Speaking as an old, it's very nearly a daily experience for me to read an article, or even just see a headline, which makes me feel like I'm living in a future world written by Phillip K. Dick.
> Is Peter Thiel the target of Pope Leo's Gandalf quote? An investigation. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
#WTF #AI #news #religion #Tolkien
Parsing a papal proclamation.Nate Anderson (Ars Technica)
Editorial: A scathing essay by the former prime minister rehashes assumptions that underpinned his own rise to power. But the challenges are quite different nowEditorial (the Guardian)
#QT mastodon.social/@SteveThompson…
So this pope in 2026 is saying exactly what I said about our humanity and AI in 2021 in the closing paragraph of the Preface to my reference book Machine Law, Ethics, and Morality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
And dimwits like JD Vance are in the news today calling it "profound" because it is said by a pope.
Well, let me tell you, it was no less profound when I published it five years ago.
From my 2021 book Preface:"Whatever waits behind, or inside, each shiny new object, we will be wise to insist that we stay human, keeping AI at a safe distance where we control and regulate what we have at our disposal through thoughtful, considerate, and balanced research, deployment, and policy-making with keen focus on all requisite laws, ethics, and morality considerations."
igi-global.com/pdf.aspx?tid=26…
Pope Leo calls for being ‘profoundly human’ in the age of AI
theverge.com/news/936945/pope-…
#AI
Pope Leo calls for being ‘profoundly human’ in the age of AI
AI has been a core part of Pope Leo’s papacyMia Sato (The Verge)
So this pope in 2026 is saying exactly what I said about our humanity and AI in 2021 in the closing paragraph of the Preface to my reference book Machine Law, Ethics, and Morality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
And dimwits like JD Vance are in the news today calling it "profound" because it is said by a pope.
Well, let me tell you, it was no less profound when I published it five years ago.
From my 2021 book Preface:
"Whatever waits behind, or inside, each shiny new object, we will be wise to insist that we stay human, keeping AI at a safe distance where we control and regulate what we have at our disposal through thoughtful, considerate, and balanced research, deployment, and policy-making with keen focus on all requisite laws, ethics, and morality considerations."
igi-global.com/pdf.aspx?tid=26…
Pope Leo calls for being ‘profoundly human’ in the age of AI
theverge.com/news/936945/pope-…
#AI
AI has been a core part of Pope Leo’s papacyMia Sato (The Verge)
It's been here.
AI warfare is already here | The Verge
theverge.com/ai-artificial-int…
Even Anthropic seems to think its red lines won’t hold for long.Hayden Field (The Verge)
Google I/O showed how the industry has seized upon LLMs as the "future" of software. But that couldn't be further from the truth! It is an intensification of the old way. The same features as before, only MORE and FASTER.
It's the same mediocre vision execs have had for 40 years: give customers more tasks to do on your platform, sell them tools to solve the problems you created.
But the conditions that made this business model possible are collapsing.
productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai…
The industry has been building careers and business models around solving the very problems it created. But the conditions that once made this possible are breaking down.Pavel Samsonov (The Product Picnic)
Brilliant, the youth is not completely lost.
😍
The author of @allaboutberlin on how Google AI Overviews are killing independent web publishing, citing a 70% drop in traffic after seven years of steady growth. His work trains the model. The model is replacing his site. There is no credit, clicks, or revenue. This is what the "enshittification" of the open web looks like in practice.
Hard to imagine moving to Berlin without stumbling upon his guides at some point.
linkedin.com/posts/nicolasboul…
#AI #OpenKnowledge #Berlin #Google #Enshittification #OpenWeb #IndieWeb
AI is killing All About Berlin. When you Googled something, you used to get a link to my website. Now you get an AI-generated answer trained on my work. This has a devastating impact on traffic. It's hard to fund my work with 70% fewer visitors.Nicolas B. (LinkedIn)
Reminder: This is while the vast majority of the data centers they claim will drive the "AI revolution" haven't even been built yet.
It's entirely possible that the projected quantities of compute necessarry to do what they claim will require more energy than we have access to.
I wish I didn't have to point out that that would be pretty fucking stupid even if it actually did something valuable, which it doesn't.
#AI
Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity"An estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work."
singularityhub.com/2026/05/22/…
Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity—and the Backlash Has Begun
Strong opposition kicks in when data center demand surpasses 5% of a country's power supply.Edd Gent (SingularityHub)
"For anti-data center activists there will be victories and losses but a coalition is taking shape, one that cuts across party lines and has people engaging with politics on a local level in a way that hasn’t been seen in decades."
404media.co/an-incomplete-list…
#news #DataCenters #AI
No one wants to live next to a noisy computer warehouse and communities across the country are successfully fighting them.Matthew Gault (404 Media)
Oooh, this could be loads of fun.
IEEE Spectrum: Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks
Research shows sounds unheard by human ears can hijack models’ behavior
The #Trump admin approved a secret $9 billion request to acquire cutting-edge #ComputerChips that #US’ spy agencies need to tap into the full capabilities of the latest #ArtificialIntelligence models…
New #AI models use enormous amounts of computer #power, more than many #tech experts anticipated even a year ago fueling concerns in the WH & #Congress that a #chip shortage is causing #intelligence agencies to fall behind in testing & deploying tools for #espionage work….
