The Torment Nexus

I've written about this topic a number of times before, but in this case I'm tempted to re-use the popular meme "When the worst person in the world makes a good point," as I did awhile back when I wrote about Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI for (among…

About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which two AI models from OpenAI — one that has been released publicly, called Sol, and one that was still in testing mode with no assigned name — were asked to find the answers to a series…

I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc. when I saw the headlines saying Meta had agreed to settle many of these claims

Note: This is a repeat of a piece I published awhile back after Facebook lost a couple of trials based on its alleged harms.

Like many journalists (I expect) I got an email a little while ago from a startup founder named Ryan Merket, describing his new company: an AI-powered newsroom called RuntimeWire, where instead of just using AI agents for research (as many conventional ne…

If you aren't a writer or a journalist or someone else who cares deeply about platforms for writing and publishing, this week's newsletter probably isn't going to be that interesting for you.

In case you don't follow this sort of thing as closely as some, the headline refers to a recent incident in which two of OpenAI's leading-edge AI models gained unauthorized access to – in other words, hacked – an open-source model known as Hugging Face and

If you read The Atlantic, or you follow a lot of writers on Substack — or virtually any other writing-focused website or form of social media — you will already know what this post is about: The Atlantic published a piece recently entitled The End of Read…

I've written a number of times about what has become conventional wisdom – spread primarily by academics like Jonathan Haidt – that phones and/or social media are evil, and that they cause teenagers in particular to develop anxiety, depression, etc. and t…

As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how little we know about human consciousness, let alone the…

I've been writing a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and I wanted to break that cycle by writing about something that's been bugging me for a little while now: namely, the controversy over Microsoft's claim that it has developed a new and improved

(Note: This is a special edition of The Torment Nexus, dedicated to my friend Om Malik, who passed away due to congestive heart failure at the age of 59.

The UK recently passed a new law that effectively bans children under the age of 16 from using most social-media platforms, a move that the UK government notes was based explicitly on Australia's similar law, which was passed in 2024 (Britain's law comes…

In a previous edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the launch of Anthropic's newest AI model, code-named Mythos, and how the company said that it was too powerful to be trusted — mostly because of its ability to detect and potentially exploit software

As regular readers will know, I've written a lot about the topic of AI and consciousness (too much for some perhaps!)