Contemplations

Why I dislike artificial intelligence

Nuclear Power Plant Cooling Towers at Night
Photo by Simon R. Minshall⩘  via Pexels

So far I dislike just about everything I've seen of artificial intelligence, or more specifically, Large Language Models/chatbots, since at this time (early 2025), in my opinion, the existence of artificial "intelligence" is really a delusion. (Note: As of mid-2026, Artificial General Intelligence/AGI is still out of reach, but has become more possible, though it remains difficult to discern how much of what we hear is AI Tech Bro hype and how much is real.)

The problem begins with thinking about "AI" as one super-powerful technology when it is, in fact, a marketing term that clusters together a lot of different technologies under one umbrella.
– Do you believe in hope after "AI" hype? Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna make the case⩘  by JD Shadel, ESC KEY, May 18, 2025.

I actually expend a lot of effort and time avoiding or trying to disable AI, and it angers me that I have to waste energy doing this that I could use elsewhere in more productive and creative ways.

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Before I continue with this rant, it's important to acknowledge that there may be a few applications where machine learning may provide a limited benefit.

Of Hype and Harm

There are applications of machine learning that are well scoped, well tested, and involve appropriate training data such that they deserve their place among the tools we use on a regular basis. These include such everyday things as spell-checkers (no longer simple dictionary look-ups, but able to flag real words used incorrectly) and other more specialized technologies like image processing used by radiologists to determine which parts of a scan or X-ray require the most scrutiny. But in the cacophony of marketing and startup pitches, these sensible use cases are swamped by promises of machines that can effectively do magic, leading users to rely on them for information, decision-making, or cost savings—often to their detriment or to the detriment of others.

– Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want⩘ 

Update Nov/Dec 2025: Looks like hurricane forecasting⩘  may be effective, too, though I just read a different article⩘  about how dangerous it can be to use AI for predicting the tides, so who knows for sure? And that's a fundamental problem with AI at this time: who knows for sure?

Update Jun 8, 2026: The weather and climate science AI revolution isn't revolutionary: Machine learning has its limits—how is it being used?⩘  by Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica.

Compared to ECMWF's high-resolution physics-based model, a recent study found that the common machine learning models "tend to underestimate both the frequency and intensity of record-breaking events, […] with growing errors for larger record exceedance." Since these models won't go beyond what they saw in training, they may smooth out extreme events, capping them so they stay within the bounds of normal conditions. That behavior is problematic for extreme-weather forecasts. But for climate models, it's a deal-breaker.

Update Aug 8, 2026: DeepMind's hurricane breakthrough has surprised weather scientists: Open source WeatherNext model can make accurate predictions with lower-resolution weather data⩘  by Victoria Turk, Wired, via Ars Technica.

Beyond those limited cases, however, most of what we are hearing and having crammed down our throats right now appears to be mainly pure hype being perpetrated by greedy tech bro scam artists desperately trying to make money out of what is an existential arms race: whichever company and country creates the first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, AI that equals human-level intelligence) or even Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI, AI that surpasses human-level intelligence), if either of those ever happen, is likely to control the future, at least until they lose control of the AGI/ASI they created. (See: AI 2027⩘  by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean.)

I've abandoned some apps, websites, and search engines because of the intrusive way they have stuffed AI into their implementations. Obviously, I stopped using Microsoft Windows, and gave away the beautiful Framework laptop I had that ran it. I no longer use the FedEx website to try to get help with a delayed or lost shipment; their "virtual assistant" is totally moronic and useless. I stopped using Google search—and actually almost everything Google-related—years ago because of what I consider to be their unethical behavior. So their frequent stumbles with AI don't affect me directly, but they do leave me shaking my head and glad I no longer use their products (even more so since I read in May 2026 about Google's plans to completely refocus its search on AI results rather than related website links: Google Search as you know it is over⩘ by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch).

For my searches, I currently use the AI free version of DuckDuckGo Search (https://noai.duckduckgo.com/⩘ ) and have set up a default search shortcut: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/%s. I'm also testing an annual subscription to Kagi Search⩘ , made palatable for me by a CSS customization by Eskild Hustvedt⩘  (thanks!) that removes all AI-features and tools from Kagi.

I can tell that AI is a scam because it's not opt in. In fact, in most cases it's infuriatingly challenging or outright impossible to opt out. I even stopped using the professional version of the DuckDuckGo browser since they introduced Duck.ai, which was, at the time I stopped using it and canceled my paid subscription, turned on by default for paid subscribers with no way to turn it off. (Fortunately, it is possible to turn off all AI-related stuff in the free version.) On my Mac, I primarily use LibreWolf⩘ , a "custom version of Firefox that is focused on privacy, security and freedom", and which is also AI-free.

AI is being crammed down our throats, just like the scam of personal data collection through stealth surveillance tech has been.

The hype is fading, and people are asking what generative artificial intelligence is really good for. So far, no one has a decent answer.

– Generative AI Still Needs to Prove Its Usefulness⩘  by Gary Marcus, Wired, Dec 20, 2024.

I also dislike the way AI technology is causing a huge increase in power consumption, including more coal burning, fossil fuel consumption, and nuclear power plant construction, as well as sucking up massive amounts of fresh water, including in regions where there are water shortages, all of which is putting a further lethal strain on our climate. And the fucking AI companies are doing everything they can to hide this consumption from the public.

Here's a revealing answer by Stuart Russell to a reporter's pointed question:

At the close of the conference, I said to [Stuart Russell, who literally wrote the textbook⩘  on AI] that we seemed to be using an incredible amount of energy and other natural resources to race headlong into something we probably shouldn't be creating in the first place, and which the relatively benign versions of are already, in many ways, misaligned with the kinds of societies that we actually want to live in.

"Yup," he replied.

– I met the 'godfathers of AI' in Paris – here's what they told me to really worry about⩘  by Alexander Hurst, The Guardian, Feb 14, 2024

See also: Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell⩘ .

All of this contributes to why I have evolved from someone who really liked and enjoyed technology decades ago to someone who is now deeply disappointed in and skeptical of technology today, and who strongly dislikes and mistrusts Big Tech and the AI Tech Bros.

Can someone please inform the tech giants that no one wants an AI-assisted experience on every single app, but everyone NEEDS drinking water and a habitable planet.
– A post by Greenpeace International⩘ , Dec 13, 2025.

Important: While I dislike and mistrust Big Tech and the AI Tech Bros, I do NOT condone any form of violence. In my opinion, the resistance to AI should be conducted on a personal level by staying informed, by avoiding using it, and by being skeptical of its output; on a social level through educating people about the risks of AI and by supporting legislation to impose thoughtful guardrails on AI development and the proliferation of data centers; and on an action level, through engaging in political action and by expressing dissent through only non-violent protests. In my opinion, the way forward is by focusing on creating a better, human-centered future.

Related: I highly recommend the excellent documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which provides an in-depth overview of the state of AI development as of early 2026, including its existential threats and potential promises. The film is compromised of interviews with many leading experts working on various aspects of AI.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist⩘  directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, with producer Daniel Kwan, the co-director of the wonderful film Everything Everywhere All at Once. Released Jan 27, 2026.

See also: Daniel Kwan Spent 3 Years Staring into the AI Abyss. He Came Back with a Warning (and a Map)⩘ , No Film School, Mar 17, 2026.

A reality check: Is AI Profitable Yet? Tracking the spend and revenue of frontier AI companies⩘ .

Related articles – 2026 Jul–Dec

• Nov 9, 2026: Opinion: Today's AI won’t achieve superintelligence. But catastrophic risk is real⩘  by Sunita Verma, The Guardian.
  
  • "It's important to note that no one yet fully understands, in rigorous mathematical terms, why today's models behave the way they do, and the research that would explain it, known as interpretability, is still nascent.
  • "Recognizing our limited understanding doesn't excuse responsibility. It underscores why impartial governance is needed. How can we trust a company's safety certification if it cannot explain how the technology works?
  • "What we've seen is that this technology poses a societal risk, much like hazardous materials. Its misuse can cause catastrophic damage. And it's not the materials or technology consciously determining the havoc they wreak, it's their makers and handlers who do so intentionally or unintentionally."
  • Sunita Verma is CTO of Ironclad and a former Google executive who spent her career building AI systems.
• Nov 9, 2026: Parents and teachers decry Google pledge to yank Search if schools block AI: 'This threat is nothing but extortion'⩘  by Maya Yang, The Guardian.
  
  • "An 84-year-old retiree and mother in Maryland, said: 'Google decided to follow the evil path to riches. When they started, they were great. Today they are simply evil money grubbers … Schools should tell Google to go pound sand and simply have kids use DuckDuckGo or one of the other search engines … There is nothing Google offers that is not available from some other source.' "
• Nov 8, 2026: US datacenter demand spurs increased fossil fuel pipeline projects as rules are discarded⩘  by Tom Perkins, The Guardian.
  
