Say Yes - Do No

The shift from Pagecord is finished so this site won't be updating any more, nor will the newsletter be going out.

Just a quick note to say that this week I've switched the Say Yes, Do No site from Pagecord to WordPress.

When AI is presented as a miracle cure for all the ills of the world the first question I always ask is 'how else could we solve this problem?'

I'm inherently biased towards the everyday forms of resistance, because it's what I research, but even allowing for there does seem to be a growing sense that the best battles to fight when it comes to big tech are the local ones.

Something that sounds like it should be the title of a long and arduous exploration of big tech finances culminating in some hedging about the future and the wonders of AI but no is pretty much the only answer you need.

After this report from Axion about an unnamed company managing to torch half a billion dollars in the span of a month through unregulated Claude token usage it's unsurprising that more and more companies are starting to reconsider the wild productivity ga…

Just a quick update on how things are progressing with the upcoming anti-AI anthology.

As part of the Reclaiming Futures project at KCL I'll be on a panel on the 8th of July for London Data Week along with some colleagues with similarly critical eyes for AI.

There's a definite contrast amongst those who are openly critical of 'AI' at the moment - and it centres on the perception of the fight.

Just a quick note to highlight this new report on the use of 'dark patterns' in chatbot design.

It's an increasingly less heard argument (in my experience at least) that AI companies would eventually run out of training data and, with the ever degrading quality of synthetic data, some kind of brick wall of development would be hit.

Happy to be involved in this one given the potentials to get anti and AI critical voices involved.

Sometimes even I, as an ardent Luddite, wish AI companies would be slower in driving their own failure.

This article from Wired is well worth a read as it outlines the increasing attempts in the US to problematise and criminalise AI resistance movements.

A random sampling of stuff I've come across this week...