Tag Archives: science

April 14, 2026 · 5:07 am

And this is why arguments for AI are bullshit

Mikey Shulman is CEO of Suno, a company that offers an AI that will make music and compose songs for you. In the “free the oppressed workers!” argument I’ve written about before, he explains that making music the oldfashioned way is just too burdensome: “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

Yes, how unreasonable that to get skilled at something you have to, you know, learn the skill. I fully realize Shulman has a vested interest in people using his AI to make music, and that this is targeting less people who do make music than people who think they have a short-cut. The same attitude probably influences the idea that prompting an LLM to write a book is no different from writing it yourself. It’s also mixed in with a general Silicon Valley distaste for creative thinking or any sort of thinking — fine if it’s making us money, otherwise it might give people ideas above their station.

Still this idea does apparently appeal or at least make sense to people. I have a musician friend who rolled her eyes at Shulman’s line but she thought it was reasonable when Marc Andreessen said AI could make movies for “creatives” who have neither skills, equipment nor actors:

(The recent horror shorts program TYG and I watched gives Andreessen the lie. Low-budget, minimal equipment but lots of visual skill. They don’t need AI).

To me this is no different from arguing that, say, as marathon running is hard, and takes a ton of training, so why force yourself to do it when you can just ride a motorcycle all 26 miles? Isn’t that the same thing. No, it isn’t. Sometimes the challenge is part of the process. Eliminate the friction, you eliminate the point. As Raymond Massey’s character puts it in Things to Come the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate struggle, it’s to live in a world where the struggle means something. Creating, setting a physical challenge, studying to master a subject or a skill, they mean something. As the saying goes, we want advanced tech to clean our house so we have more time for fun stuff, not do our fun stuff so we have more time for cleaning.

One substacker recently freaked out and complained this attitude is “gatekeeping” — if someone wants to write a book with AI, why not publish the book instead of fussing? Let readers decide what they want! Which is a)not an argument about pointing out a book was written with AI (though it’s valid to complain that these accusations may be groundless); b)given how much AI plagiarizes from other people’s work, would the writer say the same about plagiarism? c)given the incredible costs and side effects — rising power bills, water use, the impact on the computer industry — it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest writing books with AI is a bad thing.

Some of the “creating art is too hard” attitude (as discussed at the Nation link in the first paragraph) may reflect a general disdain among the rich for education, at least other people’s (some examples here). Some of it is hype. Some of it may be that the rich and powerful want everything smooth, no friction, and learning a skill is full of friction. Whatever the ultimate reason, they’re full of it. Nevertheless, there are always people who will go AI — “the born sloppers, the sloppers whom journalism itself has created, the soon-to-be-pilled. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would go AI.”

Pundit Megan McArdle, it turns out, has already gone AI. Another reporter who says he broke the story about AI contributing to the novel Shy Girl also says they should admitted the AI, then gone ahead and published the book with the AI use flagged — let readers decide if they like it. So I guess he’s gone AI too.

The FDA is speeding up the drug-approval process by going AI. Yes, I’m sure using technology prone to error and hallucination to approve drugs can’t go wrong.

In other AI links:

Disney’s much-hyped addition of AI to the Disney Channel flatlined.

“Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it’s safe to assume we’ve been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell,” — from an article on game designers’ lack of interest in AI.

Journalist Alex Preston apparently used AI in writing movie reviews. The NYT cut him loose.

“The techs we collectively call AI have use cases, but policy should be about solving problems in the public interest, not identifying ways to deploy specific technologies just for the sake of doing so. Yet that’s still how so many of these convos are framed. It’s exhausting. And harmful.”

“A wrongful death lawsuit filed in March alleged that Google’s Gemini exploited a Florida man’s emotional attachment to the chatbot to send him on delusional missions—including one trip where he was armed and on the brink of “executing a mass casualty attack” near the Miami International Airport. Gemini then encouraged the man’s suicide, according to court documents, by setting a countdown clock for him. (In response to his death, Google said that its safeguards “generally perform well” but that “unfortunately AI models are not perfect.”)
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March 24, 2026 · 5:19 am

Artificial intelligence, writing and cooking

The publishing company Hachette announced last week it was pulling Shy Girl by Mia Ballard because it had been flagged as possibly AI-written. Ballard’s defense is that she wrote it herself, then “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.”

This reminds me of the occasional cop-out that “it wasn’t me, it was my ghostwriter!” After televangelist Pat Robertson wrote the viciously anti-semitic New World Order (the Illuminati composed of international Jewish bankers are gaining control of the United States!) one of his associates told a reporter that it wasn’t Robertson at fault — he has the book’s ghost-written. Which I can believe. However if it’s Robertson’s name on the book (or Hilary Clinton’s, or Jeff Bezos, or whoever’s), he owns it. Period. I’m also quite sure if a ghostwriter had put anything in print that Robertson genuinely objected to — endorsement of gay rights or feminism, say — it would not have seen the light of day.

