I’ve been struck by how the British far right is using deepfake technology — less to deceive about specific events, more to tap into fascistic affects & desires. This is really frightening.

My dispatch from grim corners of the Internet, for @lrb.co.uk online.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

Transcription! It's not perfect and has to be carefully checked, but it's good enough to save you masses of time (the search feature on Otter transcripts in particular is great). What about you?

I wrote about tech CEOs and lobtailing

www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1...

Analysts show that capital expenditures on AI were so big over the last 6 months they added more to the GDP than *all consumer spending*. That growth is offsetting pain from the tariffs and slow job growth.

So the AI bubble may be propping up the whole US economy. What happens if and when it pops?

Check out the colossal array of great Murphs in the replies.

This is, regrettably, a pretty persuasive take on where we're headed

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

“There will be fewer, if any, enforcement actions about how companies are deploying AI,” says former FTC attorney Leah Frazier.

The gleeful doxing of someone cheating in public is bad even if they are a CEO and even if they are a Coldplay fan. It's bad because this kind of thing is happening to random people on TikTok for such crimes as "sitting silently on a plane" or "being attractive"

www.404media.co/the-astronom...

This is the sort of thing I mean. How is this not just evident to all that this is clearly worse than what we were doing before?

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Generative AI is impressive and great at a small proportion of the tasks we're currently trying to use it for. I can't believe how much fixing/editing we're putting up with for the remaining (majority) of use cases. It does feel a bit like we've collectively lost our minds sometimes.

Aww Paul! I *think* maybe he's using his freaky little cat mouth-nose (ours do this sometimes when they really want to get a good whiff of something 😂)

The AI model is still slapping garbled, nonsensical captions on videos more than a month after launch, even when users explicitly ask for no captions at all.

This might be my favourite cat meme of 2025 so far

Big congrats to @squigglyvolcano.bsky.social for writing this blockbuster of a story and to @asilverman.bsky.social for editing it. It's honestly begging to be televised

Everything about this story is *fantastic* but I particularly enjoyed the bonus fun sidebar: astronomers absolutely hate the moon

obviously this is mental in and of itself but man alive it really does suck extra hard when you think about all the ACTUAL CRIMES the police just isn't investigating, because of "lack of resources"

It's also clear that he spends precisely *zero* time talking to normal people

Some people believe chatbots like ChatGPT can provide an affordable alternative to in-person psychedelic-assisted therapy. Many experts say it’s a bad idea.

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

The thing we keep missing about the emotional impact of AI companions is that it's going to be VERY uneven. Most people will probably be fine and won't form unhealthy dependencies. But the people that *won't* be fine will be unbelievably not fine, and we'll have almost nothing in place to help them

This has to be one of the bleakest stories from the AI relationships subgenre yet. I genuinely admire the writer's attempt to not portray these people as troubled freaks but I'm afraid it spectacularly failed. Real nails on a blackboard stuff.

www.wired.com/story/couple...