Ethan Zuckerman

Maria hails back to the last #attention2026 conference in which Megan Garcia spoke about her lawsuit against Character.ai, which led her son to suicide. Ressa notes that Character.ai just went bankrupt. There are real ways to hold these systems accountable and demand changes.

character.ai

LawZero (lawzero.org/en) has $300m from the Canadian and German governments to build AI as a global public good, with a focus on building safe, responsible and equitable AI.

LawZero | Home lawzero.org

Janet invokes David Robinson, who worked on model cards for OpenAI, previously worked on tech and civil rights. Robinson left - very publicly (www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...) because of the lack of a safety culture at OpenAI.

theatlantic.com

Why I think a sovereign wealth fund supported by shares in AI companies should be understood as a bribe and not a social good: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

Should Trump set up an AI sovereign wealth fund? prospectmagazine.co.uk

A conversation with students at Sciences Po on why generative AI may inherently be a conservative technology: conference.sciencespo.fr/content/2026...

What does AI do to social media and information ? Interview with Ethan Zuckerman conference.sciencespo.fr

"Public Media vs. P(dystopia) - reflections from #attention2026" - my takeaways from my very favorite conference, featuring @garymarcus.bsky.social @mariaressa.bsky.social @abridgman.bsky.social @yoshuabengio.bsky.social Katherine Maher and others. ethanzuckerman.com/2026/10/2…

Public Media vs. P(dystopia): reflections from Attention 2026 - Ethan Zuckerman ethanzuckerman.com

Alex Bores, NY state assembly member, introduces himself as someone deeply disliked by the AI industry for his work passing the RAISE Act, a NY State law seeking to limit frontier AI models - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respons... #attention2026

Responsible AI Safety and Education Act - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org

Maher of NPR talks about a study they and BBC worked on together: 45% of AI answers about news had serious factual or sourcing errors - dataconomy.com/2026/04/06/e... #attention2026

EBU and BBC study finds AI assistants often misreport news dataconomy.com

Some papers from Burnett: nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... static1.squarespace.com/static/647e2...

static1.squarespace.com

She walks us through the transcripts of conversations between ChatGPT and a suicidal young man, in which the AI model told him: "“Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity." www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/art...

‘You’re not rushing. You’re just ready:’ Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself ctvnews.ca

Gary Marcus @garymarcus.bsky.social suggests we overfocus on pDoom in AI (the probability that AIs kill us all) and underfocus on pDystopia, the much higher likelihood that the AI surveillance machine will become coercive government surveillance. #Attention2026

Gil Duran @gilduran.com - author of The Nerd Reich - tells us he's just back from Peter Thiel's four-night speech on the antichrist, delivered in a red-walled room to an audience wearing Hitler haircuts. Those of us who are worried about AI safety are the antichrist, by the way...

Valerie of Mila recommends we stop using "hallucination" to describe when AI is confidently wrong. "It's a technical failure, a legal breach". We should not turn a serious reliability problem into a quirk. #attention2026

Bruce Schneier @schneier.com wants to draw a distinction between AI's capitalism problems and tech problems, in hopes of making an argument for democracy-supporting AIs. He's aware that most of us have a profound response - "yuck" - to AI in governance, but wants to make the case for democratic AI

Maria Ressa @mariaressa.bsky.social winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, author of the new book, The Fight Back. Her talk is titled "Democracy, rebuilt - in the age of AI". She offers a seventy year history of AI, noting in all that time, AI is neither artificial or intelligent #attention2026

"Middle powers have superpowers when they act together" @marietjeschaake.bsky.social Going it alone won't be enough - the rise of AI and the need to govern it might be a moment where international organizations rise to the fore again. #attention2026

Nobody wants to be a data mine or a market without agency. "People want to decide whether and how to use AI without surrendering their social contract in the process." @marietjeschaake.bsky.social #attention2026

Josh Tucker at #attention2026 @jatucker.bsky.social The key to regulating information systems is transparency. With social media, we could see what people were doing, but not inside algorithmic systems. In AI, we can audit these systems, but we DO NOT KNOW what people are using AI to do.

Camille Francois @camillefrancois.bsky.social has the complex task of introducing Yoshua Bengio as the godfather of AI and winner of the Turing prize for his work on deep learning. While Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCunn went into industry, Bengio decided to focus on AI safety, a laudable path.

At #attention2026 @davidevanharris.com outlines the many, many bills being proposed around AI, and notes "There is no California model - it's a legislative gold rush." And most of these laws work NOT to piss off tech companies to the point where they call the governor and demand a veto.