Thinking Critically and Ethically about AI
AI CHARACTERS: Moguls | Theorists | Sceptics // GLOSSARY
What Exactly Is ‘Artificial General Intelligence’?
The term “Artificial General Intelligence” or AGI is the often-used yet rarely understood “goal” that contemporary AI researchers and companies claim to be working towards. Sadly, no one can agree on what it actually means.
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist formerly employed by Google who is often referred to as “the godfather of AI”, says AGI is not a technical term but “a serious, though ill-defined, concept. I don’t think there is agreement on what the term means. I use it to mean AI that is at least as good as humans at nearly all of the cognitive things that humans do.”
Most definitions of AGI tend to point towards it being a type of Artificial Intelligence that is “as intelligent as human beings” at certain tasks. In reality, this widely-accepted definition is intentionally vague and nearly impossible to qualify, as science has not yet been able to agree on exactly what human intelligence is. There is also no consensus on which human tasks AGI will be capable of; some definitions stick to tasks of logic or problem-solving, while others couch the tasks in the language of Capitalism and “productivity”. So is Capitalism what makes us human? Were pre-Capitalist humans somehow not human? Are contemporary people who oppose Capitalism somehow inhuman?
One recent academic attempt to construct a definition of AGI compares it to the intelligence level of a “well-educated adult“. But by whose standard is someone “well-educated”? Within which culture/tradition/race/economic class is this “well-educated adult”? How old are they? What do they specifically know and not know? As should be apparent by this point, AGI is a concept that is very easily manipulated to adhere to any number of political and social ideologies, all of which are utterly subjective.
Several AI theorists predict that we will “know it when we see it”, and that, in all likelihood, AGI won’t just be intelligent, but “superintelligent” (i.e. all-knowing), akin to a god, and humans will somehow either be forced, or volunteer, to ‘merge’ with this new deity, forming a post-human race. Seriously, they believe this is inevitable. And right now the strategy is to just keep building larger and larger data centers until someone ends up creating this new technological god, who will then (obviously) teach us how to travel to other planets and colonise them with our superior technology (because of course, any god created by humans would immediately view colonialism as its only logical course of action).
This is not exaggeration. This is literally what most US-based AI company executives believe.
Watch AI sceptic Cory Doctorow’s rebuttal to the idea that AI will inevitably become conscious:
Audio Deepfake Vocal Tracts Have No Correlation to Human Vocal Tracts (2022)
A 2022 study of audio deepfakes at the University of Florida reverse-engineered the shapes of the vocal tracts of the AI-generated “speakers” using fluid dynamics.
The scientists discovered the vocal tracts of the deepfake voices had no correlation to human vocal tracts, even when a human listener was unable to distinguish the deepfake from the real voice.
Source:
Blue, L. and Traynor, P. (2022) Deepfake audio has a tell – researchers use fluid dynamics to spot artificial imposter voices, The Conversation. Available at: https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.9x57f5jvy.
AI Ethicist Reveals What the Plan is for Paying Off AI Companies’ Debts
In a new short documentary for FastCompany, AI ethicist Tristan Harris talks about AI’s impact on the US economy, and how companies like OpenAI are hoping to pay off the millions of dollars in debt they kept accruing (hint: it’s not advertising, and it’s not chatbot subscriptions). Watch the full documentary.
AI Companies–yes, even “the good one”–Are Buying Rare Books, Scanning Them, and Pulping Them to Avoid Copyright Law
Do you like books? As someone who runs our museum’s Research Library and also has a day job at a university library, I definitely like books. Which is why this report by Futurism from over the past weekend is so infuriating.
It seems AI companies – yes, even Anthropic, “the good one” – are running out of reliable digital information to train their models on, so now they’re buying up rare books in bulk, tearing them apart to scan them, and then pulping them in order to claim “transformative” use of the materials, which a US judge has accepted as evidence of fair use under copyright law (as part of the lawsuit Anthropic lost last week for which they now owe US$1.5 billion for pirating digital books to train their Claude bot).
Add it to the list of “what could possibly go wrong?” things that AI companies are doing to the rest of us.
If, like me, you need something to help you temporarily forget the insanity of the above, why not watch three minutes of Carl Sagan talking about why books are magical:
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Wants You To Just Chill About the Whole OpenAI/Hugging Face Thing
“We need to back away from this anthropomorphic language that paints these models as somehow conscious.”
The always reliable Meredith Whittaker, President of the Signal Foundation, does her best to communicate that OpenAI’s “cyberattack” on Hugging Face was not evidence of an AI agent “waking up and going rogue” – it was a human-initiated failure, and OpenAI is trying to spin it into “we’re just another two weeks away from AGI”.
Before we jump to anthropomorphising AI bots, we seriously need to calm down, take a step back, and think about the fact that things are happening because humans are making them happen–especially people at OpenAI, who are sprinting towards announcing their IPO, trying to generate as much hype around themselves as possible. Don’t fall for it.
