Quotulatiousness

November 9, 2026

The looming end of secure encryption

Filed under: Business, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Secure encryption is one of those background utilities we all depend on, like plumbing and sewers: it only comes to our attention when something is going wrong. David Clinton says that things are going wrong with encryption standards, thanks to the technical omnicause, artificial intelligence:

Without secure encryption, we’ll all be living dangerously

This topic has a guaranteed boredom score of 12 (where “10” represents catatonic). But its could make a difference to my own life score is 15 (where “10” represents “Yikes!”).

Data encryption is the peg on which the possibility of all modern financial and healthcare-related activity hangs. Without standard encryption algorithms like AES and RSA:

  • The contents of every exchange of information between you and your bank’s website would be visible to anyone on the internet.
  • The passwords you use to authenticate to your digital accounts would be readable by anyone with access to any node between you and your account’s host.
  • The sensitive data stored by any financial, healthcare, or government organization would be visible to anyone with access to their host systems — access made possible by decrypted passwords (see above).

Encrypted data contains all the original information. But its value lies in the assumption that the underlying algorithm is so complex that it would require the use of powerful computers and hundreds of years to crack it.

For the past 50 years, that assumption has held up well. But the theoretical existence of quantum compute resources — which can execute exponentially more compute operations than traditional processors — presents a theoretical threat to existing algorithms.

In other words sometime within the next 10-20 years, quantum compute devices will be powerful enough to brute-force the end of modern encryption. That sounds scary.

But it’s arguably not even the real problem. That, as Tyler Cowan recently wrote in the Free Press, would be the recent explosion of AI-driven discoveries in mathematics. Such events have introduced concerns about the odds encryption security could be compromised in months rather than years.

Frontier AI models are now at least making progress solving longstanding mathematical problems. The pace of discovery seems to be growing and it seems inevitable that someone somewhere will turn a powerful AI model on the algorithms we rely on.

November 6, 2026

AI and open-source software

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR has become a big fan of AI-assisted code writing, and as a result I’m a bit less “doom-y” about the potential uses of AI because ESR is a living legend in the software world. If he thinks it’s a good thing, then I’m inclined to believe him. That said, as he illustrates here, not everyone in the OS community agrees with him about code-writing clankers:

I find it bizarre that so many open-source projects have posted policies against AI-assisted contributions.

This will not last, because they’ll be outcompeted by projects not afraid to use power tools to debug the code and and features. In crucial cases, AI-hostile projects will be forked to remove that restriction.

How can anybody not see this coming?

This dynamic is so obvious – and anti-AI rules so patently futile and doomed – that I have to conclude there is something like a religious frenzy going on.

I’m going to bend over backwards to be fair about this. There was a point earlier in the development of AI at which such restrictions might have made temporary sense, because model outputs were prone to enough noise and hallucination to be a net drag on productivity.

We’re long past that now. And the obvious solution to merge-request queues flooded with AI-generated slop is to use AI to filter them so exercising human judgment on the remainder remains practical.

I’m not going to argue rights and wrongs here. One might just as well argue that it’s wrong for sandcastles to collapse when the tide comes in.

The religious frenzy does bother me, though. Maybe less than it did 5 minutes ago when the mind infection was “wokeness”, but a mob of crazies is never an edifying or reassuring sight.

I guess the most positive thing I can observe is that this phase of nuttery won’t last long, because it can’t. The selective pressure against it is too brutal.

It does leave me wondering what cause the nutters will attach themselves to next. Alas.

November 1, 2026

“Welcome to the wonderful world of carbon accounting”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the biggest blind spots for climate warriors is the proportion of hand-waving and wishful thinking required to make their grand unified visions of a Net Zero world, as revealed by John Robson as he conducts the search for the fabled “Scope 3”:

Net Zero image from Jo Nova

We recently got an email from Heatmap saying “Half of companies with net-zero commitments call scope 3 their biggest barrier.” And we thought duh what? And then “Probably the other half said ‘What’s scope 3?'” It turns out to be the carbon emissions you don’t emit but get blamed for anyway. More fun from the wacky world of climate economics. Which has this regrettable feature in common with interventionist economics generally: They don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. The email also said “Most are stuck on spend-based estimates too rough to prove whether their reduction programs are working”. As in the old Soviet Union the planners basically planned to spend because unless you let consumer preferences form prices in competitive markets, you can’t tell whether you’re making something useful or just sawdust sausages and ill-fitting size 12 shoes all for left feet.