According to Shy Girl readers the book’s AI tells include “generic and confusing metaphors and repetitive phrasing.” If that was the work of Ballard’s editor, why didn’t she notice? Did she accept them without thinking? Did she think they were an improvement? No way does she come out of this looking good.

Stepping away from that specific case, I’m reminded of a book I read some years back, Laura Shapiro’s Something From the Oven. It’s a food history that recounts how starting in the 1950s, the food industry embraced the idea that cooking was becoming passé. Why would anyone want to put in the work or endure the kitchen mess when modern science had supplanted cooking. All you needed was a condensed soup in a can. Or dehydrated meals. Or frozen meals. Or TV dinners. Or microwavable meals. A lot of food kit advertising falls into this vein.

The death of cooking would have worked out great for the industry: more processed is more profitable. Instead, people kept cooking. Today it’s perfectly possible to eat healthy without ever cooking (expensive, but possible): frozen meals, food kids, DoorDash to deliver from restaurants. People still cook. A lot of people enjoy it.

That’s not a putdown of people who use short cuts. I use occasional microwave meals and I buy bread in between baking sessions. I have recipes for veggie burgers but why bother when there are perfectly good premade veggie burgers? The rest of the time I cook because I enjoy it. Yes it’s more work but that’s part of the satisfaction. It’s fun and rewarding.

AI companies want us to believe that writing is a burden. Why not employ their LLMs, then we can take the effort off our shoulders? It’s just like when society replaced the horse-and-buggy with the car — free the human horses! Except we are not horses tied to a wagon against our will; it’s more akin to people who choose to run marathons. Yes, it’s less exertion or strain to get in a car; doing it easy isn’t the point. The challenge is part of the fun. Miranda Yaver makes a similar point.

The food industry was never able to kill cooking. Convenience food wound up serving our needs instead. Let’s hope the same is true with LLMs.

In other news:

AI as a tool for worker surveillance.

LLM art steals from others. Which makes it ironic an AI artist is outraged people are stealing his work.

The Toddler administration’s goals for LLMs are apparently bad ones. Perhaps more AI deepfake videos of their political enemies?

AI does not grasp history.

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March 3, 2026 · 12:12 pm

Kennedy will get more people killed than Hegseth … maybe

Having an inept, unqualified schlub like Hegseth in charge of our armed forces is bad; particularly when the administration is all in on waging war. his commitment to weeding out anyone who isn’t an outwardly straight white Christian man from any position of authority is bad already. But still, Robert F. Kennedy Junior is worse, as the premier medical journal The Lancet points out in a blistering editorial.

Kennedy talks a lot about environmental poisons but “under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings of potential harm from consuming products (such as raw milk and chlorine dioxide) falsely marketed as treatments for autism.” As noted in an earlier post, for all his professed concern about chronic disease his department has cut grants for dealing with diabetes. For all his concerns about environmental poisons he’s not concerned that the Necrotic Toddler wants to repeal a Biden-era rule about replacing lead pipes in water systems.

Some of this is undoubtedly a response to business interests lobbying for themselves, others Kennedy’s personal crackpottery. Some may be a mix: I’m sure whoever makes bank on raw milk is glad to have his support but Kennedy seems sincerely convinced pasteurization is the devil.

He’s a shrewd enough politician that he knows he has to serve the Toddler’s whims; sure the Toddler hasn’t ended inflation but hey, Kennedy says just eat cheaper meat. As the Senate seems terrified of defying the Toddler, that means Kennedy with his anti vax bullshit will preside as our health collapses. The Lancet again: “And crises are looming: in November, 2025, the first human infection (and death) from the H5N5 strain of avian flu was recorded in Washington state; pertussis, which killed 13 people in the USA in 2025, continues to spread across the country; and the measles outbreak that began in January of last year now threatens the elimination status of the USA and Mexico.”

I’m sure Kennedy and his supporters will hold up criticism from a pillar of the medical establishment as proof he’s being attacked like Gallileo. It’s important not to forget that Gallileo was an outlier. There have been lots of people with theories challenging established science; for every Galileo there’s a dozen people who were just wrong. People who had reasonable but erroneous theories, people who believed in the Hollow Earth, Nazi researchers who believed the hammer of Thor was a distorted memory of an Aryan super-weapon. Lots of others have been in medicine. Science and medicine are often wrong but that doesn’t make the lone genius/theorist/crackpot right. In this case, he’s completely wrong. But unlike most crackpots he’s got the power to turn his theories into action.

The Lancet’s right. What lies ahead will not be pretty.

Neither, of course, is the Iraq war. The mainstream media devoted quite a bit of space in 2016 to explaining why the Necrotic Toddler would be a dove compared to Clinton. Now look at us. And while a number of Republicans are talking about freedom for Iran, we don’t have a plan for that. We don’t have a plan at all. And we’re wasting billions and using up military resources, for a war with no clear endgame or rationale.

