Link tags: ethics

Webspace Invaders · Matthias Ott

There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

10 Thoughts On “AI,” February 2026 Edition | Whatever

1. I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work.
2. I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist.
3. People in general are burning out on “AI.”
4. I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work.
5. “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form.
6. “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies.
7. There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect.
8. The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows.
9. It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.”
10. Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it.

You Can Just Say No to the Data - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Appealing to data as the ultimate authority — especially when fueled by engineered desire — isn’t neutrality, it’s an abdication of responsibility.

Dissent | blarg

I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.

There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.

When All You Have Is a Robots.txt Hammer – Pixel Envy

I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.

You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company – This day’s portion

🎯

I Am An AI Hater | moser’s frame shop

I wanted to quote an excerpt of this post, but honestly I couldn’t choose just one part—the whole thing is perfect. You should read it for the beauty of the language alone.

(This is Anthony Moser’s first blog post. I fear he has created his Citizen Kane.)

This website is for humans - localghost

This website is for humans, and LLMs are not welcome here.

Cosigned.

You Should Probably Leave Substack | How to Leave Substack.

Substack willingly platforms and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation.

Says who?

Here are some well-reasoned pieces on the subject for you to educate yourself and decide.

The sound of inevitability | My place to put things

People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.

This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.

The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools.

Large Language Muddle • Jason Santa Maria

It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it.

Critical questions for design leaders working with artificial intelligence, New York 2025 | Leading Design

AI presents design leaders with a quandary, requiring us to tread a fine line between what is acceptable and useful, and what is problematic and harmful.

This document is not a manifesto or an agenda. It is a series of prompts written by design leaders for design leaders, conceived to help us navigate these tricky waters.

The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype

Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.

This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can’t determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they’re mistakes.

Ensloppification – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

Frankly, I’d rather quit my career than live in the future they’re selling. It’s the sheer dystopian drabness of it. Mediocrity as a service.

I tried the tab-completion slot machines; not my cup of tea. I tried image generation and was overcome with literal depression. I don’t want a future as a “prompt artist”.

I’m mostly linking this for what it says, but oh boy, do I love the way it says it with this wonderful HTML web compenent.

Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used | Frank Elavsky

Must be something in the air.

The luxury of saying no.

If I’m understanding Greg correctly here, he’s saying it’s okay for people to use large language models …because they’re being forced to?

EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis - Irish Council for Civil Liberties

It’s official. No matter how many annoying cookie consent banners you slap on a website, real-time bidding for behavioural adverts is illegal in Europe.

And before you go crying about advertising-supported businesses, this only applies to behavioural advertising, not contextual advertising …which works better anyway.

Figure and ground • Buttondown

Man, this resonates:

At one end, you prioritise your own interests. Slap on the SPF and enjoy the cricket; ignore the emails; nip to Paris for the day. But egocentrism erodes social goods. It harms other people. So perhaps you reject it and skew the other way, anchoring your wellbeing to the trajectory of the world. But that undertow will easily drown you. The beneficence of caring only about others seems noble, but in truth few of us can endure that level of self-sacrifice. Total empathy harms you. And so most of us stumble in the fog between these extremes, recoiling from either end when the shame or the sadness becomes too much to bear. I plug away at my pleasant life with heartache for what’s happening to us. Perhaps you feel similarly, smiling but seconds from tears.