AI Angst

My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there. As for the genAI tech itself, I guess I’m a moderate; there is a there there, it’s not all slop. But first…

‎Google Gemini

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"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.

"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.

The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers

I got a great pitch email for Pivot to AI last week: [Mastodon] I am Shriya, reaching out on behalf of Frame Fellowship, a 10-week residential program in San Francisco, US for creators who want to …

The Dark Forest and Generative AI

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

John Horton on Twitter / X

I increasingly think we have to keep AI generated 'papers' out of venues meant for humans---not b/c the papers are bad per se---just that our currently-designed systems cannot accommodate and will break. But I also think what we need a venue for AI generated work (it's good &… pic.twitter.com/fXd92SYbN5— John Horton (@johnjhorton) September 29, 2026

Guest Post - The Perils of Using Generative AI to Perform Research Tasks: Editors’ and Publishers’ Viewpoints - The Scholarly Kitchen

Today's guest post offers a review of a panel of publishers and editors discussing the pros and cons of using Generative AI, along with ethical and policy implications.

Nature is Laughing at the AI Build Out -

I was catching up on Acquired episodes this week and listened to the spectacular “Google: The AI Company” episode that Ben and David put together. What the two of them have created with their podcast fascinates me in the inevitability of its success. I think Acquired proves that if you are smart and work your […]