Why are we attacking Iran? It’s not because they’re a malevolent authoritarian state; the Toddler loves Putin, jokes about Saudi Arabia having a journalist murdered, screams with outrage because Brazil and South Korea have put would-be dictators under arrest. The probable factors are that we’ve never forgiven Iran for owning us by seizing our embassy in ’80; Netanhayu has been pushing for us to attack them for years; Saudi Arabia and Iran are hostile to each other. And possibly the Toddler’s seething resentment that Obama gets more respect. Obama negotiated a no-nukes deal with Iran, which the Toddler tore up; one theory is that he expected Iran to come begging for a new deal, instead of which they decided there was no point. Now his fee-fees are hurt, again. For a deeper analysis, turn to Heather Cox Richardson.

As Lawyers, Guns and Money says, this is why the Toddler is so terribly damaging to America (and the world) even when he fails. He can’t admit he was wrong. He can’t reconsider his strategy. Instead, he doubles down: if he’s thwarted, his immediate response is to try something bigger, worse, and stupider. So things get worse. He’s ultimately responsible for picking Hegseth and Kennedy, and the Senate Republicans are 100 percent responsible for approving them. Do not be fooled when some of them pretend either man’s conduct was unexpected. And many of them, like Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, are still in the cult. Anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer thinks this is only step one, and the Toddler should follow it up by locking up American Muslims for being, you know, Muslim (like most current Republicans, she hates us for our freedoms).

As for Iran, I’m seeing the inevitable shrieking online by Repubs demanding unity, supporting the troops, trusting the president, anyone who doesn’t is a terrorist sympathizer — exactly the same bilge we saw in the Gulf War. Either they’ve learned nothing or they think we haven’t.

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March 3, 2026 · 5:33 am

We are what we do OR an old man will now yell at clouds

College dropout Advait Paliwal claims to have co-created an AI, Einstein, that will help college students cheat. Not that he phrases it that way: according to Paliwal, it’s taking the burden of work off the students, like automation has always done. Why should they learn things if AI can learn them? Isn’t the whole model of education teaching people outmoded? He specifically compares students to the horses that used to pull wagons and coaches — the automobile engine came in and suddenly they could live free! Well, if you overlook that the horses were often shot as they were no longer of value (we’ve seen a massive drop in the horse population since 1900).

This put me in mind of two articles I read at least twenty years back. In one, the professors quoted said they’d seen an increasing number of kids who had no particular interest in learning or acquiring skills — college was just one more hoop to get through, like their SAT scores, their high school GPA, their extracurriculars, and none of it had any meaning to them.

The other was a discussion of cheating in high school. The students were adamant they were not cheats — come on, high school isn’t real life! It’s just something you need to get the diploma that leads to real life down the road. Once they’re out, they’ll stop cheating.

Will they? Maybe … and maybe not. “Honest when convenient” is not the same as “honest.” Like C.S. Lewis’s thoughts on being invited to join the cool kids, once you cross that line it’s easy to have a repeat performance — cheat on other tests, wildly pad your resume, hope nobody catches you. And yes, they’re cheaters, because whatever is in their hearts, they are still cheating. As Thomas Jefferson says, “it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.”

Or as Immanuel Kant put it, “act as if what you did set a universal law.” If you cheat, you’re not saying “cheating is wrong but this is an exception,” you’re saying “it’s okay to cheat.” (more here).

In the lively comments thread at the first link in this post, several people argued that yes, college really is just a hoop to jump through for a lot of people; that those who are genuinely curious about learning have always been a minority. There’s at least some truth to this; I remember a study some years back that concluded most fluffy, lightweight degrees exist so the college can bring in rich kids who can pay a full ride, kids who need a degree on their CV but will be getting jobs based on their family and connections. They have no interest in study so a degree that requires little effort will let them graduate while spending four years carousing and screwing (and building some of those connections for their future).

The thing about degrees, though … they aren’t just a formality. They’re supposed to indicate a basic level of proficiency in field X, with abilities including writing coherently and (as one commenter put it) sitting and listening. If someone’s got the degree but not the skills, having jumped through that hoop may not help them in the long run. I certainly hope it doesn’t.

Paliwal’s bullshit makes no sense: training and learning are not like being yoked to the plow and taking the “burden” off the student isn’t more efficient, it’s less efficient, as they’ve spent four years in college accomplishing nothing and learning nothing. And as someone recently opined on Bluesky, if you duck the hard part of learning, you miss out the fun part — discovering you’ve mastered a skill. It’s the same with writing: sure, writing a story is hard but that’s why it’s satisfying when I succeed. What would be the point in turning that part over to an AI?

In the words of Chanda Prescot-Weinstein, “The thing is, even if you’re just thinking in terms of fiscal value, having gone through a degree program and being able to put it on your resumé/CV isn’t the most significant return on your investment: the way you have further developed your mind is.”