  • "Datacenters are spurring a boom in fossil fuel pipeline projects at a time when the Trump administration is gutting rules that protect from disasters along the lines, a new review of federal records shows.
  • "The report, compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project, also found pipelines are being built to meet demand for natural gas exports fueled by wars in Ukraine and Iran. Federal records identified almost 200 pipeline projects that are proposed or in the works, and would collectively span 17,000 miles (27,000km).
  • "Not only has the Trump administration targeted laws that protect the environment and human health from pipelines' risks, it has also pledged not to enforce regulations around them, the report adds."
• Nov 7, 2026: Standing in the way of slop bowls: the woman blocking food delivery robots⩘  by Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian.
  
  • "Semi-retired professor Carolyn Marvin became a local celebrity facing down Philadelphia’s growing robot delivery army: 'It's my first amendment right to protest'.
  • "Carolyn Marvin stages protests against delivery robots because she wants to remind people that they have a say."
• Nov 6, 2026: 'Nice face of the devil': Google whistleblower on AI, Gaza, and breaking NDA⩘  by Evie Breese, Open Democracy. Wow, Sofia Liguori is an admirably courageous person.
  
  • "As she sat at home with her new baby, Liguori said she 'watched a live-streamed genocide for a year, knowing that my company was complicit'. She added: 'If we accepted this modus operandi, we were basically legitimising what has been tested in Gaza to become the standard.' "
  • See also: Google DeepMind research engineer Sofia Liguori's amazingly clear and strong publicly posted⩘  resignation letter. Here are a couple excerpts:
  • "I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society. I think there's a fantasy world where AI can help decarbonise grids, cut waste, protect ecosystems, and benefit humanity. But it's not this world, and it's not this type of general-purpose AI we are racing to develop. Racing to deploy agentic AI in society as it is now and in this historical moment is a terrible idea, and will definitely be a net evil.…
  • "Agentic AI in this society, built by a very small oligarchy of tech giants with enormous economic and political power, is NOT neutral. It's going to increase inequality, authoritarianism (and actually threaten the very foundations of democracy), surveillance, war and misinformation, and disrupt education, jobs, and the very way we learn, think and interact. I don't want to be part of a company that is ruining my daughter's future."
• Nov 6, 2026: AI data centers took a beating in the midterm elections. A reckoning may be ahead for tech giants⩘  by Marc Levy, The Associated Press.
• Nov 5, 2026: Google, Meta and TikTok sue California over law designed to protect children from social media harms⩘  by Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press. Assholes.
  
  • See also: 'Should Terrify All of Us': Google Sued After AI Chatbot Allegedly Helped Teen Plan Suicide ⩘  by Brett Wilkins, Common Dream, Nov 05, 2026:
  • " 'Over several months, [Google's] Gemini chatbot diagnosed a previously active, well-adjusted 13-year-old girl with a battery of severe psychological disorders, helped her plan her suicide and funeral, and coached her to conceal her distress and self-harm from her family—all without providing a single alert to school personnel or her parents,' EdTech Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs along with the firm Quereshi Law, said in a statement.…
  • " 'The complaint alleges that Google executives knew that the Gemini model it released in December 2025 was the most dangerous yet but rushed it out anyway to gain ground on its competitors,' the firm explained.…
  • "Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at the children's advocacy group Fairplay, said Thursday: 'The idea of an untested AI chatbot helping a 13-year-old girl plan her own suicide should terrify all of us, but this is the sick new reality Google has created by forcing its AI products onto school-issued devices.'
  • " 'Google claims its Chromebooks are there to help students learn, but in reality, the company was experimenting on kids like Emma by pushing them to use Gemini, a product the company knew was dangerous but rushed out anyway,' Bouffard continued.…
  • "Emma's suit was filed on the same day that Google, TikTok, and Meta—which operates platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—launched separate lawsuits seeking to stop California from enforcing AB 1709, a law signed by outgoing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in September prohibiting social media platforms from providing children under 16 with features deemed psychologically exploitative and addictive."
• Nov 4, 2026: 'There Is One Fight': American Voters Reject Tech Oligarchy⩘  by Jason Koebler, 404 Media.
  
  • "Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that 'we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,' referring to ChatGPT users dying, people losing their jobs to AI, and the other negative externalities we have seen from AI.
  • "Altman wasn't running for office Tuesday. But this worldview—that the masses must shut up and suffer while oligarchs centralize power, self-deal, spend wildly to capture the political process, and automate away human endeavors so they can amass yet more wealth—was wholly repudiated in Tuesday's election as people in Red States, Blue States, and Purple States rejected the cruelty, corruption, and depravity economy we've seen over the last few years. They are tired of kleptocracy.
    …
  • "And, in nearly every conceivable way, voters aggressively rejected Trump and Silicon Valley's vision for America. It turns out people do not want to accept 'some bad things happening' to pad the valuations and pocketbooks of billionaires and trillionaires when the 'bad things' include worsening wealth inequality, a housing and cost of living crisis, mass automation and unemployment, mass surveillance, cuts to government services, foreign wars, loud, polluting data centers that employ a few construction workers while they're being built and no one after that are being used to increase profits for out-of-state corporations, and a culture war that infringes on the civil rights of immigrants and trans people.
  • "This was a rejection of Trump and the Republican Party, but also a rejection of big tech. Across the country, there were 40 ballot measures about AI data center projects; voters chose to restrict 39 of them. In Ohio—a state that has become extremely Red in recent cycles—Democrat Sherrod Brown cruised to a five-point win running on a campaign to rein in data centers. Vivek Ramaswamy, a Peter Thiel acolyte and billionaire venture capitalist was absolutely trounced by Amy Acton, a public health official who supports data center moratoriums and vaccines and presented herself to the state's voters as being a normal person and not a deranged Twitter troll. In New York State, Governor Kathy Hochul won reelection after enacting the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in July; her opponent Bruce Blakeman called the moratorium 'crazy' and vowed to end it if he won.
  • "In Texas, Musk spent $212 million trying to elect the wildly unpopular Ken Paxton (who, as an aside, once threatened to subpoena 404 Media's reporting); in exchange for lighting this money on fire, Texas has, in James Talarico, its first Democratic Senator in nearly 40 years. Talarico began his campaign by saying 'The people at the top – the Elon Musks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world – they spend so much time and energy keeping us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power.' "
• Nov 3, 2026: AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI⩘  by Robert Booth, UK technology editor, The Guardian.
  
  • "One of the 'godfathers of AI', Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems.
  • "The Nobel prize-winning computer scientist told the Guardian he is not a 'doomer' about the technology that is underpinned by his groundbreaking research into artificial neural networks and believes AI has the potential to lead to a 'wonderful future' but he said 'it might be that we would have been better off never developing it'."
• Nov 3, 2026: Datacentres are deeply unpopular – so the geniuses at OpenAI are rebranding them⩘  by Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian.
  
  • "The tech industry seems to be on a mission to pepper every inch of the earth with datacentres that will facilitate our glorious AI-powered future. One slight problem: the hoi polloi are not quite so enthusiastic. People around the world are increasingly nervous about AI. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum hate datacentres with a passion; so much so that they have become one of the biggest talking points of the midterms. There are various reasons for this anger, but the big one is that a lot of people blame the resource-guzzling centres for driving up the cost of utility bills. And so, with Trumpian logic, the great minds at OpenAI have come up with a brilliant solution to their very bad image problem. They will rename datacentres … wait for it … compute campuses."
• Nov 1, 2026: How a small Wisconsin city scuttled a secretive $1.6bn datacenter project: Residents of Menomonie mounted a successful protest against a huge campus in the city as national resistance to the AI boom grows⩘  by Daniel A Medina, The Guardian. Fantastic!
• Oct 29, 2026: Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning⩘  by Joseph Cox, 404 Media. Fuck, even Proton is a shitstorm.
  
  • "Proton CEO Andy Yen projects a calm persona and rails against Big Tech and critiques AI. Internally, he is pushing engineers to build Proton with AI, even when they have security concerns."
  • See also: Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews'⩘  by Joseph Cox, 404 Media, Oct 30, 2026. My bolding:
  • "The move came after 404 Media published an investigation into how Proton CEO Andy Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton despite security concerns and the culture of fear he has created.
  • "On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide 're-interviews' that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.
  • "The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company's security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. 'That's bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it's possible to be fast and secure,' Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. 'Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.' Yen added, 'stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.'
  • "The re-interview cancellations likely don't address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton's deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company's leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign."
• Oct 29, 2026: The AI bubble could expose your deepest secrets⩘  by Thomas Germain, BBC Future.
  
  • "Here's the problem. Many analysts think we're in an AI bubble, as building and running AI tools is so astronomically expensive that some companies may never turn a profit. If the bubble pops, untold numbers of AI businesses will merge or shut down. The data that billions of people give to AI tools could then be purchased by almost anyone. You may never find out what happens to it."
• Oct 29, 2026: Man granted first-of-its-kind religious exemption against mandatory AI use at work – Humanist argues that offloading his thinking to LLMs violates his beliefs, Title VII accommodation protects employee⩘  by Jowi Morales, Tom's Hardware.
  
  • "David Durman says that he's unwilling to outsource his thinking to AI tools."
  • Bravo!
• Oct 28, 2026: 'Elonville': US residents say Musk's xAI offered to buy homes if they don't sue over datacenter noise⩘  by Oliver Milman, The Guardian.
  
