Who's Who of AI

Ben Winters

111 trust policy @benwinters.bsky.social · 2,484 followers

Policy & governance AI business Culture, work & education

Why they matter

Policy with public evidence across Policy & governance, AI business, Culture, work & education.

AI signals: 7
Sources: 6
Discussões: 0
Latest signal: 1d ago

What they're sharing

Articles & links

↻ Ben Winters reposted

404 Media @404media.co

Hacked source code reveals how Suno scraped decades worth of music and podcasts from the internet to train its AI tool. www.404media.co/hack-reveals...

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

AI Weekly's analysis →

Leaked logs quantify scraping per platform: 2M+ YouTube clips, 62,117 Pond5 hours, 12,287 Deezer hours, 17,615 Genius hours, and roughly 1M podcast hours.
Suno publicly called the breach 'limited' and 'quickly contained' while withholding notification from customers whose emails, phone numbers, and Stripe records were exposed.
TechCrunch flags a distinct DMCA angle: deliberately circumventing YouTube's anti-scraping protections is a separate violation from copyright infringement in the underlying suits.

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↻ Ben Winters reposted

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social

"The secrecy was agreed to by nearly everyone involved, from utility executives to the governor’s office to a local elected official who knew about the talks with Meta and sold 300 acres of his own property for the project."

nytimes.com View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

404 Media @404media.co

"For the time being, if you or someone on your crew has availability to secure black plastic bags (or something else) over the cameras, that would be great."

Flock ‘Objects to Our Removing Their Equipment’: Emails Reveal Why a Town Put Bags Over Its Flock Cameras 404media.co

AI Weekly's analysis →

Verona, Wisconsin covered three Flock license plate cameras with black plastic bags in January after the vendor did not remove them following the city's November vote to end the contract.
Emails obtained by 404 Media show Flock issued a work order for maintenance rather than removal, and a Flock employee said they were unsure the cameras could be remotely disabled.
Mayor Luke Diaz said the council acted after officers elsewhere in the country accessed Verona's Flock cameras on behalf of immigration agents.

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↻ Ben Winters reposted

404 Media @404media.co

Ads everywhere. Usage limits. Frustrating guardrails. Less model choice. Users of the Character.AI chatbot app are revolting after a series of changes they say have made the app worse.

‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like 404media.co View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

@consumerfed.bsky.social

“This type of behavior is not unique for #Meta,” says @benwinters.bsky.social, director of #AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “They are stewards of the opt-out status quo that we find ourselves in."

Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI wired.com View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com

Jesus christ! OpenAI had a negative 122% operating margin for Q1 2026 and growth in ChatGPT has stalled. Very nice Mr. Altman! Well done sir! www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

OpenAI Generated Nearly $6 Billion in Revenue in First Quarter, Boosted by Codex — The Information theinformation.com View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

“.. The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, ‘You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you ..’” @techcrunch.com techcrunch.com/2026/05/17/i...

If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI | TechCrunch techcrunch.com View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app

They are trying hard to make folks feel like it’s a cool secret that you aren’t in on yet, but mostly it comes off like the Nathan Fielder laughing friends meme.

OpenAI's CFO says she can't say if Jony Ive's device is an earpiece businessinsider.com View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

Daniel Solove @daniel-solove.bsky.social

From the Onion, though it's the most realistic AI headline I've seen in a while . . . theonion.com/guy-who-suck...

Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI theonion.com View on Bluesky →

↻ Ben Winters reposted

@defector.com

"Nature documentaries conjure such universal awe in people precisely because of their reality."

AI Animal Videos Are Ruining One Of The Internet's Last Good Things | Defector defector.com View on Bluesky →

269 page AI bill from Reps Obernolte (R) and Trahan (D) dropped this morning -- just digging in, but there is an effort to do preemption of any state regs on model development...devil is in the details, but doesnt seem great happy reading: www.politico.com/2026/06/04/o...

politico.com

View on Bluesky · ♥ 6 ↻ 2 ↩ 2 · 2 from the directory shared this · 54d ago

Eric Schmidt has been doing this nonsense for many years - i wrote this 4 years ago epic.org/playing-both... His pursuit has always been clear: get AI, and my AI - in war, in trade, in anything - he laid the blueprint of having harmful AI become too big to fail that Altman gle…

epic.org

View on Bluesky · ♥ 11 ↻ 4 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 72d ago

Their own posts

Recent commentary

it is hilariously difficult to guess whether a given commercial is for Jesus or an AI tool

View on Bluesky · ♥ 4 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 21d ago

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In Ben Winters's orbit

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