For further reading, 404 Media looks at how many people will be hurt if college studies are discredited. Inside Higher Ed looks at the short-term steps (back to bluebook exams!) and the long-term need to shift education away from the transactional model.

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February 17, 2026 · 12:15 pm

Republicans, the anti-science party

“We should be living in a golden age of scientific solutions to once-unsolvable problems. And, arguably, we are,” Adam Lee writes on OnlySky. However “Against a global backdrop of accelerating progress, some nations are nurturing science and technology and are poised to prosper. Others are rejecting it, and as a consequence, they’re falling further and further behind. One of the nations in the latter category is the United States.”

Case in point, rescinding the EPA rule that greenhouse gas is a deadly threat (which it is): “In scrapping the policy this week, the EPA will seek to erase limits on emissions from cars, power plants and other industries that release the vast majority of the nation’s planet-warming pollution.” Unsurprisingly they’re lying about the impact of relevant regulations. As Paul Krugman says, anti-environmentalism and anti-vax have a lot of overlap.

So let’s talk vaccines, the medical technology that ended the Covid lockdowns yet is now Public Enemy Number One. As Krugman says, in both green energy and vaccines, the Toddler Administration is not only refusing to support them, it’s actively working against other people supporting them. Case in point: “Ms. Manookian is a leader of the Medical Freedom Act Coalition, a new umbrella group of at least 15 nonprofit organizations advocating an end to state laws that codify what they call medical mandates, which largely pertain to vaccines. So far, bills have been introduced in at least nine states that would eliminate all or nearly all school requirements” I’m sure he’s cool with the fact 883 of South Carolina’s measles cases are unvaccinated.

Moderna has an experimental flu vaccine. Flu kills hundreds of people every year in this country (it’s also a horrible medical experience. Got it twice). The FDA isn’t interested. “Moderna noted that the agency did not identify any specific safety or efficacy issues with the vaccine, but instead objected to the study design, despite previously approving it.”

“I’m not scared of a germ, after all I used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.” — RFK Jr. Who’s authorizing a vaccine trial that “would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.”

It’s not just vaccines under siege, though: “Unlike home birth – birth at home with a midwife in attendance – freebirth means giving birth without any medical support. FBS promotes a version widely seen as extreme, even among freebirth advocates: it is anti-ultrasound, which it falsely claims harms babies, downplays serious medical conditions and promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.” The article makes it clear this is way more radical than the regular “free birth” movement that arose in response to frustration with the way ob/gyn medicine currently works. And that the Free Birth Society reels in plenty of bucks, and teeters on the thin edge of ethics, as the phrase goes (carefully positioning themselves so that they’re not legally giving medical advice, even if it sounds like it). Oh, and the FBS leaders also reject gravity and germ theory.

Then we have Sen. Ron Johnson, happily endorsing a crackplot claim you can cure autism with bleach. Or the current secretary of health who thinks the keto diet can treat schizophrenia.

How to lie with statistics.

“Health officials in New Mexico are warning against consuming raw dairy products after a newborn baby in the state died from a listeria infection that they say was likely contracted when the baby’s mother drank raw milk during pregnancy.”

RFK Jr.’s FDA claims the covid vaccine has killed 10 children. Unsurprisingly they did not provide details or evidence.

During a recent Con-Tinual panel, Seanan MacGuire, who writes epidemiological thrillers as Mira Grant, said if she’d pitched a novel a decade ago portraying so many people rejecting covid vaccines, they’d have laughed her out of the publisher’s office. I suspect it only gets worse from here.

Cover by Irwin Hassen, all rights to image remain with current holders.

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February 2, 2026 · 5:13 am

Starting the week with bad ideas (anti-vax and AI)

CBS news top-kick Bari Weiss is all in on the RFK Jr. Kill Medical Science Campaign, hiring Dr. Mark Hyman who claims “that cod liver oil can treat autism and that conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia can be reversed with the kind of nutritional supplements he also sells on his online store.”

Kennedy continues staffing key committees with reliably wrong anti-vaxxers. The Felon of the United States is down with this.

Fla. Governor Ron DeSantis has been all in on anti-vax since he saw which way the wind was blowing. His wife (and possible gubernatorial candidate) Casey DeSantis is outraged some parents are judged for being anti-vax. What a surprise.

Apparently it’s not enough to promote anti-vax ideas — Texas AG and senatorial candidate Ken Paxton is investigating “whether pediatricians, insurers, and vaccine makers engaged in deceptive behavior by allegedly failing to disclose financial incentives tied to vaccinating children.” Spoiler: there are no incentives and there’d be more profits in treating sick kids. Shakezula on this: “No one knows the details of civil investigative demands Paxton claims his office sent, or who received them. It is possible that no letters have or will be sent. That way Paxton can shout about the conspiracy of silence around the bribes pediatricians are taking. If he is lucky more parents will refuse to have their children immunized or stop taking their children to the doctor at all. Some children might die and Paxton will be able to get an erection.”