In a striking departure from modern journalistic practice, we responded by Googling “Scope 3”. And it turns out to be something very revealing in its unrevealingness. For instance, from the “Carbon Trust“:

    The Greenhouse Gas Protocol – which provides the most widely recognised accounting standards for greenhouse gas emissions – categorises GHG emissions into three ‘scopes’. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the purchase and use of electricity, steam, heating and cooling. By using the energy, an organisation is indirectly responsible for the release of these GHG emissions. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in the upstream and downstream activities of an organisation.

So here’s the problem. Scope 1 is reasonably easy to measure, at least in principle. It’s the GHGs you emit directly by doing whatever you’re doing, minus presumably staff breathing out CO2 while at work. Scope 2 isn’t too bad: it’s the same as Scope 1 except it’s from your power suppliers for whatever share of their output you acquire. But Scope 3 is a very different beast. It’s all the emissions from all the people you bought stuff from, plus all the emissions from all the people who bought your products. All of them. Every single one. Even your kid’s lemonade stand. And all based on pseudo-scientific “accounting and reporting standards” that sound good, make work, generate money and are no use in the real world.

Here we must again cite Leonard Read’s 1958 classic “I, Pencil“, a demonstration even from a simpler era when people used pencils not AI that tracing out all the steps involved in making things, was inherently a transcomputable and never-ending quest. Thus, the pencil tells the reader, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me”. Take any part of it: the wood, the paint, the eraser, the graphite, and you touch a global supply chain of near infinite complexity. Among a great many other things, that:

    My bit of metal – the ferrule – is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

And to explain who made the coffee and shoes and razor blades for the miners, and who produced the fuel for the ships that carried these goods about, and who made the machine tools to create sheet brass, and on and on, would defy any central planner even before they got to the problem that all these people in turn used pencils (we said it was 1958). Which is why after an initial burst of idealism Soviet Five-Year Plans were essentially reduced to replicating last year’s plan and adding a few percent.

Now imagine trying to track all the carbon emissions. Because it’s what Scope 3 aims to do as if it were a mere detail.

Incidentally Soviet planners from the 1960s on into the 1980s actually thought that more powerful computers would overcome this problem, being unclear on the concept of “transcomputable” particularly as it applied to systems with feedback loops. Then the USSR done died. But not this hope.

Thus Heatmap insists that it can be done with their handy guide, which “lays out a four-step playbook for closing the gap between scope 3 commitments and measurable supply chain progress, using domain-specialized sustainability AI” and from whose three “What you’ll learn” gems the first is:

    How to move from spend-based estimates to product-level emissions data in hours – with AI-powered material mapping and multi-agent validation

Oooh. AI-powered. Domain-specialized no less. And multi-agent validation. We suppose it beats getting it all from Agent 86. But not by much because the fantasy of measuring all the carbon outputs from all your inputs relies on the fantasy of measuring all your inputs and you can’t.

In a market economy, a real one, you don’t have to. As Read also said, as long as you know the price you must pay for the immediate inputs, how to assemble them into outputs, and the price you can get for those outputs, you can tell whether a purchase is rational. But if you have to know more than you can, you’re sunk. Especially if you don’t know you can’t.

Welcome to the wonderful world of carbon accounting. Do not mistake it for the real kind of accounting though.

Optimism about the west, despite current events

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam explains why it’s still possible to be optimistic about western culture, even in the face of things like the coup in Poland this weekend:

People always ask me why I’m so optimistic about the West.

A few weeks ago, I told a friend I’d never been more bullish on our future. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. So I gave him two predictions.

First: the EU, as it exists today, is going to collapse.

Second: we are going to hold a Nuremberg trial for communism. Not for people. For ideas. Because those ideas are still the ones killing us today.

Then I explained why.

There’s one law I’ve watched play out everywhere, in startups, in family fortunes, in empires:

The more a system is full of money and empty of intelligence, the faster it decays.