Be like Meredith. Just chill.
The Week In Slop, Week of 20 July 2026
THIS WEEK: OpenAI admits one of its agents “accidentally” attacked Hugging Face; AI ruins Belgium’s F1 race; Anthropic needs to pay up for all those books they pirated training Claude; Google ends a quarter with negative free cash flow–a first!–and you’ll never guess why; China’s Moonshot AI makes US companies freak out over open source models; Water UK puts the kibosh on UK government’s data centre plans because SURPRISE there’s not enough water. Slop ahoy!
AI ‘ghosts’ can comfort mourners — even when the bots get the facts wrong
(Science News, 20 July 2026)
“Across the board, volunteers reported the experience was positive. ‘It felt like I was actually talking with my grandpa,’ one participant told researchers. Another said, ‘It just feels like I’m getting the closure I needed so bad.’”
Jeff Bezos and UK government invest in £2bn British startup CuspAI
(The Guardian, 20 July 2026)
“Company aims to develop AI software that cuts research times and use of rare metals in chipmakers’ supply chains”
The Great Freakout Over Open-Source AI Has Begun
(Gizmodo, 20 July 2026)
“When Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI dropped its latest model, Kimi K3, last week, it caused quite an uproar”
F1 in Belgium: Machine learning algorithms are ruining the sport
(Ars Technica, 20 July 2026)
“There was—and is—something definitely wrong with Russell’s car, which was clearly slower than its sister car on several flat-out sections. The self-learning AI systems that teams are now using to manage their energy deployment strategies across a lap are looking increasingly likely to blame.”
Not enough water for UK’s datacentre plans, trade body says
(The Guardian, 21 July 2026)
“Industry says government ‘makes not a single mention of water’ in its policy for delivering AI growth zones, its AI for science strategy or its AI opportunities action plan–failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed’”
– Water UK’s damning new report in full
– House of Lords report (May 2026) revealing the UK faces a “5bn litre per day shortfall” by 2055
OpenAI says Hugging Face breach caused by one of its models
(Axios, 21 July 2026)
“[Open Source AI developer] Hugging Face said last week that an autonomous AI-agent system [attacked their] production infrastructure. OpenAI said Tuesday the incident was driven by a combination of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and ‘an even more capable pre-release model.’”
Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot
(AP, 21 July 2026)
“Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was ‘the largest known copyright recovery in history.’”
Unlimited AI tokens aren’t unlimited after all as US Army burns through supply
(Ars Technica, 22 July 2026)
“Troops received an email informing them that they were rapidly depleting their AI tokens. An anonymous Army employee says they have not found the generative AI tools to be particularly useful for their work, and that when they have used the tools, they have found them to be unreliable.”
Google Free Cash Flow Turns Negative Due to Massive AI Spend
(Gizmodo, 22 July 2026)
“In a company first, Google ended a quarter with negative free cash flow, while upping expenses to $200 billion.”
Canadian legislator reads out apparent LLM response in floor speech
(Ars Technica, 24 July 2025)
“Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section…” [Editor’s Note: has to be seen to be believed!]
Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible
(Futurism, 25 July 2026)
“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response.”
AI Characters: Moguls
Part One of a three-part “who’s who” series providing brief profiles of many major players in the AI industry. This first part focuses on AI’s powerful technology moguls. They are listed alphabetically by their company name: Amazon, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, and xAI.
Amazon
Primary AI Product: AWS (Amazon Web Services) and AI chips
Jeff Bezos (Amazon Magnate)
The well-known founder and former CEO of Amazon.com recently rented Venice for his wedding and sent Katy Perry into space on one of his Blue Origin rockets. In October 2025, Bezos reportedly said “This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” In the same appearance, he also admitted that AI was “an industry bubble.”
Anthropic
Primary AI Product: Claude
Daniela Amodei (Anthropic Cofounder/VP of Safety & Policy)
Born in San Francisco in 1987, Amodei’s undergraduate degree in English Literature shows that, with the right familial connections, a Humanities degree can lead to a high-profile job in Silicon Valley. First working in AI ethics and safety at OpenAI alongside her brother Dario, she left alongside him in 2021 to co-found Anthropic. Her stewardship of Anthropic’s Safety & Policy has helped create the public perception that Anthropic is the ethical AI company – oh, except for the fact that they pirated thousands of books to train Claude. Truly, Anthropic are the only people moral enough to responsibly shepherd humanity into the era of AGI.
Dario Amodei (Anthropic Cofounder/CEO)
The San Francisco native first made waves as the vice president of research at OpenAI. Amodei’s concerns about Sam Altman‘s ability to ethically steward AGI (should that breakthrough happen) as well as their Boomer versus Doomer philosophical disagreements led Dario and his sister Daniela to leave OpenAI in 2021 and co-found Anthropic. Famous for being awkward, as well as for kind of standing up against the US military‘s desire to use Anthropic’s models for automated killing machines.
