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:
Pluralistic: Why I don’t like AI art (25 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
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.
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: AI’s pogo-stick grift (02 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."
Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":
Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
Pluralistic: “Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:
Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?
Pluralistic: AI psychosis and the warped mirror (18 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"AI psychosis" is the pop-psych diagnosis in a recent string of horrible and horrifying cases in which vulnerable people were lured by chatbots into harming themselves and others, including a murder-suicide:
ADD / XOR / ROL: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
How LLMs are and are not like the brain
Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...
Lincoln Michel on Twitter / X
This was my read on AI from the beginning and it proved very true. Whatever hypothetical benefits LLMs have (and they have some), their main use is to waste everyone's time wading through slop. Longer colleague powerpoints. More spam emails. More slop clogging up all the systems. https://t.co/2gtGfqf7KF— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 21, 2026
Artificial
An LLM is a computer program. We should talk about it like a computer program.
Artificial
An LLM is a computer program. We should talk about it like a computer program.