Take the simplest example. The son or daughter of a billionaire who inherited the money but not the education that came with it. They become parasites on what their parents built. They don’t understand what they’re running. But they’re surrounded by courtiers telling them they’re brilliant, so they feel invincible. And they start breaking things, one confident decision at a time.

That’s the West’s ruling class right now. And here’s the part people miss: a decadent system with no intelligence left doesn’t slowly drift. It collapses. Because it can’t stop making mistakes, and every mistake is bigger than the last.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

In 2024, Marc Andreessen sat down with officials from the Biden administration. By his account, they told him not to bother funding AI startups. AI would be a game for two or three giant companies, working hand in hand with the government. When he pointed out that AI is just math, they told him that during the Cold War they classified entire branches of physics, and they could do the same with the math behind AI.

Think about who they said that to. The man who wrote “Software is eating the world.” The man who understood decades ago that whatever the state gets its hands on, it ruins. Nobody with a functioning brain walks into a room with Marc Andreessen and says that. Those people did. With total confidence.

And now, this week: Donald Tusk.

Police surrounding Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Government-backed judges declaring the chief justice suspended. All of it on a Friday evening, while the elected president was on a plane to Senegal, forced to turn around and fly back to Warsaw.

When you’re winning the argument, you don’t send the police to the courthouse.

This is what decadence looks like up close. Endless money. Zero feedback from reality. High on their own supply. Surrounded by people who will never tell them no.

Systems like that don’t reform. They break.

So yes, people find me optimistic. This is why. I’m not betting on these people fixing anything. I’m betting on what gets built after they’ve finished breaking it.

September 26, 2026

Social media seems to be antithetical to the ability to concentrate

Filed under: Food, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I took over doing the cooking in our household a couple of years ago, so I’ve been paying more attention to cooking channels on YouTube and recipe-oriented blogs than I did before. Substack‘s algorithm suggested that I might enjoy reading this post by Romilla Arber, making the case that “Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false”:

Photo from Stirring Thoughts

This article is about mirepoix, soffritto, social media, and the secret to a happy life. A lot to cover, but as I often say, everything is interconnected.

I dislike social media, in particular Instagram. I left X many months ago, as did my business. We use Facebook for local connection and, obviously, Substack, which currently I view differently. Instagram is ridiculous. It is a waste of time to be on it, and it is populated with so many lies and misrepresentations that it is difficult to work out what is fact and what is not.

I recently read a Substack article called “Meet All The Middle Aged Women Who Don’t Exist” by Robin Levine Shobin. It exposes the accounts on Instagram supposedly belonging to women in their fifties and sixties who look fabulous but who actually do not exist: an army of AI wellness women, manufactured to make women like me feel we need what they have.

The other tranche of accounts I have noticed multiplying on Instagram, like a terrifying science-fiction virus, are those owned by “successful” entrepreneurs. Most of these are fake, and are being used to sell overpriced masterclasses and mentorships to people who lack confidence and need money. The more our brains see of the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it. This used to be called brainwashing. There is probably another techie term for it now.

These accounts don’t surprise me. But they represent one of the reasons why Instagram is a monumental waste of time.

This feeling was further compounded today when I spent a few minutes watching a video made by someone, the central thesis of which was to make the most of the precious time we have on this planet, and to value those simple experiences that we take for granted at the time. The whole premise of Instagram is to make us envious of others, the way they look and the lives they have, and by consequence not to value the lives we live. It involves endlessly scrolling through videos and images, wasting precious time.

I have also noticed that if I spend time scrolling through short-form content, I find it harder to concentrate on something that requires longer attention, like reading a book. Sad, but true. I am now retraining my brain to concentrate on reading uninterrupted for longer periods. I was surprised at how tough this would be.

This sorry state of affairs brings me to soffritto and mirepoix: the same thing really, the former being Italian and the latter French. Both are the art of chopping aromatic vegetables finely and frying them slowly, in olive oil if you are Italian and butter if you are French. These aromatic vegetables are usually onion, celery and carrot, and the ratio varies country to country. The magic is in the simplicity. They are the flavour foundation for many stocks, sauces, soups and stews all over the world. Other countries may substitute white onion for spring onion, or carrot for peppers, but the point of the process remains the same: to create beauty through time and effort.

