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My AI Conceded Two Points and Changed Nothing

My AI Conceded Two Points and Changed Nothing

A concession that changes nothing costs the conceder nothing, and the cost lands on the person on the other side. A cautionary tale about faceless decisions, from a degree title to an immigration office.

Can Tokens Start an Apocalypse?

Can Tokens Start an Apocalypse?

A stream of tokens is speech produced faster, and the rules belong where the words are wired to something. Then there is the apocalypse that is about money.

There's No Such Thing as "AI Ethics"

There's No Such Thing as "AI Ethics"

A large language model only ever produces text. Treating that text as a novel ethical category, rather than as speech, is where the argument goes wrong.

AI Could Have Done My Job in 1986

AI Could Have Done My Job in 1986

Four things to write down before you hand a job to an AI agent: what comes in, the rules, the action, and how you will check the work.

Are We Finally Building the Machines We Dreamed Of?

Are We Finally Building the Machines We Dreamed Of?

Sixty years of fictional and real conversational machines, and one throughline: the dystopian version is always easier to imagine than the protopian one, and that says more about us than about the machines.

The AI That Never Read the Bible or the Quran

The AI That Never Read the Bible or the Quran

Cut one small religion from a model's training data and you leave a gap no one can see from inside. Cut the two biggest and you change what the model can explain at all.

Follow Your Whims

Follow Your Whims

Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.

The Book They Burned Before the Raid

The Book They Burned Before the Raid

A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.