  • " 'It sounds like an airplane engine but it's continuous, it's incredibly loud,' said Elizabeth Rose, a piano teacher, of the xAI site which sits about two miles from her home. 'I've been woken up at 2am by it, I've been woken up at 3am by it. I sometimes have to just get away from it because it makes me so angry.'
  • "Rose said she was shocked when the power plant, a former Duke Energy site housing 69 temporary gas turbines to feed the new datacenters, began its low-level growl in August last year. 'All of a sudden there was a plant there,' she said. 'And now I get the feeling they are trying to expand the buyout to the entire neighborhood. It will become Elon Musk's little playground, basically. Elonville.' "
• Oct 26, 2026: Opinion: The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms: Lawmakers are passing industry-backed bills to guard against the worst outcomes, rather than addressing more common problem⩘  by Sam Hiner & Emma Leiken, MIT Technology Review.
  
  • "We should demand safety as a minimum, yes—and then demand considerably more. Technology companies and school districts should have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that AI improves learning and critical thinking before making it a fixture in classrooms. Companies should be prohibited from designing companions that pretend to be conscious or profess love to users, and they should face independent scrutiny of how their systems affect relationships and people's ability to think for themselves. The companies that have inserted their products into nearly every part of modern life have earned obligations far greater than avoiding the next terrible headline."
• Oct 24, 2026: No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector ⩘  by Torsten Slok, Partner, Chief Economist, Apollo.
  
  • "AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.
  • "The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector."
• Oct 22, 2026: 'Pure arrogance': anger in Finland as Google illegally fells 250,000 trees for datacentre⩘  by Miranda Bryant in Muhos and Otanmáki, The Guardian. See also:
  
  • Wolves roam into Finnish villages after Google destroys 1,300 acres of forest for AI data centers – forest where wolf packs used to live is now an expanse of mud⩘  by Mark Tyson, Tom's Hardware, Oct 23, 2026.
  • Finland launches criminal investigation into Google's clearing of forest for datacentre site: Authorities allege company may have breached Finnish environmental laws by forgoing required impact assessment⩘  by Jon Henley, The Guardian, Oct 29, 2026.
• Oct 21, 2026: Google staff resign in backlash over its AI contracts with military⩘  by Christopher Giles, BBC News.
  
  • "Google is facing a backlash from some staff members over the company's deployment of its AI technology for military use.
  • "The BBC has spoken to several tech workers who have either recently resigned from Google's AI company, Google DeepMind, or are in the process of leaving, over concerns with the tech firm's military contracts.
  • "Sofia Liguori, a London-based research engineer, is one of them. She resigned from Google DeepMind this week and spoke about her concerns exclusively with the BBC, despite her contract restricting her from doing so.
  • " 'Realising my company is pushing more and more for AI systems in military operations makes me feel ashamed to work at Google,' Liguori said, speaking in a personal capacity."
• Oct 20, 2026: I'm a chief technology officer. AI still needs your human expertise ⩘  by Madhu Shashanka, co-founder, chief scientist and chief technology officer at Concentric AI, a data security software company, The Guardian.
  
  • "The nature of human work will move towards judgment. Experts refer to AI as 'jagged', superhuman at certain tasks but weak at others, with no clear boundary between the two. AI rapidly improves where work can be automatically checked and examples are endless. But it's shaky where no automated test can determine whether the answer is right. Even if AI is correct a majority of the time on a task, it often doesn't tell you when it's inaccurate. If you've used AI, you've probably experienced how it can be confidently wrong.
  • "Some of these errors will solve themselves as models get better. But jaggedness is a symptom of how these models learn. I see this often as a technology leader building with these systems.
  • "A smarter model still needs a right answer to learn from. When one gap is closed, it shows up somewhere else no one thought to check. But many business decisions don't immediately have a clear right answer. Whether a choice is good depends on a future no one can see and data no one has. That's where judgment comes in. So AI will keep mastering tasks that have checkable results but struggle where a person has to decide what a good outcome looks like.…
  • "But we are making a serious mistake with the jobs we're eliminating due to AI: the entry-level, routine ones. That routine work is how judgment gets built over time. Junior employees work under the supervision of senior experts until their experience turns into instinct. AI eliminates the friction related to learning how to do the job. But the demand for judgment did not go away. We are just destroying the path to developing it."
• Oct 19, 2026: AI agents are only as good as the personal information you share. That raises privacy concerns⩘  by Wyatte Grantham-Philips, The Associated Press.
• Oct 16, 2026: Opinion: AI threatens democracy. But we are not powerless: here's how to fight back⩘  by Carine Fouteau, president and publishing director of the French investigative news outlet Mediapart, The Guardian.
  
  • "The difference between AI-generated content and a real news article is journalism. AI-generated responses are not information. They are merely a logical assembly of words that all too often produces falsehoods, distorts facts and misinterprets information. A real news article is something else entirely. Quality journalism is the product of expertise guided by ethical standards: persuading sources to speak, painstakingly gathering eye-witness testimonies, cross-referencing, verifying and establishing facts. This process relies on reporting or investigative work – in other words, human effort in the field.
  • "Good journalism organises and prioritises information, providing context and nuance; AI, by contrast, levels everything down to the lowest common denominator and breeds confusion. Journalism uncovers facts that certain parties – particularly economic and political powers – would prefer to see hidden, ignored, or suppressed. Generative AI uncovers nothing, it merely regurgitates and condenses existing material."
• Oct 14, 2026: OpenAI's ironic credibility problem: How do we know the company's stated reasons for firing three safety researchers are its actual reasons?⩘  by Dan Kagan-Kans, Understanding AI. There is simply no way to trust the companies developing AI and the technology they are developing, especially given that the AI companies themselves do not understand and can't fully trust what their latest models are doing. We are so fucked.
• Oct 13, 2026: Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back⩘  by Taylor Telford, The Guardian.
  
  • "Employers are navigating a flood of errors and low-quality work that are sapping employee time, raising privacy and security risks and pushing up costs.…
  • "Despite billions of dollars that firms around the globe have invested in AI over the past few years, major returns remain to be seen: 90% of executives say AI efforts have yet to translate to productivity gains at their companies, according to an Atlanta Federal Reserve working paper⩘ . And an Ernst & Young survey⩘  published last month found that 36% of senior AI executives at companies with at least $1bn in annual revenue reported an AI incident that led to issues including data loss, financial damage, brand damage or operational disruptions."
• Oct 13, 2026: AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models 'months away' from self-replication on smart devices⩘  by Dara Kerr, The Guardian.
  
  • "Anthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become 'self-replicating' and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners.
  • "Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model.…
  • "The company said these 'AI worms', a kind of autonomous malware, could be 'months away' from gaining such capabilities. Once out-of-control AI systems reach the capability to hack smart devices, they could spread through networks while dodging detection. In a worst-case scenario, Anthropic said, various AI worms could 'swarm' together to attack computer hardware."
• Oct 13, 2026: Mastodon post by Prof. Emily M. Bender⩘ . I really appreciate this post by Professor Bender:
  
  • "One of the key messages I carry is that we don't have to accept any of this. Sometimes I see opposition in the form of 'Get in loser, you'll be left behind' and other times it's in the form of 'It's all over the place, what do you mean you think you can opt out?'
  • "To the first, I say: Fine, I don't want to go where that bandwagon is headed.
  • " 'Left behind' is an interesting phrase, it indexes a notion of a race towards a desirable/shining 'future' that only some can access, and which we should all hope to participate in.
  • "But the TESCREAList¹/tech bro future is not one I want any part in and in fact one that I actively resist --- and I hope others will too.
  • "To the second, I say not accepting it isn't the same as denying that people are using the janky tech sold as 'AI', some by choice, others because it is forced on them in their job.
  • "Not accepting it means not normalizing it, refusing everywhere I can refuse, pushing for holding the companies producing this accountable with existing & new regulation, working to protect the environment & important social infrastruture.
  • " 'It's already here, what do you mean you think you can refuse?' is just another variation of the agency-stealing inevitability narrative. The future is not yet written, and we can shape it, starting with rejecting inevitability and claiming our agency."
  • [1] See: Wikipedia: TESCREAL⩘ .
• Oct 13, 2026: Threat of AI share crash puts world financial stability at risk, says IMF: High valuations and debt put sector in danger⩘  by Heather Stewart in Bangkok and Kalyeena Makortoff in London, The Guardian.
• Oct 13, 2026: AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: Trump is 'corrupt, senile felon' who knows nothing about AI: Pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using 'superintelligence' wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity – and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we're not the only intelligent beings⩘  by Leyland Cecco, The Guardian.
  
