Technological

Child Predators Turn to Open-Source AI to Make Unlimited Illegal Images

Open-source AI tools are fueling a rise in explicit child sexual images, and current laws are ill-equipped to stop it

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool

A new open-source tool is making waves in the Mac community by helping users reclaim valuable storage space taken up by Apple's AI models. Called "RemoveMacAI," the command line tool disables Apple Intelligence on macOS 27, removes its downloaded models, and prevents them from being downloaded again. In macOS 27, Apple removed the toggle to disable Apple Intelligence wholesale, and simply disabling individual features doesn't remove the models from your Mac's drive.

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."

Cory Doctorow: AI’s big beasts aren’t really scared of their products. They’re scared of their competition

The US giants would love to stop battling each other and be protected from China – and they might have hit on just the narrative to make that possible, writes our tech columnist

How AI Chatbots Are 'Deskilling' Human Empathy

Sherry Turkle's latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, comes out on September 29.

Pluralistic: The Claude Delusion (21 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

One of the less remarked-upon aspects of becoming an atheist is how it changes the way you see a sunset. If you believe in an almighty, omnipresent God, then sunsets are one of God's intentional creations, which means that the beautiful colors refracting through the darkling sky were chosen to produce that effect.

Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Technopolitics

It's one thing to be anti-AI in the sense of believing that AI-generated slop, disinformation and deepfakes are bad; that AI companies that hope to con your boss into firing you and replacing you with AI that can't do your job are bad; that betting the economy on AI is bad; that betting the human-habitable planet Earth on AI is bad; that running roughshod over local environmental rules and seizing …Read More

Field Notes: The Architecture of Rationalization - Aaron Ross Powell

Marginalia on the internet turning bad, platform extraction, and existential restlessness.

And Then the Networks Started Talking | Jason G. Butterfield | Offprint

Gander, Eurosky, and interoperability is no longer theoretical

How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month

Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.

AI Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out Of Control

The press obsession with software-powered doomsday is a misdirection overshadowing a much deadlier reality: our public interest regulators no longer function.

Behind the AI ‘Extinction’ Power Bid: Soaring Costs Could Hit 10% of World GDP

AI firms are invoking unproven extinction warnings to justify restrictions on developments by their smaller rivals whilst seeking greater influence over regulation

Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down

Facebook is hosting huge numbers of horrifying AI-generated videos of violent child abuse, and Meta is barely taking them down.

Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters

Kalie Robins shared a video of her and her daughter singing. Meta AI started prompting her to investigate information about her family.

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

Rediscovering The Spark

The last few years have been hard as someone who is not only very much engaged with technologies, their applications, damages and affordances as well as their politics. We’ve been moving through hype cycle after hype cycle with increasing promises at increasing speeds. Which is somewhat natural of course: Being built not around something material, […]

Scientists Say LLMs Appear to Be Acting as a Cognitive Virus Among Humans

AI's wide proliferation shares some striking similarities with the ways viruses spread, as an international team of researchers argue.

Skyreader update - Reading Rooms - Skyreader Dev Log

You can now read together with other people in Skyreader.

Tech billionaires aren't juvenile science-fiction nerds, they just can't read

Tech billionaires aren't juvenile science-fiction nerds, they just can't read