Tomorrow! @ainowinstitute.bsky.social's Data Center Policy in Practice training series kicks off w "The AI Industry, Data Center Buildout, and How to Take Power Back." Register to explore practical policy pathways to stop, slow, & restrict the rapid expansion of data centers: bit.ly/policy-in-pr...

A.I. Has a Message Problem of Its Own Making A.I. companies are facing hostility and mistrust—and much of the heightened, sometimes histrionic rhetoric about the powers of the technology has come from within the industry.

"If you tell people often enough that your product is going to upend their way of life, take their jobs, and very possibly pose an existential threat to humanity, they just might start to believe you," @chaykak.bsky.social writes. www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

We All Hate AI, but if You’re Poor, It Can Really Ruin Your Life Debt collection. Parole decisions. Oversight of public services. It’s all being outsourced to AI, with terrible consequences for poor people.

“As automation and AI become ubiquitous, the human touch has become a luxury good,” @kaliholloway.bsky.social writes. Meanwhile, it’s the poor who are subject to the most consequential uses of AI.
www.thenation.com/article/soci...

He Warned About the Dangers of A.I. If Only His Father Had Listened.

Joe Riley died of leukemia after relying on AI for medical advice and refusing treatment. The story of how it unfolded is also a window into how tech is reshaping our most fundamental relationships: including between father and son, and doctor and patient. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/w...

The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Much Worse Than You Thought An analysis by WIRED and Indicator found nearly 90 schools and 600 students around the world impacted by AI-generated deepfake nude images—and the problem shows no signs of going away.

“What AI changes is scale, speed, and accessibility. The technical barrier has dropped significantly, which means more people...can produce more convincing outputs with minimal effort. As with many AI-enabled harms, this results in a glut of content.”
www.wired.com/story/deepfa...

In this U.S. hot spot for data centers, voters have turned against them Findings from a new Washington Post-Schar School poll come as Prince William County on Tuesday abandoned plans for one of the country’s biggest and most controversial data center projects.

With the industry on a construction spree, a commanding majority of Virginia voters are not comfortable with a new data center getting built in their community. Even residents of Loudoun County, who benefit in the form of lower taxes, aren't sold. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Listen to @whitneyphillips.bsky.social on the @404media.co podcast! www.404media.co/how-the-inte...

I am at #CHI2026 representing @datasociety.bsky.social! I'm participating in the Social & Emotional Uses of AI workshop, where I'll be contributing findings from our longitudinal study on how people use LLMs for mental & emotional care. If you're around, please say hi! @chi.acm.org

Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators More than 70 organizations, including the ACLU, EPIC, and Fight for the Future, say the AI smart glasses feature would endanger abuse victims, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities," as face recognition on smart glasses would enable. www.wired.com/story/meta-r...

Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’ Workslop refers to AI-generated work that seems polished but is flawed and in need of heavy corrections

In an effort to reduce labor costs, companies pushing genAI are are instead yielding a deluge of "workslop." GenAI is often presented "as a general-use tool that can do anything, but the reality doesn’t work that way,” says D&S's @aihathing.bsky.social. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI? | Quanta Magazine Our tales of AI developing the will to survive, commandeer resources, and manipulate people say more about us than they do about language models.

At "the racing heart of the modern AI horror genre" is a fear not of intelligence but of desire, Amanda Gefter writes: "A machine that knows a lot doesn’t scare us. A machine that *wants* something does." www.quantamagazine.org/why-do-we-te...

Alexandra Mateescu on Workers’ Experience of Technology, Worker Power, and Finding Hope in Challenging Times - Siegel Family Endowment Alexandra Mateescuis in her second year as a Siegel Research Fellow at Data & Society, where she has worked for the last decade. In this Q&A, Alexandra shares her research about the gendered experienc...

“A lot of the ways that AI systems play out now are just a reiteration of different kinds of algorithmic controls and disempowerment of workers that we’ve already seen before,” says Labor Futures Researcher (and Siegel Research Fellow) @cariatida.bsky.social. www.siegelendowment.org/insights/ale...

How Accurate Are Google’s A.I. Overviews?

An analysis of Google’s AI Overviews found that they were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times. That might sound pretty good, but given the trillions of searches Google processes, this means it provides “tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...

"Glasswing is built on a deeply uncomfortable premise — that the only way to protect us from dangerous AI models is to build them first," @caseynewton.bsky.social writes. "And Anthropic is doing so in an environment that is barely regulated at all." www.platformer.news/anthropic-my...

Refugees and AI Centering the lived experiences of refugees and their power building work in fighting against surveillance technologies.

🔇🔇🔇 On Friday April 17th (9am PDT/5pm CET/7pm EAT), we'll have a virtual event introducing our Refugees, Migrants and AI research program which centers the lived experiences of refugees and migrants and puts power back into their hands🧵

☘️☘️☘️ Register at www.eventbrite.com/e/refugees-a...

The ChatGPT Symptom Spiral Be careful asking chatbots about your health.

Upwards of 12 percent of the population struggles with health anxiety, and turning to AI chatbots for health advice can make it worse. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Half of Gen Z Uses AI, but Their Feelings Are Souring, Study Shows A new study from Gallup found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about artificial intelligence.

