iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 10h

No two words send AI industry advocates into fits of rage more than "stochastic parrots." The question is: Why? Why do they get so worked up over this particular critical framework time and time again? I sat down with @emilymbender.bsky.social, one of the coauthors of the original paper, to discuss

bloodinthemachine.com

The two words the AI industry hates more than anything

I talk with computational linguist Emily M. Bender, co-author of the influential 2021 “stochastic parrots” paper, about why AI industry leaders can’t stop seething over the term.

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John C @badsocialism.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Right then, our turn What's your fake Star Trek academic paper

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James Poniewozik @poniewozik.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Been reading about Paramount's promise that an outside body will ensure CNN's editorial independence, and man is it wearisome to be the sole person on Earth who remembers anything that happened more than 10 years ago www.theguardian.com/business/200....

theguardian.com

Wall Street Journal committee claims Murdoch broke agreement

A special independent committee accused the press baron of breaking agreement to protect editorial integrity

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Brian Stelter @brianstelter.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Many — I suspect most — viewers and readers feel lost when they hear phrases like “pacing the frontier” and see references to the “Hugging Face incident.” And they wonder about the motives of the people in positions of power...

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Jay Rosen @jayrosen.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Were I still teaching, I would assign for week one Tom Rosenstiel, co-author of the most commonly used text, "The Elements of Journalism." For week two, we read "The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy." www.cjr.org/analysis/sho... By week three we're in the thick of it.

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Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Trump has threatened to sue the left-leaning @americanprogress.bsky.social (CAP) and its donors over a study it published questioning the benefits of his National Guard deployment. I'm proud that Cato's president is speaking out against this act of intimidation. "We stand with CAP." /1

Cato Institute graphic with text "Disagreements on matters of policy should be settled through open inquiry, evidence, and debate -- not threats designed to silence criticism. We stand with CAP in defending the fundamental American principle of free speech." -- Peter Goettler President and CEO Cato Institute with picture of Goettler

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

standard. SCOTUS allows Trump to continue to create literal facts on the ground while they 'consider' his his meritless challenge. nothing is more important than reforming the court and ending its corruption.

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Richard Tofel @dicktofel.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Questions, some of them skeptical, for Tom Rosenstiel on his just-published and important book, The Next Journalism. This week’s Second Rough Draft newsletter dicktofel.substack.com/p/what-the-n...

dicktofel.substack.com

What The Next Journalism Should Be

A conversation with Tom Rosenstiel

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A lot of questions beyond "who did this?" Was this an academic experiment? If so, how was it developed/approved? If not academic, what were they trying to accomplish on behalf of whom? If not really an experiment at all, what was its real purpose?

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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

“My first day on the job, I fucked up.” That’s the lede to this CJR account of my 4 months in Utah, where I worked as a junior editor. I wanted to see what’s changed since i left local journalism a few decades ago. A lot of things are different. But not everything. www.cjr.org/first_person...

cjr.org

The 69-year-old rookie.

I was a fifty-year newspaper veteran and a journalism professor. Then I joined the Salt Lake Tribune as a junior editor.

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

interesting to learn nancy mace had the first line of mrs. dalloway tattooed on her. the first line, of course, sets up the scene of mrs. dalloway buying flowers for her dinner party, where she would wrestle with her homosexual memories of, and desires for, her friend sally.

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Very insightful, particularly on the important role of the press as a source of independent verification of the president’s whereabouts, which the country – and White House – need in place if disaster strikes

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Mark Follman @markfollman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

My new investigation into a mass shooter’s harrowing history with ChatGPT reveals numerous red flags—and some very disturbing ChatGPT replies—from long before his attack on Florida State University www.motherjones.com/media/2026/0... 1x 🧵

motherjones.com

Inside a mass shooter’s harrowing history with ChatGPT

A year of chats reveals glaring red flags—and disturbing ChatGPT replies—from long before a rampage at Florida State University.

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Tom & Lorenzo @tomandlorenzo.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I think the scholar had interesting observations about the popular entertainment but that critiquing popular entertainment from a scholarly perspective is bound to result in harsh assessments because the criteria and language for one perspective doesn't map well to the other

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Matt Zoller Seitz @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

"disruptively"

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Damon Kiesow @kiesow.net · 25/07/2026

Fascinating ethical failure here: metrophiladelphia.com/stories/will... I am always suspicious of any story about AI because tey seem to over-0index for being written by AI. But in this case it is an advertorial: 1/2 metrophiladelphia.com/stories/will...

metrophiladelphia.com

Will AI Text Detectors Become Obsolete as AI Writing Gets Better? - Metro Philadelphia

AI text detectors were introduced to help identify content generated by artificial intelligence and these tools were considered an effective way to distinguish between human and AI-written text. …

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Jonathan V. Last @jvl.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Worst part of the new @status.news report is that the Bari Weiss team appears to get its view of what is actually happening in the world from Twitter. They were asking Vega to include things that *weren't real* b/c they didn't know any better. www.status.news/p/cecilia-ve...

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

exCUSE me??????????? I take a week off and there’s a KIDNAPPING?!!?!????????

