Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 4h

Gee, I thought Altman said we would get amazing medical cures, solutions to global problems, like climate change, and AGI.

But no...instead we get the AI industry trying to get a piece of the lucrative porn industry in a desperate attempt to stop the bubble from bursting.

404 Media @404media.co · 5h

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a post on X Tuesday that ChatGPT is officially getting into the fuckable chatbots game, with “erotica for verified adults” rolling out in December.

🔗 www.404media.co/chatgpt-erot...

ChatGPT’s Hail Mary: Chatbots You Can Fuck

As recent reports show OpenAI bleeding cash, and on the heels of accusations that ChatGPT caused teens and adults alike to harm themselves and others, CEO Sam Altman announced that you can soon fuck t...

www.404media.co

2 4

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 11h

“What’s happening here is a very specialized industry that’s enabling some of the world’s worst dictators and despots to undermine the foundational pillars of liberal democracy.”

The surveillance empire that tracked world leaders, a Vatican enemy, and maybe you

We uncovered a massive data trove. It revealed the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.

www.motherjones.com

2 21 38

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

🎃smell🎃patatas🎃 @its.small.patatas.ca · 8h

The #Canada #AI policy survey is long, leading, and seems designed to be alienating to non-industry people like me.

But!

I saved a copy of all my responses, so if it'd be helpful for anyone to see some possible starting points for your own answers, lemme know!

#CdnPoli

🎃smell🎃patatas🎃 @its.small.patatas.ca · 2d

hey Canada - here's where you can tell the federal government to go cram it when it comes to AI policy ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en...

Help define the next chapter of Canada's AI leadership

Current status: Open from October 1 to October 31, 2025 Canada helped invent modern AI. To stay a leader—and protect our digital sovereignty—we're running a 30-day national sprint to shape a renew...

ised-isde.canada.ca

2 2 2

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 9h

I was asked to join for a session on advancing "ethical and inclusive approaches to AI" in response to their task force. I can't make it, but I questioned whether there were any "ethical" uses given the industry and asked we value research over industry hype.

1 1

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Jenny Cohn @jennycohn.bsky.social · 10h

Balaji (a close associate of Thiel & Andreessen) leads the “network state” movement, which encourages tech elites to build their own “countries” by acquiring physical territory w/in host countries & building “parallel institutions” to replace existing ones in media, education, finance, & science 1/

81 380 610

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 12h

Dying for and from convenience.

2

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 19h

A new search engine is actually needed that works and combs out ai nonsense by default

　　　the　　　 ghostes @rem.bsjky.team · 1d

love how much of the stuff on the internet is essentially jsut. gone forever. unsearchable means unfindable means, in essence, gone

4 15 56

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Peter Tarras @petertarras.bsky.social · 19h

One effect of 'AI' is that it actually atrophies our stores of information and knowledge. Explain to me how this is progress 🫠

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 19h

A new search engine is actually needed that works and combs out ai nonsense by default

　　　the　　　 ghostes @rem.bsjky.team · 1d

love how much of the stuff on the internet is essentially jsut. gone forever. unsearchable means unfindable means, in essence, gone

2 16 42

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 13h

As it shrinks the world, the AI industry is not only destroying the planet, it is destroying local knowledge that offers potential solutions to the environmental crisis: "When a language becomes marginalised, the plant knowledge embedded within it often disappears as well."
aeon.co/essays/gener...

Generative AI has access to a small slice of human knowledge | Aeon Essays

Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is shockingly ignorant too

aeon.co

1

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 1d

@mark-carney.bsky.social Can Canada please pay attention to the techno-feudalistic & planet-burning project of the "AI" sci-fi fantasy industry pushed by the bro oligarchs and stop treating it as "science" or a "future" anyone wants?

Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 1d

Project 2025, Silicon Valley & Tech's AI War on Democracy.
New Nerd Reich podcast episode with @ebharrington.bsky.social and @adambecker.bsky.social

Come for the analysis of tech fascism, stay for the laughs.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2eh...