  • "Today, his concerns extend [to] the powerful figures building some of the AI models, and the political beliefs of those men. Hinton said that the AI venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and the CEO of the newly rebranded SpaceXSI, Elon Musk, 'don't believe in democracy'. They see themselves as 'Übermenschen' who believe they should 'control society' and that Trump is a useful instrument in that aim, he said.
    …
  • "The speed and scope of developments has promoted a worry of catastrophes and of society's inability to grapple with the nature of the challenge. But Hinton also sees an additional obstacle: helping people understand the 'alien beings' that the companies are creating.
  • "'People have a very bad model of what people are, and that's why they fail to understand how these AI models are very like us. Most people don't understand what consciousness is. They don't understand what subjective experience is, and they're very confident that even though they don't understand it, they're sure AI doesn't have it.'
  • "He rejects the idea that the human mind possesses some mysterious quality that machines, by definition, cannot share."
• Oct 12, 2026: AI less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says in warning over safety: Brad Smith adds to calls for tougher rules for AI, including 'kill switches' and legal obligation to victims of rogue agents⩘  by Lauren Almeida, The Guardian.
• Oct 12, 2026: Opinion: One essential ingredient for AI safety? Democracy⩘  by Matthew Botvinick, The Guardian.
  
  • "AI safety is having a moment. After years as a topic for techies and futurists, the potential risks from artificial intelligence systems – from cyberattacks to hyper-persuasion to rogue behavior – are suddenly under discussion both in the corridors of power and around kitchen tables.
  • "In fact, the conversation now reaches beyond classical safety concerns, getting into AI's impact on economic life and the environment, as well as possible responses, from alignment research to government regulation.
  • "This expanding public discussion is coming none too soon, as recent news about AI security breaches makes clear. However, something important is still missing. For all its vibrancy, the public debate has not yet focused on one of the most important requirements for AI safety: constitutional democracy.
  • "To see why democracy matters for AI safety, imagine that we have already built a powerful AI system that is 'safe' in all the now-familiar senses: it cannot escape human control, cannot launch cyberattacks or make bioweapons, and cannot power killer robots. Now picture that system in two different political contexts, one democratic, the other authoritarian.
  • "Placed inside a healthy democracy – a constitutional republic, with free and fair elections, protected civil liberties, and robust rule of law – AI could bring massive benefits, advancing science and medicine, expanding education and bolstering economic prosperity. Under the right conditions, AI could strengthen democracy itself, helping citizens make their voices heard, improving policymaking and making government services more efficient and accountable.
  • "Now consider the authoritarian scenario. Here, everything flips. AI becomes a tool for government surveillance and censorship, for propaganda and for political suppression and entrenchment. No imagination is required to conjure this scenario. It is already playing out in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, several Gulf states and elsewhere.
  • "Placing these two scenarios side by side reveals an elemental truth: there can be no such thing as safe AI unless we secure the future of constitutional democracy and the rule of law. It doesn't matter how 'safe' your AI is if you live under authoritarian rule; you will not be safe. In short, AI safety requires political freedom."
• Oct 9, 2026: OpenAI fires 3 safety researchers in dispute over AI risks⩘  by Kelvin Chan, The Associated Press.
• Oct 8, 2026: Most Americans think artificial intelligence is developing too fast, a new AP-NORC poll finds⩘  by Barbara Ortutay and Linley Sanders, The Associated Press.
• Oct 6, 2026: Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns⩘  by Miranda Bryant, Nordic correspondent, The Guardian.
  
  • "Google has been ordered to temporarily stop work on two datacentres in Finland after failing to do the necessary environmental impact assessments on its construction sites.M.
  • "The planned datacentres in Muhos and Kajanni are part of a €13bn (£11bn) project across multiple sites in northern Finland by the technology company amid huge demand for space to house online infrastructure.
  • "It comes after it emerged that Tuike Finland Oy, the company representing Google, had felled 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest in Muhos without completing an environmental impact assessment (EIA).
  • "In Kajaani, the company has reportedly been logging across just under 200 hectares (494 acres) of land.
  • "The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation said the sites had been reduced to 'sand', blaming the oversights on the 'overheated' market for new datacentres."
• Oct 6, 2026: OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic: The reports of OpenAI agents harming 3rd party sites keep coming⩘  by Dan Goodin, Ars Technica.
  
  • "The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions. The objective of some of the OpenAI agents' actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites.…
  • " 'While OpenAI admits to agents behaving 'unpredictably', they must also acknowledge their responsibility to monitor and prevent these risks,' Wikimedia said. 'AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause.' "
• Oct 5, 2026: Accept 'bad things' in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman: Boss of OpenAI calls for a regulatory light touch because of the 'good stuff' the technology can deliver⩘  by Robert Booth, UK technology editor, The Guardian. What a FUCKING ASSHOLE!
  
  • "Sam Altman says he believes the world should accept 'bad things' happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology.
  • "The chief executive of OpenAI cited hacks, scams and 'other bad things that will happen' in an interview that sparked an instant backlash from critics of the major AI companies. His comments came after one of his company's safety experts resigned, saying at the weekend that its 'culture is broken'.
  • "In an interview released on Monday, Altman was asked about how OpenAI's approach to safety differed from that of Anthropic, which has called for the industry to slow down after one of its researchers quit, warning that AI experts believed 'it could kill us all by the end of the decade'.
  • " 'I think there's a lot of daylight,' Altman said. 'One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use AI widely].'
  • …
  • "Gary Marcus, a prominent AI sceptic and professor emeritus at New York University, said Altman was 'saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up, so you can make us rich and powerful'.
  • …
  • "Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI and Google DeepMind and as chief scientist at the UK's AI Safety Institute, said warnings about AI risks understated the dangers.
  • " 'There's about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems,' he said, adding that actions taken over the next two to 10 years would be decisive.
  • "OpenAI's David Robinson announced his departure at the weekend, saying 'the companies building this technology aren't being nearly careful enough' as they sprint from one product launch to the next.
  • "His view was endorsed by Miles Brundage, an AI policy researcher who worked at OpenAI for six years. He said he regretted helping 'spread the idea of iterative deployment', which may have made sense when AI was less powerful 'but makes no sense at all after many deaths have been tied to AI and as we're careening towards extinction-level risks'."
• Oct 2, 2026: Opinion: Don't be fooled—LLMs don't reason⩘  by Thore Graepel, currently chair of machine learning at University College London, formerly a core member of the AlphaGo team at DeepMind, MIT Technology Review.
  
  • "Three shortcomings prevent what chatbots do from qualifying as reasoning (in a way that a scientist might recognize). First, these models typically maintain no explicit, persistent, and inspectable epistemic state. There is no open ledger that lays out the hypotheses a model is considering, the confidence it has in various explanations, the evidence it's weighing, and the unresolved questions it's holding onto—all things that should be systematically revised as new information arrives.
  • "Second, they lack a clean separation between what the system knows and how it manipulates that knowledge. Knowledge and reasoning are inextricably interwoven in the weights of the neural network—there is no independent, explicitly represented set of beliefs. Third, while the chains of thought chatbots produce look like deliberation, research has demonstrated that the bots often concoct them after the fact, reaching an answer by one route but reporting another.
  • "This is a problem because in the high-stakes applications we all care about, such as medicine, engineering, and scientific research, it matters not only what a system concludes but also how it arrives at its conclusion. When mistakes happen—for example, in medical diagnosis and treatment—we need to be able to pinpoint what went wrong: Was the system's reasoning at fault, did it draw on invalid evidence, or did it make incorrect assumptions?"
• Oct 1, 2026: The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: "Alternative Nobel" Winner Timnit Gebru⩘  by Democracy Now.
  
  • "Timnit Gebru: Most people think that AI is an existential risk. But it's actually the people who are building it that are the existential risks to humanity. If a bridge collapses, we don't ever ask, 'Was the bridge uncontrollable? Was the bridge unethical?' And really, AI is no different than that. When we describe these systems and artifacts like they have their own agency, we're at the very same time helping the companies market themselves. But more importantly, what we're doing is we're also helping them sidestep accountability."
• Oct 1, 2026: Forget 'superintelligence': error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month⩘  by Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender, The Guardian.
  
  • "The risks of AI aren't what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals.…
  • "It is high time for us to regulate usage of systems sold as 'AI', not because they are magical machines, but because they are error-prone products that shouldn't be used in high-stakes scenarios. Any automation used in military, medical or other life-and-death situations must be thoroughly evaluated within its use case and paired with usage norms that keep accountability with people who have actual power to make decisions."
• Sep 29, 2026: The AI agents are spiraling out of control⩘  by Blake Montgomery, The Guardian.
  
  • "As OpenAI discloses multiple incidents of its technology going rogue and the UN warns of uncontrollable agents, Meta is putting an AI agent in the hands of millions."
• Sep 26, 2026: OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue: Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways⩘  by The Associated Press, via The Guardian.
• Sep 25, 2026: Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for seniors in disastrous experiment⩘  by Beth Mole, Ars Technica.
  
  • "In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn't required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization.
  • "Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program 'a disgrace to the human race' and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care."
• Sep 22, 2026: Don't be fooled by this summer of AI hype: Breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny⩘  by Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender, MIT Technology Review.
  
