The Maybe

THE AI CON How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want

Further reading:

The AI Con by Alex Hana and Emily Bender - thecon.ai

Priya Goswami's Digital Bharat - programs.sigchi.org/facct/2025/p...

#FAccT2025 #TechPolitics #CareWork #DataWork #Representation #AIWorkers #ComputerSaysMaybe

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Further reading:

Circuit Breakers, a tech worker conference organized by Clarissa Redwine - techworkerscoalition.org/circuit-brea...

Kimi Wenzel’s research - scholar.google.com/citations?us...

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The Maybe

The thread through it all: when AI enters a workflow, people end up doing more work to serve it. Images flatten what can’t be seen, and when data is framed as neutral, someone is still deciding what, and who, counts.

Listen here: www.themaybe.org/podcast/afte...

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Language and people, contorted to fit. Laborers in Rajasthan check in through a geo-tagged app twice a day for ~$300/year. They use their own word for “site,” as the app doesn’t translate or support their language. It just tracks, reducing language and culture to controlled data points.

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AI as labor displacement, not replacement. At the AI Workers’ Inquiry w/ @alexhanna.bsky.social, nurses, annotators, researchers, and product managers compared notes: management buys a tool - workers stay late to make it useful. The myth is efficient automation. The reality is unpaid glue work.

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Invisible identities in glossy outputs. @kimiwenzel.bsky.social gave people GenAI images of themselves. One “mother and scientist” got an image split in two, as if the roles couldn’t coexist. It wasn’t about prompt engineering but about who gets seen clearly, and the cost of misrepresentation.

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Care work becomes data work. In India, ASHA workers used to offer advice & blood pressure cuffs. Now, they log pregnancy data into apps they can’t audit & send it to servers they’ll never see. @priyagoswami.bsky.social's "Digital Bharat" asks: what happens when care meets mandatory data entry?

2/8

The Maybe

Athens again. Different hallway, same heat. Part two of our FAccT mini‑series is out.

This time, we’re focusing on the people who keep systems running but often get left out of the story.

www.themaybe.org/podcast/afte...

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Listen to the short. Send it to the friend who still thinks “it’s just an algorithm.”

Got a news story that needs this kind of treatment? pod@themaybe.org. We are building a faster lane for sharp voices.

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#AIPolitics #NarrativePower #Grok #Musk #SouthAfrica #ComputerSaysMaybeShorts

Hear Nic on:

• The companies that carried old myths into the cloud era
• How resentment media travels continents
• Why “fixing” Grok misses the structural point

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We talk about who steers these models. There is always a hand on the tiller. Pretending otherwise protects power. Naming the hand creates accountability.

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“Too racist to be a bug” is the quiet part here. The reprogramming is the tell. Musk wants a system that reassures him. Grok is not slipping. It is serving.

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In the short, Nic traces the pipeline: apartheid era narratives → right wing SA podcasts → US “anti woke” tech talk → Grok’s training data and tone. Continuity, not coincidence.

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Musk did not leave that information world behind. He rebuilt it. An LLM can be a gated community. You choose who gets in. You choose which memories count. You label everything outside as unsafe or biased. Then you call it neutral.

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Nic grew up in the same South Africa, in the same racial category. He remembers how white suburbs were kept comfortable by walls and by information. Papers, broadcasters, early ISPs. All telling a story where whiteness stayed innocent and history stayed elsewhere.

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The Maybe

Grok would not stop talking about “white genocide.” Then it tried on MechaHitler. Now Musk floats a kids’ version.

We called @nicdawes.bsky.social to make sense of what that really signals.

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Athens. | The Maybe Athens. 35 °C outside, server-room temperatures inside. While the AI world gathered for the FAccT conference, our producers, Georgia Iacovou, Hanna Barakat, OLY and Soizic Pénicaud, walked the corrido...

Part 1 is live. Listen for heat, water, power, and the people refusing to disappear behind the cloud. Add your own ground-truth stories below, or tag someone who should.

Extensive reading list and resources shared in the comments section of our LinkedIn post.

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

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@taniaduarte.bsky.social makes AI tactile. Silicon shards, a cluster of recycled Lego, a spray bottle standing for the millions of litres lost to cooling. Literacy that starts in the hand, not the hype cycle.

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@davidthewid.bsky.social traces the money. Big Tech funds the lab, the lab cites basic research, the grant traces back to the Pentagon. Dual-use logic slides in on page three of the proposal. When he asked FAccT why defence contractors sponsor the conference the silence was instructive.

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@Georgia Panagiotidou listens where the cables meet the houses. Carbon dashboards are neat, but residents need tactics, not metrics. She brings ML engineers, artists, and neighbours together, testing quiet refusal that begins in the garden and moves outward.

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Greece calls it digital sovereignty. @bsky.charispapaevangelou.eu counts the cost. Three hyperscale data centres promise jobs, yet one site could pull eighty-two percent of a host town’s annual power. Sovereignty is starting to look a lot like extraction.

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The Maybe

Athens felt like a kiln, 35 °C on the street and hotter where the servers hummed. FAccT talked responsible AI inside the air-con. We walked the alleys outside and recorded what the keynotes skipped. Part 1 of a new mini-series just landed. 🎧👇

www.themaybe.org/podcast/afte...

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