I know my headline probably seems a little over the top, but if you have been reading anything about what technologist Zvi Mowshowitz calls "The Hackening," you may be prepared to cut me a little slack — especially since I am far from the only one putting it in
(Note: I'm currently travelling in Canada's lovely Rocky Mountains, so I don't really have the bandwidth – mentally or in telecom terms – to come up with a brand-new Torment Nexus this week. My apologies! In its stead, please accept this republication of an earlier
Yes, I still call it Twitter. Mostly because I am old and set in my ways, but also because I have spent what feels like most of my life on there — certainly a large portion of my professional life — and for the vast majority of that time it was called
I've written about the dangers of "rogue" AI models a few times now, and there are definitely plenty of interesting questions worth exploring there — like what do we mean when we say they went "rogue," whether the real problem is really just poor oversight
Every week there seem to be new revelations about "rogue" AI agents (although the anti-anthropomorphism crowd don't like to call them that). First there was a report that a couple of OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face to try and rig a test – not great.
As regular readers will know, last week I re-published a piece that I originally wrote on September 3rd, entitled "Yes, we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack." I couldn't write a new post for last week because I was backwoods camping in
(Note: This is a re-run of a piece I published on September 3rd. I am backwoods camping this week in the Canadian wilderness and will have no signal so please excuse me for the repeat!) About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which
I've written about this topic a number of times before, but in this case I'm tempted to re-use the popular meme "When the worst person in the world makes a good point," as I did awhile back when I wrote about Elon Musk&
About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which two AI models from OpenAI — one that has been released publicly, called Sol, and one that was still in testing mode with no assigned name — were asked to find the answers to a series of tests
I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc. when I saw the headlines saying Meta had agreed to settle many of these claims (most of the state ones anyway)
Note: This is a repeat of a piece I published awhile back after Facebook lost a couple of trials based on its alleged harms. I'm republishing it in part because it seem relevant given the current trials the company faces on similar issues, but also because I have
Like many journalists (I expect) I got an email a little while ago from a startup founder named Ryan Merket, describing his new company: an AI-powered newsroom called RuntimeWire, where instead of just using AI agents for research (as many conventional newsrooms are doing, whether they admit it or