July 22, 2025, 3:12pm
Another Wild Week for the manufacturer of popular predictive chatbots and large, generative prerequisite transformer software. Here are some stories about AI that I came across my desk this week:
Baldacci Burns Business
Fallouts around the discovery that the president likely was a close friend along with the accused sexual offender feel that could be a plot point for one of David Balducci's legal thrillers. However, the author was not in DC last week to study his next book. He was in town to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism.
“It really felt like someone had backed up the track to my imagination and stole everything I'd ever created,” Bardac told the Senate committee at a hearing entitled “Is it too big to prosecute? Examine the bulk of AI industry copyrighted work for AI training.” Baldacci, a bestselling author of over 50 legal thrillers and YA books, was invited to talk about the impact of the fiercely stolen books of high-tech companies as a member of the Authors Guild.
Baldacci awakened to the dangers of this technology when his son used ChatGpt to generate plot summary for books like David Baldacci. Elder Barudach was shocked that the program pulled “almost every book element I have ever written” into its output. Since then, he has spoken about how the technology is hurting authors and publishers.
The bipartisan support for what Baludach and the Author Guild are saying gives me hope, but Trump and his Hogman are not holding their breath in technology and beds, and immediately have meaningful surveillance and regulations.
The court tolerate the case
The hearing took place just before a US district judge ruled that a class action lawsuit against humanity Claude LLM could proceed. This case is based on the same complaints that Baludacci made before the Congress. Tech companies are illegal and damaging to infringe copyright in the work of authors who train large language models.
Unfortunately it was a mixed bag from a Northern District Judge in California. Last month, I decided that the work of human writers was “very transformative” and was fair. This logic doesn't pass the smell test for me, especially as the judge also said to download books from piracy sites. do not have Fair use.
Part of Quibling here is because the suit class is categorized into “pirated book classes” and “scanned book classes”, and part of the judge's decision here is centered around how these classes are defined and which groups they should be included in. Publisher weekly I will go into further detail about the judge's thinking and the author's guild's response, but I personally hope for the author's justice and rewards soon.
Scholars speculate on slander
If you're like me, you might be having an unpleasant conversation with people using AI and being accused of being mean or backward for ordering them to be cut out. According to at least one academic, telling people that using this software is bad is becoming a very phenomena as academic research is required to solve its social and cultural effects.
A paper submitted to the conference on human factors in computing systems argues that the phrase “AI could write this” includes a forehead in classical slur in the field of knowledge work. Whether joking, sloppy or fired, this kind of “AI shame arises from class anxiety induced by middle-class knowledge workers, and is a form of boundary work that maintains class solidarity and limits mobility to knowledge work.” In other words, telling people that their work appears to be bad is gatekeeping the work of a laptop. I've not read the entire paper so I just say it seems like a big claim.
But I'm not surprised that people are upset when they hear their email sounds like a spreadsheet coughing.
Microsoft is cheating more
Finally (and thank God as my Retail Tank is approaching the sky), Emily Atkin's excellent “Heallord” has an interview with two former Microsoft engineers who quit after repeated climate hypocrisy from the company. The engineers were hired to create “tools that make Microsoft's AI easier to use in an ethical and environmentally sustainable way for customers to use,” but were repeatedly ignored and undercut. It's worth reading the full interview. This is a great insight into how these tech companies talk and use these tools. You may not be surprised that this is another case of hypocrisy driven by a desire for profit.
Speaking to engineer Atkin, Will and Holly Alpine were initially excited to support Shepherd AI technology in a more responsible direction. And initially, Microsoft said the right things about their commitment to environmental concerns and their desire to be carbon negative.
However, engineers and other staff have discovered that Microsoft is using AI tools to help oil companies. The tech giant helps ExxonMobil increase 50,000 barrels of oil extraction per day, trading with Chevron to “radically accelerate speeds.” [they] Data can be analyzed to generate new exploration opportunities. ” Microsoft made more promises and Alpines recommended that the company claimed it wanted, but ultimately drove Alpines.
You shouldn't be surprised by the hypocrisy of a company that made money by stealing other people's jobs or committing to supporting the planet while turbocharged turbocharged. These accusations have not been taken seriously by the AI booster. Because when we arrive at the just historic AI utopia where every step ahead will move forward in the future, every step now will move forward. This magical idea of “AI will fix everything” ignores the fact that betting on AI is a huge gamble supported by tenuous evidence. And that means that climate change is not due to a lack of political will, it is a technical issue. You have all the technology, science and resources you need to reduce this problem Right now. Climate change is not something that requires new widgets to be designed, it is an organisational issue.
But all of these stories remind us that these are products and are built and managed by people and for-profit companies. These software are not sacred clocks or perfect optional over human prejudices. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is a human engineering product built to work in a specific way.
Don't allow the promised wonder and breathtaking marketing for this technology to be diverted from the very realistic and important concerns about its creation and use. It is worth criticizing that it is built on stolen work, maintained with enormous amounts of energy and water, and used to extract fossil fuels and increase guide bombs. If it's a bad classification of saying that the melted AI image of Trump and Epstein's hands look stupid, then I would say it's a good classification of saying that wealthy people and wealthy companies shouldn't have the right to take away and destroy anything they want just to raise stock prices.