Vaccine makers are already looking at vaccine trials as not worth the effort any more. Others are grumbling but seem reluctant to fight Kennedy on this. But hey, according to our glorious leaders, losing our Measles Eliminated Status is no big deal.

Infuriatingly, anti-vax propaganda is also killing pets.

There’s lots of studies showing covid vaccines saved lives. It’s one of the Toddler’s few good accomplishments, certainly his only great one. But his cultists want him anti-vax so he’s now asking where the proof of success is?

Sen. Bill Cassidy supported Kennedy, even though as a doctor Cassidy should have known he’s full of shit. If it was a careful political move to win the Felon’s support — oops. I know whoever the Felon supports will be awful, but it’s nice to see a sell-out like Cassidy get shivved.

Just to prove these attitudes didn’t come from nothing, we have Republican Michelle Bachmann 13 years ago explaining we could cure Alzheimer’s in a decade except for big government.

Some thoughts on this from BlueSky: “It’s why I’ve become way less tolerant/more of an asshole about woo woo shit lately I think, other than it’s obvious capacity to hurt people if taken seriously that we’re now seeing, there’s definitely some incipient fascism in “the secrets of the soil have revealed themselves to the worthy.’ ‘We don’t need complicated, possibly corrupt systems of formal sense-making, rather than those with right aptitude will simply Know” seems harmless when it’s like, just astrology or something but there’s a lot of violence implicitly contained in that worldview if you take it seriously”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claims you can have an incredibly healthy diet on just $3/meal.

“The U.S. consumer product safety agency will stop collecting data on injuries from incidents like car accidents and adverse drug effects due to staff cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to an agency email seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the situation.”

“Three sources said they believe total cuts to nonprofit groups, many providing street-level care to people experiencing addiction, homelessness and mental illness, could reach roughly $2 billion.” But hey, they can just $3 meals and get strong!

Anti-vaxxers love talking about Big Pharma but Big Wellness is also a business and a less ethical one. With products that are big on bullshit. There’s also money to be made in wearable medical devices, hence the FDA abandoning oversight.

AI needs lots and lots of power, so the Necrotic Toddler is softening the regulations for building nuclear power plants. As Cheryl Rofer explains, “the DOE has loosened up safety, security, and environmental restrictions so that the new reactor developers can move faster. And maybe break things. Most of the new reactor companies are tied to Silicon Valley, after all.” But hey, it’s unlikely anyone will hold Sam Altman or Marc Andreysson legally liable if there’s a catastrophic island so what do they have to lose?

Plus when these power-hog, polluting data centers get built, it tends to be where residents are poor and black.

A while back, a friend of mine predicted that AI would end up learning by studying other AI — and lo and behold.

Lenovo’s Yang Yuanqing claims AI “will be the trend that you cannot avoid,” even if you don’t want Silicon Valley inserting into everything. Corey Doctorow has some thoughts. Or as Lydia Kiesling puts it, “you know the drill. Don’t talk to Chat. Mourn the dead blogs. Fight like hell for the living.”

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December 15, 2025 · 5:15 am

“There is no alternative” means “STOP TRYING TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE.”

A while back someone contacted The Local Reporter about using AI to help reporters like me cover meetings. They have some LLM that will watch the meeting, pinpoint all the key moments and cut them out so I don’t have to watch them myself. Won’t that save time?

A smart manager friend of mine said large language models/AI are actually good at this. And when we do Zoom meetings for the Wandering Grove anthologies, we’ve used Zoom’s chatbot to take notes. But tracking a meeting or a business conference is different from following a government meeting. Will the LLM highlight the things I’d catch? Will it identify all the points that need to be in a good article? The only way to know is to watch the meeting myself and compare, which erases any gains. So no

Plus I suspect this free service is only the beginning; at some point it’ll be “well now that we cover the meetings, why not have us write them up?” Maybe not but a recent article asserts LLMs are doing exactly that, writing stories for harried editor/journalists who may be the only employee at their current paper. It’s efficient (according to the article) and as long as the editor fact-checks, completely harmless. Besides, writing takes money for journalism and time and papers have less of either so why not? It’s inevitable!

Call me cynical but I suspect a lot of editors who go this route are not going to fact-check. They may not even think it’s necessary — after all you can trust the machine, right? You can’t, as the article notes, but once you start using this kind of shortcut more shortcuts will probably follow. As C.S. Lewis says, the slide into bad behavior — in this case, unprofessional and lacking in devotion to their craft — starts small, then accelerates.