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Bari Weiss once again faced with the irreconcilable contradiction of practicing responsible journalism and carrying out the Ellison mandate deadline.com/2026/07/trum...

UPDATED with ABC & NBC plans, 12:51 PM: ABC News and NBC News said Thursday afternoon that they will carry Donald Trump‘s primetime address tonight only on their respective streaming sites, ABC News Live and NBC News Now, and not their broadcast networks.

[Highlighted] CBS News has yet to reveal its coverage plans.

NBC News said it will air a special report on the network after the speech. ABC News will monitor the speech and will break in for a special report depending on developments.

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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 08/07/2026

absolutely insane story, and yeah, just looking at this chart... with the exception of maybe two people, this entire class was cheating like motherfuckers

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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

An interesting thing just happened ... and while my full account will appear in CJR Friday, I want to take note of it now. Start with this NYPost/Fox story that ran Sunday. Note the headline (including typo). Illegal immigration caused house prices to rise 30%! web.archive.org/web/20260705... 1/

web.archive.org

Biden’s illegal immigration surge triggered 30% rise in home prices, $ 20% in rents, Fed paper finds

The paper describes 2021 through 2024 as an “unprecedented boom” in illegal immigration.

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Josh Fischman @jfischman.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

An eventful week at Scientific American. Owner Springer Nature rushed to sell SciAm 3 days before the staff overwhelmingly voted to form a union, and laid off a lot of people. Including me. I got to work with amazing writers during my time, people who made me better. Thank-you list in comment below:

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Asha Rangappa @asharangappa.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Did DoD just admit in a court filing that it used xAI's Grok Gov Model to hit the girls' school on the first day of the Iran war? Based on some passages flagged by @rgoodlaw.bsky.social in DoD's recent filing in NAACP's case against X, it looks like it did 1/

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Say The Thing Tee @saythethingtee.com · 20/06/2026

It appears Grok killed the schoolchildren in Iran, in tandem with a US military under Pete Hegseth who DGAF. Remember when Anthropic said 'No' to Hegseth's demand that they allow the DoD to use Claude to kill autonomously, with no human oversight? Check out this timeline:

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The press is ensnared by the contradictions of outmoded conventions (scrupulous fairness to disingenuous/bad faith actors like Vance; the president as Man of History deserving of respect and deference; Republican/MAGA performative aggression as political winners; "savvy" framing)

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Dan Kennedy @dankennedy.net · 16/06/2026

News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media: Looking at the new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report. www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/news...

niemanlab.org

News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media

Facebook for news is on the rebound, impartial news isn't dead, and other findings from RISJ's 2026 Digital News Report

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

From a political communications standpoint, kind of brilliant. "Court packing" sounds bad; "we have the wrong number of justices" is a simple and compelling way to put it; makes you think, why do we have this (arbitrary/path dependent) number that doesn't represent a majority of the country

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Some stray thoughts on gap-filling. Take them for what they are 1. Gaps in archives are not like rips in clothing; they don't have a well defined and wholly known, or in the broadest sense wholly knowable, shape or extent. You can't cut a patch for them or fill them with putty and smooth them over.

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Josh Sternberg @joshsternberg.com · 01/06/2026

"What NJ needed was a strong response...What it got instead was a calamity. Sherrill struck exactly the wrong tone and embraced exactly the wrong tactics. This mishandling of legitimate protest over the past weekend has left her looking hopelessly in over her head." www.nj.com/opinion/2026...

nj.com

Mikie Sherrill, welcome to your 1st political disaster. Delaney Hall is a national calamity. | Opinion

N.J. gov's strong-arm tactics have stifled protest and shifted public attention away from ICE concerns

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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 31/05/2026

The fact that tech firms aren't doing much more to prevent the pollution of our information spaces with AI scams and slop and bots monetizing AI-hallucinated bullshit right now when the problem is still more or less manageable is unbelievably irresponsible. Instead, they're pushing that shit on us.

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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Finally, someone citing Tolkien in politics for good

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 18/05/2026

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

Title: Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity

abstract: Over the past decade, the AI industry has come to exert an unprecedented economic, political and societal power and influence. The well-functioning of regulatory and oversight structures and processes that govern the industry thus have paramount ramifications for everything from fostering public trust in systems marketed as AI, the credibility of scientific knowledge, educational and healthcare services and products, information ecosystems, the environment, rule of law and integrity of democratic process. In this paper, we first develop a taxonomy of mechanisms enabling capture to provide a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Grounded in design science research (DSR) methodologies and extensive scoping review of existing literature and media reports, our taxonomy of capture consists of 27 mechanisms across five categories. We then develop an annotation template incorporating our taxonomy, and manually annotate and analyse 100 news articles. The purpose behind this analysis is twofold: validate our taxonomy and provide a novel quantification of capture mechanisms and dominant narratives. Our analysis identifies 249 instances of capture mechanisms, often co-occurring with narratives that rationalise such capture. We find that the most recurring categories of mechanisms are Discourse & Epistemic Influence, concerning narrative framing, and Elusion of law, related to violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws. We further find that Regulation stifles innovation, Red tape and National Interest are the most frequently invoked narratives used to rationalise capture. We emphasize the extent and breadth of regulatory capture by coalescing forces — Big AI and governments — as something policy makers and the public ought to treat as an emergency.

