JD Shadel

“If they couldn’t be bothered to write this, why should we be bothered to read it?” ‼️ In their cathartic, broligarchy-rattling new book, “The AI Con,” @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social are handing out needles so you, too, can burst the hype bubble. www.esckey.co/do-you-belie...

"I understand that there have been some experiments showing that LLM review may have similar outcomes to human peer review, but who cares? Either scholarship, research and publishing are human enterprises or they aren’t." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu... >>

Not a single parent has filed a book challenge in Palm Beach in two years. The district just removed 1800 books anyway, because AI told them to. There are many reasons that is unthinkable but let's not forget AI DOES NOT HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOKS. IT CANNOT READ THEM. It just makes crap up!

Based on some pitches I’ve gotten, just like Christmas, PRs do not understand the true meaning of Locktober

Naza is the only film I’ve ever seen in a cinema where the credits roll, and the entire audience sits there in silence. No one moved. The credits rolled. The credits ended. The lights came on. The room was motionless, speechless.

now Trump coming for golf courses is a bridge too far

Meta also fucked with the Brazilian elections in a very similar way

my immediate response would probably be, i didn’t consent to you opening that suitcase, sir; put it and your little pool away, please

A goddamn Buddhist mountain temple?? I traveled across the country and hiked an hour for a temple light festival, which usually means hand-made lanterns, and it's AI slop projection-mapped onto ancient buildings??? Is there no escape?

I think the thing people forget is that the CEOs of calculator companies were, in the calc-hype of the 1970s, warning that calculators would self replicate and could take over the world as well, same with toaster CEOs and toast hype before that

New: I pulled the Character ai bankruptcy documents. They show: - They were spending $14 million/month on compute alone at a time their revenue was around ~$1 million/month - Currently losing $9 million a month - They admitted they enshittified & that it didnt work www.404media.co/character-ai...

AI lets us work faster, which is why switching to using AI makes the game delayed

For Halloween this year I’m dressing up as a LinkedIn thought leader. Whenever anyone asks me what I’m dressed up as, I’ll reply with, “Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: [then go back to the bar to get another drink]”

When I moved to Portland with only a suitcase and a dream, I didn’t realize I’d booked my flight to the wrong Portland, and I just ran with it www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Me painting a canvas: *I love this! I’m discovering a new language a new poetics yesss* Me painting six doors and skirting boards after painting too many walls: *DIY as in I want to die!!*

Breaking: Microsoft has updated its usage policy to make clear users cannot be rude to Excel. Be nice to your spreadsheet in case it might one day be conscious. It’s Pascal's wager but for a particular kind of software we're trying to market as powerful beyond belief (ergo, gestures at discourse).

HOMOPHOBIC BULLIES: “being bi and gay is very bad and evil and unnatural and totally fake!!” Bi and gay people, hearing that coming out may be dangerous, that they might lose family of friends, or might not get or keep a job: *keeps quiet about their truth* HOMOPHOBIC BULLIES: “SEE!!”

Well-sourced, eye-opening (but in hindsight, unsurprising) piece from Adam. The main use of AI by publishers appears to be publicity/marketing. I would like to explain why this is a bad use from the perspective of someone who gets pitched dozens of books a week for coverage.

Nooooooooooo (Edinburgh)

Overheard this dreadful line of gossip earlier in the pharmacy, whilst waiting, and I’ll do my best to transcribe from memory: “they strike me as someone who appears very concerned with how others perceive them and also dreadful at understanding how that makes others perceive them”

[picture people on LinkedIn thinking about what their thought leadership take of the day would be about the announcement of the live-streamed execution in Texas]

They don’t know this, but everyone in my generation implicitly asks themselves this exact question whenever they’re doing something, anything: but how would this be perceived on my MySpace page??!!

cute little dogs keep following me

can they not help themselves from taking the bait?!? there’s too much oxygen in the “centrist” discourse about ultra rich tech lords adopting “SI” v “AI” when (a) it’s stupid partly because “SI” means as much nothing as “AI” and (b) it’s clearly a fascist dog whistle distracting from myriad things

There are things I greatly miss about my time writing for Vice (RIP) … for example, today I was thinking about writing an essay about the taboo of shigella. Where else in the widely read press would one write a reported essay about shigella today!? What we have lost, dear reader, what we have lost!

you’re in a coffee shop in Seattle, Washington, and the next song begins: “Now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter, and what does that say about me?!?!?”

I was quoted in this piece, so I thought I'd share the bits that weren't included: What I see here is language models doing what language models do: reading and writing. Wikis are prime targets for agents, which are foremost writing machines.

“The most important thing for thinking about the way this particular technology is developed is to ask where accountability can be found.” I spoke with @sciam.bsky.social on “Rogue AI” and how that frame displaces accountability. Podcast and transcript below.

We have published now two full reports both debunking this claim and shining a new light on the climate impacts of companies like NVIDIA and others who insist on this without evidence. Public control won't fix this problem - not at all. ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/b... ketanjoshi.co/2026/09/16/n...

Why isn't this on every TV screen and not the fairy tale of killer robots

I will happily attend your destination wedding if it means you come to me

NEW: After we investigated a company that buys struggling news sites and turns them into AI-powered content mills that churn out garbage using fake journalists and subject matter experts, Google has officially cracked down on the scheme: futurism.com/artificial-i...

hey Hey how are you? Not bad. You? yeah all good just had dinner Same. nice. Yeah what you have? Pickles just pickles? yeah I cut up a bunch of pickles and put them on a tray and I ate a pickle tray wicked Yeah so what are you into? Pickles

when I write something that’s very typically me, I’ll chuckle to myself “oh how Shadelian of you”

New from @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and me: "It is high time for us to regulate usage of systems sold as “AI”, not because they are magical machines, but because they are error-prone products that shouldn’t be used in high stakes scenarios." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I think if you want a demo of the mechanics of how AI doom-hype detracts from the climate push, listen to this Al Gore interview w/ @heatmap.news, where he dismisses the climate impacts (using a spurious comparison, imo) but treats the chatbot doom as serious and real heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

It's kind of wild how many businesses whose entire model is convincing you to give up convenience and affordability in exchange for a more ethical option are going all-in on AI and completely shooting themselves in the foot.

feeling ready to take an evil job, make a shit load of money, then quit and tell everyone how evil my job was (this is an evergreen subtweet)

This. This is the hill I will die on.

Somehow "the guy who buys struggling publications and fills them with fake journalists that publish thousands of articles of AI slop to overwhelm google? turns out he goes way back with Ghislaine Maxwell, the collaborator of Jeffrey Epstein" feels like the ultimate and most exhausting 2026 sentence

in Q4 i am moving my Friendships tier to a dynamic pricing model for social occasions where we divide the bill for, say, lunch based on a variable percentage I calculate by asking myself how much fun I’m having when the card reader arrives

Women trying to succeed in Silicon Valley AI and effective altruist spaces are reporting feeling serious social pressure to attend sex parties - where people have reported being sexually assaulted, like below. Events like Aella’s “Slutcon,” which is happening again this weekend.

I asked AI to help me rewrite the Bible. “Jesus didn’t just cry. He wept.”

before there were polycules there were ☞ manicules