Book Review: The AI Con – A Critical Look At AI Hype
Via LLRX – Jerry Lawson reviews Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s new book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper 2025).
Category «Internet»
The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” leaves newspaper
The Indicator: “On Monday, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler announced that he had accepted a buyout and would leave the publication on July 31. Kessler has been the main author of The Fact Checker column since 2011 and serves as a member of the advisory board of the International Fact-Checking Network. He wrote that his …
Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor
Gizmodo: “Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College for years, but his job became significantly more difficult in 2023. Not long after AI apps like ChatGPT became freely available, higher education throughout the U.S. was hit with a tsunami of automated cheating. Students have been using AI to write essays—and the …
How AI is impacting 700 professions and might impact yours
Washington Post [no paywall] Companies are rushing to embrace artificial intelligence to cut costs, increase efficiency and better understand this new technology. IBM has replaced a couple hundred human resources workers with AI applications. At Microsoft and Google, AI writes more than one-quarter of the code. Writers can now use AI as their personal assistant …
Major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data
MIT Technology Review – no paywall: “Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images—including identifiable faces—were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training …
Try these hidden ‘NOPE’ buttons to stop AI content
Washington Post – no paywall – How to turn off AI in Google and DuckDuckGo web search results — plus a no-AI nuclear option: ” Let’s say that you’re worried about artificial intelligence turning us into mushy-brained monsters, draining resources from the planet, slurping all your data and human knowledge, preying on vulnerable minds, wiping …
USPTO launches new design patent examination AI tool
“The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is launching DesignVision, the first artificial intelligence (AI)-based image search tool available to design patent examiners via the Patents End-to-End (PE2E) search suite. DesignVision is the latest step in the agency’s broader efforts to streamline and modernize examination and reduce application pendency. DesignVision is an AI-powered tool that …
What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets?
The Pudding: “This is possible because media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!). The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in …
Trump admin. is muffling CDC’s flagship health journal, report finds
Ars Technica: “The flagship health journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has grown quiet this year, and a report from MedPage Today indicates that a variety of actions by the Trump administration may be to blame for hamstringing the critical resource. Most strikingly, sources told MedPage that the journal’s scientific articles …
Thunderforge Brings AI Agents to Wargames
IEEE Spectrum: “The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), is leading an experimental project, Thunderforge, to build a custom agentic AI system with multiple digital “agents” critiquing war plans across different military domains, running parallel analyses, and flagging potential weaknesses neglected by human planners. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) …
Online Monitoring Program is Expanding Behind the Scenes
Reddit/privacy: “You do not have to be famous or break any laws to end up under digital watch. New reports confirm that a US agency is expanding its contracts with private firms to quietly track internet activity. This includes what you post, what you like, what you share, and even how you express emotion. The …
Explore the dynamics of congressional elections with open data on candidates and campaigns
Campaign View: Dive into the records, learn about candidates, and explore their policies. Data to help facilitate a more informed public and advance social science research. Explore Data Our Methodology Download Data Candidate Bios – Read how candidates describe their backgrounds and qualifications in their own words. Read how candidates describe their backgrounds and qualifications …