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Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

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Dan "Mr. Bones and Me" Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

I was lucky to write the lead article for a special issue of Academe on AI in the Corporate University. In "What does AI do?" I offer a provisional balance sheet of this technology's effects on our work, our finances, and our management, in a moment of rising fascist attacks on higher education.

aaup.org

What Does AI Do?

The economic and political problems of “cost disease” in education have created a powerful incentive for the adoption of AI.

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Trump administration maybe getting a little scared of what its "let AI run rampant" policy might mean www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

New York Times headline:
White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released
The Trump administration, which took a noninterventionist approach to artificial intelligence, is now discussing imposing oversight on A.I. models before they are made publicly available.

The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models.

In meetings last week, White House officials told executives from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI about some of those plans, people briefed on the conversations said.

The working group is likely to consider a number of oversight approaches, officials said. But a review process could be similar to one being developed in Britain, which has assigned several government bodies to ensure that A.I. models meet certain safety standards, people in the tech industry and the administration said.

The discussions signal a stark reversal in the Trump administration’s approach to A.I.

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Game over for New Orleans in decades, according to a new study. Especially galling, recent politically motivated decisions by the governor and SCOTUS have accelerated this timeline. History will look back on so much of this period as, WTF were they thinking? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

theguardian.com

‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds

Louisiana’s cultural hotspot could be surrounded by Gulf of Mexico before end of this century, authors say

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Damon Kiesow @kiesow.net · 01/05/2026

No. You need websites that are designed to serve human readers, quality, authenticity and trust not commodified programmatic scale. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/b...

“We need more stories, and we need more inventory,” Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news, told staff members in a meeting on March 17, according to a transcript reviewed by The New York Times. “This is a tool where we can take our strong content and find new audiences, angles and entry points.”

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

“Trump slurs Black people” would be a very easy story to put together

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

We need more boring, predictable speeches on time-tested virtues that nevertheless are blistering critiques of the current administration

Main NYT home page headline: King Charles Stresses Cooperation in Speech to Congress. Video of Charles speaking to Congress.

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

New investigative stories by @wired.com and @nytimes.com show why watchdog journalism is so important right now, with proliferating AI technologies and a legal system increasingly dictated from the top by right-wing partisan actors www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u... www.wired.com/story/madiso...

NYT on SCOTUS shadow docket:
In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.

When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

In the Trump era, he and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings. By contrast, the papers reveal a court wielding those same powers to block Mr. Obama. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. warned that if the court failed to stop the president, its own “institutional legitimacy” would be threatened.

Wired on intrusive surveillance in Madison Square Garden:
But the true extent of Dolan’s panopticon has only been caught in glimpses. A 2025 lawsuit by a former member of the MSG security team lifted the veil, just a bit. We started our own digging into the Garden's operations. We discovered that Dolan’s security teams obsessively tracked Nina Richards, a trans woman, over a two-year period, monitoring her movements through the venue down to the second. (WIRED is using a pseudonym in this article out of respect for her privacy.) Dolan's biometric surveillance is so extensive that a New York City police officer’s photo was added to a face-recognition database, and a child triggered an alert at one of Dolan’s properties. According to that lawsuit and our sources, Dolan’s head of corporate security takes such an expansive view of his mission that his employees will functionally cosplay as cops—patrolling the neighborhood, snooping on protesters if they happen to be in the area. You don't have to enter a Dolan venue to be under his watch.

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Helen Kennedy @helenkennedy.com · 12/04/2026

Pro tip: don’t lay off all the copy editors, you numpties. That’s how you end up with horror. (Also get you a less credulous skyline writer)

The big front page headline in the daily news is “Grand Central horror: machete weilding man claimed to be Lucifer”. The word weilding is circled in red

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Maybe there’s more here but AP’s strategy sounds an awful lot like “we’re downsizing on journalists and pivoting to video and AI,” which is no strategy at all apnews.com/article/news...

The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion’s share of AP’s revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income.

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, said in an interview.

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Michelle Goldberg @michellegoldberg.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/o...

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

In an ordinary presidency, by now the CoS, Defense Secretary, and Secretary of State/National Security Adviser would have been fired in disgrace and replaced. But the operating principle of Trump II is Trump gets to do whatever he wants and no one can say otherwise, so this just continues on and on

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Category confusion that results from putting extremists in key positions. What in past administrations would have been a "public servant resigns on principle" story is ... still that, but the "principle" in question is based on a mix of accurate observation and anti-Semitism.

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John McQuaid @johnmcquaid.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

As it was during COVID, Trump's need to run his mouth on camera several times a day does a not-insignificant amount of damage to US strategic goals, to the efforts of people working for the US government, to his own political standing, and to public understanding

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The Editorial Board @editorialboard.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Great thread on journalism.

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