Ben Werdmuller (Page 2)

Latest

OpenAI wants to give us 5% of its success. It's a bad bargain.

A wealth fund that shares 5% of AI success with government and voters is either based on hype or not nearly enough to cover the damage. Either way, the incentives are perverse.

I have a theory about AI fake news site The Editorial

I was taken in by a fake AI news site. I think it may be an attempt to poison LLMs with propaganda.

AI's costs are going through the roof - so businesses are telling LLMs to talk like cavemen

Me think this hilarious sign of times.

They tell us surveillance makes us safer. It undermines our democratic rights.

Civil society actors in nearly every region of the world now operate under the assumption that they are being surveilled. The result is a less democratic world for everyone.

A concrete tool to help newsrooms cover emergencies

A new site to help newsrooms cover disasters is refreshing in its concrete practicality. Wouldn't it be great if these existed for every aspect of running a newsroom?

Community Survey 2026

How can I serve you over the coming year?

A right-wing media chain tried to replace 47 newspapers with AI. They all died.

A right-wing media chain bought local papers, replaced their journalists with AI, and died. Now their communities are left to plug the gaps.

Two posts about writing

Ideas that spoke to me

Are frontier models really too dangerous?

To an increasingly authoritarian regime, the opportunity to shape how models describe the world may be too good to pass up on.

Notable links: June 26, 2026

To meet your community where it's at, you need to empower your people.

All you need to poison an LLM is 13 words.

"It really is just that simple. The way that you can attack these systems is usually so much dumber than you think it is, or than you think it needs to be."

To build resilient organizations, you need to empower your team to make decisions.

"That is not leadership. That is control. And it creates dependency, not growth."

Media

Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself.

"In philosophy, we have a term for this: a logical fallacy. And right now, journalism is full of them."

Democracy

Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines

The unusually long sentences criminalize being an anti-fascist activist, reading the wrong zines, and using the wrong communication apps. They're incredibly dangerous.

Notable links

Notable links: June 19, 2026

Preparing for the fastest period of technical change in decades.

Technology

The European Commission falls for openness theater by working with W Social

The European Commission has moved its profiles to W Social. That's a terrible decision.

Media

More people get their news from social media than anywhere else - globally. The platforms we use matter.

"For the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news."

AI answers are a new vector for election disinformation

For years, people have used social media to seed disinformation in order to swing elections. Now, the answers our search engines and expert systems produce have become more vulnerable.

The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI

"The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” This is a bad CEO."

Media

To build the future, we need theories of change

News tends to treat technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid. To better navigate the future, we need to imagine what might come next.