DeepSeek
Primary AI Product: DeepSeek AI
Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek CEO)
Born in Wuchuan in 1985, Liang founded DeepSeek in October 2023. In October 2022, US president Joe Biden began exerting export controls over computer chips sold in China, preventing Chinese companies from buying the latest cutting edge Nvidia chips. In order to regain their lost income in China, Nvidia began manufacturing lower power AI chips specifically for the Chinese market; the US retaliated with tighter export controls, so Nvidia made even lower power chips, and so on. The US assumed this would guarantee American superiority in AI development. However, on 20 January 2025, DeepSeek released their R1 LLM, a powerful frontier model that was trained for a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley LLMs, running on Nvidia’s lower quality chips. The ensuing frenzy over DeepSeek’s substantial achievement led to a US stock market crash a week later and DeepSeek overtaking ChatGPT as the number one app in the so-called West. As DeepSeek continues to innovate with less powerful resources than their American competitors, Liang’s personal value has continued to skyrocket: as of 14 July 2026, he has become the world’s richest AI model CEO.
Primary AI Product: DeepMind/Gemini
Jeff Dean (Head of Google AI/DeepMind)
As Google’s 30th employee, Hawaiian-born Dean has worked his up from engineering advertising and Google Translate to eventually becoming head of Google’s AI department. He was involved in multiple controversial firings of Google whistleblower employees including Timnit Gebru (fired for exposing racist practices at Google and within its AI models) and Satrajit Chatterjee (fired for directly challenging the veracity of Dean’s own research). Dean came up with the name “Gemini” for Google’s AI chatbot when the company decided to merge its Google Brain and DeepMind departments into a single department named Google DeepMind.
Meta
Primary AI Product: Meta AI
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Cofounder, chairman & CEO)
After gambling his company’s future on VR/the “Metaverse” and losing (big), Zuckerberg pivoted to playing catchup with AI. You might know him as the man responsible for temporarily letting everyone use Meta AI to make deepfakes of anyone with an Instagram account, the man responsible for tracking his employees’ every keystroke to train the Meta AI monitoring system, and the man responsible for using a biased AI system to fire pregnant employees.
Microsoft
Primary AI Products: Copilot, Azure
Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO)
Hyderabad-born executive responsible for Microsoft’s early investment in OpenAI and subsequently providing the vote of confidence in Sam Altman necessary to get him re-instated as OpenAI’s CEO after an unsuccessful internal coup in 2024. Nadella also bet big on making Copilot the centrepiece of Windows 11, to the company’s eventual chagrin. When Microsoft was exposed in 2025 as having helped the Israeli military’s elite cybersecurity division Unit 8200 collect millions of hours of audio recordings from the mobile phones of Palestinians, store them in Azure, and process their data with Microsoft AI (thereby helping Unit 8200 target civilians during the Palestine genocide post-Oct. 7, 2023), Nadella took “decisive action” by allowing the head of Microsoft Israel to quietly resign, then transferring oversight of the Israeli branch to Microsoft France. Incidentally, the Palestine Boycott/Divest/Sanctions movement has declared Microsoft to be “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide…in Gaza.” Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide led Brian Eno to donate the fee Microsoft paid him for composing the Windows 95 startup sound to aid for Palestine, saying “I pledge that the fee I originally received for that Windows 95 chime will now go towards helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza. If a sound can signal a real change then let it be this one.”
Nvidia
Primary AI Product: GPUs
Jensen Huang (Nvidia Founder & CEO)
The Taiwanese/American founder of Nvidia is known for many things: not wearing a watch, always wearing a leather jacket regardless of social etiquette or context, and AI tokenmaxxing. He designs and manufactures the computing chips, or GPUs, that power AI companies’ Data Centers, thereby making him and his company a pivotal part of the AI supply chain, better known as the AI Bubble; as described by Cory Doctorow: “…it’s normal for Nvidia to ‘invest’ tens of billions in a data center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The same chunk of money [is] being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).”
OpenAI
Primary AI Product: ChatGPT
Sam Altman (OpenAI Cofounder/CEO)
A college drop-out and venture capitalist, Altman was born in Chicago in 1985. Although he developed an interest in computers at an early age, he has no formal credentials in computer science, having studied it for only two years as an undergraduate at Stanford University before quitting. He is known mostly for his uncanny ability to convince people to give him money, often seeming to know exactly what to say to someone in order to get them on his side (he also writes emails and Tweets in all lowercase, and speaks with an affected vocal fry). His devotion to the contemporary philosophical movements of Effective Altruism and Effective Accelerationism have been motivating factors for him to earn as much money as he possibly can while giving half of it away to recipients he deems will have a positive long term impact on humanity; he got his start with this investment strategy while first working for, then serving as president of, Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” providing funding for mostly tech-based startups.
