I can't tell you what a premium there will be in the future on human-generated writing. In an age of AI-everything, attention remains the scarce resource.

The Literary Job AI Can’t Replace Ghostwriting is good, actually—when it’s done by humans.

Ghostwriting “allows remarkable perspectives to reach an audience they otherwise wouldn’t”—when it’s done by humans, Rebecca Ackermann argues.

The Literary Job AI Can’t Replace Ghostwriting is good, actually—when it’s done by humans.

For @theatlantic.com I wrote about choosing the human touch over the machines in another field: ghostwriting.

www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

The Giddy Nothingness of Automatic Creation If we build things to feel a sense of purpose, what happens when AI does all of the work?

Not all engineers! :) open.substack.com/pub/foggyfut...

"LLMs simply don't make mistakes like the ones you see here in this passage from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy" is jokerizing

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge In an abrupt shift, the company may release future AI models without ironclad safety guarantees

BuT CaN tHe RoBoT tHiNk?

time.com/7380854/excl...

one of many reasons that the organized critique and refusal movement is overwhelmingly led by women (yes including women computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers)

Yes, except for that breathless EA piece awhile back…

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats trom non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works 1 am extremely confident in saying it doesn't work the same way as the first one.

A.I Isn’t People www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-...

Plus! The computer scientist from Brown also worked for Google DeepMind!! But that’s not disclosed, she’s just an academic asking questions!

You know it’s going to be bad when you can hear the PR email pitch in the subhed.

I am so tired of all the things that we said would happen, and were routinely ignored or dismissed by tech bros and neoliberals for saying would happen, continuing to happen, in exactly the way that we said they would happen.

Hard no to this: French publisher Harlequin has told translators that their work will now be done by AI. They can ‘revise’ AI translations at much lower rate. It’s a subsidiary of Harper Collins so treat this as a test for rollout elsewhere

The least of anyone’s problems but wow the iPhone “Liquid Glass” update is just more confirmation that everything now is worse for no good reason.

Write about this pls (or I will!!)

Why Waymo can't compete with the bus Public infrastructure deserves to win out over private convenience.

Hell yes @rebackermann.bsky.social:

"If we don’t want to live alongside other city residents, why do we live in this city at all?"

www.sfexaminer.com/forum/waymo-...

❤️🚍❤️

Remember that Intuit (the owner of Turbotax) lobbied extensively to kill Direct File, which did tax filing for free and somehow managed to make a good and intuitive user experience without AI.

The Publishing Industry’s Most Swoon-Worthy Genre Tight-knit but open-armed fans have made romance an especially hot commodity.

What’s driving Romancelandia’s success, and can other genres successfully emulate it? Spoiler alert: There’s a phenomenon called “an open-elite network.” @rebackermann.bsky.social for @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/1...

Romance Fiction’s Secret Weapon Tight-knit but open-armed fans have made it an especially hot genre.

The tight-knit but open-armed community that supports romance novels has become unignorable, enviable—and exceedingly difficult to replicate, Rebecca Ackermann writes.

Business Insider headline saying: "Sam Altman says your ChatGPT therapy session might not stay private in a lawsuit By Robert Scammell"

Wired headline that says "ICE Is Getting Unprecedented Access to Medicaid Data A new agreement viewed by WIRED gives ICE direct access to a federal database containing sensitive medical data on tens of millions of Americans, with the goal of locating immigrants."

I’m still not over the fact that there was an extremely popular award-winning movie over a decade ago about the perils of falling in love with a chatbot and a company decided to make the chatbot in the image of the movie’s chatbot and now quite a few people have decided to date it

Analysis | AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried. A new effort using only openly licensed data may have implications on thorny policy disputes around copyright and AI

A lot of people say generative AI shouldn't infringe on copyright. These researchers actually tried to do it. The result: an 8 terabyte dataset of text that's openly licensed or in the public domain & 7 B parameter model that performs as well as Meta's Llama 7B www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Ughhhh I’m sorry (to you & to all of us for losing you)

What no!!

Bay Area NEA Grantees

I started a spreadsheet of Bay Area NEA Grantees for FY23–FY25. So far, there's ~85 arts orgs whose funding was likely withdrawn without any reimbursements going out. I'm expecting 3x that number when I get to the terminated grants.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

How AI is interacting with our creative human processes Three books examine what we gain and lose when we let machines create.

Gift link! ter.li/RAckermann

The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics i. Work and art. How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them?

For @technologyreview.com I wrote about how the names we give generative machines really matter.

Such a fascinating read and so fun to write about!

How AI is interacting with our creative human processes Three books examine what we gain and lose when we let machines create.

I wrote about what we gain & lose when we let machines make art for us (& about @vauhinivara.bsky.social’s eerie new book) www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/11/1...