Neil Turkewitz

The most depressing definition of books in history, c/o ISBNdb: “The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf. Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.” Boo…

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop 404media.co

It starts like this…& it builds. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 “If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality & its creation of disinformation on a scale unpreceden…

‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom theguardian.com

“I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, & all we do is scan books. Some are assigned to cut books, & others go to receive where they get books & scan the bar codes. We didn't have rates, but now we do, but it's not stressful.” —Amazon employee wrote on a forum for Amazon workers Glad i…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility 404media.co

“GenAI as it currently exists cannot easily replace human beings, because it cannot manifest human intelligence. That won’t stop it, however, from destabilizing society in ways more profound than we might even imagine.” @zey.bsky.social We need to focus less on the frontier & …

Opinion | Why A.I. Won’t Steal All Our Jobs - The New York Times nytimes.com

“It’s literally the gulag. You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Every once in awhile, the clouds part & provide perfect moments of clarity. This description of life at Meta perfectly mirrors life…

‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess wired.com

“Our goal has always been to help people create original new music.” —Suno But that goal is impossible. AI models are wholly dependent on their training data, incapable of generating something “original.” A novel remix of the past perhaps, but always literally derivative. @jas…

Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius 404media.co

“All of the speculation and hype around A.I. is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological in…

nytimes.com

It’d be great if everyone interested in launching some AI project first asked themselves—would this be acceptable without the AI angle? The conflation of AI & Progress obscures judgment & erases necessary interrogation of processes. Also, can everyone stop with OPT-OUTS? That’…

Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI 404media.co

Hey @nytimes.com, can we meet privately over at camera 2? Listen, I know you need to attract eyeballs, & “rogue actors” are like catnip to the public, but calling AI systems “rogue” is a dereliction of duty. They’re not rogue—they’re operating w/in the poorly set boundaries/in…

nytimes.com

“The fact that someone could ruin our reputation by dropping this cringe garbage under our name is insanely disheartening & speaks volumes about distribution & streaming services that allow this to happen.” —Allison, Lathe of Heaven’s ACTUAL vocalist 🙏🏼 @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.so…

I Hijacked a Real Artist's Spotify with AI Music. It Was Disturbingly Easy 404media.co

“Like most Silicon Valley ‘utopian’ essays, to believe that any of this is going to go how Zuckerberg suggests it will requires one to have been recently concussed or to willfully ignore how this technology is being used today.” @jasonkoebler.bsky.social @404media.co

Mark Zuckerberg Posts Deranged 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence 404media.co

“People say technology is just a tool that you can do good things or bad things with. That often is said to hide the ways in which technology makes certain realities more or less likely. So when you design tools in particular ways, there are foreseeable uses of those tools.” @…

Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI wired.com

BREAKING NEWS My plea to everyone who’s recently become aware of the dangers of inadequately regulated AI—please understand that the harms aren’t future hypotheticals at some virtual frontier. They’re here & now. If we stopped AI in its tracks, we wouldn’t have resolved AI’s threat to our humanity.

This screenshot of yesterday’s @nytimes.com tech newsletter is a wonderful illustration of the meaningless of “AI” & how this meaningless can lead to a nonsensical debate about its utility. We need to just start talking about the automation of certain functionality. AI is many things, not A thing.

No AI was used in the creation of this image. I hope you enjoy it.

In the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai, wherever you go, there you are. With AI, we are nowhere. There are better places.

A visual representation of the AI resistance we’ve seen from college graduates these past weeks.

The world offers endless opportunities. Why would anyone abandon their agency and let AI chart their path based on inferences drawn from statistical probabilities? Find your own beach…metaphorically, & possibly literally too.

In today’s TechScape newsletter, @theguardian.com reports that OpenAI’s Greg Brockman said that with the introduction of their new model, “It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.” To my ear, this is even worse than saying AGI is here. He declares his own reasonableness! 🤬

Famine Memorial Dublin Ireland 🇮🇪 Statues by Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie Photos ©2026 Neil Turkewitz Any AI use strictly prohibited 🚫

Trump’s current visit to Ireland brings this to mind… The Famine Memorial, Sculptures by Rowan Gillespie Photos by Neil Turkewitz ©2026 Any AI use strictly prohibited

This is what I think of every time someone talks about “Winning the AI race” with China.