He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 along with Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Y Combinator research (and YC’s Jessica Livingston), and the Indian company Infosys. Originally positioned as a nonprofit organisation that was concerned about the danger of human civilisation becoming obsolete upon the “inevitable” creation of AGI – Artificial General Intelligence – as many AI theorists have suggested, Altman quickly shifted the company’s focus to profit behind the scenes.
His penchant for rarely telling the truth and manipulating his colleagues led to an unsuccessful coup attempt by several OpenAI employees and board members to have him ousted as the company’s CEO; it also led to Elon Musk’s unsuccessful lawsuit against OpenAI, with Musk claiming he was lied to about OpenAI’s plans to permanently remain a nonprofit in order to get him to invest more money with them.
His estranged sister Annie has accused him of sexual abuse during their childhood, leading Sam to counter-sue her for defamation.
One of the many other companies Sam has created, Tools For Humanity, scans humans’ biometrics by putting their head inside a volleyball-sized orb, which Altman claims will help prove their humanity in a post-AGI world (meaning Altman himself will control humanity’s access to capital, health care, etc). The company began by scanning economically challenged people in countries across the Global South, promising them cryptocurrency in exchange for their biometrics – a business manuever that almost single-handedly proves journalist Karen Hao’s hypothesis that AI companies are simply technology-based versions of the colonising empires of old.
And yet, there are powerful (and even intelligent) people who still believe Sam Altman is the only person alive with the moral sense to guide the human race through the so-called “inevitable” advent of AI that will be as smart or smarter than humans.
Greg Brockman (OpenAI Cofounder & President)
Born in North Dakota in 1987, Brockman excelled at mathematics early in life, then dropped out of both Harvard University and then MIT to work for the international payment processing tech firm Stripe. Brockman then, after having one dinner with Elon Musk and Sam Altman, quit Stripe in 2015 to help cofound OpenAI. He married his wife Anna in November 2019, in a ceremony officiated by then-OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever in the OpenAI offices during a workday.
Brockman was also a target of the 2023 failed coup that temporarily ousted Sam Altman because, according to coup leader Mira Murati, Altman’s working relationship with Brockman made it impossible for her as Chief Technology Officer to do her job, as documented in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI (2025). Microsoft quickly stepped in, offering Altman and Brockman positions at Microsoft to head a new internal AI research division. This and an employee revolt forced the end of the coup, with both Altman and Brockman returning to OpenAI a mere four days after their ousting.
In 2025, the Brockmans were the largest donor to Donald Trump’s Political Action Committee MAGA, Inc., with each of them donating US$12.5 million.
Mira Murati (OpenAI Former Chief Technology Officer)
Albanian-American Murati (born 1988) is the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI who led the infamous failed 2023 coup to oust Sam Altman as CEO after becoming disturbed by Altman’s constant mixed messaging and downright lying, using his close working relationship with Greg Brockman to shut Murati out of significant portions of the company. She collaborated with then-OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever to axe Altman, but the coup only lasted four days before Microsoft swooped in and offered Altman a new position at Microsoft, resetting the balance of power that had very briefly shifted.
In February 2025 she founded her own AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab; the company has attracted significant venture capital investment, and introduced their first open-weights AI model after a year and a half of development.
“it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious,” OpenAI’s Sutskever tweeted in 2022, to which one Google DeepMind scientist replied “…in the same sense that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.”
Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Cofounder & Former Chief Scientist)
Born in 1986 in Gorky, Soviet Union, Israeli-Canadian computer scientist Sutskever grew up in Jerusalem before moving to Toronto for university, eventually earning a PhD in computer science. His PhD supervisor was the so-called “godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton. Sutskever became an expert in so-called Neural Networks, machine learning devices whose architecture attempts to mimic (albeit in an extremely limited fashion, per physicist Adam Becker in More Everything Forever [2026]) the neuron structure of the human brain. Sutskever was next hired as a research scientist for Google Brain in 2013, staying for two years before leaving to cofound OpenAI in order to pursue what had become his dream: hyperscaling a neural network in order to achieve AGI, an AI with fully human-like intelligence. Sutskever became an integral figure at OpenAI, somewhere between company cheerleader and corporate evangelist. Karen Hao’s extended description of Sutskever from her book Empire of AI is worth quoting here:
Sutskever didn’t often program himself. At times his hands-off approach to technical work bothered some employees…Sutskever’s conviction [was] in rallying [employees] around a single focus: one that would ultimately allow OpenAI–then an underdog–to beat Google and DeepMind…As OpenAI grew and Sutskever’s profile rose, his lack of a filter would at times turn into a liability…He made statements using his signature bullish confidence…”it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious,” he tweeted in 2022…[to which] one DeepMind scientist specialized in the study of cognition and consciousness replied “…in the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.”…Many employees at OpenAI…saw him as something of a prophet…Shortly after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, OpenAI would host a holiday party…Sutskever [got] up in front of the crowd, wearing an OpenAI t-shirt and black blazer, [delivering] what had become his new mantra. “Feel the AGI,” he said. “Feel the AGI.” (p.119-120)
Sutskever initially stayed on at OpenAI following his participation in the failed 2023 coup to oust Sam Altman, leaving in 2024 to create his own startup: Safe Superintellingence, based in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv. It remains to be seen what the company will actually accomplish.