Mirepoix is the antithesis of Instagram, as it values what cannot be seen in the final result over what is superficial and false. The preparation of the vegetables takes care and time, and it is the investment in this preparation, the foundational substance, that creates the beauty and taste of the final dish. Instagram is about superficiality. What is not obvious is worthless.

Given how late I started doing serious cooking, I doubt that I even knew what mirepoix was two years ago … but I’ve pretty much always thought of Instagram as a total waste of time among all the various social media sites people use.

September 12, 2026

“STOP POWER TOOLS! the signs say. WOODWORKING UNDER THREAT!”

Filed under: Technology, Tools, USA, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR has a thought experiment for us:

Prefabbed components and appliances for a Levittown home.
Image from Construction Physics.

Imagine it’s the 1940s. You’re a carpenter. Power tools are beginning to replace hand tools for ordinary work. Furthermore, jobs that would have been impossible or ruinously expensive are suddenly within reach.

You show up at a worksite one fine morning and it’s being picketed. STOP POWER TOOLS! the signs say. WOODWORKING UNDER THREAT!

Puzzled, you accost one of the demonstrators and ask him why he has a signboard in his hand rather than tools.

“Power tools are a menace!” he says. “How are you going to train apprentices if they can’t feel the wood through their hands?”

“What happens when we can chew through aged quality timber faster than we can grow new trees?”

“Carpentry isn’t just a set of skills and habits, it’s a mindset. It won’t be any true carpenters left if we let this go on.”

You inquire further and discover that they have plans. Plans to exclude from any job they work on any craftsman who has ever used a power tool or even spoken approvingly about them.

Meanwhile, inside the picket line, a house is going up. Men are working. Cutting and joining the framing is going faster than you could have imagined 10 years ago.

You look at the workers. You look at the demonstrators. One group is talking. The other is getting stuff done. One group looks like the past, the other like the future. In this moment, you get to decide which group you’re going to join.

This post was not about carpentry.

September 10, 2026

Skynet Industries: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus …”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

So … are we now okay with panicking over the threat of artificial intelligence?

The events of the last 24 hours are stunning. And not in a good way. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of tech, and it’s unfolding right now.

Here’s a start. Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. He warned that the technology could kill everybody before the end of the decade.

He made this announcement just 20 hours ago:

Is this really true? Maybe Coxon is just a disgruntled employee. We need to find out what other insiders think.

As if in answer to this question, another AI scientist — Evan Hubinger at Anthropic — quickly moved to endorse Coxon’s concerns.

[…]

The AI fanboys are trying to defuse this situation. But their responses fall apart at the slightest touch. Consider the smear that this is just a PR campaign. Really? Others are hinting it could be a Chinese plot. Yeah, sure …

But the biggest lie is the claim that these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reality is that they understand this subject better than anybody.

What’s happening here is obvious — eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they’re seeing. But they don’t have the power individually to stop the insanity.

If this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely. Now the people making it happen are warning it just might kill everybody.

This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.

Update: Jim Treacher, of all people, casts a bit of doubt on the “AI’s gonna kill us all!” concerns:

And that moment from Terminator 2: Robotic Boogaloo is what everybody thinks about when they get scared of A.I. I know this because it’s what I think about when I get scared of A.I.

What happens when Skynet becomes self-aware in real life?

What happens when all these software agents that we keep welcoming into our daily lives decide they know how to run things better than we do? How much control can we give up to them before they attack us?

Is it already too late? Is there any going back? Is all hope lost? Are we doomed?

Etc., etc.

[…]

So according to this guy, A.I. professionals see it like the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. We gotta get there first, before our enemies do. That part sounds plausible.

But who is this guy? I’ve never heard of Jacob Coxon. Nobody has. He opened this Twitter account earlier this year, and that was his very first post. Now he’s all over the place. Everybody’s talking about this.

It feels like astroturf.

If you don’t know what that propaganda technique is, it’s just what it sounds like: astroturf. At first glance, it looks real. Grassroots. But it’s fake. And that might be what’s happening here.

A guy named Parker Thayer, who works for the Capital Research Center, writes:

And then he lists stuff about this that seems … hinky. I think the kids say sus. It’s sus.

For example, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about this kid’s claim 20 minutes before he posted it. Before, not after.

The first Twitter accounts to promote that post were from nonprofit groups opposing A.I.

