Turtles All the Way Down
Simon Willison quotes Tom MacWright on a new pattern in hiring: job applications cowritten by an LLM, linking to an LLM-generated portfolio site, linking in turn to LLM-generated GitHub projects with LLM-generated commit messages.
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI
404 Media reports on companies cutting AI spend; leaked Accenture audio identifies a major source of token consumption as employees converting PDFs into presentation slides.
Curbed examines the spread of AI-generated imagery into storefront and bodega signage, and how to recognize it.
Madison Square Garden Made Dossier on Activists Who Opposed Facial Recognition
404 Media reports that Madison Square Garden compiled a document titled "Facial Recognition Activists.docx," collecting specific activists' comments and tweets criticizing its facial recognition program.
Bodycam Shows Moment Cops Arrested a Man for Speaking Too Long at Data Center Meeting
404 Media spoke with Darren Blanchard, arrested while speaking against a data center at a community meeting, and published the bodycam footage of the arrest.
Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data
A research paper introduces a method for training an AI agent to act as a data scientist that builds and improves its own synthetic training and evaluation data.
Wikipedia Cofounder Larry Sanger Banned From Site for 'Canvassing'
404 Media reports that Larry Sanger, a cofounder of Wikipedia, was banned from the site after editors accused him of "canvassing" — organizing to build a pressure group within the community.
Ed Zitron's latest premium newsletter argues that much of the current AI build-out imitates the form of productive work without its substance.
Slopagotchi: Score your AI slop against other developers
A web toy that scores your AI-generated "slop" and ranks it against other developers on a leaderboard.
Simon Willison highlights Bruce Schneier on a German ruling holding Google liable for errors in its AI overviews: an AI agent is an agent of whoever deploys it, and should be treated as such under the law.