“a town supervisor on Long Island had to debunk a rumor about a new data-center project after an inaccurate AI-generated search summary attracted so much attention that residents planned a protest (which they promoted with a flyer that itself appeared to be AI-generated).” @ka…
Who's Who of AI
Damon Beres
Senior editor at The Atlantic, focused on tech //
On leave until July writing EASY MODE, a book exploring technology, humanity, and the importance of friction, for Scribner
SIGNAL: Damon.63
📨 dberes at the atlantic dot com
✴️ damonberes.com
What they're sharing
How Much of Data-Center Activism Is Really AI Slop? theatlantic.com
A Twist in This Year’s Strangest Literary AI Scandal - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
View on Bluesky →
How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late theatlantic.com
The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI theatlantic.com
The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music theatlantic.com
Elon Musk Is Dropping a Boulder in a Kiddie Pool theatlantic.com
Paul Schrader Had 'AI Girlfriend' Who Ended Relationship variety.com
China’s Answer to AI Sticker Shock theatlantic.com
Thoughts on AI, From a Prizewinning Writer Accused of Using AI theatlantic.com
Is This the World’s First Mainstream AI Music Hit? zinstrel.substack.com
The New (And Slightly Smelly) Center of the AI Boom theatlantic.com
I’d Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast theatlantic.com
Articles & links
Damon Beres reposted
Jamir Nazir was accused of using AI to write "The Serpent in the Grove," a short story that was named a regional winner of the Commonwealth Prize. This week, he won the overall prize after an investigation concluded he didn't use AI. I talked with him about it: www.theatlantic…
Great pod with @cwarzel.bsky.social and @doctorow.pluralistic.net. The conversation at the end about the material conditions that enable AI is exactly how people need to think and talk about this stuff
“Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.”
New from @alexreisner.bsky.social: Millions of songs—including hundreds by Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney, and "Penile Drip" by Gwar—have been sucked up by AI companies, which often claim to only use free music, which clearly produce plagiarized tunes, which are clearly doing…
“To a large extent, much of the U.S. economy was already tangled up with Silicon Valley … But now the fate of the American financial system will be even more directly exposed to the fate of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI” @matteowong.bsky.social
🫡
“The arrival of GLM-5.2 poses a business dilemma for Silicon Valley—and possibly a national-security dilemma for the country as a whole.” @matteowong.bsky.social on the uncomfortable reality of a relatively low-cost competitor to Claude Code et al.
Actual lol: “Although he couldn’t name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott’s style, which he hopes to publish soon.”
Not to be dramatic, but we live in hell
The AI kids are trying to surgically implant devices in living creatures—lobsters—to see if they can get AI agents to control them. (But first they need to stop accidentally killing them.) by @matteowong.bsky.social
“I will wait a little longer for a cure—even if it means losing my fertility and living under the shadow of risk—if it lets us approach this new world more carefully, and ensure that, in curing cancer, we do not lose the things that make cancer worth curing.”
Their own posts
Recent commentary
I really do struggle with the incongruity between Anthropic's messaging about safety, the idea that Fable 5 was dangerous in some way, and this cutesy presentation advertising the model's return in Claude.
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