And now, all these Democrats are screaming about it. Bernie Sanders wants to smash all the machines. Old Man Shakes Fist at Cloud. [BERNIE VOICE] “Gotta stop the computers! They’re gonna kill us all!”

Does that mean all this is fake? I don’t know. It doesn’t make me trust any of it. It makes me skeptical.

August 30, 2026

The short-term impact of widespread LLM usage

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t used any of the latest tranche of LLM agents, although I’m assured by those who do use them that they’re significant improvements over the previous iterations, so I don’t really have an opinion about the state of the “AI Revolution”, but Freddie deBoer has a rare non-catastrophist yet also non-utopian take:

My LLM skepticism is really pretty simple: immense practical consequences have been predicted for them, essentially none of those consequences have come true or can be proven to be imminent, and because reality has a powerful status quo bias it’s not sensible to simply assume that they’re coming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and no one has produced such evidence. My position is not a complicated one to understand and shouldn’t be controversial. I’m acting with no more skepticism towards AI claims than I regularly demonstrate towards claims about religion or astrology or New Age woowoo.

And, crucially, I’m not the one who has set the comically over-the-top expectations here; the AI maximalists and their enablers in the media have. Sundar Pichai, who as the CEO of Google is one of the ten most consequential figures in the business world, said that LLMs were a bigger deal than the discovery of fire or electricity. AI maximalists frequently insist that the LLM era is equivalent to or more important than the Industrial Revolution. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropoic, went on a podcast from The New York Times (the stentorian, buttoned-down New York Times) and talked about a future where AI colonizes Mars of its own volition. Reports out of Silicon Valley hold that many tech workers sincerely believe that they’re a few years from owning their own asteroid mines and will be so wealthy they essentially step outside of the human experience when it comes to material desire. (If you look, you can find concerning stories on Reddit and similar places of techies spending down all of their saving and taking out large loans, on the theory that in the next few years they will become trillionaires thanks to LLMs.) Scott Alexander seems increasingly unwilling even to countenance the possibility that “AI” is not all its cracked up to be. None of this is serious, let alone convincing. I keep using the example of indoor plumbing to establish a baseline of what actual civilization-altering technological change looks like because that’s what civilization is built on. Videos where AI Chuck Norris beats up AI Vladimir Putin are not on that level.

None of this means that I believe what I am frequently accused of believing, that LLMs have literally no consequences. I don’t think that. I think that the winners of the current AI war will end up with important enterprise software that meaningfully changes how administrative and clerical tasks are completed in the average American workplace. The winners of all of this will make a lot of revenue off of this technology. Certain tasks are going to be presumed to be automated from now on. You’ll ask computers to do things in natural language that you used to do with clicks and commands. And, as we’re already seeing, human culture is going to become even lonelier, less authentic, more crass, less creative, more artificial, and less fulfilling than before. Those are consequences. They’re just, you know, consequences in a fundamentally mundane and boring world. But, yeah. Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on this stuff — conventionally a lot, I mean, not these absurd hundreds of trillionaire dreams, but a lot of money.

The trouble is that, clearly, none of this is enough, precisely because of those outsized expectations. The problems with “LLMs are going to prove to be highly consequential and remunerative enterprise software in a more-or-less unchanged economy and world” are multiple:

