Digital Ethics

People are using OpenAI's Sora 2 to generate videos of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking being brutalized in ghoulish ways.

Misinformation researchers say lifelike scenes could obfuscate truth and lead to fraud, bullying and intimidation

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In five years, more than a fifth of global energy demand will come from data centers alone.

U.S. Data Workers Speak Out About Big Tech’s Exploitation

The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.

This captures well the uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or at all, because challenging the factuality or other face-value elements of the statement is a personal attack on the person saying it and their identity. I'm sure we've all been in such situations, unfortunately, and we can all point to lots of situations where wank is prevalent in our current society.

The app best known for respecting privacy looks to grow, despite anti-privacy efforts

Andrew Chien told Fortune he's been a computer science for 40 years but we're close to "some seminal moments for how we think about AI and its impact on society.”

The scrutiny of data centers has intensified because of tech company secrecy, energy consumption and societal impacts on customers, policymakers and communities.

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.

Debunking AI consciousness claims: Why Geoffrey Hinton's argument is flawed and why AI, despite its intelligence, is not truly conscious

By Christine HaskellOrigins in RejectionOver twenty years ago, a college sophomore sat in a dorm room, stewing after rejection, and built a crude website called FaceMash, where students could rate women like trading cards. Prank as power grab. Voyeurism coded as innovation.We like to file that under “youthful mistake.” It wasn’t. The logic metastasized. The same impulse that turns women into scores now turns all of us into streams of data—watchable, rankable, profitable—making “If you’re not pay

A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says

Why LLMs should not be integrated with screen readers

When someone close to you passes away, dealing with their online accounts might be the last thing on your mind. We have some tips to make it less of a burden.

It’s not as simple as deleting a few accounts.

It’s a trippy time to have a library card.

Leading AI chatbots are now twice as likely to spread false information as they were a year ago.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs’ outputs with “human” performance on various tests. Here, we ask, “Which humans?” Much of the existing literature largely ignores the fact that humans are a cultural species with substantial psychological diversity around the globe that is not fully captured by the textual data on which current LLMs have been trained.

Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees.

A Manifesto

Linkedin has been joking about “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” but it’s actually a growing profession.

A new article of Yours Truly is featured in the culture pages of the Italian magazine L’Espresso. I introduce the readers to our award-winning documentary In the Belly of AI, which I co-wrote and that will presented at the Festival del Pensare Contemporaneo in Piacenza, Italy on September 13, 2025. The 75-minute documentary, co-written with Julien Goetz and Lili Fernandez and directed by Henri Poulain, exposes the hidden human and environmental costs behind artificial intelligence systems—from data centers consuming massive natural resources to underpaid “data workers” in the Global South who process disturbing content to train algorithms, often developing psychological […]

Update 8/8/2025 – I wrote this the day before a certain post by a popular developer services company. I’ve seen some comments this is a rebuttal – it wasn’t meant to be! But…

A new paper calls on academia to repel rampant AI in university departments and classrooms.