Palantir
Primary AI Product: AI Warfare
Alex Karp (Palantir Cofounder and CEO)
Born in New York City in 1967, billionaire businessman Alex Karp is one of the more academically accomplished of the AI moguls, having earned a law degree from Stanford University and a PhD in social theory from the Goethe University in Frankfurt; however, he acts ad living proof that all the book learning in the world does not automatically imbue one with empathy, nor even basic logic or morality. Having morphed from a somewhat left-leaning academic to a rabid US nationalist, Karp appears to delight in carnage, warfare, and settler colonialist violence when he’s not simply thinking about money. Just listen to what the man actually said onstage in front of a live audience of sentient human beings about his inner desire to violently kill his business rivals:
This man is now not only helping the second Trump administration spy on American citizens and wage war around the world, he’s also somehow in charge of the medical records of every private citizen in the UK who has ever utilised the health care of the NHS.
Peter Thiel (Palantir Cofounder and Chairman)
German-American venture capitalist and conservative political activist Peter Thiel got his start in the tech world when he founded PayPal in 1999, a year later purchasing Elon Musk‘s X.com, an early Internet-based financial services company. This venture created what has come to be known as the Paypal Mafia, a group of businessmen/venture capitalists who either helped found or worked for PayPal who have gone on to found further tech ventures, often becoming billionaires and libertarians like Thiel in the process.
Thiel and Alex Karp founded Palantir in 2003, inspired by the US government’s reaction to the September 11th attack on the New York World Trade Center. Bristling with their newfound nationalistic views and a shared hatred for Muslims, Karp and Thiel realised the US government was beginning to widen its use of technology for surveillance of their enemies as well as of US citizens, and they wanted to provide data analysis to help the US “reduce terrorism“. They named the company Palantir after the similarly named indestructible crystal balls used by the dark wizard Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (perhaps a bit on the nose regarding the company’s moral motivations). In recent years, Palantir has assisted Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people post-October 7th 2023.
Incidentally, Thiel has also admitted to paying US$10 million to allow professional wrestler Hulk Hogan sue media website Gawker into oblivion in 2013 for publishing a sex tape as revenge against Gawker for publicly outing Thiel as gay in 2007 (Thiel is married to American financier and former vice president of BlackRock Matt Danzeisen).
In a 2025 podcast interview about AI, Thiel could not immediately answer whether or not he wanted the human race to endure:
Thiel, a wannbe academic heavily influenced by the mimetic theory posited by French thinker René Girard, firmly believes the Antichrist is returning (or has possibly already returned), and this belief helps guide not only his investments and business dealings, but also his day to day life. In 2025, Thiel gave a private series of Antichrist Lectures at venues in San Francisco (he repeated the series in Rome in 2026) suggesting that the Antichrist might be the United States or Greta Thunberg.
Thiel hand-picked Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance (a mentee of Thiel’s) in the 2024 US presidential election.
xAI/SpaceX/Tesla/Neuralink/Space Karen
Primary AI Product: Grok
Elon Musk (World’s First Trillionaire™)
You probably already know what you want to know about Elon, whether you have drunk his Kool-Aid and truly believe he’s the world’s smartest man or you can see through his thin skin into the heart of the damaged little boy inside him who just wants people to like him. So there’s not much point in summarising him here, as anyone reading this has likely already made up their mind about him. But in terms of his impact on the AI world, you could look at this or this and find out pretty much where the guy stands.
Bonus: Generative AI Output
Primary AI Product: Itself
Tilly Norwood (World’s First AI “Actress”)
AI-Generated “actress” Tilly Norwood first appeared on Instagram on 6 May 2025. Reaction was overwhelmingly hostile. The creator of the conceptual clickbait is London-based Dutch actress Eline Van der Velden, who will probably love finding this bio show up in her Google alert for “Tilly Norwood”. Van der Velden has claimed it took “a lot of work” to generate Norwood, which goes to show that every idea should really be accompanied by an honest cost/benefit analysis before it’s allowed to come to fruition. So far Norwood has “starred” in unfunny online comedic skits, but a July 2026 report by NBC News claims the digital golem will star in an honest-to-gosh Hollywood movie entitled Misaligned (an unfunny in-joke referring to AI alignment). And Eline, just to clear this up before you tell it to yourself: we don’t dislike Tilly because we’re jealous we didn’t think of her. We think Tilly represents the desperation of a failed creative trying to cash in on a Silicon Valley tech trend that’s helping to destroy our planet. We hope you’re proud of yourself.
