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 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?
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.
Artificial intelligences and human scientists exhibit...
We investigate the effectiveness of artificial intelligences (AI)-specifically large language models (LLMs)-relative to human scientists at high-level cognitive tasks in social science such as...
Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network
Anthropic's conceptual mapping helps explain why LLMs behave the way they do.
Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.
How Do We Talk about LLMs?
By Jim Clifford It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all deal…