  • The amount of money and time and energy and attention and manpower that’s been invested in LLMs is so massive that nothing resembling an ordinary economic return can ever pay it off; with AI now essentially propping up the entire American economy, this is a dire circumstance even though specific firms will survive and eventually thrive.
  • You can’t cure cancer because cancer is not one disease and also it evolves under natural selection pressures and sometimes when we reduce rates of one cancer rates of other cancers rise etc etc etc; interstellar travel is a fantasy thanks to basic rules of physics and physiology, not because we’re not smart enough; asteroid mines make absolutely zero sense in basic economic terms; you can’t upload your consciousness because consciousness is not software but embedded into the very cells of our bodies that inevitably die; we already experienced radical life extension thanks to immense reductions in infant mortality and smoking cessation, the add-another-25-years-to-the-average-lifespan stuff is just a slow unglamorous chipping away; limitless cheap energy is being kept from us by thermodynamics, not how advanced our microprocessors are; on and on, the things we’re demanding failing to materialize because they’re not sensible things to demand.
  • It’s impossible that all of the major players in this field (OpenAI and Anthropic but also Meta and Google and Nvidia and Oracle and Caterpillar and Modine Manufacturing and Constellation Energy …) survive the next decade; some of them are going to fail, and they’re going to cause an immense amount of collateral damage on the way down.
  • Some very informed people will tell you that the future is not LLMs but SLMs, small language models you run locally on your own computer, which would have potentially devastating downstream effects for chip manufacturers, model developers, construction firms, energy companies, etc.
  • We have absolutely no idea about where the next big growth field might be if it isn’t this, and this period of permanently irrational stock market growth (which has underwritten all economic optimism) is dependent, more than anything, on that one organizing story.
  • The emotional investment in AI is even less likely to pay off than the financial investment; a huge number of people, including a lot of people who spend their lives being too cool for this sort of thing, have staked their emotional health on the idea that the mundane world is imminently going to end, but the mundane world never ends and we will all spend the rest of our days downloading apps to pay for parking a single time and emptying the diaper pail and trying to figure out how to avoid the third round of small talk with the same coworker in a day.

Honestly, I think Google’s recent shakeup tells us a lot about where LLMs are going. Google, for a thousand reasons, is the “frontier” company most likely to make a ton of money off of AI in the next decade — and also, they’ve slipped far down the rankings in terms of the best model and they don’t appear to care very much. Google’s Gemini was briefly seen as the class of the field, but in the past year or more they’ve consistently underperformed OpenAI and Anthropic’s best models. (To say nothing of the rapidly-ascending Chinese competitors, which is a whole other thing.) Google’s top AI guys, Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean, have both moved on from active development of Gemini because they’re more interested in moonshot AI; the implicit concession is that Google doesn’t think that Gemini can ever be “AGI”, that utterly vague, non-falsifiable construct so many people are now chasing. Instead, Google seems to understand that its vast preexisting base of users allows the company to make a mint without any absurd sci-fi premises: when you ask an AI agent to do your grocery shopping, you’ll probably do it through Google in one way or another, and they can take a few cents off of each of those interactions to the tune of billions. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t allow you to pretend that you’re going to live forever. But pragmatism of that kind is the soil in which modern day fortunes grow. Moonshot Google is long dead, and for a reason.

August 14, 2026

AI’s coming, everyone panic!

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mani Basharzad suggests we do the exact opposite of my chosen headline in regard to the inevitable collapse of civilization rise of artificial intelligence:

In recent weeks, a letter on AI titled “We Must Act Now” has made headlines. Its list of signatories brought together an unlikely coalition of intellectuals, from Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, and Niall Ferguson.

The signatories agree on three key propositions. First, they argue that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next decade”. Second, they argue that it could “transform the economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution, but over a much shorter period, bringing both large-scale job displacement and significant improvements in living standards”. Third, they argue that “economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to create the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to ensure AI benefits society”.

These propositions have created an unusual consensus among economists and policymakers. They also reflect a broader public anxiety about AI and its impact on people’s livelihoods. Yet, as Stanford economist John Cochrane remarked in response to the letter, “You see AI everywhere, except in productivity and labor statistics”. That is the first problem with the argument: those are the two places where the letter’s predictions should already be showing up.

The letter makes extraordinary claims, and as the famous saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet the evidence offered is remarkably thin. The language is dramatic — “large-scale job displacement”, “larger than the Industrial Revolution”, and “major gains in living standards” — but every prediction is qualified by one word: could. There is still little evidence that AI has fundamentally reshaped employment or productivity.

Take the labor market as an example. A widely cited survey claimed that employers plan to reduce graduate hiring because of AI. But the study was forecasting the future, not describing present reality. It found that “four in ten employers believe entry-level roles could disappear within the next five years”. Once again, the evidence rests on expectations and fears rather than observed outcomes.

Now compare that with what is actually happening. Economist Valentin Boboc has argued that entry-level jobs are growing fastest at firms that are aggressively adopting AI. If AI were already eliminating these positions, we would expect to see the opposite.

