Is AI the greatest art heist in history?

New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it

What AI is Really For - Christopher Butler

After three years of immersion in AI, I have come to a relatively simple conclusion: it’s a useful technology that is very likely overhyped to the

AI, Artifice, And Authenticity

The era of badly-automated homogenized engagement slop is upon us. I desperately want to believe there's a renaissance for authenticity on the other end.

What Would “Good” AI Look Like? - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

3: Consulting the Record: AI Consistently Fails the Public - AI Now Institute

Amid the excitement over AI’s (speculative, hypothetical) potential, we have lost sight of the sobering reality of its present and recent past. AI is already intermediating critical social infrastructures, materially reshaping our institutions in ways that ratchet up inequality and concentrate power in the hands of the already powerful. It is consistently deployed in ways […]

After AI Takes Everything | Airing

Prompted by letters from three engineers, the author asks what remains for humans as AI takes over execution, naming judgment, taste, and derivation as irreplaceable, and warns against the erosion of subjecthood.

AI Fakes Spread Disinformation. Is the Distrust They Create Even Worse?

Manipulated images undermine our shared reality—and the democracy built upon it.

The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people an…

AI, Ethics, and Society — Home

The AI We Deserve

Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?

"I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

Copywriters were one of the first to have their jobs targeted by AI firms. These are their stories, three years into the AI era.

AI Is a Waste of Time

The newest AI tools are accelerating basic research and scaring the general public. But many people are simply using them as toys.

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Although this strategy had some success in the aerospace industry, the zealots of artificial intelligence (AI) have been making the same argument regarding how it will transform work, claiming that so little human effort will be required that humanity will enter an era of radical abundance, free from disease, drudgery, and danger, among other benefits, leaving society with more time for creative pursuits. But history tells a different story. When machines began to increase productivity during the second industrial revolution, American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management encouraged corporations to use surveillance to get employees to work harder and longer, an approach that exhausted and discouraged workers and led to the transfer of knowledge and any decision-making from workers to management, while enriching the profits for only those at the top. Yet, it remains foundational to the American economic enterprise. Indeed, scientific publishing is starting to experience some Taylorism with the insertion of AI. Rigorous human checking of AI-generated research papers is creating bottlenecks as publishers strive to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The challenge is requiring even more human effort, making the whole endeavor slower and more expensive.

If AI is normal technology, history is not reassuring. — LessWrong

There’s a truism that technology is good - even if it creates winners and losers, it improves the world. Toby Ord argues that the conclusions about t…

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.