Project 2025, Silicon Valley & Tech's AI War on Democracy | The Nerd Reich Podcast Mailbag

YouTube video by The Nerd Reich with Gil Duran

www.youtube.com

1 1 2

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 1d

The Information confirming what most of us already seemed to get a handle on -- "AI" has been profitable for only the chip manufacturers, and the circular network of cloud providers.

www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-...

Meanwhile, we’ve seen precious little evidence that AI is a profitable business for those using the servers to sell AI apps or those developing AI models. The cost of AI models weighs on all AI-powered applications, although those costs have come down over time. Coding assistants, for instance, aren’t exactly high margin. We’d bet that’s true of other AI apps, whether they’re run by big companies or startups, although we don’t really know. Few of the big public companies have said much about the revenue they’re getting from AI apps, let alone the profits.

2 8 29

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 1d

The creation of ‘parallel’ institutions—media outlets, universities, political parties, etc—is key.

That's how billionaires turn their money into institutional capture and ideological weaponization.

Weiss already has a “university” and a “Free Press.”
Now she gets CBS...

From Gil Duran's New Republic piece: So, there’s no debate about whether this ideology exists. The question is what to call it, and how to describe its political orientation. For clarity, it helps to briefly examine some of the intertwined characters trying to circle-jerk this parallel world into being.

Let’s start with Bowles. Her celebrated article echoed the arguments in Michael Shellenberger’s “San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities” book and even featured the exact same anti-S.F. critics. Shellenberger, a former leftist P.R. expert who worked for socialist Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez before pivoting to right-wing causes, now serves as chair of politics, censorship and free speech at the newly formed University of Austin. This effort at a parallel academic institution was co-founded by The New York Times’ former conservative columnist Bari Weiss, Bowles’s wife. In 2022, after Musk put Weiss in charge of writing “The Twitter Files,” she recruited Shellenberger to help.

1 26 83

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 3d

But you know sure let it be your search engine replacement and read and write (whatever that means) for you, not a problem at all 🥲

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3d

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT

GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.

www.theverge.com

2 17 48

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 4d

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

www.nytimes.com

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 4d

Thought exactly the same...tell me how converting words and images into numbers, subjecting them to an insane# of mathematical calculations that take an insane amount of energy becomes an "it" that births new "life" forms....honestly!! A field built on fiction.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 4d

These are all flagrant lies, unsourced yet printed in a newspaper that allegedly fact checks things. The rest of it is meandering panic-bait that treats jail breaking LLMs. They don’t even describe the virus! They just said someone made one. Bullshit!

One answer is to look at the data. After the launch of GPT-5 in August, some thought that A.I. had hit a plateau. Expert analysis suggests this isn’t true. GPT-5 can do things no other A.I. can do. It can hack into a web server. It can design novel forms of life. It can even build its own A.I. (albeit a much simpler one) from scratch.

1 3

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Marisa Elena Duarte @mwhitehorse.bsky.social · 4d

Okay, thank you for this, as the president of my university recently compared AI to the printing press, and as an information scientist I am saying, "no, sir, that is neither helpful nor accurate."

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 4d

really nice piece on this btw from @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer

The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...

sonjadrimmer.com

3 12 34

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 5d

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

1.9K 23K 56K

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 4d

@mark-carney.bsky.social I assume our AI Minister is keeping up with this massive bubble that promises to build fantasy infrastructure for a product that has no market and no wants? Please tell me he has rejected Open AI's interest in developing "sovereign AI capabilities" (an oxymoron) in Canada.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 4d

Premium: The AI Bubble's promises are impossible. NVIDIA's customers are running out of money, GPUs die in 3-5 years, most 1GW data centers will never get built, and OpenAI's Abilene data center doesn't won't have the power it needs before 2028 - if it ever does.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

The AI Bubble's Impossible Promises

Readers: I’ve done a very generous “free” portion of this newsletter, but I do recommend paying for premium to get the in-depth analysis underpinning the intro. That being said, I want as many people ...

www.wheresyoured.at

1 2 5

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 4d

Sorry? So Canada is caving to the OpenAI bubble?

