If you pay attention to the news at all, you may have seen a host of alarming headlines recently about how the number of Americans who say they read for pleasure has declined sharply over the past 20 years, from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent
The current battle over regulating speech online seems new, in part because the Trump government and its allies are going to extreme lengths to police speech about the murder of Charlie Kirk (a man who trumpeted the benefits of free speech, but is now the reason why people are losing
If you've been following the online discourse at all (and I would encourage you not to do too much of that, especially now) you may have seen a number of journalists and other commentators arguing that the blame for a big part of the unrest that we are
When AI engines or LLMs (large-language models) such as ChatGPT started to become popular, one of the main concerns some people had was the widespread crawling and indexing of content that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in while training these models, and that this is a form of theft.
A little over a year ago, things looked fairly bleak for Google on the legal front (and on other fronts, but we'll get to that). In August last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia handed down a decision in the US government's antitrust
Ever since artificial intelligence became a topic of popular conversation, the environmental cost of all these large-language models and the massive server farms that make them possible has been the subject of much concern. Every week or two, it seems, there is another article about the vast appetite these systems
I know what many of you may be thinking now, as you read the headline of this post. You might be remembering the photo reproduced below, in which Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (who, it must be said, has a large and rather egg-shaped head, no offense intended) is
OpenAI recently released a new version of its ChatGPT artificial-intelligence engine, called GPT-5. Normally, I wouldn't choose to write about the latest iteration of a product that is in its fifth generation, especially since GPT-5 doesn't seem radically different in most important ways from GPT-4. In
Let's all agree, for the sake of argument, that there's a lot of bad stuff on the old interwebs, okay? I mean, there's some really bad stuff – and not just porn, but violence and death and that sort of thing. I would rather not
In a recent essay in Asterisk magazine entitled Scapegoating the Algorithm, Cambridge PhD and social scientist Dan Williams wrote that there seems to be a sense that the United States (and possibly other parts of the world) is going through an epistemic crisis, which he describes as a "breakdown
Ever since Google climbed onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon last year by announcing that AI results would start appearing at the top of search pages, there has been a suspicion that by using AI to provide answers, Google would inevitably wind up displacing websites and media companies whose businesses depend
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous research. Obviously, there are some things
Hi everyone! I'm going to keep this (mercifully) short. I don't do this a lot, and in fact I think I've only done this one other time. I write and publish this newsletter because I love writing about tech and the impact it has
You might have noticed that there’s a tiny bit of anxiety about artificial intelligence these days — its design, its implementation, its uses and misuses, its reason for existing at all. Is it ruining society? Is it making our kids stupid? Is it going to kill us? Etc. A lot
I'd like to apologize in advance for the topic of this week's newsletter, which I fear may not interest all (or perhaps even most) of you. It would be nice to think that lots of people care about the nuances of how news and information gets
Ever since ChatGPT first emerged on the scene in 2022, there has been a vociferous debate about whether the indexing (or "scraping") of public content that AI companies do when they are training a large-language model should be considered an infringement of the copyright held by publishers and/
A little over six months ago, I (and pretty much everyone else with a pulse) was writing about Bluesky's meteoric growth, which seemed to be driven in equal parts by frustration with Elon Musk's MAGAfication of Twitter/X and the search for somewhere to talk about
This isn’t an AI newsletter per se, in the sense that I don’t always write about it. However, I do write about it fairly often, mostly because I don’t think there’s anything else happening — apart from maybe crypto — that blends the surprising and the terrifying and
I've never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote about a few of them at Gigaom in a previous lifetime (including one about how newspapers should "burn
Let's get this out of the way right up front: I don't have an iPhone, I have a Pixel. And I run Windows and Linux on my desktops, not MacOS. That said, I am a longtime Macbook Air fan, having had more than half a dozen
If you've been following the news about Google's I/O conference at all, you probably know that it was all about artificial intelligence — and that isn't an exaggeration. Literally every announcement, every feature, and every app demonstration involved AI in some form or another.
As many of you may have noticed, some of these Torment Nexus newsletters involve the presentation of a bunch of evidence in the form of links, followed by a well-thought-out conclusion (some may be more well-thought than others, but I let's not quibble). I want to say up
It seems quaint now, but not that long ago, one of the biggest reasons for concern about the surveillance of our behavior by massive internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — or by companies buying click data and GPS location from our smartphones — was that they might use that information
A recent New York Times piece arrived with a headline that asked "If AI systems become conscious, should they have rights?" If you were to judge the article by the response on social media like X and Bluesky (which is almost always a mistake, as many of you