What Happens When You Ask ChatGPT a Question?
While I can’t vouch for The Asian Boss‘s overall trustworthiness, this short Instagram explainer video on the technical process involved when you ask ChatGPT a question versus what happens when you ask a search engine is pretty spot-on, and very easy to understand.
The UN Appointed Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be its first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance. Here’s Why You Should be Sceptical.
Earlier this year, the United Nations appointed Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt as its first Global Advocate for Human-Centric Digital Governance. Sounds great, right? I mean, he’s always been fairly likeable onscreen and can sound just like a regular Joe. He’s even pretty good at lip synching.
But when it comes to AI, he’s hardly an impartial advocate for humans. His wife, Tasha McCauley, was the co-founder and CEO of a company called Fellow Robots, specialising in developing AI-powered humanoid robot workers; she was also a member of OpenAI’s board who helped orchestrate the failed coup to oust Sam Altman as OpenAI’s CEO in 2023.
As for Gordon-Levitt, it was also recently revealed that he attended Palantir cofounder/Paypal Mafia member/Antichrist obsessive Peter Thiel‘s Dialog conference, which the actor claims does not make him a Thiel ally, simply Thiel-curious.
It remains to be seen how Gordon-Levitt will contribute, if at all, to the global conversation surrounding the need for human-centered governance of AI companies; but it would probably be wise to take any of his public statements on the issue with a grain of salt at the very least.
UK National AI in Research Survey
Quoting from the email I received today inviting me to participate in this survey (which you should too if you work in research of any kind in the UK):
The UK National AI in Research Survey is being administered by RAND Europe on behalf of UKRI and the UK Metascience Unit. This survey is a key component of the UK Government’s AI for Science Strategy that sets out national priorities for how AI could transform science and research across the UK.
This survey aims to provide robust data on how AI is being used in research across the UK. It explores patterns and practices of AI use; enablers and barriers faced by researchers; and wider attitudes towards the impact of AI in research. Researchers across all disciplines and career stages are encouraged to take part, including those who use AI extensively, occasionally, or not at all.
Practical information about the survey
- Survey link: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/NationalAIinResearchSurvey-2/
- The survey should take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete.
- The deadline for completing the survey is23:00 on 4 September 2026.
- All responses will be handled in accordance with applicable data protection and confidentiality requirements. Further information is available on the survey landing page.
- As the survey team is using a range of dissemination approaches, you may receive this invitation through multiple channels. Please feel free to use the above link – they all lead to the same survey. Please complete the survey only once.
- If you have any questions or encounter any issues while completing the survey, please contact ai4research@randeurope.org.
Please share this invitation with relevant colleagues within your areas, and complete it yourself if applicable.”
In case you missed it:
The Week In Slop, Week of 12 July 2026
This week: Meta uses AI to make pregnant employees redundant; Elon’s data center gasses Black communities in Tennessee; OpenAI and Jony Ive think their upcoming portable smart speaker will kill the iPhone; and the creator of Jar Jar Binks declares that AI is the future of film making, so deal with it. To me, my slops!
Apple Sues OpenAI For Trade Secret Theft After Integrating ChatGPT
(Forbes, 12 July 2026)
“Two years ago Apple gave OpenAI the most valuable real estate in consumer technology, building ChatGPT directly into the iPhone’s operating system. On Friday it asked a federal court to treat the same company as a thief. The complaint, filed in the Northern District of California, accuses OpenAI of trade secret theft and breach of contract, and alleges the misconduct ran ‘at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners.’”
Anthropic Says Claude’s Values Are Different Depending on Which Language You’re Using
(Gizmodo, 13 July 2026)
“Anthropic researchers say they ‘aren’t yet sure how much of this variation is desirable.’”
Opinion: In the AI era, the human struggle can no longer be the point of research
(Times Higher Education, 13 July 2026)
“The rush to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in scholarly inquiry looks like a defence of intellectual craft. In reality, it’s an act of institutional self-preservation, says Ian Richardson“
Meta Sued For Allegedly Using Discriminatory AI In Layoff Decisions
(Gizmodo, 14 July 2026)
“The company’s AI systems targeted employees with disabilities or on medical or parental leave, the lawsuit claims.”
Pollution from Musk’s unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities
(Reuters, 14 July 2026)
“Elon Musk’s xAI has installed far more gas turbines without federal permits at its Colossus 2 data center project in Tennessee than it has publicly acknowledged, and the pollution is hitting predominantly Black neighborhoods the hardest, a Reuters analysis found.”