The results of a new Gallup survey suggest that Americans’ animosity toward AI extends to a younger generation — one that is currently struggling to find its footing in the workplace. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/s...

Cloud Control | Brian J. Chen & Jai Vipra However genuine Anthropic’s commitment to safety restrictions may be, the company’s actions are a corporate end run around public governance.

The eagerness to applaud Anthropic for its stand against the Trump admin misses the fact that govt intervention will be needed to keep the tech industry in check and shape the digital economy beyond this administration, Policy Director Brian J. Chen & Jai Vipra write. thebaffler.com/latest/cloud...

Poster for a “Just Tech: Take Back Tech Workshop Series” event titled “How to Stop a Data Center.” It describes a panel discussion on the rapid expansion of data centers in the U.S. and resulting community resistance over environmental and energy concerns. Speakers include Livia Garofalo, Cella Sun (Data & Society), Steph Jordan, Nicole Sugarman (Kairos), Shawmar Pitts (Philly Thrive), Jordan Brittingham (People’s Tech Project). The event takes place Friday, April 10, from 2–4 pm at McCabe Library Lab, Swarthmore College. Presented by the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College in conjunction with the 2025-26 faculty/staff seminar, Just Tech: Accessible Sustainable Futures. The design features bold black text on white boxes over a red-orange abstract background.

Join us Friday, 2-4PM for @aydelottefound.bsky.social's panel - How to Stop a Data Center - online and @swarthmorecollege.bsky.social! Panelists from @datasociety.bsky.social, @kairosfellows.bsky.social, @peoplestechproject.bsky.social, and Philly Thrive.

RSVP for zoom link: bit.ly/stopdatacenters

📣 New! In seeking to accelerate AI infrastructure projects in PA, efforts that bypass local governance can harm communities. @cellllla.bsky.social & @mwoluchem.bsky.social offer an alternative framework that better aligns state infrastructure goals with local needs. datasociety.net/library/last...

Read the research! "[G]enerative AI technologies make it far easier for companies to radically manipulate models’ images and repurpose them,” write @cariatida.bsky.social, Zoë West, and Sanjay Pinto. datasociety.net/points/fashi...

How Pamela Anderson's Combatting "Unsettling" AI in Fashion In an interview with 'Marie Claire', she says it all comes back to being her unfiltered self.

"I want to stay provocative in our thinking — the more we talk about [AI] and the more we can think about it, we won't get so controlled or seduced by it," says Pamela Anderson, in an article that cites D&S research on how AI is reshaping modeling work. www.marieclaire.com/fashion/cele...

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Silicon Valley Elite How the self-styled know-it-alls atop the knowledge economy want to dismantle the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake

Today’s tech oligarchs “value their own expertise, but reflexively deride that of others — especially anyone who has the temerity to demand a voice in public life and a say in how our society is constructed,” @espiers.bsky.social writes. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Does A.I. Need a Constitution? A new set of precepts is meant to make the chatbot Claude wise, decent, and safe. It also marks a striking transfer of public responsibility from constitutional government to private tech firms.

The very existence of the "constitution" Anthropic created for its LLM, Claude, "is a product of the larger crisis of constitutionalism in the United States,” Jill Lepore writes.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

'You Can't Defeat the Robots!': Baseball's AI Strike Zone Is Must-Watch Television MLB's ABS system somehow feels extremely human. It's not human vs robot, it's human vs human as judged by a robot.

Days into the new baseball season, @jasonkoebler.bsky.social looks at how the early disputes driven by Major League Baseball’s new automated ball-strike challenge system might be seen as “a microcosm of various human-AI beefs in society more broadly." www.404media.co/you-cant-def...

Site Fight Guide: Stop Data Centers, Free the Robots [LIVING DOC] Data Center Site Fight Guide A Shared Resource for Stopping Data Centers from the Data Center Working Group This live document was created and is maintained by members of the Data Center Working Gro...

A live, crowdsourced document maintained by the Data Center Working Group, the new DATA CENTER SITE FIGHT GUIDE features organizing and policy guidance, research, and other resources to support launching a data center site fight or joining ongoing efforts. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

When a research participant referred to his AI companion as a “diet girlfriend,” Research Assistant @merylye.bsky.social saw a useful metaphor: chatbots lack social nutrition; they “offer comfort in the moment, but are rarely filling on their own." datasociety.net/points/socia...

Last Place in the AI-First Economy

They offer a framework for the institutional, political, and economic shifts that underpin AI adoption, a step toward developing a clear worker-first agenda that foregrounds human working conditions, not just the advancement of AI industry objectives. Read the primer: datasociety.net/library/last...

"[W]ith few or no guardrails in place, our fear is that, much like the housing collapse of the early 2000s, when the fallout was borne by homeowners and renters, workers will be the ones left in the lurch,” they write.

📣 New! @cariatida.bsky.social, @aihathing.bsky.social & Sanjay Pinto argue for understanding the sprint to create the "AI-first economy" not as the logical march of progress, but as a series of deliberate economic decisions that risk harming workers in ways old & new. datasociety.net/library/last...