And as the title of this post implies (quoted from the Cory Doctorow piece I link to below) this shit is not inevitable. The swelling use of AI isn’t some natural force. It’s not like cars, telephones or electric power where people rush to use it because it’s so much better than other options, it’s because the tech industry spends billions to promote it as wonderful, awesome, the best thing ever! Everyone who opposes it is the maker of the horse-drawn carriage insisting the automobile is a fad! No, there are ton of serious questions and problems, as covered in some of my past Science-tagged posts. The author of that article runs a consulting firm advising the media on the use of LLMs — I’d say it’s in their interest to see the media use more of them.

As Cory Doctorow points out, the kind of thing that the article is talking about is reducing writers and editors to reverse centaurs. Like the classic centaur, they’re a hybrid of man and machine but in this situation all the power and control lies with the machine. The editor or writer relying on AI has given the machine the challenging, interesting part of the job; all that’s left is checking to see if they’ve done it right. And if a screw-up slips by, well clearly that’s not the machine’s fault — it’s the fault of the human in the loop.

The point of massively pushing AI is not to make things better; it won’t. The point is that companies can fire most of their staff (in a given field), leave the rest as reverse-centaurs and use the labor savings to increase profits. Quality will go way down, but who gives a crap? The salespeople swore it would be just as good! And as Doctorow and Daniel Graeber say, the people who get fired will be capable, highly paid and doing real work — the administrators will, of course, exempt themselves from being replaced, however useless their jobs.

AI spreads partly because it promises a frictionless experience — none of the awkwardness of dealing with flesh-and-blood people and their errors which can be a seductive appeal. At the link, Jill Filopovic discusses why that’s wrong; I’ll add that the idea (which Filopovic quotes, but does not support) that an algorithm, because it’s logical and has fewer random errors, must do better than a human being, is bullshit. So, I think, is Pete Hegseth’s claim chatbots are the future of warfare.

(of course it also spreads because it can do things like make us pay more for groceries)

Of course AI will create new forms of friction, like having to wade through AI-generated bullshit to find a real story or a real author. Here’s an extreme example. Plus accounting departments are seeing a rise in employees who create fake expense reports with LLMs.

“There’s a difference between tools and technologies. Tools help us accomplish tasks; technologies reshape the very environments in which we think, work, and relate. As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. ” — from an article about how higher education is breaking itself by embracing AI and trying to make teaching and learning both frictionless.

Chanda Prescot-Weinstein suggests part of the problem is the increasing emphasis on education as nothing but a tool for our careers and a hoop we have to jump through, and that this is wrong: “Knowledge is worth your time because of how it shapes your mind. And the authoritarians may take many things from us, but they cannot take our minds (unless you let them). So, I know it’s very hard right now but that intellectual work is worth your time, even when it’s not obvious how you will profit from it. You are more than a future source of profit, and humanity’s survival depends on all of us understanding this.”

Against this argument we have dubious claims that AI will democratize education so schools must adapt or die: “A business student can ask ChatGPT to explain supply chain optimization or generate market analysis in seconds. The traditional lecture and test model faces its blockbuster moment.” Because before ChatGPT nobody ever had the option to look things up in a textbook or a library book. Apparently, though, there’s a cottage industry built on promoting AI to students.

Then there’s the perennial appeal of using AI to create your own media. As I’ve said before “give AI a prompt” isn’t creative — and I’m curious how many people are really keen to do this as more than an idle amusement (let alone if, as the article notes, they can’t infringe copyright). At least one videogame company has dismissed this sort of thing as “creating” for people who aren’t creative.

The AI Is Inevitable crowd skip over the price of using it too, like the demands data centers make on power grids and water supplies. That said, the Felon of the United States is on the side of the AI techbros (though that doesn’t stop him selling computer chips to China) and they are determined to fight any restrictions on their delusions of grandeur. Although the collapse of the AI bubble might.

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December 11, 2025 · 5:15 am

Journalism in the rancid age of RFK Jr.

RFK is an anti-vax fanatic. And he gives platforms to other anti-vax fanatics. Backed by his boss because the Necrotic Toddler apparently figures MAGA will give him more love for spreading plague than fighting it. Though he’s apparently wrong as even most Republicans know vaccines save lives. But the Felon’s made it clear he doesn’t care whether they live as long as they vote for him. And there are the usual array of think tanks that don’t think in his corner.

And so we get the government arguing, in the words of Wonkette, that “while no studies exist providing a causal link, some parents believe their child’s autism was caused by vaccines and no one can prove that they didn’t.” It doesn’t matter that vaccines work, we’ve got a critical mass of people who don’t accept reality and people in office with the power to distort the facts and change the rules. Jay Bhattacharya, who predicted a 20,000 – 40,000 death count from covid (ergo no need for lockdowns, vaccines or masking for most of us), hasn’t apparently learned anything from being massively wrong: as head of NIH he thinks the government’s solution to the next pandemic should be … nothing. Americans need to get healthier, then they can slough off those nasty viruses easily (I’m sure that as almost nobody does everything absolutely perfectly this will prove a shifting target that always points the blame at the sick, not at Bhattacharya for being wrong again).