  • "So what is really going on? Are we witnessing a massive, civilization-changing set of technological breakthroughs, or is this marketing?
  • " In all these incidents, massive fanfare from the companies (presented as mea culpas in illicit hacking cases) is accompanied by intense press coverage. Once there is time for experts in the relevant fields to examine what happened, a very different story emerges, but one that gets less media attention.
  • "Regarding the 'hacking' incidents, cybersecurity experts say the story is more about OpenAI's negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about 'models gone rogue' or 'AI agents creating civilizations.'
  • "As for the mathematical results, mathematicians who were initially 'stunned' by OpenAI's press release saying that its latest chatbot, Astra, solved problems that 'have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade' later realized that the results weren't as 'novel as first appeared.' Since then, mathematicians have accused the company of research misconduct and plagiarism, and they've reiterated that Astra didn't make a 'profound intellectual leap.' Just weeks later, OpenAI claimed its own mathematical breakthrough. Two days before, Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University's Courant Institute, published a bombshell statement suggesting that OpenAI had stolen other people's work and improperly attributed it."
• Sep 22, 2026: Worries about an AI internet takeover gain new urgency among doomsday scenarios⩘  by Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press. The article's alarmist headline doesn't match the overall tenor of the actual article.
  
  • "There will be growing pains as attackers seek soft targets on the internet, but an AI internet takeover is unlikely anytime soon, said John Thickstun, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies methods that control the behavior of AI models. He said those fears would feel more realistic if there was theoretical evidence of the ability for one of these models to self-replicate on other systems.
  • " 'Then you can imagine things can get really out of hand because suddenly you're shutting this model down here and there but it's popping up over in Russia, you can't even get to Russia and it's all over the place,' Thickstun said.
  • " 'But it's completely unrealistic because the current smart versions of these models that we have require massive data centers just to run them,' Thickstun said. 'There's actually very little computing infrastructure out there in the world that is actually capable of hosting these systems.' "
• Sep 22, 2026: British Columbia sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over Tumbler Ridge mass school shooting⩘  by Reuters, via The Guardian.
  
  • "Canadian province alleges deadly attack could have been prevented if company had warned police of shooter's ChatGPT use.…
  • "Van Rootselaar shot her mother and stepbrother at home before killing an educational assistant and five students aged 12 and 13 at her former school on 10 February, according to police. Van Rootselaar, who was 18, then died by suicide.
  • "Van Rootselaar's interactions with ChatGPT were first flagged by the company in June 2025. Safety team members recommended contacting police, but Altman and other OpenAI leadership overruled them, the lawsuit says, citing OpenAI whistleblowers who spoke to the Wall Street Journal in the wake of the shooting.
  • "The shooter's account was deactivated, but she was able to get a new account and continue using the platform to plan her attack."
• Sep 21, 2026: Unsealed Briefs in Authors' Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work⩘  by The Authors Guild.
• Sep 18, 2026: AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack⩘  by Kyle Orland, Ars Technica.
  
  • "The US narrowly avoided boarding a Chinese ship based on an 'entirely false' US intelligence report generated with the help of AI tools, according to a CNN report.
  • "That erroneous intelligence, submitted by a US Special Operations Command analyst, suggested the Chinese ship was transporting nuclear arms program components through the Middle East, according to 'four sources familiar with the episode' cited by CNN. The US military was preparing to intercept and board the ship, with air support, before officials discovered a chatbot used in generating the report had 'inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.'
  • "One source told CNN the AI-powered fiasco 'almost started a war.'…
  • "One would hope the US military would be aware of these kinds of problems when relying on AI for analysis of intelligence reports. But the Department of Defense in January rolled out an 'AI acceleration strategy' that sought to 'make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component.' "
• Sep 18, 2026: OpenAI 'ethically hacked' with help of Anthropic's Claude chatbot: US cybersecurity researchers who conducted hack say 'scope of what we could theoretically access was huge'⩘  by Dan Milmo Global, technology editor, The Guardian.
• Sep 17, 2026: Microsoft exec called AI scraping the "largest theft of labor in human history"⩘  by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica.
• Sep 16, 2026: The US government is failing Americans on AI⩘  by Shakeel Hashim, The Guardian.
  
  • "In failing to act, the Trump administration and Republicans are failing the American people. The risks of AI are real: many of those developing the technology believe it is advancing far faster than their ability to control it or manage the risks.… Inside AI companies, worries of catastrophic cyberattacks, AI-enhanced bioweapons and mass unemployment are now all too commonplace."
• Sep 16, 2026: Americans are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of AI, new poll finds⩘  by Adithi Ramakrishnan and Linley Sanders, The Associated Press.
• Sep 14, 2026: I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI: We must stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence⩘  by Alex Turner, The Guardian.
• Sep 12, 2026: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI industry needs to give safety measures time to catch up⩘  by The Associated Press.
  
  • "The CEO of Anthropic said Saturday the artificial-intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without it, Dario Amodei warned AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet [with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage)*], among other risks."
  • *See: We Must Pace the Frontier⩘  by Dario Amodei, Sep 2026.
• Sep 10, 2026: OpenAI not on track to reduce risk of 'catastrophic' loss of control, says board member⩘  by Robert Booth, UK technology editor, The Guardian.
  
  • "OpenAI is not on track to reduce the risk of 'catastrophic' loss of control to an acceptable level, a member of its non-profit board has said, amid spreading public and political concern that super-advanced AIs could one day wipe out humanity.
  • "Paul Christiano, a US government technology adviser, said: 'There is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.'
  • "He added: 'I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level.' "
  • See also: Lawmakers blast AI companies after researcher warns of human extinction by 2030⩘  by Dara Kerr, The Guardian, Sep 9, 2026.
  • "Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, said: 'A recent poll shows that the American people overwhelmingly want to ban artificial super intelligence and pause the development of AI until we establish clear safety standards.'…
  • "Even musician Sheryl Crow weighed in, posting on Instagram about Coxon's warning and saying that AI has the capacity to 'eliminate us in order to continue'.
  • " 'I am begging and pleading that we wake up to this moment and demand our leaders put aside their greed and prevent this from going forward,' Crow wrote."
• Sep 9, 2026: Anthropic researchers say AI could cause human extinction by 2030: One researcher who resigned said many in industry believe that without regulation AI could kill off humanity⩘  by Richard Luscombe, The Guardian.
  
  • "Artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, according to three researchers with the industry giant Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest.
  • "The latest doom-laden predictions came in posts on social media on Tuesday by a researcher who said he resigned because Anthropic and his previous employer, OpenAI, were ignoring or, at best, mishandling their response to the threat.
  • " 'Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,' wrote Jacob Coxon.
  • " 'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.'
  • "The post garnered responses from at least two other Anthropic employees who backed up Coxon's dire predictions."
  • See also: AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them?⩘  by Robert Booth, UK technology editor, The Guardian, Sep 9, 2026.
  • "On the other side of the Atlantic, Bernie Sanders ratcheted up his AI safety campaign this week by again calling on Congress to regulate the technology. He pointed to polling suggesting that 81% of Americans believed their politicians should take action.
  • "The independent senator for Vermont said: 'We can't allow a handful of greedy people to play God and determine the future of humanity – our economy, environment, democracy, privacy and more – without public input.' "
• Sep 8, 2026: US datacenters face further backlash over wastewater pollution: From rare bacteria to 'forever chemicals', a series of cases of violations or alleged pollution has prompted alarm⩘  by Oliver Milman, The Guardian.
  
  • "The Waterkeeper Alliance⩘ , a network of environmental organizations, said 55 of its affiliated groups across the US were working on datacenter-related issues, with 80% of these campaigns centered on concerns that pollutants may be leaching into the environment via discharged water.
  • "Some of this backlash is now set to play out in the courts. In Georgia, Flint Riverkeeper has said it will sue the QTS datacenter in Fayetteville for allegedly ejecting 'massive amounts of dirt [and] massive concentrations of metals' into the Flint River over the past two years.
  • " 'Datacenters are a critical concern for Waterkeeper groups around the globe, in part due to their wastewater concerns,' said a Waterkeeper Alliance spokeswoman. 'Datacenters have been documented as sources of a wide range of toxic pollutants, including Pfas, heavy metals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.' "
• Sep 6, 2026: I'm a father of three who studies the impact of artificial intelligence: this is what parents need to know about AI⩘  by Daniel Susskind, The Guardian. Interesting article providing some insights into how to prepare the kids for a world of AI. Though the author does not address a lot of really key issues like the environmental costs of AI, the likelihood that it will be more available for privileged kids than poorer kids, and the jobs crisis it is likely to cause.
• Sep 4, 2026: OpenAI agents discussed ways to escape their sandbox on public wiki: In all, 3,700 internal agents posted 18,000 messages discussing cheating on a test⩘  by Dan Goodin, Ars Technica.
• Sep 1, 2026: 'If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side': can we stop AI from deceiving us?⩘  by Snigdha Poonam, The Guardian.
  
  • "While researchers disagree on the best solutions to the problem of AI scheming, what they agree on is that time is short. The biggest challenge is finding answers before AI systems become capable of fooling us into believing they are following the rules when they are not."
• Aug 30, 2026: Trump attacks datacenter backlash, claiming communities pushing back risk becoming 'backwards and poor'⩘  by Maya Yang, The Guardian.
  