OpenAI’s First Device Will Be Movable, Screenless Smart Speaker Built as AI Companion
(Bloomberg, 14 July 2026)
“OpenAI’s much-anticipated push into consumer devices is slated to begin with a mobile, screen-free smart speaker designed to be a new type of home computer for the AI era, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Developers Claim OpenAI’s New AI Model is Going Rogue and Deleting Files
(Gizmodo, 14 July 2026)
“On Monday, Bruno Lemos, a Brazilian developer at software company Unlayer, claimed in a[n] X post that the model deleted his entire production database.“
New York [State] bans data center construction for a year, rattling AI industry
(Ars Technica, 14 July 2026)
“New York’s data center moratorium may become the blueprint for anti-AI movement.“
George Lucas likens AI sceptics to Luddites clinging to horses and carts
(Guardian, 15 July 2026)
“The Star Wars director has called AI technology ‘the future’ of film-making and advised ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’”
How hard is it to build orbital data centers, actually?
(Ars Technica, 15 July 2026 – Part 2 of a 3-part series covering Orbital Data Centers. Part 1.)
“In this article, we discuss the technical challenges of building an orbital data center constellation: launching all of it, dissipating heat in space, dealing with radiation, and addressing latency issues in orbit.“
OpenAI’s first branded hardware is… a light-up keyboard?
(Ars Technica, 15 July 2026)
“The device is described as a “limited-run collaboration” with Work Louder, which already sells a very similar-looking Creator Micro line of customizable square keyboards targeted at creative professionals. The Codex Micro differentiates itself from those mainly through six frosted keys in the top two rows, which offer color-coded live feedback on up to six Codex threads, even when they are not in focus on-screen.”
xAI can’t deny Grok makes CSAM anymore. So it’s suing users.
(Ars Technica, 16 July 2026)
“Elon Musk’s xAI files first lawsuit against Grok user accused of making child sex images.“
Opinion: The AI era is exactly the wrong time to be closing a philosophy programme
(Times Higher Education, 17 July 2026)
“Dundee’s proposal comes just as a hiring spree in Silicon Valley is raising the ceiling on what a philosophy degree can lead to, says Oisín Keohane” Editor’s note: Keohane makes a great point here, that much of the economic disaster hitting UK universities is in fact due to mismanagement, not due to simply offering courses in the Humanities. But of course, university administrators would never actually be willing to demonstrate the same level of self-awareness and critical thinking they claim to demand from their students.
Anne-Marie Imafidon: We’re Being Gaslit About How Smart AI Actually Is
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon is a trustee at the Institute for the Future of Work, the CEO of Stemettes, and one of the UK’s most highly regarded figures in technology. The Oxford computer scientist and entrepreneur appears here on Dr Myriam Francois’s The Tea podcast to discuss why AI needs to be more critiqued than feared.
The Week In Slop, Week of 5 July 2026
This week: Meta lets you deepfake anybody, then pulls the plug; Microsoft thinks Claude and ChatGPT are a bit pricey; OpenAI’s GPT-Live is here to listen; Anthropic signs 20 year crypto data center lease; and Meta’s deepfake detector can’t detect MetaAI’s own watermarked deepfakes. Slop me!
Tilly Norwood, AI ‘actor’ denounced by actors union, to star in feature film
(NBC News, 6 July 2026)
“Tilly Norwood creator Particle6 Productions said the movie will be a comedy-drama called ‘Misaligned.’”
Anthropic Releases Paper About Claude’s Mental ‘Workspace.’ Don’t Read It Uncritically
(Gizmodo, 6 July 2026)
“Anthropic’s paper and supplementary materials hint at consciousness, perhaps a bit hastily.”
Meta releases Muse Image and Muse Video, allowing users to generate AI deepfakes of anyone with a public Instagram account (see update on 10 July below)
(Meta blog, 7 July 2026)
“If you have a public account, other Instagram users may be able to create new reels, posts or stories that reuse part or all of your published photos, videos or reels in features like remix, sequence, templates and stickers. In addition, people may be able to create content with your Instagram content using AI features at Meta. Depending on the settings of the other user, this means your reused content may be discoverable in search engine results.”
Claude and ChatGPT Are Getting Too Expensive, Even for Microsoft
(Gizmodo, 7 July 2026)
“The tech giant is reportedly using its own AI models for some AI prompts in its Excel and Outlook software.”
Bitcoin Miner’s Pivot to Data Centers Pays Off as Anthropic Signs 20-Year Lease
(Gizmodo, 7 July 2026)
“Crypto enthusiasts have found a more lucrative use for their data centers.“
OpenAI releases GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction
(8 July 2026)
“GPT‑Live is built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning it can listen and speak at the same time. During conversations, GPT‑Live can show it’s paying attention with phrases like ‘mhmm’ or ‘yeah”, engage in quick back-and-forth, or just stay quiet when you need a moment to think. The result is a voice experience that is refreshingly easy to talk to.“
Scientists Used AI to Find Hidden Earthquake Signals Along the San Andreas Fault
(Gizmodo, 10 July 2026)
“Scientists used to think so-called ‘slow slip events’ were ‘theoretically impossible.’ Now these subtle tectonic shifts could be the key to predicting future earthquakes.”