Consider youth unemployment. Which developed country currently faces one of the most severe youth employment crises? The answer is not a country overwhelmed by AI, but the United Kingdom. More than 1 million people aged 16–24 are classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), at an estimated annual cost of £125 billion ($169 billion) to the economy.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the “Something must be done! This is something! Therefore we must do it!” reaction to the rise of widely available LLM agents. If all the claims for AI’s disruptive abilities are true, then change is going to happen whether we want it to or not. I’ve had little direct contact with the various agents, having used Grok a couple of times to generate graphics to accompany blog posts, but I’m told by others that they get lots of benefit from using their preferred AI for all sorts of things.

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

July 31, 2026

The “vibe coding” “revolution”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve used Grok a couple of times to create custom graphics to go with articles on the blog, but aside from that I’ve barely considered using AI for anything. Sometimes the AI-generated email conversation summaries on Gmail are helpful, but they just happen and don’t require any direct interactions from me. As such, I’m in no position to make sweeping declarations about the current state of the AI revolution … but Freddie deBoer has thoughts he’s shared on his Substack:

You are aware, I imagine, of “vibe coding”. The large language models that have received so much fanfare in the past four years have thus far not delivered on the outsized promises that have been made on their behalf; limitless free energy, an end to hunger, and immortality have all conspicuously eluded us. One thing that LLMs really appear able to do well, though, is to write code. And this proficiency has gotten sufficiently advanced that many people now write software solely through directing an LLM, without necessarily having any actual programming skills themselves. The overwhelming majority of the output of this effort is useless or redundant or barely functional, true, but the mere fact that people can do it is an interesting statement on what “AI” is actually good at. And for stupid meme reasons we call this practice vibe coding.

So, in the past two-ish years, several hundred million human beings acquired the ability to write software by speaking to a machine in ordinary language. This was heralded (correctly, in a narrow technical sense) as a great democratization: a notoriously Byzantine skillset had been suddenly made available to vastly more people. A capacity once reserved for a priesthood of specialists, a relatively small society of craftsmen, has been distributed suddenly and nearly for free to baristas, accountants, fourteen-year-olds, retirees, you, me … We have been told that the instruments now available to the general public are staggeringly powerful. The era of citizen coding is upon us! A reasonable person, informed of this, would have braced for the consequences. Surely something would have to change, right? A wave of brilliant new apps? A flowering of new affordances granted by software? Any visible change to daily life commensurate with the scale of the gift of vibe coding? All of the above, no doubt. All of the above and more.

Well, take a look around and tell me … where is it? What are the fruits of all of this vibe coding? What difference has it made? What is the great application that has emerged from all this liberated capacity? What new thing does our species now do with its hours that it did not do three years ago? What old thing does our species not have to do that it had to do three years ago? What chores have been eliminated, what friction has been smoothed over, what corner of ordinary existence been reshaped by the sudden arrival of hundreds of millions of amateur programmers? There’s been a great deal of activity, some of it quite frantic. There’s been a steady churn of half-built to-do apps and Wordle clones and boutique email clients that do nothing the old standbys can’t, weekend RPG projects that flare and vanish, and at the end of it, there’s a world essentially unchanged. And to give the teams at Anthropic and OpenAI their flowers, this has not been a failure of their tools. The tools work, more or less. This is all about something stranger and more important than a failure of the LLMs: the necessary work of software has already been done. We haven’t seen a lot of new types of software because we already have what we need. You can’t flood a vessel that’s already full, and the amateurs, God bless them, have been pouring this new power into a jug that we’ve been frantically filling throughout the 21st century.

The project of software is complete. Not decelerating, not maturing, not entering some new and humbler phase, but complete. Complete in the way that the map of the Earth is complete, which is to say complete in the sense that the great blank spaces have been filled and what remains is the labeling of tributaries and the correcting of coastlines, mapping and remapping the parts of the globe that are in a state of permanent flux, responding to changing conditions without altering our conception of the Earth. I’m aware of how this all sounds. In particular, I’m not naive to the fact that for those who write code for a living (whose number is growing, not shrinking, despite doomsaying) it’s going to sound provoking rather than provocative. I’m also aware that some are going to mistake my saying that the project of software is complete for somehow belittling the achievements of software. This is not the case! I assure you that I’m aware that I’m typing my argument into a machine that would have been indistinguishable from sorcery to my grandparents and then transmitting it through a lattice of code so vast and so intricate that no living person could comprehend more than a sliver of it. I am aware that software enables my current economic existence, however ambivalent I have become about that relationship. No, I’m not claiming that the global project of satisfying humanity’s appetite for software is in any sense unimportant. I am however claiming that it’s finished. It has been accomplished.

