Madison Square Garden was a frontrunner in using facial recognition technology to keep legal opponents from going to concerts and sporting events. Interesting piece from Wired about the security apparatus there more generally.
www.wired.com/story/madiso...
I am grateful to the New York Times and reporter @teddyrosenbluth.bsky.social for sharing the sad story of my father’s reliance on AI for medical guidance, and how it caused him so much pain, and likely hastened his death.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/w...
Coming up Tuesday, 6-7:30 p.m. at the Seattle Central Library: Our team is co-hosting the Risks and Realities of AI Chatbots, a discussion featuring @mnickelsburg.bsky.social of @kuow.org interviewing @kashhill.bsky.social (NYT) and @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social (Reuters): www.cip.uw.edu/2026/02/16/r...
I actually laughed aloud reading this.
Read the Guardian's review of "a prize-winning blockbuster" novel about Italy: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...
...Then the NYT review by a freelancer who used generative AI & plagiarized the Guardian: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/b...
This is why some people call it 'derivative AI.'
It's how my mom finds my stories.
I spent a year talking to teens about why they were using role-playing chatbots, and something surprising happened: By the end of the year, the teens stopped using the chatbots.
Observer effect? Or that chatbots fall into patterns that eventually get boring? www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/t...
Photo of a high school in Sydney, after Australia banned social media for those under 18, where every single kid is on a phone
this photo with this caption is its own editorial
More to come: "The jury of seven women and five men will deliberate further to decide what punitive damages the companies should pay for malice or fraud."
Snap and TikTok settled before this one went to trial.
Verdict in for the bellwether case in the thousands of claims against social media companies for making harmful products. Jury ruled in favor of the now 20-year-old plaintiff, who claimed anxiety and depression caused by addictive design, and awarded her $3 million.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/t...
OpenAI’s video generation app is shutting down. Screenshot of goodbye tweet from official Sora account on Twitter
Never understood the point of OpenAI’s social video generation app Sora in terms of the company’s mission, nor its market fit.
Who wants to watch other people’s fake AI videos? It’s what most people are trying to avoid right now.
Well, it’s shutting down.
Does Grammarly have lawyers or did they just ask an AI agent if this was legal to do? Even a sycophantic AI agent would have to mention 'Right of publicity' laws...
Screenshot of text: "And yet, from another angle, these platforms have handed us the shovels to dig their own graves, and practically begged us to use them. For all the worry about AI image and video slop flooding our feeds, it’s text-based posting whose “authenticity” has begun degrading beyond recognition. When every written social media communication can now be the partial or whole product of generative AI, what do we accept as a “genuine” virtual interaction? Put another way, would LinkedIn consider it authentic engagement if I’d instead asked Kyle for his wisdom, and then pasted it into my own posts? Would you? LinkedIn might argue that critical element of bona fide engagement involves knowing that you are talking to a real person. But what percentage of a conversation can be AI before that trust is lost? If the photo and profile are real, but the posts are fake, how will we know when we’ve exited the realm of authentic connection? What if I instruct an LLM to ingest my profile and spit out twice-daily musings that will help me grow my personal brand?"
In pushing people to use AI on social media platforms, the companies are destroying what they've built. Great piece from @evrat.bsky.social
www.wired.com/story/linked...
Hypothetically yes. In reality video conferencing seems good enough.
Can't say I'm shocked that the metaverse is now being laid to rest: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/t...
Not all things that the tech industry presents as inevitable are in fact inevitable.
Screenshot of text that reads "For now, though, the company is still constrained by the physical world, and by the fact that most people, apart from those currently in the metaverse, aren’t keen to spend hours and hours of their day “in the plastic.”"
In 2022, I did a story about life in "the metaverse," spending 24 hours as an avatar with no legs meeting the people using Facebook's VR-based social network, Horizon Worlds. www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/t...
Met interesting people who seemed enthused about it but this was my conclusion:
I was hoping there would be more about your missed opportunity to be my roommate.
Katie on Katie.
@katierobertson.bsky.social profiles Wired editor, @katie-drummond.bsky.social, who has been making the tech optimists very mad lately.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/b...
New report of a woman who was improperly jailed for SIX MONTHS because of a facial recognition error
How many times will this happen before Congress steps up and enacts strong rules on how facial recognition is used?
www.grandforksherald.com/news/north-d...
And I'm the journalist who revealed that automakers were selling that driving data to them. :)
LexisNexis employees also agitating, mostly on the journalism side. It is another data broker, whose parent company RELX, also owns a news org: www.poynter.org/business-wor...
Reuters is a great outlet. But yes, the data brokering is one of the revenue streams for the parent company, as is the more benign Westlaw.
Military cartography is a topic I waded into a decade back, when I was doing a series on IP address mapping and how it can go awry.
A man in South Africa contacted me because people kept showing up at his house accusing him of crimes. It was the U.S. government's fault: gizmodo.com/how-cartogra...
Thomson Reuters is the parent company. Reuters was purchased by Thomson in 2007: www.reuters.com/article/busi...
One thing that letter signers, which includes Reuters journalists, are pushing for is a disclosure in Reuters articles that the parent company has contracts with the government.
Going to war with bad maps. It has happened before: www.nytimes.com/2000/04/17/w...
Thomson Reuters is best known for its media outlet and legal research tools, but it is also a huge data broker that provides investigative tools to the government, including ICE. Its Minneapolis workers aren't happy about that:
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/t...
Scoop: DHS ousted multiple privacy officers at CBP after they questioned orders to purposely mislabel records about government surveillance to prevent their release under FOIA.
@stuartathompson.bsky.social Cursing you for creating this.
