace of AI-generated smears Helyeh Doutaghi was placed on leave by Yale Law School after being falsely accused of “terrorism” over her support for Palestine. She says her case reflects the new era of Zionist McCarthyism and that...

An AI-bot accuses a university scholar of being a 'terrorist'. In what crazy world does the university act on AI-fabricated claims without verifying any legitimacy? And this university was rated #1 of Best Law Schools! mondoweiss.net/2025/03/susp... @yaleisp.bsky.social

Bubble Trouble An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.

'A study by Uplevel Data Labs tracked 800 software engineers using Copilot on GitHub and found no measurable increase in coding productivity, despite this exact use case being the one pointed to the most by AI companies'.

Is anyone still convinced by AI hype? prospect.org/power/2025-0...

'According to its own numbers, OpenAI loses $2 for every $1 it makes, a red flag for the sustainability of any business.' The AI hype bubble has got to burst at some point.

The money being poured into AI far outpaces the Manhattan Project ($30b today) and Operation Warp Speed ($18b) combined, and rivals the cost of the entire Interstate Highway System ($114b) - for gains that are much much more speculative.

A Sale of 23andMe’s Data Would Be Bad for Privacy. Here’s What Customers Can Do. The CEO of 23andMe has recently said she’d consider selling the genetic genealogy testing company–and with it, the sensitive DNA data that it’s collected, and stored, from many of its 15 million custo...

With 23andMe filing for bankruptcy, there's talk of genetic data being for sale. Data from 15 million people (plus any relatives who are connected genetically).

If it's sold to a company with ties to law enforcement, what could possibly go wrong...? www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... @eff.org

It absolutely is this constructing of an alternative reality that you write about, and why it's so important (albeit draining) to keep writing about the actual experience of being disabled.

I've been endlessly obsessed with masks/pseudonyms so I love reading stuff like this: 'Our masks are not there to hide our identity but to reveal it... Masking symbolises the rejection of the cult of personality, rooted in consumer capitalism’. Written on masks at Carnival Against Capital, 1999.

Love this: 'The process of invisibilization...from the cloudification of networks to the emergence of algorithmic governance – has gone hand in hand with the evolution of media activism and hacktivist practices employing anonymity and invisibility as tactical weapons': inactual.it/zone-di-opac...