“Privacy-preserving” isn’t as private as you might think. Our new brief, published in collab w @powerswitchaction.org & Coworker, exposes how so-called “privacy-preserving” technologies can actually enable *more* worker surveillance — and what we can do about it. datasociety.net/library/the-...

Altman claims the company didn’t anticipate people not wanting their deepfakes to say “offensive things or things that they find deeply problematic,” which sounds like a lie but is also indicative of how they recklessly release tech into the world.

The syllabus and schedule for my fall semester quantitative literary analysis course is now online, better late than never! github.com/laurenfklein...

“One of the negative consequences AI is having on students is that it is hurting their ability to develop meaningful relationships with teachers, the report finds. Half of the students agree that using AI in class makes them feel less connected to their teachers.”

Genius.

A thread on how people's use of generative AI has changed in the last year - based on survey data from 6 countries (🇬🇧🇺🇸🇫🇷🇩🇰🇯🇵🇦🇷 ).

First, gen AI use has grown rapidly.

Most people have tried out gen AI at least once (61%), and 34% now use it on a weekly basis - roughly doubling from 18% a year ago.

“…that Sora is being used for stalking and harassment will likely not be an edge case, because deepfaking yourself and others into videos is one of its core selling points.”

Far from an edge case, it’s the primary use case.

This is the first year I have seen multiple students taking notes by hand because they have a deeper understanding of how information is most effectively encoded in their brains. It’s exciting to see!

Ty!

I definitely thought about getting printed coursepacks for this semester, but I don’t know where to order them!

I think we’re really going to have to do a lot more of this. A massive deprogramming so that people can read more than ten words at a time without anxiety.

www.thetimes.com/uk/education...?

Shoutout to all the first-year students who left home, grew tiny mustaches, and are debuting them in-person at parents' weekend.

And don't forget to register for the next webinar in our AI series! We'll be talking legal and ethical issues in AI with @merbroussard.bsky.social and @nickgarcia.bsky.social!

nyu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

King Chunk

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising

www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

One of the loudest bells tolling for social science right now is that the decade of abundant data on humans is coming to a close. Whether you work on digital trace or surveys, LLM pollution is a serious problem, even while the wide roll out of LLMs creates an urgent need for social science.

New: landlords are demanding potential tenants hand over employer login credentials so a tool can verify their income. We were sent screenshot of the tool, Argyle, downloading much more data than necessary to approve the renter. "Opt-out means no housing" www.404media.co/landlords-de...

"Data centers are proliferating in VA and a blind man in [MD] is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills...It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers...[pull]...households into paying for the digital economy" www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

It is... 3d now? Why?

AI: even more energy-hungry than you imagined. futurism.com/future-socie...

Hm is it bad if the industry somehow propping up a trembling economy is based almost entirely on our collective willingness to let it do crimes

“.. OpenAI spent more on marketing and equity options for its employees than it made in revenue in the first half of 2025. That single fact sums up where we are in the AI cycle more neatly than anything we could ever write, so we’ll just end there.”

@financialtimes.com
www.ft.com/content/908d...

Whose video did OpenAI take to train Sora? @kevinschaul.bsky.social and I are back on our training data bullshit to find out. Gift link 🎁 t.co/c3Zg4gcYIT

“This worldwide update includes the ability for parents, as well as law enforcement, to receive notifications if a child—in this case, users between the ages of 13 and 18—engages in chatbot conversations about self harm or suicide.”