Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 20h

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 · 20h

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 · 21h

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.

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Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Marisa Elena Duarte @mwhitehorse.bsky.social · 23h

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 · 1d

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

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Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 1d

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

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 23h

@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 · 1d

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

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 1d

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...

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 1d

"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

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Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Tim Bousquet @timbousquet.bsky.social · 1d

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

blair @blairaf.com · 1d

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.

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Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2d

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”

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

@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 · 2d

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/

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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 2d

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 · 3d

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")

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

www.cbc.ca

Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 3d

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

www.zem-brandenburg.de/veranstaltun...

ZeM SPRING LECTURE „The Mothers of AI? Alan Turing’s Response to Ada Lovelace“ | ZeM

Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften

www.zem-brandenburg.de

Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

"the largest tech companies in the world are purchasing this infrastructure"...we know the game and no one wants your planet-burning war-industry infrastructure, so you can produce more AI slop. Canada please stop wasting tax dollars on Cohere/Coreweave: betakit.com/cohere-secur...

Cohere secures federal backing to build multibillion-dollar Canadian AI data centre

This marks the first investment through the new Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.

betakit.com

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

"Imitation" replaces "thinking" in the Turing test (which also relies on deception in "Can Machines Think?"); this 1950 model leads us directly to this fake AI economy.

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 2d

The real economy is already in a deep recession. The fake AI economy is a smokescreen. And now I'm afraid that the government will throw any amount of money at it to keep it from popping.

The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the US economy together, Deutsche Bank warns

According to a research note recently sent to clients by Deutsche Bank, the AI boom is currently helping the US economy avoid a recession but it cannot...

www.techspot.com

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

Would love to hear more about John Brockman (the digerati replacing the literati)...the Epstein-funded Edge Foundation and the millionaire/billionaire dinners. Think Trump was early on in the game?

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Reposted by Teresa Heffernan

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 2d

🏆 How does a comedy show have the best news research team? @thedailyshow.com

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

"From Greek mythology to Aesop’s Fables to Star Trek—literature has always been about exploring and negotiating what it means to be human." But the AI industry has used fiction as marketing drivel that sells a literal future. Wrote about it here:
www.socialrobotfutures.com/2018/04/27/w...

Why Technoscience Needs Fiction

By Teresa Heffernan As science was emerging as a discrete and soon to be dominant way of knowing and as the industrial revolution was transforming the English country-side, Thomas Love Peacock…

www.socialrobotfutures.com

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

And let's not forget Reid Hoffman, John Brockman, Marvin Minsky, MIT Media Lab, and many in the AI industry.

Christine Galea @chrisgalea.bsky.social · 2d

The fact that Elon musk, Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon all being in the Epstein files dropped out of the news way too fast www.bbc.com/news/article...

Elon Musk and Prince Andrew named in new Epstein files

The documents by the estate of convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein were released by Congressional Democrats.

www.bbc.com

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

I always use hard copies...books and paper.

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

www.socialrobotfutures.com/2018/04/27/w...

Why Technoscience Needs Fiction

By Teresa Heffernan As science was emerging as a discrete and soon to be dominant way of knowing and as the industrial revolution was transforming the English country-side, Thomas Love Peacock…

www.socialrobotfutures.com

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 2d

In the periods in history when calculation trumped imagination, Shelley argued, there was the greatest social inequality: the rich got richer and the poor got poorer as the society was torn between “anarchy and despotism.”

Hamilton Nolan @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social · 3d

It takes no special technical expertise to know that
1) AI's main value proposition today is automating labor,
2) AI is going to supercharge economic inequality, and
3) If we do not get out in front of that policy-wise, we are fools.

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/thinking-o...

Thinking of AI as a Social Problem

No need to know the unknowable. The knowable is bad enough.

www.hamiltonnolan.com

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