The political economy of Blurry JPEGs

ImportAI 449: LLMs training other LLMs; 72B distributed training run; computer vision is harder than generative text

Will AI cause a political interregnum

How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion

Social media democratised public opinion, shifting influence away from elites and experts to ordinary people. LLMs will partly reverse this trend. They are a powerful, new technocratising force.

It's all a blur

If you follow information security discussions on the internet, you might have heard that blurring an image is not a good way of redacting its contents.

LLMs Are Still Making Election Deepfakes Just Days Before the US Midterms

The Brennan Center tested AI chatbots to see if they would generate images with false election claims. The results were unsettling, writes Abdiaziz Ahmed.

Brandon Stewart on Twitter / X

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses. pic.twitter.com/5LdFvzbFaf— Brandon Stewart (@b_m_stewart) May 13, 2026

There's Something Fundamentally Wrong With LLMs

LLMs aren't trained on the "vast majority of speech," experts warn, a major blind spot that could have sweeping consequences.

Old Tricks, New Tech: How Legacy Media Capture Fuels Today’s Digital Authoritarianism

Marius Dragomir and Minna Aslama Horowitz discuss how digital authoritarianism is rising as states and Big Tech align, threatening independent media.

These LLMs are the best at resisting Russian propaganda

Estonian government benchmark shows how dozens of models combat Russia's "strategic narratives."

What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding | off the grid

There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in $ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW”, and from the other side flat-out rejections of the idea that this type of tool can have any utility.1 I think it best sheds light on these claims to examine them in the context of another field that’s been ahead of the curve on this: translation.

Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting

Workers at three major publishing houses tell WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech.

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

Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business

The Netscapes of AI

Happy, those able to know the causes of things

[This is a guest post by Nestor Guillen, crossposted from his blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Keywords: LLMs, cultural tech…

Understanding Multimodal LLMs

An introduction to the main techniques and latest models

Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X

this is true and is a big reason why you don’t need to be a highly technical researcher to use LLMs in surprising and novel ways https://t.co/TuxNzXzToU— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 27, 2025