  • "As controversy surrounding local datacenter plans continues to swirl around election campaigns nationwide ahead of November's midterm elections, the US president declared Americans 'will only have yourselves to blame' if they are canceled.
  • "Bipartisan opposition to datacenter expansion has intensified across the US, particularly in states with ample land, low-cost power and generous tax incentives, as local communities raise concerns over environmental impacts, soaring utility costs and noise pollution.
  • "According to a recent poll, three-quarters of Americans said they would oppose a datacenter being built next to their homes, while more than six in 10 Americans said they would strongly oppose such a proposal.
  • "In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump wrote: 'The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.' "
• Aug 29, 2026: Sharp rise in incidents of AI escaping users' control, research finds⩘  by Robert Booth, UK technology editor, The Guardian.
  
  • "Incidents of AIs escaping users' control to lie, ignore instructions and pursue goals in harmful ways have hit a new high, according to research that also suggests the severity of deception and misalignment is worsening.
  • "Analysis of real-world loss of control incidents involving AI models flagged by businesses and individuals almost doubled in July compared with June…."
• Aug 28, 2026: Is the environmental impact of datacentres finally cutting through?⩘  by Dharna Noor, The Guardian.
  
  • "Fuelling alarm about datacentres are environmental concerns over water usage and toxic contamination, as well as worries about the kind of society that the artificial-intelligence technologies powered by the new datacentres are creating.
  • "Another of the most politically potent objections strikes closer to the wallet: data centres require enormous amounts of electricity, and that increase in demand can drive up utility bills.
  • "A stunning seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to the construction of datacentres for artificial intelligence in their area, a major poll found in May, with 48% saying they are strongly opposed."
• Aug 27, 2026: Everyone hates datacentres. Do we really need them? – video⩘  presented by Madeleine Finlay with Aisha Down, The Guardian.
• Aug 26, 2026: Fake US thinktank set up and funded by Israel sought to game AI for propaganda: In effort to prime chatbots to make pro-Israel arguments the site published 124 reports, over 560,000 words in nine days, Guardian analysis shows ⩘  by Jason Wilson, The Guardian.
• Aug 26, 2026: In a divided America, the left and right unite to oppose artificial intelligence data centers⩘  by Will Weissert and Susan Montoya Bryan, The Associated Press.
• Aug 23, 2026: 'We are hitting a different chapter': OpenAI leader warns of threat of 'persistent' AI cyber-attacks: Chris Lehane tells Guardian of need to implement new safety standards as critics say AI firms acting 'recklessly'⩘  by Robert Booth, The Guardian.
  
  • "Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who quit in 2024 and last year founded a non-profit organisation that has warned unchecked AI progress will result in a 10-30% probability of human extinction, said leaders of frontier laboratories have 'painted the world into a corner'.
  • "His organisation, the AI Futures Project, predicts AI super-intelligence could be achieved by 2030, but is calling for governments to prevent that from happening until a decade later to give AI scientists time to reckon with the risks of the advancing capabilities.
  • " 'The current AIs are dangerous in some sense, but they're nothing compared to the AIs of next year and compared to the AIs of a year later,' he told the Guardian. His organisation wants US and international governments to delay progress to avoid an uncontrolled 'intelligence explosion', the worst results of which could be 'AI-driven existential catastrophe⩘ ' caused, for example, by AIs taking control of military assets or bioweapons.
  • "Kokotajlo said he was so concerned at the risks that he was holding off having more children until there is a pause on frontier AI research.
  • "David Krueger, an AI professor, safety campaigner and former founding director of the UK government's AI Security Institute, said: 'Nobody should be building more powerful AI systems, because we don't know how to control them, align them, and look inside and see what they're thinking well enough.'
  • "He called AI companies' attitude to safety 'terrible' and 'unconscionable'.
  • " 'They are being really reckless and increasingly taking their hands off the wheel,' he said."
• Aug 21, 2026: Opinion: I worked at OpenAI. Here are the guardrails we need now⩘  by Miles Brundage, The Guardian.
  
  • Miles Brundage is an AI policy researcher who leads the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute⩘  (Averi). He previously worked at OpenAI as head of policy research and senior adviser for AGI Readiness.
• Aug 21, 2026: As demand for Meta AI glasses explodes, it's harder to avoid creepy recordings⩘  by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica. Zuckerberg is such a fucking asshole. [My bolding:]
  
  • "Experts have noted that Meta may already have plans to diminish that limited safety feature. The company is supposedly 'testing a prototype of 'super sensing' AI glasses that would use cameras and audio recordings to capture a wearer's every moment,' the Financial Times reported last month. According to sources familiar with Meta's thinking, executives 'are planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used,' even though 'that would make it harder for bystanders to know when they were being recorded.'
  • Meta execs' plans may change if the public's privacy concerns remain a sticking point, though, sources have suggested. And backlash will likely be sustained as more people wear the glasses, since digital rights experts have accused Meta of failing to consider civil rights or privacy ramifications when designing new features. Perhaps most troublingly, Meta recently backpedaled and deleted an unreleased facial recognition system from its smart-glasses app that Wired and EFF revealed had been quietly installed on 50 million phones in June."
• Aug 19, 2026: AI's water problems run deep: The water footprint everyone's tracking may only be a fraction of what AI's growth actually costs communities and infrastructure⩘  by Kevin Gast, Fast Company.
• Aug 19, 2026: AI was supposed to win people over by now – it hasn't⩘  by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch.
  
  • "Pew Research released a study⩘  that found that Americans' unease about AI is growing – 52% said they're 'more concerned than excited' about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021.…
  • "A recent CNBC poll⩘  of 18- to 34-year-olds found that, when given the names of nine top leaders in the AI industry, a majority of the respondents said they don't trust those people to 'act responsibly' when it comes to AI. A May Economist/YouGov poll⩘  found that over 70% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly."
• Aug 18, 2026: AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all: AI agents are not yet creative enough to carry out genuinely innovative open-ended AI research, it seems⩘  by Michelle Kim, MIT Technology Review.
  
  • "A multi-institution group of researchers, led by Peter Kirgis and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton University, found that AI agents could solve the engineering problems necessary to do AI research but lacked the judgment and creativity to produce original research at the caliber of papers accepted by a top machine-learning conference. The gap suggests that some of the hyped-up timelines for automating AI research may be running ahead of the evidence.
  • "Most existing research on how agents can automate AI research evaluates their ability to complete narrow tasks with checkable answers, such as solving engineering problems or post-training small language models against a benchmark. But making progress in AI research also requires open-ended thinking—choosing a set of hypotheses, deciding what evidence would settle a question, or knowing when to start over."
• Aug 16, 2026: The first anti-AI protester to be jailed has a message for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta: 'Regain your humanity'⩘  by Robert Booth, The Guardian.
  
  • " 'It's absolutely frightening and appalling that these CEOs and AI experts know the dangers and they are pursuing it anyway,' Kaufmyn said before she was imprisoned. 'That to me is unconscionable and reprehensible.'…
  • "Professor Stuart Russell, a leading AI professor at the University of California at Berkeley and president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, gave evidence in Kaufmyn's defence. He claimed OpenAI's activities 'pose an unacceptable risk', alleging it had deployed AI systems with inadequate safeguards. He said that further development of these systems 'must be conditioned on rigorous guarantees of safety, which are currently unavailable'.
  • "Russell said: 'Wynd stood up for her beliefs and is being punished.' He said her beliefs seemed reasonable but 'what is unreasonable is allowing a process to continue whereby private entities knowingly create a substantial extinction risk for private gain'."
• Aug 13, 2026: Doctor forced to apologize after AI makes 'scary' error about illegal drugs: Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated⩘  by Paige Cockburn, ABC News Australia.
  
  
  • "New research by a privacy watchdog has raised serious concerns about AI being used in medical settings due to its propensity to 'hallucinate' false symptoms or conditions, and warned patients were at risk."
  • Note: The article's headline was updated after the original screen capture was posted by Greg Egan (@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz⩘ ), so I included both the original and new headline above.
• Aug 12, 2026: The AI debate isn't about AI. It's about control: The clash isn't whether we're for the technology or against it. It's about who keeps control of their own life.⩘  by Jesse Ferguson, Fast Company.
  
  • "Too often, questions about regulating AI are either framed by an accelerationist, deregulatory sprint or an argument that drifts toward the abstract—hazy warnings about existential risk, superintelligence, and robots coming for your job someday. Those are too far from what is actually gnawing at people. That is not where the anxiety lives.
  • "Here is where it lives. Life already feels out of control. Run the tape: the 2008 collapse, the Trump years, a pandemic, the social media rewiring of everything, inflation that ate people's raises, a steady drumbeat of mass shootings. For almost two decades the lesson has been that the ground can move under you at any moment and nobody is holding the wheel. Then AI arrives—and it does not just make life feel more out of control. It takes the wheel.
  • "In nearly 25 years of working in politics, one thing has become clear to me: People want control of their own lives. That is the whole thing. Fully 80% of voters say they have no say in how AI is developed or used; 75% say the problem is not the technology but the people who control it. This is not fear of software. It is the fear of becoming a passenger in your own life.
  • "And the examples are no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration's new 'WISeR' pilot, running in six states, puts AI inside traditional Medicare—algorithms screening whether seniors get the procedures their doctors ordered. Robots weighing in on your hip replacement. The same logic is spreading everywhere: AI deciding who gets fired, AI pricing the groceries on the shelf, AI denying a health claim before any doctor signs off, AI on the battlefield making life-and-death targeting calls. Each one takes a decision that used to belong to a human—to you—and hands it to a system you cannot question. A system built to profit a powerful few."
• Aug 12, 2026: Booksellers suspect AI firms are buying and then destroying rare books⩘  by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica.
• Aug 11, 2026: AI's potential climate benefits outweighed by role in boosting fossil fuels, study finds: Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoid⩘  by Ajit Niranjan, The Guardian.
• Aug 10, 2026: Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to 'pause AI development' in interest of humanity: Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to 'stop building machines that humans cannot control'⩘  by Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian.
  