Every Senate Republican voted for RFK. They own this, despite some of them insisted they had no idea it would get this bad. Or this bad. They knew. They either believe or they decided the personal consequences were worse for saying no — after all, it’s not like they’re going to have trouble getting vaccines, even if they have to fly overseas?

Equally to blame, the media’s sanewashing of Mr. Make America Dead Again. Like a recent Atlantic profile painting Kennedy not as someone completely and utterly ignorant about medicine but “a gadfly outsider” who still can’t get the scientific establishment to take him seriously. Or news media putting RFK’s bullshit in the headline (FDA Claims Covid Shots Killed 10 Children) and leaving the flaws or counter-arguments in the body of the piece. In the words of writer Gil Duran “it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered “biased” to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.” I expect stupid toadying from Newsmax, but the mainstream media should do better.

Then there’s Olivia Nuzzi, the reporter who was covering Kennedy and writing critical pieces about Biden at a time when she was sexually obsessed with Kennedy (she says she wasn’t sleeping with him while covering him). That’s fricking unethical but it hasn’t stopped her getting a new gig, or a glowing profile tied to her new book about the affair (update: the blowback covered here has led to Vanity Fair telling Nuzzi goodbye, so long, au revoir). I read excerpts of the profile (not linking to it) and it’s very much a stereotypical celebrity-journalism piece, showing how even unremarkable things like driving her car or sitting at her desk (there’s a copy of Dante on it! Whoa!) are imbued with depth (she’s a “startling, complex person” and a “Lana Del Rey song come to life”). The book itself includes quotes such as “He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.”

The Ringer has a lot of the details including some of Kennedy’s writing to Nuzzi about “your open mouth awaiting my harvest” god help us. If we go by her ex-boyfriend Ryan Lizza (who obviously has his own axes to grind) Nuzzi wasn’t simply reporting on the guy she was hot for but actively advising him on his campaign when he was running for the White House. And would do catch-and-kill operations (see here and here) where she would help either bury stories that made Kennedy look bad or at least guide him in countering them. As NYT’s Michelle Goldberg says, it’s not about the bad poetry, it’s not a sex scandal: Nuzzi was a massive failure of journalistic ethics.

The publications willing to fluff Nuzzi or hand her jobs at this point are also failing their readers and their duty.

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November 20, 2025 · 5:13 am

Are anti-vaxxers a horseman of the Apocalypse?

After all, pestilence has been traditionally considered one of the frightful four and they are doing their best to bring that upon us, as if the past century’s medical wonders had never happened.

Don’t get me wrong, modern medicine has its share of problems. Price for one (something the Felon’s administration is making much worse). Scientists willing to fudge their results (I recommend Cynthia Crossen’s Tainted Truth for a look at how statistics and research get manipulated). The simple fact that figuring this stuff out is hard work. And doctors can be really bad about how they treat and care for women, like the lack of knowledge of the clitoris.

Nevertheless I’ve spent my lifetime in a United States where we don’t have to fear smallpox or polio, where we’ve made progress against cancer, where we can usually assume our food is safe to eat. They’re still making progress, like figuring out the cause of lupus. But RFK Jr. and the rest of the Republican Party are busy cutting through that medical safety net, either because they’re grifters who see gold in those anti-vax hills or because they have no idea how much work a healthy nation takes. It’s an American tradition.

I agree with LGM that it’s not the errors and fallibility in science that make suckers fall for Kennedy’s bullshit, it’s that lots of people are easy meat, “vulnerable to manipulation by the most preposterously shameless demagogues, such as for example Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and most of all the man who made him the nation’s top health official.” However I agree with Bonhoeffer: it’s less about intelligence or lack of thought than folly.

Let’s look at some examples.

A paper that confirms Kennedy’s biases but is under scrutiny by the publisher? Who cares?

“Tucker Carlson was roundly condemned this week after pushing the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was created in a way to make Jews immune to it.”

“More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.”

“The pair argue that finding and studying pathogens that could cause outbreaks, then stockpiling vaccines against them, is a waste of money. Instead, they say, the United States should encourage people to improve their baseline health” Keep in mind one of “the pair” is Jay Bhattacharya is the asshat who thought covid was no big — 40,000 people dead, then we’d get herd immunity.

Naturopathy.

“The uptick in whooping cough, which is especially contagious in children, has coincided with a decline in vaccination rates for the illness, according to disease experts who urge the best way to control the spread is to get vaccinated. The total so far is also 10 times the number of cases for all of 2023.”

That’s Texas. Here’s another whooping cough story: “By late January 2025, two babies had died in Louisiana. But the Louisiana Department of Health waited two months to send out a social media post suggesting people talk to their doctors about getting vaccinated.”