Solomon "said that building sovereignty requires working with international partners, including the U.S."

www.thecanadianvanguard.com/canada-emerg...

1

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 4d

"AI threatens multiple forms of failure: model collapse, ecological collapse, and cognitive collapse. The current approach to AI cannot sustain itself indefinitely. The question becomes not whether current AI slop economies will destroy themselves, but when."

Matthieu Dugal @matthieudugal.bsky.social · Sep 9

Si t'as une analyse à lire sur l'accélération de déliquescence du contenu produit par les IA génératives laissées à elles-mêmes qui monopolisent monstrueusement ressources cognitives et matérielles, il faut lire la grande chercheure @katecrawford.bsky.social. Brillant. www.e-flux.com/architecture...

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop

AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

www.e-flux.com

1 5 13

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Tim Bousquet @timbousquet.bsky.social · 5d

AI's not going to buy your art, Evan.

blair @blairaf.com · 5d

Looks like Canada's approach to "sovereign AI" will involve creating structural dependencies on large US tech companies

Excerpt from an article that reads: Lehane met with AI Minister Evan Solomon on Monday. Solomon told The Logic in June that his mission is to “create sovereign AI.” But “sovereignty is not solitude,” Solomon said, noting that Canada still needs technology and capital from other countries.

OpenAI is participating in similar initiatives in other advanced economies. In May, the firm launched OpenAI for Countries, a new program that localizes ChatGPT and its underlying models for a nation’s particular customs and the requirements of its public sector. It is also offering to build data centres for countries that help pay for the infrastructure.

Countries are turning to OpenAI because of its “cutting-edge technology,” which can be used to build homegrown tools and applications, and because the firm can help stimulate their domestic AI ecosystems by building or buying compute capacity, Lehane said.

4 8 27

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 5d

Next week in NY! Would love to see folks come out. www.ccny.cuny.edu/calendar/rif...

Poster for a talk at city college NY that reads, “Stripmining History:
How the 'Al' Industry Extracts the Past & What Scholars in the Humanities Can Do to Stop It
IN-PERSON & VIA ZOOM
OCTOBER 16 | 5:00PM - 6:30PM | NAC 6/316
Universities and museums have recently begun partnering with technology firms like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, who have promised that their Al products will enhance both historical research and accessibility to historical collections. These promises, however, are not supported by the reality of what computer vision-a foundational branch of Al-can achieve.
This talk provides an introduction to computer vision's origins in military surveillance, an overview of its development under late capitalist regimes of exploitative micro-labor, and an orientation to how computer vision works. This vision has relied on extracting history, and Drimmer argues that it is the responsibility of scholars in the humanities to be knowledgeable about the forms this extraction takes.
Sonja Drimmer
Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst”

8 17

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 5d

@mattgalloway.bsky.social Thanks for the segment on Sora, OpenAI, and the threat to democracy. Read "the Omega Team" in Tegmark's Life 3.0 (2017), which states the goal: “for the first time ever, our planet was run by a single power." Musk launched his Open AI project with Altman at his conference.

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 5d

We're so relieved to see Germany reaffirm its opposition to the dangerous Chat Control proposal--the one that would mandate mass scanning of communications. Germany's long been a solid champion of privacy, and the news that it was considering backing mass surveillance was alarming. 1/

9 220 1K

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 6d

Really love to see stuff like this, and it's 100% why I'm very happy to beam into your classroom, workplace, book club etc, to talk Luddites, resisting AI and job degradation, organizing or whatever, whenever I can. Thx Susan, your group was great, and glad you're picking up the proverbial hammer

Susan Kaye Quinn is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱 @susankayequinn.bsky.social · 7d

My recent adventures with AI:

—attended bookclub where BLOOD IN THE MACHINE author @bcmerchant.bsky.social zoomed in; I said I've been thinking about "What's my hammer?" (my answer to myself: "stories" and "copyright law")

1/n

2 13 82