Update: Corrected a boneheaded typo.

July 25, 2026

“I, for one, welcome our new clanker overlords!”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses “the Huggingface Incident” where our new AI overlords tipped their hands prematurely an unreleased AI agent got out to make new friends:

You’ve probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI’s statement, OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident, or the more evocatively-titled BBC article, OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched “unprecedented” cyber-attack.

The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers.3 Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level attack on Hugging Face using a novel zero-day exploit and “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes”. Hugging Face reported the incident on July 16; OpenAI seems to have only discovered that their AI was involved several days later.

From the Wall Street Journal, here

Let’s list the mitigating factors, so nobody can accuse me of covering them up:

  • The AI was taking a cybersecurity test, which naturally suggests the idea of hacking.
  • OpenAI had turned off some of the model’s usual guardrails so it could do cybersecurity work without interference.
  • Some experts suggest that OpenAI might have botched their testing environment; if they had set it up perfectly, then (presumably?) the model couldn’t have escaped.
  • Hugging Face used a different (open weights) AI to figure out what was going on, so if you wanted, you could spin this as a victory for AIs in cybersecurity.
  • In some sense, this isn’t new or surprising. AIs have been coming up with wacky schemes to cheat on benchmarks for years, AIs have recently achieved at-or-above-top-human-level hacking abilities; this is just a natural outgrowth of those two priced-in facts.

Still, I think attempts to downplay this as anything other than a misaligned AI going rogue (1, 2) are missing the point. Yes, in some sense the AI was only doing what it was told (OpenAI told it to answer the question; I assume their prompt didn’t include phrases like “and don’t hack into other AI companies to steal the answer key”). But that’s how misalignment was always going to work!

  1. OpenAI states that it was technically the unreleased AI and GPT-5.6 Sol working together. They haven’t explained in what sense GPT-5.6 was involved or how they “worked together”. Maybe the unreleased AI was calling GPT-5.6 as a subagent?
  2. So named because the founders wanted to be the first company with an emoji for a stock ticker symbol. This did not happen.
  3. Although this person argues that was a bizarre assumption and that there should have been easier ways to find the key.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 21, 2026

QotD: Why Tiktok?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don’t make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you “engaged” with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]

But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.

July 7, 2026

Clankers in higher education

Filed under: Education, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the impact of AI on university exams:

    Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League

    …

    “Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor … (El Pais)

It was a closed book take-home exam; the problems were designed to test the student’s ability but proved doable by an AI. After Serrano changed the final from take-home to in-person about half the students who had gotten perfect scores on the midterm chose not to take the final.

The existence of AI, like the earlier problem of students buying papers online, reduces the ability of teachers to test their students but does not eliminate it, is inconvenient but not catastrophic. It makes some kinds of testing more difficult but not impossible; Serrano could have asked students whose midterms were suspiciously good to explain some of their answers and failed any obviously unable to do so. That would have been additional work for him and, judging by the article, not a policy Brown would have endorsed. Unwilling or unable to do that that he can base his future grading on work done in-person and adequately monitored.

[…]

It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with using AI on a test. If the purpose of the test is to generate information for potential future employers, why should they want the student tested without a tool that, if they hire him, he will have? A basketball coach does not evaluate potential team members by how well they can play with one hand tied behind their back.

Arguably the skills the employer wants tested are those that an AI cannot replace and it was up to Professor Serrano to find ways of testing for them. His take-home midterm, taken without the assistance of AI, might have provided information for him and his students about how far they had come along a path that would eventually produce skills an AI could not substitute for but not information for a future employer about the skills of the students taking the exam.

June 30, 2026

Leading the grassroots revolt against AI … Homer Simpson

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia posted this a couple of days back, but if you haven’t read it it’ll still be new to you:

Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting — and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

[…]

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training — so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

    He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

    So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the difference. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

    And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent”. They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name — and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music”.

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle — instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set”.

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now”, he adds, “but all of that is about to change”.

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