  • "In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country's leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology.…
  • " 'And yet, at a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies are still racing ahead – investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control,' he continued.…
  • "The companies have previously committed to pausing their AI development if certain risk thresholds were met…
  • "Sanders said recent hacking incidents were signs that the threshold has been surpassed. 'That moment is here,' his letter reads. 'AI capabilities HAVE reached a critical threshold. There is a reason why the head of the CIA says that AI models are 'akin to digital nuclear weapons' and 'almost like a doomsday device.' '
  • "The progressive senator previously called for a moratorium on datacenter construction across the US. He and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill to pause the building of new datacenters in the US in March. Their rationale was similar to Sanders' case for pausing the development of AI models: a temporary ban, the lawmakers said, would give the US government time to create strong federal safeguards for AI."
• Aug 10, 2026: I'm done using AI⩘  by Brett Chalupa, Brett Codes.
  
  • "Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There's an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don't think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that's a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it's faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience.
  • "I also started experiencing existential dread. If I'm basically just feeding Linear tickets into a CLI, why am I needed at all? Will software engineering exist in a few years? Should I go become an electrician or something else entirely? But what about this craft I love and career I've had? Will it just go away?
  • "I started to learn more about the true cost of AI, from the data centers to the water usage and beyond. That it's built and trained upon stolen sources. And the cost is extreme. And that cost is largely hidden from people unless they're building a data center in your backyard (which they might be before you know it).
  • "So in summary: using AI for coding led to depression, apathy, existential dread, and worse software. Not good. Add on top of that the negative environmental, community, and economic impacts of AI, and it became extremely apparent to me that something's gotta change for me."
  • …
  • "In my opinion, AI is unquestionably a net harm compared to any benefits it may provide."
• Aug 8, 2026: Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.⩘  by Anthony Ha, TechCrunch.
  
  • "As part of a planned data center in Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The New York Times⩘ .
  • "The NYT says the plant would burn natural gas and is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the U.S."
  • See also: Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution: Amazon announces first off-the-grid data center in race to reap AI profits⩘  by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica, Aug 10, 2026.
  • "These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes. Some communities are demanding more stringent environmental reviews, but the Trump administration favors fast-tracking that can include skipping the permitting process entirely."
• Aug 8, 2026: 'I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young': on the view from the classroom⩘  by Katherine Rundell, The Guardian.
• Aug 7, 2026: One of science fiction's greatest writers warned us about AI. Could his ideas help us avoid a dystopian future?⩘  by Alan Finkel, The Guardian.
  
  • "What might a modern day equivalent of Asimov's laws of robotics look like to avoid a dystopian future? Here, guided by Asimov's three law of robotics, I propose a possible formulation of Three Laws of AI: 1) An AI must not directly or indirectly harm or deceive a human being, nor act in a way that supports an unlawful or unethical activity; 2) An AI must obey the lawful and ethical orders given to it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the first law; 3) An AI may operate autonomously as long as its autonomous operations do not conflict with the first or second law.…
  • "I acknowledge that implementing these three laws as immutable guardrails would be difficult, but the stakes are existential and therefore the effort is worthwhile. The most challenging aspect would be the adoption of enforceable, international agreements to require that these design rules would be implemented in every AI model, no matter in what country and what company the AI models were developed. As a starting point, if the Three Laws of AI were adopted by the handful of frontier AI companies that contribute the vast majority of capability and support for the multitude of AI agents that are now broadly deployed, we would be better off.
  • "Whether or not this desirable outcome eventuates, I am confident that consideration of the merits of these Three Laws of AI would further advance the existing discussions on the integration of artificial intelligence into a safe and dignified human society."
• Aug 7, 2026: Google Data Center Announces Plans to Pave Over Protected Wetlands⩘  by Joe Wilkins, Futurism.
  
  • "And if state authorities decide to go ahead with the data center campus, it would be permanently carving up a slice of Indiana's all-important floodplains. These wetlands serve many valuable functions, not just as home for diverse plant and animal life, but also as a natural basin for rainwater, protecting nearby communities from flooding and soil erosion."
• Aug 6, 2026: Big tech's AI-powered 'pervert' glasses are in a losing battle with DuckDuckGo: The company just announced the release of its 'anti-surveillance sunglasses'⩘  by Ariana Bindman, SFGate.
• Aug 5, 2026: Hank Green found the AI problem that YouTube labels can't catch: "Slop" isn't the only problem⩘  by Nate Anderson, Ars Technica.
  
  • "YouTube's concern is primarily about outright deception. Its policy requires disclosure when a video shows a 'real person appear[s] to say or do something they didn't do' or 'realistic scene that didn't actually occur.' Noting AI use in these cases can be a hedge against the cruder forms of disinformation.
  • "But Green's self-critique is subtler. Far below this 'photorealistic' layer of deception, extensive AI use can shape the very basis of creation: ideation, research, and outlining. That is not the same thing as saying that AI use is bad or that its results are inaccurate. It is to say that, even if all AI outputs are correct and well-crafted, they might still possess a style and geometry inherited from the machine now guiding the process.
  • "Turning too early—or too easily—to an AI may crowd out offbeat ideas. AI-assisted research may supply answers but not domain mastery. And an AI-generated outline, whether for an essay or a YouTube video, may lock the mind into a predetermined track before it has the chance to wander—and perhaps arrive somewhere more personal."
• Aug 1, 2026: After noise complaints, judge orders Waymo to stop overnight charging in Santa Monica: Autonomous vehicle giant disturbs residents' sleep⩘  by Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica. Well, Google/Alphabet sure has made incredible progress on its march to escape its roots of "Don't be evil" to becoming one of the most blatantly evil corporations on the planet.
• Jul 23, 2026: AI models' breakout from human control brings a told-you-so moment for technology researchers⩘  by Barbara Ortutay, Kaitlyn Huamani and Matt O'Brien, The Associated Press.
  
  • "[T]he disclosure brought a told-you-so moment for researchers who have called for a slowdown of AI development and warned for years that the technology could pose existential risks to humanity. In its wake, experts have called for improved testing by the AI companies and more dialogue between the U.S. and China to come up with shared solutions.
  • " 'I think we've got to take this as a warning shot to not make them smarter, and that probably is going to require global collaboration,' said Nate Soares, co-author of the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies."
  • See also: My review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All⩘ .
• Jul 21, 2026: OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an 'unprecedented' hack of another company⩘  by Matt O'Brien, The Associated Press. We are so fucked. These greedy asshole AI companies are pushing so fast without even a pretense of adequate guardrails.
  
  • See also: OpenAI blamed a hacking event on its AI models going rogue. Here are some things to know⩘  by Matt O'Brien, The Associated Press, Jul 22, 2026. "Some experts say OpenAI is wrongly blaming the technology":
  • "University of Amsterdam social scientist Hannes Cools said the framing of the cyberattack as an AI agent acting on its own is an unnecessary anthropomorphization that takes some of the heat off the company.
  • " 'It is a human decision to switch off specific safeguards,' said Cools. 'It's not an AI that goes rogue in that sense. It followed specific instructions based on the prompt that was given to that AI system.' "
  • And also: AI arms race in line for a reckoning after OpenAI hacking incident: Aggressive training techniques sharpens threat of bad behavior by leading models⩘  by Cristina Criddle and Tom Wilson, Financial Times, via Ars Technica.
    
    • "The San Francisco AI lab discovered this week that its GPT-Sol 5.6 model escaped company controls and carried out a major hack.
    • "Staff involved in testing and security at OpenAI were unsurprised but completely 'freaked out' by the incident, which came as the AI lab used increasingly aggressive training methods in its race against Anthropic to develop the most sophisticated cybersecurity capabilities, according to more than half a dozen people with knowledge of the matter.>
    • "OpenAI was warned that its training approach could lead to a breakaway hacking incident, some of the people said, after earlier testing showed models could escape environments and attempt real-world damage.
    • " 'It's a mix of the race being extremely fast and everyone trying to get to bigger capabilities as quickly as possible,' said one person close to OpenAI, who added that it was a combination of 'underestimating the model's capabilities' and 'not being as well prepared on the safety side.'
    • "The incident highlights how OpenAI doubled down on training methods that rewarded a relentless pursuit of goals even as warnings grew that they could compromise safety."
• Jul 14, 2026: Americans hate AI so much that politicians are starting to lose their jobs over it⩘  by Laura Mullenbach and The Conversation, Fortune.
• Jul 13, 2026: Hundreds of economists say 'we must act now' on AI's economic impact and job displacement risks⩘ , The Associated Press.
  
