Who's Who of AI

Mar Hicks

415 trust @histoftech.bsky.social · 52,984 followers
Historian of technology, occasional dad jokes. www.marhicks.com
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Articles & links

↻ Mar Hicks reposted
@telliotter.bsky.social

DHS may have a new designation for those who have a problem with AI, data centers, or the harms of the tech industry: anti-tech extremists. www.wired.com/story/us-law...

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows | WIRED wired.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Wired reviewed over 1,000 pages of unpublished DHS, FBI, and fusion-center reports coalescing around a new label called 'anti-tech extremism.'
  • A Delaware Valley fusion-center bulletin flagged AI data centers as extremist targets while conceding it had no specific plots or suspects.
  • The term 'anti-technology violent extremism' does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI extremism documents, per Wired's review.
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New initiative from @karenhao.bsky.social airesistlist.org

The AI Resist List airesistlist.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Karen Hao launched the AI Resist List on the one-year anniversary of her book Empire of AI as a publicly accessible, community-contributed database.
  • The database organizes entries by 'Pillars of Support' sustaining AI empires, a framework adapted from Choose Democracy's authoritarianism resistance model.
  • Entries span labor actions, legal challenges, and grassroots campaigns across gig work, healthcare, education, and law enforcement sectors.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 65 ↻ 23 ↩ 2 · 13 from the directory shared this · 44d ago
↻ Mar Hicks reposted
Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social

Please tell me again how you using all our data, books, etc to train your models is fine, but someone else using the output of your models to train theirs is a heinous crime

nytimes.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Anthropic told Capitol Hill that Alibaba's Qwen lab used roughly 25,000 fake accounts to generate 28.8 million Claude exchanges between April 22 and June 5.
  • Chinese-developed models now make up about 61% of token consumption among the top 10 models on OpenRouter, up from under 1.2% in late 2024.
  • The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in April described China-based distillation of US frontier models as industrial-scale IP theft.
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↻ Mar Hicks reposted
@jmcrapola.bsky.social

AI is not your friend @meredithmeredith.bsky.social techcrunch.com/2026/06/20/s...

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’ | TechCrunch techcrunch.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Signal President Meredith Whittaker called AI chatbots 'not your friends' and 'not conscious beings' in a Bloomberg interview.
  • Whittaker limits her own AI use to document formatting, avoiding chatbots for any substantive thinking.
  • She labeled broad cross-app AI integration like Microsoft Copilot's a 'kind of backdoor' against Signal's privacy mission.
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↻ Mar Hicks reposted
🌶 David Gray Widder @davidthewid.bsky.social

Once again, everyone is now worried there's an AI bubble. It is, and it will deflate. But deflating doesn't undo the harmful effects, as @histoftech.bsky.social and I wrote back in 2024… ash.harvard.edu/resources/wa...

Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate – Ash Center ash.harvard.edu
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital publicly questioned whether generative AI costs are generating commensurate revenue, signaling the hype peak.
  • U.S. coal plant retirements slowed by 40% amid AI energy demand; Microsoft abandoned its 2030 carbon-negative goal as emissions climbed 30% since 2020.
  • The authors argue the bubble's deflation will not reverse environmental damage, labor displacement in creative fields, or erosion of information quality.
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Their own posts

Recent commentary

Been thinking a lot about the Horizon Post Office (UK) system in relation to the push to shove AI into major operating systems. Two unaccountable management technologies… Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 25 ↻ 4 ↩ 2 · 49d ago
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