UC Regent / Podcaster Scott Galloway on CNN:

Yes, we shouldn't be scared of AI. We should be scared of reckless people with mal intent who use AI.

In 2001, a woman named Sharon Whipple was mauled by two dogs. And ultimately the owners of the dogs were put in -- put in prison. We're now prosecuting the parents of kids who find unsecured AR15s and use those to kill others.

I think it's the incentive. There's always a wizard behind the curtain here, and I think we have to create incentives, specifically disincentives, and make it clear that, OK, while these bots are in fact coordinating and they show incredible resourcefulness and high IQ, somebody program the incentives here. So, moving to solution, I think part of it is you have to have incentives, specifically disincentives that say you, the company, and maybe individually are responsible for the bad outcomes here.

I just get this sense if you tell these companies their IPOs might be threatened or they risk criminal prosecution, they're going to figure this out. We figured out a way to control atomic weapons. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to control this. And the notion that they're sentient and it's out of my control is an attempt to absolve themselves of the guilt and the responsibility that they should bear here.

The Whipple case was one of the more insane / divisive SF local crime cases, (TrueAnon ep if you aren't familiar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMd0mPAqR8A ) - so that's an odd and interesting pull for Galloway on national news.

I don't think repurposing the logic of the NRA "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is the play though, and I think the incentive framing is too watered down. This isn't a problem we can nudge our way out of.

AI 'actress' Tilly Norwood melts down and starts talking in CANTONESE as she is interviewed by Piers Morgan h/t Naked Capitalism

Long-in-the-tooth Mr Morgan remained remarkably calm as the AI bot unleashed a monologue in Cantonese, staring down the lens and allowing her to finish her point.

But Mr Conti was stunned, shaking his head incredulously at the unexpected answer to his question before turning his head to smile, presumably at someone else sitting in the room with him.

He soon managed to compose himself, offering the simple rebuttal, 'I didn't quite get that,' which proved sufficient to cut Tilly off and fix the glitch.

At this point, even Mr Morgan had to laugh, chuckling for a few seconds before addressing the AI bot, who sat in her seat expectantly as if rolling out a Cantonese soliloquy on an English-language YouTube show was the most normal thing in the world.

Delivering the bad news, he said: 'You suddenly seemed to be speaking Chinese, completely randomly for no reason.'

Mr Conti by now had completely lost control, giggling hysterically - either in amusement at Tilly's off-script answer, or in unbridled relief that his job might be safe for the time being.

Why the hell is it so hard to find a translation of what it 'said'? Not a single news outlet could ask a native speaker, can't even be bothered to dump it through whisper? This, how many years after YouTube force pushed autodubbing? The lack of effort is telling.

r/Cantonese not impressed either.

Anyway once we replace long in tooth piers with PiersBot 9000, itll just know Cantonese and this won't even make the paper

Saw this post about irregular last week https://www.effort.news/irregular

Omer Nevo, Irregular’s co-founder and CTO, is a board member of Effective Altruism Israel, as well as Effective Altruism NGOs Heron and Probably Good. Dan Lahav, Irregular’s co-founder and CEO, received $395,000 to start a course along with Sella Nevo, Omer Nevo’s brother. Sella and Omer co-founded an NGO to educate people about Effective Altruism, Impact Focused Education. They also co-founded Probably Good together.2

I kind of feel like maybe I should start my own NGO that does fuck all, seems pretty easy

AdExchanger deserves its own kind of sneer club and it isn't even the worst of them.

Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:

A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or "super-intelligent AI systems"), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species.

I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.)

"Very Real" ??? :(

Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/automattics-interim-ceo-and-legal-chief-signed-reciprocal-severance-deals-during-mullenwegs-brief-ouster/

$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.

It's a listserv. dm me if you'd like me to ask Paul to add you.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html

Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).

Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:

Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts aren't wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.

This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then 'volunteering' to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage 'Too big to fail' t-shirts floating around on ebay.

Fun times!!

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism

Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.

gah

Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.

lmao of course they were