Rebecca Ackermann

Romance Fiction’s Secret Weapon Tight-knit but open-armed fans have made it an especially hot genre.

The tight-knit but open-armed community that supports romance novels has become unignorable, enviable—and exceedingly difficult to replicate, Rebecca Ackermann writes.

Business Insider headline saying: "Sam Altman says your ChatGPT therapy session might not stay private in a lawsuit By Robert Scammell"

Wired headline that says "ICE Is Getting Unprecedented Access to Medicaid Data A new agreement viewed by WIRED gives ICE direct access to a federal database containing sensitive medical data on tens of millions of Americans, with the goal of locating immigrants."

I’m still not over the fact that there was an extremely popular award-winning movie over a decade ago about the perils of falling in love with a chatbot and a company decided to make the chatbot in the image of the movie’s chatbot and now quite a few people have decided to date it

Analysis | AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried. A new effort using only openly licensed data may have implications on thorny policy disputes around copyright and AI

A lot of people say generative AI shouldn't infringe on copyright. These researchers actually tried to do it. The result: an 8 terabyte dataset of text that's openly licensed or in the public domain & 7 B parameter model that performs as well as Meta's Llama 7B www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Ughhhh I’m sorry (to you & to all of us for losing you)

What no!!

Bay Area NEA Grantees

I started a spreadsheet of Bay Area NEA Grantees for FY23–FY25. So far, there's ~85 arts orgs whose funding was likely withdrawn without any reimbursements going out. I'm expecting 3x that number when I get to the terminated grants.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

How AI is interacting with our creative human processes Three books examine what we gain and lose when we let machines create.

Gift link! ter.li/RAckermann

The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics i. Work and art. How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them?

For @technologyreview.com I wrote about how the names we give generative machines really matter.

Such a fascinating read and so fun to write about!

How AI is interacting with our creative human processes Three books examine what we gain and lose when we let machines create.

I wrote about what we gain & lose when we let machines make art for us (& about @vauhinivara.bsky.social’s eerie new book) www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/11/1...

Calling it now: they’ll launch stablecoins as the new war bonds

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use National security hinges on unfettered access to AI training data, OpenAI says.

So it’s over then, works for me

Is AI the Bitter End—or the Lucrative Future—of Book Publishing? As the law fights to catch up to Big Tech, the future of books hangs in the balance. Are writers doomed by “the biggest rip-off in creative history” or could AI offer new ways of making a living?

An AI model that can write you say? Wonder who it learned how to do that from (& if these fair use cases are ever going to get settled) www.esquire.com/entertainmen...

It is now

Your boss is watching Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. Protections lag far behind.

More on how electronic monitoring is widening the dangerous power gap between workers & employers across the country www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/24/1...

Yet this line of thinking is hardly unique to Amazon, although the company could be seen as a pioneer in the datafication of work. (An investigation found that over one year between 2017 and 2018, the company fired hundreds of workers at a single facility—by means of automatically generated letters—for not meeting productivity quotas.)

Automated firing systems? El*n hardly invented the approach that many companies are already employing.

Your boss is watching Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. Protections lag far behind.

Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. New policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power.

But the report goes on to reveal that in 2022, another team at Amazon, called Core AI, also evaluated warehouse safety and concluded that unrealistic pacing wasn’t the reason all those workers were getting hurt on the job. Core AI said that the cause, instead, was workers’ “frailty” and “intrinsic likelihood of injury.” The issue was the limitations of the human bodies the company was measuring, not the pressures it was subjecting those bodies to. Amazon stood by this reasoning during the congressional investigation.

You’re right! I’m new to this, just adjusted my accessibility settings to require it.

Your boss is watching Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. Protections lag far behind.

Most bosses don’t need a 5 things email. They already know exactly what you’re doing. ter.li/326z8h

Your boss is watching Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. Protections lag far behind.

Read more here ter.li/326z8h

What happens when workers are reduced to productivity metrics? I wrote about surveillance tech & the datafication of work for @technologyreview.com

The definitive design thinking piece imo (from @rebackermann.bsky.social) www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1...

Every current & former tech worker has had to write the kind of email El*n is demanding & knows its true purpose.

Your boss is watching Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. Protections lag far behind.

Dove deep into workplace monitoring tech and came out the other side concerned about the widening power gap between workers and companies (oh & AI too) ter.li/326z8h

STILL! Come on!

"This was a huge surprise when we first noticed it"
...
it doesn't have to be a surprise...

So frustrating when life refuses to become art yet.

The continued public presence of Larry Summers really puts the lie to the concept of cancellation