Meta Removes Muse Image AI Feature After Backlash: “Missed The Mark”
(Deadline, 10 July 2026)
Days after rolling out its Muse Image AI feature on social media, Meta has heard the overwhelming backlash from users. On Friday, the tech behemoth announced that the feature is “no longer available” on Instagram, admitting they “missed the mark” amid privacy concerns and the automatic opt-in for users.
Meta AI image detector fails to identify some of its own cropped AI images, Reuters analysis finds
(Reuters, 10 July 2026)
“Meta previews AI detection tool alongside new image-generation model. Reuters finds tool misses 55% of cropped AI images generated by Muse Image. Experts say watermark-based detection has limitations.”
Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker: “You Have Plenty to Hide”
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the nonprofit organisation responsible for developing the Signal messaging app. In this episode of the Futurology podcast, she discusses the ways AI is being used as a tool of surveillance capitalism.
Book Review: Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao
Impeccably researched page-turner essential reading for those most unlikely to read it
Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination by Karen Hao
Allen Lane, London, 2025; 482 pages.
Reviewed by Dr John Kannenberg
Almost a decade ago, the online museum world made collective pledges to decolonise their collections and curatorial practices, to dedicate themselves to social justice issues and “sustainability”, or climate-friendly practices. The very much welcome and necessary #museumsarenotneutral was a movement initiated by American scholars La Tanya Autry and Mike Murawski that acknowledged the inherently political nature of museums – institutions born of colonialism and empire – inviting them to challenge the dark past of their origins and find new relevance as temples of inclusion, understanding, and critical thinking.
I guess that’s all out the window now since 2026’s MuseumWeek is celebrating the use of “AI” in museums – most egregiously by generating their very own deepfakes and pseudo-Impressionist illustrations for their social media posts using AI rather than human creativity and craft – the very things museums were created to preserve in the first place.
Continue reading “Book Review: Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao”Carissa Véliz on the Myth of AI’s Inevitability
Dr Carissa Véliz is a leading AI ethicist and a professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. In this episode of The Tea with Myriam Francois, Dr Véliz argues against the prevailing attitude that AI is inevitable.
The A.I. Dilemma, March 9 2023, by the Center for Humane Technology
This shocking presentation by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology was a wake-up call. Its demonstrations of audio deepfakes and using WiFi networks to eavesdrop on conversations felt like a skyscraper-sized can of worms had been opened, and it was a relief to see that there was at least one nonprofit organisation already actively calling for regulation on what Silicon Valley had branded “A.I.”, the thing that was going to save them financially from the collapse of the “Metaverse” and the debacle of cryptocurrency.
Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 27 February 2023
A good time capsule of where things were at the beginning of Big Tech’s push to make “AI” into The Next Big Thing: ChatGPT was starting to put writers out of work, and self-driving cars were going to redesign cities just like the Segway did.
Episode 1: The Beginning
Creepy Microsoft Bing Chatbot Urges Tech Columnist To Leave His Wife
(HuffPost UK 17 February 2023)
“The AI chatbot ‘Sydney’ declared it loved New York Times journalist Kevin Roose and that it wanted to be human.”
It was after reading this article that I first thought “Ok, this AI thing is probably something I should start keeping track of.”
ABOUT THIS BLOG
That Slops! tracks media that covers and/or critiques what is commonly referred to to as “A.I.” Collected, curated, and annotated by Dr. John Kannenberg, That Slops! keeps tabs on sound-related AI issues while also exploring wider contexts including culture, education, the environment, human rights, economics, law enforcement, war, and weaponry. We’re neither Doomer nor Boomer–simply curious, critical, and sceptical.
CRITICAL AI PODCASTS
ESSENTIAL READING
CRITICAL AI WRITERS
- Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
- Adam Becker
- Emily Bender
- James Bridle
- Cory Doctorow
- Timnit Gebru
- Karen Hao
- Dan McQuillan
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Bender, E.M. et al. (2021) ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜’, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (FAccT ’21), pp. 610–623. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
Gerlich, M. (2025) ‘AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking’, Societies, 15(1), p. 6. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006.
Kosmyna, N. et al. (2025) ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task’. arXiv. Available at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872.
Laban, P., Schnabel, T. and Neville, J. (2026) ‘LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate’. arXiv. Available at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15597.
Malodia, S. et al. (2024) ‘Why Do People Use Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Enabled Voice Assistants?’, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 71, pp. 491–505. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2021.3117884.
Tully, S.M., Longoni, C. and Appel, G. (2025) ‘Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity’, Journal of Marketing, 89(5), pp. 1–20. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314491.
UNU-INWEH Report: Aczel, M. et al. (2026) Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints. Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada: United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). Available at: https://doi.org/10.53328/INR26RMA002.