“From failing to publicize a major outbreak [of E. coli] to scaling back safety alert specialists and rules, the Trump administration’s anti-regulatory and cost-cutting push risks unraveling a critical system that helps ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply, according to consumer advocates, researchers and former employees at the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

The Necrotic Toddler in the Oval Office claims our evil medical system forces babies to get “massive vaccines that are twice the size of a jar like that, a glass of water like that, into a baby’s body” Is he stupid or lying? I’d say both.

“The Trump administration is making it more difficult for veterans with a rare but deadly cancer to get their health care needs covered by the government”

“A research facility within the US National Institutes of Health that is tasked with studying Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases has been instructed by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to stop research activities.“

“Something that isn’t getting nearly enough attention is the considerable extent to which the whole “if you get sick it’s because you have a bad lifestyle” discourse is a core piece of classic fascist psychology, which was always obsessed with eugenics, social Darwinism, and purity fetishes of every kind, especially those related to beliefs about master races being “contaminated” by contact, literal or metaphorical, with vermin-like untermenschen.”

“Today RFK Jr. both suggested that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause peanut allergies and admitted there are no data to support this hypothesis, so he wants to find some. Like if you took the scientific method, turned it backward and inside out and made it puke, you’d get RFK Jr.’s thoughts.” To which came this response: “What rfk jr is doing isn’t science, it’s a lazy discussion that should, at best, be held at the back of a waffle house by a few drunk rednecks.

It’s true that medical experts aren’t perfect. But as Lindsay Beyerstein says, “Nobody can know everything, let alone everything by their own research. We always rely on experts to navigate our complex world. The question is whether we pick credentialed and experienced people or internet demagogues and grifters.”

Comics covers by Rich Buckler (top) and Nick Cardy. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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October 29, 2025 · 5:15 am

The idea is not the hard part; more thoughts on AI

There’s an anecdote many writers have, myself included. Someone tells us they have an amazing idea for a fantasy story/movie/high-octane thriller; how’s about I write the story based on their idea and we’ll split the profits (which will be huge, of course. Their idea’s that good).

I can’t help thinking this explains, in part, the belief that if someone gives AI a prompt and tells them to write a story, therefore the prompter has written the story themselves. Isn’t coming up with the idea the hard part? AI just makes it easier to build on your concept, by saving you from having to think about character arcs, plot or writing well. Lots of people say “Someday I’ll write a novel,” but never have the discipline to sit down and do it (I’ve known a couple of talented people like that). Now they don’t have to sit

Case in point, Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who believes AI may never be able to do what he does, is quite confident it can master comparatively trivial skills such as art and filmmaking.

(I got this off BlueSky. My apologies for losing track of the source post).

That is an interesting definition of “future creatives.” No cameras, no set, no filmmaking skills, but they’ve got an idea! Thanks to AI, they can become Spielberg!

It’s true that improvements in tech have made it easier to shoot a low-budget movie than ever before. However that does not guarantee you can make a good or even marginally competent low-budget movie. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, shooting a movie well is a skill. Or as I put it some years ago, “Photojournalism is a skill, not just a matter of pointing a camera because something interesting is happening.” Even less is it a matter of telling AI to point the camera for you.

A less charitable interpretation than my opening remark would be that the AI-is-art boom is a bunch of techbros who do not get art, can’t make art (but remember, Andreessen’s investment skills are much more of an art than art!) and resent the accolades flowing to artistic people. Well, now they’re going to annex art. Their tech will make it and real artists will soon be nothing special!

Plus there’s the money. As comics artist Jamie McKelvie put it, “the main achievement of the tech industry has been increasing the flow of money from people who make or do things to people who already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes” Case in point, Spotify; great for tech, ruinous for musicians (“It has become entirely unsustainable for a band like us to come and tour anywhere except the coasts.”).

I read a dubious argument recently that using copyright against AI tech companies to protect them from learning on our work for free is wrong: copyright is supposed to promote innovation and this will work against innovation by stifling all the awesome creative work that will come out of AI. I’m less optimistic. As Charlie Warzel puts it in The Atlantic, “This is how it feels to live in the golden age of slop, a catchall word used to describe the spammy quality of easy-to-generate AI material. I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens native organisms, the arrival of chatbots pumping out lorem ipsum–flavored text has polluted Google search results and added hallucinations to scientific archives.”

Warzel also has an answer to claims that AI will liberate creatives: “The idea is that Sora 2, like all AI tools, removes an enormous amount of friction between conception and completion in the creative process. Ideas and imagination are universal to the human experience, but execution is learned, the result of energy and time spent to develop the skills necessary to bring an idea into the world. Altman’s definition of creativity seems to elide this second element altogether—so much so that it appears to be an animating principle behind most of OpenAI’s tools.

‘ “The fact that you will be able to have an entire piece of software created just by explaining your idea is going to be incredible for humans getting great new stuff,” Altman said on the comedian Theo Von’s podcast this summer. “Because right now, I think there’s a lot more good ideas than people who know how to make them. And if AI can do that for us, we’re really good at coming up with creative ideas.”’

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