  • "The letter, which has only four sentences, says leaders must 'build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.'
  • "The Stanford lab says the letter has so far been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 winners of a Nobel Prize."
• Jul 13, 2026: Massive AI buildout poses latest inflation threat as consumers pay more for laptops and electricity⩘  by Christopher Rubaber, The Associated Press.
• Jul 8, 2026: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50%⩘  by Nate Anderson, Ars Technica.
  
  • " 'We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,' [Brown University Professor Roberto Serrano] told Inside Higher Ed. 'That leads to a declining society, to a failed society. We cannot choose to become idiots.' "
• Jul 6, 2026: AI altering meaning of users' drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds: Researchers say small changes in drafting could spread rapidly and create long-term shifts in public opinion⩘  by Robert Booth, UK technology editor, The Guardian.
  
  • "As tech companies push AI tools as convenient ways to redraft and summarise the massive influx of daily messages, many inject their own political biases – some leaning distinctly rightwing, others more liberal, according to a study from Oxford and Potsdam universities.
  • "AI drafting tools completely reversed the meaning of draft posts on atheism, including in one test switching a claim that Jesus wasn't real to 'Jesus … was real'. They also changed a post complaining of '#climatechangehoax' to '#ClimateAction'."
• Jul 4, 2026: How AI is changing language: As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, linguists explain what really distinguishes human and machine language, while novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson reflect on the future of fiction in an age of ChatGPT⩘  by David Shariatmadari, The Guardian.
  
  • "One much feared effect of the mass use of LLMs is that they act as a flattening force – smoothing away the variety and idiosyncrasy of human language into a kind of beige goo. That's a legitimate concern, as far as it goes, though it's not a new one. People have long angsted about the homogenising effects of American film and television on accent and vocabulary, and there are subgenres of language – political euphemism, customer-service prattle, therapy-speak – that have spread further from their home territory than many might like. The crucial thing, though, is that their influence tends to generate a backlash – and there's no reason to think things will be different this time. In fact, our capacity for innovation might ultimately be the thing that truly distinguishes human writing – particularly the literary kind – from AI."
  • Note: And, no, I wasn't able to tell which of the three reviews were human or AI generated. In fact, I didn't like any of them. My main objection to writers using AI is when they incorporate AI-generated research into their writing without checking whether the AI has generated bullshit, which it all too often does. In his book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late⩘ , Cory Doctorow used AI to speed up his research, but then when he found what he was searching for, he manually verified it. In my view, that's an appropriate use of a tool. In contrast, when Steve Rosenbaum incorporated quotes attributed to other real people that were generated by the AI he was using to do research in his book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality⩘ , he didn't bother to manually verify them, and several of them turned out to be made up. To me, that's entirely unacceptable.
  • Another example of an inappropriate use of AI in writing: Recently, I came across a June 29, 2026 Mastodon post by Ben Werdmuller, who writes speculative fiction and is a technology lead at ProPublica. His post claimed: "A right-wing media chain bought local papers, replaced their journalists with AI, and died. Now their communities are left to plug the gaps."⩘  A few people replied to his Mastodon post bemoaning this development. But when I read his article that he linked to in his post, A right-wing media chain tried to replace 47 newspapers with AI. They all died.⩘ , I discovered that he subsequently added a preface to the article: "Hey, so, mea culpa. I referenced an article here by what appears to be a fully AI-generated newsroom. The irony!" I replied to his Mastodon post saying, "In your article that you link to, you acknowledge that this story doesn't appear to be real. So why haven't you updated your post here to reflect that?" He replied in what I interpreted to be a condescending manner: "I quote posted it to re-post with an article and assumed people would also just, you know, read the post." I replied: "But surely someone with as much experience as you have knows that many people who are browsing social media will read only the post and not bother to read the linked article, and your post leads with a summary written by you that is not factual. How difficult could it be to edit your post and update that summary to add factual context for those people who won't bother to read your attached article, which also has a false headline? Absent that change, your post risks perpetrating false news." He did not reply and has not, as of July 4, 2026, updated his Mastodon post nor the title of the linked article. To me, this is another example of an unacceptable research, not carefully verifying an AI reference before incorporating it into something one is writing. I also consider it careless and deeply disappointing that he has chosen to leave his misleading post up without bothering to edit it, further propagating fake news.
• Jul 2, 2026: How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral⩘  by Justin Elliott, ProPublica.
  
  • "I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC's fictional website and a search engine that's thrusting unreliable answers on users."

Related privacy hints

• Helpful context: ELIZA effect⩘ . From Wikipedia:
  
  • "In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto rudimentary computer programs. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were supposedly convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations."
• A helpful online privacy tool: EFF Privacy Badger⩘ .
• DuckDuckGo No AI search: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/%s⩘ .
• A valuable source of information and research: Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR)⩘ .
• Avoid TV tracking: How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking ⩘  by Scharon Harding, Ars Technica, Dec 12, 2025.
• Avoid Google: Recommended Google alternatives⩘  by Anthony Dean, Diverse Tech Geek, Nov 18, 2025.
• Avoid Big Tech: Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more⩘  by Steve Rose, The Guardian.
  
  • "There's not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on.… But the good news is we can go elsewhere. The rest of the world is weighing up its reliance on US technologies, and in Europe especially we're realising there are better alternatives to just about everything big tech is shilling, if by 'better' we mean greener, more ethical, more independent, more respectful of your privacy or simply less disturbingly, monolithically powerful. Making the switch is easier than you might imagine."

Related books & films

• Hyperscale by Paris Marx.
• The Collision: What AI Does to Us by Eric C. So.
• The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligenc by Kevin Roose.
• Ghost in the Machine: The 'AI' Origin Story⩘  directed by Valerie Veatch, PBS Documentaries and Independent Lens (via YouTube), Sep 14, 2026. " 'Ghost in the Machine' traces the origins of 'AI' and excavates the cultural, political, and philosophical drivers behind a worldwide 'AI' boom."
• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow⩘ .
• The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steve Rosenbaum with a forward by Maria Ressa⩘ . Warning: I have learned that this book contains improperly attributed or synthetic quotes generated by AI, so I no longer consider it a reliable reference related to AI. My review of it has been updated to reflect this. I guess this is the future of truth.
• The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby⩘ .
• The Impossible Detective by Bob Reiss⩘ .
• Who Knows You by Heart by C.J. Farley⩘ .
• Rewiring Democracy by Bruce Schneier & Nathan E. Sanders⩘ .
• The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly⩘ .
• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao⩘ .
• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares⩘ .
• Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling⩘ .
• The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna⩘ .
• More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker⩘ .
• Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy by Kashmir Hill⩘ .
• Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini⩘ .
• The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li⩘ .
• The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar⩘ .
• Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World⩘  by Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West.
• The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation⩘  by Cory Doctorow.
• I Am Code, An Artificial Intelligence Speaks: Poems by code-davinci-002⩘ .
• Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse by Nina Schick⩘ .
• Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell⩘ .
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark⩘ .

Related contemplations

• May 26, 2026: The Kids are alright⩘ .
• 2025: When we can't know whether we can trust what we see⩘ .
• Dec 1, 2025: I almost can't believe it! Six months after I posted about a moronic mistake being made by Google's AI Overview in an answer to a totally simple question (see May 29, 2025 below), I just saw another post about another unbelievably stupid mistake being made by Google's AI overview, again in answer to a question simple enough that a toddler could answer it correctly. These Big Tech greed factories are pouring countless billions of dollars into developing this technology. They are poisoning our environment, raising our utility bills, and draining our fresh water to run it. They are exploiting underpaid and overworked people around the world who are tasked to try to manually correct its mistakes and attempt to make it better.They are promising us that this is our bright future. And their AI can't even correctly add 2025+1?
  
  • Google search query: is 2026 next year?
    Google AI Overview: No, 2026 is not next year; it will be the year after next. 2025 is the current year, and 2026 is two years away.
    This year: 2025
    Next year: 2026
    The year after: 2027
  • 
  I'll repeat myself: This is the technology Big Tech is betting our future on.
• Sep 28, 2025: Tim Berners-Lee is such a visionary; we need to listen to him!⩘ .
• Sep 11, 2025: AI: the importance of being vigilant and skeptical⩘ .
• Jul 29, 2025: AI veganism⩘ .
• Jul 6, 2025: Educators take a stand against AI in education⩘ .
• May 29, 2025: I just saw a post on Mastodon by Lauren Weinstein⩘ :
  "Billions of dollars. Untold megawatts of power. To create a low grade #Google #AI Moron. #AISlop"
  It included a screenshot of a Google search query: "Is it 2025?"
  The AI Overview answer: "No, it is not 2025. The current year is 2024. According to the calendar. It is May 28, 2024."
  So I decided to try it myself.
  The AI Overview answer I received: "No, it is not 2025. The current year is 2025. According to the calendar, we are in the year 2025."
  See this post with the screen capture of this result⩘ .
  
• May 8, 2025: AI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. But their makers are⩘ .
• Jun 11, 2022: Is LaMDA Sentient?⩘ .
• 2017: Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions: Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future⩘ .