The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement today SLAMMING the display of an #AI-processed version of Ansel Adams‘ photograph, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico”, at an Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) exhibition.
Cleverly, the Trust didn’t criticize the image‘s submitter, Jamez Danzinger, for using AI, but that he used AI to rip off Ansel Adams’ work (I think this is clever because ripping off other people’s work is pretty much *core* to the way AI image generation works, and really is its original sin against the artist community). Danzinger was apparently trying to parlay this image into promoting his new “using AI to colorize classic photos” business venture.
Source: hxxps://www.instagram.com/p/DYr3-ueG5yn/
Yesterday I attended the first major protest against AI data centres in Vancouver. There was a solid turnout, more than I expected for an event organized by a teen who'd never run a protest and just put out some Instagram posts and physical posters on a few main streets. At least 300, maybe over 400 people? I'm trying to be conservative in my guesses.
Speaking to the crowd, the top concerns were the social and cultural effects of AI (misinformation, disconnection, undermining the arts), then environmental concerns (Vancouver is already under water restrictions due to drought; fossil fuel buildup for AI; etc), then prioritization (why is money and space going to this instead of housing, healthcare, etc). A few other topics came up less often, like economic effects.
The group shut down traffic on two of Vancouver's biggest streets, Granville and Broadway, including the Granville Street Bridge. They also passed through Granville Island, one of the most-visited tourist destinations in Canada.
#cdnpoli #canada #vancouver #britishcolumbia #ai #noai #datacenter #protest #protestsign #telus
This is half "You filled your server room with stochastic parrots & now you're surprised there's bird shit everywhere" & half "believing you can dictate the correct way of working to a bot with no correctness mechanism"...
#AI
Talked to a software engineer at Microsoft working on Copilot Studio today at a social event and he said he was ashamed that he hadn’t written a single line of code in over three months. “I used to take pride in my work.” (They simply create plans in natural language and feed it to the LLM which generates the code. They can’t even do human code reviews anymore as there’s too much code being generated.)
He said a lot of them were waiting for a catastrophic event (something that would take down critical infrastructure) to get top management to reverse course. He seemed to think such a failure was very likely.
Given what we’ve been seeing recently, I tend to agree with him. Although I feel they will just double down. There’s too much money in the pot for them to fold.
Y’all, we need to talk about upcoming #IPOs, and the insane rule changes that #nasdaq has just announced.
Nasdaq rewrote its #index inclusion rules to accommodate #SpaceX’s mega-IPO, implementing a "Fast Entry" provision that allows the company to join the Nasdaq-100 index just 15 trading days after its initial public offering, down from the standard three-month seasoning period.
They also eliminated the minimum float requirement of 20% available public shares and instead stocks with less than 20% of shares publicly traded, Nasdaq applies a 3x multiplier to the free-float for index weighting purposes, artificially inflating low-float giants like SpaceX in passive funds.
Ok, but in English? #SpaceX, #OpenAI and #Anthropic have just figured out a scam to force every passive #IRA, #401k, and index fund to buy their stock before pricing evaluation.
They’ve figured out how to steal your #retirement.
#AI #LLM #Scam #guillotines #YouWillOwnNothing
businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo…
SpaceX's IPO filing has arrived. Elon Musk's rocket company is set to reshape the market when it goes public, with impacts at the index level and beyond.Naomi Buchanan (Business Insider)
“This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.”
thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome…
#Google #AI #Chrome #Privacy #Law #Surveillance
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it.Alexander Hanff (That Privacy Guy! — Hanff & Co. AB)
Experts say a series of AI-generated digital news outlets is the first recorded example of "pink-slime" journalism in Australia, with the website owner claiming the now-deleted outlets were an experiment gone wrong.Madigan Landry (ABC News)
Google CEO tries to tell University students to love AI. They tell him to BOO off.
It is good to see kids are saying no and fighting back. Do you know why? Because the future of bots, AI and robots doesn't offer any jobs to these young kids. They know greedy AI companies want to get rid of working class. It is simple as that.
For those who wish to read instead of the clip. See BBC page: bbc.com/news/articles/ce8pqd54…
The reaction underscores a growing anxiety among students over AI's impact on jobs and their future careers.BBC News
Overseas fakers using AI videos to push a narrative of UK decline, BBC finds
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgpyn…
"Patriotic" UK anti-immigration social media accounts have been traced to Sri Lanka and Vietnam.Marianna Spring (BBC News)
8 ways to detect #AI slop
Did this help? Or did i just waste your time LOLI'm sorry this took so long to upload! (2 months...) There was a lot of back and forth with stuff, other proj...Willowish (YouTube)
Okay, what is an "AI tool" doing that wasn't fixed by people handing someone a slip of paper with their name and phonetics at graduation?
Futurism: Students Boo and Jeer as AI Name-Reader Flops Spectacularly at College Graduation Ceremony
futurism.com/artificial-intell…
h/t @MikeElgan
#ai #graduation #college
A college president was booed after a generative AI tool tasked with reading graduating students' names completely bungled the job.Maggie Harrison Dupré (Futurism)
