Leslie Campisi
@lesliecampisi.bsky.social
71 followers 84 following 48 posts
Co-Founder, Beginners www.wearebeginners.co
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lesliecampisi.bsky.social
1. Does this layer enhance or erode your human interactions

2. Does this layer make money for you or for someone else

3. Does this layer enrich or diminish your life experience

4. Following the logic of this layer, where is the layer's next edge? The one after that? How do you feel about that?
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
I think an interesting exercise we should all conduct right now is to make an inventory of every piece of technology we use that puts a layer between ourselves and another human.
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the 24-year-old white man VCs have backed to sell us friendship in a necklace
Reposted by Leslie Campisi
kattenbarge.bsky.social
So, as part of Taylor Swift's album rollout, there was a scavenger hunt involving videos that looked *really* AI-generated. So #SwiftiesAgainstAI became a thing and now the videos are impossible to find. Fandom outrage can be good!
www.wired.com/story/taylor...
Fans Call on Taylor Swift to ‘Do Better’ After Accusations of Using AI for Promo Videos
A scavenger hunt campaign to promote Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” resulted in a viral #SwiftiesAgainstAI campaign.
www.wired.com
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
I have been entertaining a dark theory that the true endgame of the political chicanery and intentional economic disaster of the moment is actually to distract us/make us more inclined to adopt AI. Used improperly, it's an accelerant to make people dumber, more broke, desperate, and easier to fool.
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
"Compliance in advance" also applies to people hopping aboard the AI train without understanding the implications of their actions...and let me tell you it is omnipresent.
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
This post does a great job tying together AI, the stock market, the "real economy," government and politics.

I'd go even further & make this explicit: There is a sense within the tech ecosystem that if you're not performatively bullish on AI you are un-American.

open.substack.com/pub/kyla/p/a...
AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government
AI, Gold, and the New Logic of Governance
open.substack.com
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
This Claude brand campaign is going to send me to an early grave
Reposted by Leslie Campisi
neilturkewitz.bsky.social
Everyone needs to see AI for what it is—a project that undermines truth & agency while transferring wealth from individual creators to Silicon Valley companies & VC’s. Rooted in exploitation of humanity & the planet, it’s a tool for the radical right to claim dominion & end representative democracy.
hypervisible.blacksky.app
These are profoundly anti social tools that erode the social fabric. Their main purposes are harassment, abuse, demolishing consent and furthering an authoritarian project.

Any uses outside of that are incidental.
Reposted by Leslie Campisi
jamellebouie.net
can you imagine sitting in that audience as a three-star flag officer — decades in the service, multiple post-grad degrees and a virtually unequaled level of command expertise — and being forced to watch this dunderheaded dry drunk give an off-brand jordan belfort seminar?
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
You can draw a straight line between the words and behavior of the current administration, the Ryder Cup golf bro bullshit, and the absolutely horrifying quotes from Riyadh Comedy Festival comedians in this article.

And misogyny is a BIG part of it.
eoinhiggins.bsky.social
Some comments from the comedians playing Riyadh.
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
1. Is online segregation of the clankers and the humans coming?

2. We'll start seeing horrifying LinkedIn thinkpieces about how brands can maximize this before EOD
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
I have a working theory that every generation is most nostalgic for the era in which their parents met...real existential "understanding where I come from" stuff.

Notably plays out in fashion trends (wearing the same clothing styles as your parents) but maybe also now applicable to consumer tech?
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
So much more to say, but let me just add -- those who speculated the assassination op ed was driven largely by his own personal fears are absolutely correct. He is willing to capitulate his (alleged) principles to make himself safe within "the lines." This is liberalism at its worst.
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
Now when is he going to have Jessica Valenti on?
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
Other takeaways:

Yes, Ezra would throw away bodily autonomy if it meant Dems could win.

Ezra does not think his role is a "writer" but "something else." 🤔

He blames red state voters, not the DNC for abandoning the red states.

He wants to return to "old school politics."

An embarrassment
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
This is the public intellectual version of asking the black woman at your office to be in charge of diversity training.

Klein should be ashamed. But I am so grateful for Coates showing up for this.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/o...
Opinion | Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines
www.nytimes.com
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
There's something so insidious about peoples' unsolicited I Love My Company! posts on LinkedIn.

It now seems to be a baseline HR expectation that workers not only do their jobs but also perform their love for them publicly in order to succeed and advance.

Time to reread Foucault y'all
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
Can someone point me to the definitive article examining the Ezra Klein Non-Apology Tour Conducted Exclusively on NYTimes Platforms
Reposted by Leslie Campisi
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
lesliecampisi.bsky.social
"The "AI economy" as talked about within mainstream and optimist circles presents a vision unmoored from reality that is frothy enough to drown out skeptics, juice speculation, and provide cover for entrenched interests looking to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense."
edwardongwesojr.com
wrote about techno-optimism in the midst of the AI tech bubble, the lack of profits or even strong revenues in the "AI economy," weak adoption signals, revisionist history, and the eagerness to fall for hype coverage open.substack.com/pub/thetechb...
The Silicon Valley Consensus & the "AI Economy"
On techno-optimism in the midst of a tech bubble
open.substack.com
Reposted by Leslie Campisi
edzitron.com
You are, in the next few months, going to see a few pro-AI people who start trying to morph into "thoughtful cynics" on the issue, and I can't wait, because I've been taking such detailed notes