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Anti-viral is presented in partnership with Sublime, a creative thinking tool and communal search engine designed to help you collect, connect, and create from what inspires you — away from infinite feeds and AI slop. Sublime is my favorite kind of business — the small kind! — and they’re…

Late in 2025, X users began flooding the platform with requests for its AI chatbot Grok to generate sexualized images, mostly of women. According to one report, there were 1.8 million sexualized images of women generated in just nine days. That accounts for 41% of all images produced by…

There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a surge in AI-critical TV and filmmaking right now. Last year there was Pluribus, Companion, Mickey 17, MurderBot, Alien: Earth, etc. Guillermo del Toro punctuated press appearances for his Frankenstein film by uttering “Fuck AI” into the mic. However, there hadn’t been a film…

Last week, I wrote a bit about how and why the AI discourse has become particularly unhinged lately. Right as I published that piece, another AI discourse generator started making the rounds; an article by Dan Kagan-Kans in the effective altruist AI newsletter Transformer, that argued that “the left…

The list of reasons to want OpenAI banished from the face of this planet and to see Sam Altman behind bars for the rest of his life is longer than I could possibly list in a single article. The generative AI hype wave he kicked off in late 2022 has…

You might not agree, but there’s a growing consensus, even among reluctant users, that LLMs feel different. I don’t think it undermines critique to ask about the stakes of those feelings — and of this new goal of “agential AI.”

In my latest piece for Tech Policy Press, I…

"Noise is the central image of Eryk Salvaggio’s Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm. Its sources are varied but familiar: instructional films, found footage from commercials, the detritus and AI-generated slop forced into a dialogue with the noise that infuses every shot. Brief moments of sharp…

Silicon Valley is tightening its ties with Trumpworld, the surveillance state is rapidly expanding, and big tech’s AI data center buildout is booming. Civilians are pushing back.

In today’s edition of Blood in the Machine:

• Across the nation, people are dismantling and destroying Flock cameras that conduct warrantless…

The AI discourse has been particularly, let’s say, “heated” lately. It’s hitting a lot of the beats we’ve heard before—people are not ready for what’s coming, critics are too dismissive, and at everyone’s peril, “the left” is getting AI all wrong, etc—but delivered at a fever pitch.

A viral, AI-generated…

An audio essay

ChatGPT Breakup Mixtape Cybernetic Forests

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