Governments around the world are using predictive systems to manage engagement with even the most vulnerable. Results are mixed.

More like this: Algorithmically Cutting Benefits w/ Kevin De Liban

Luckily people like Soizic Pénicaud are working to prevent the modern welfare state from becoming a web of punishment of the most marginalised. Soizic has worked on algorithmic transparency both in and outside of a government context, and this week will share her journey from working on incrementally improving these systems (boring, ineffective, hard) — to escaping the slow pace of government and looking at the bigger picture of algorithmic governance, and how it can build better public benefit in France (fun, transformative, and a good challenge).

Soizic is working to shift political debates about opaque decision-making algorithms to focus on what they’re really about: the marginalised communities who’s lives are most effected by these systems.

Further reading & resources:

• The Observatory of Public Algorithms and their Inventory
• The ongoing court case against the French welfare agency's risk-scoring algorithm
• More about Soizic
• More on the Transparency of Public Algorithms roadmap from Etalab — the task force Soizic was part of
• La Quadrature du Net
• France’s Digital Inquisition — co-authored by Soizic in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports, 2023
• AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament ‘false starts’ — The Guardian Jan 2025
• Learning from Cancelled Systems by Data Justice Lab
• The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment — by Nari Johnson et al, featured in FAccT 2024

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Seeing is believing. Right? But what happens when we lose trust in the reproductive media put in front of us?

More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI and Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

We talked to a global expert and leading voice on this issue for the past 20 years, Sam Gregory to get his take. We started way back in 1992 when Rodney King was assaulted by 4 police officers in Los Angeles. Police brutality was (and is) commonplace, but something different happened in this case. Someone used a camcorder and caught it on video. It changed our understanding about the role video could play in accountability. And in the past 30 years, we’ve gone from seeking video as evidence and advocacy, to AI slop threatening to seismically reshape our shared realities.

Now apps like Sora provide impersonation-as-entertainment. How did we get here?

Further reading & resources:

• More on the riots following Rodney King’s murder — NPR
• More about Sam and Witness
• ObscuraCam — a privacy-preserving camera app from WITNESS and The Guardian Project
• C2PA: the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity
• Deepfakes Rapid Response Force by WITNESS

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Post Production by Sarah Myles

What happens when AI models try to fill the gaping hole in the media landscape where journalists should be?

More like this: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes

This week Alix is joined by Nic Dawes, who until very recently ran the non-profit newsroom The City. In this conversation we explore journalism’s new found toxic relationship with AI and big tech: can journalists meaningfully use AI in their work? If a model summarises a few documents, does that add a new layer of efficiency, or inadvertently oversimplify? And what can we learn from big tech positioning itself as a helpful friend to journalism during the Search era?

Beyond the just accurate relaying of facts, journalistic organisations also represent an entire backlog of valuable training data for AI companies. If you don’t have the same resources as the NYT, suing for copyright infringement isn’t an option — so what then? Nic says we have to break out of the false binary of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them!’

Further reading & resources:

• Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward — NPR
• Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society — Reuters Institute
• An example of The City’s investigative reporting: private equity firms buying up property in the Bronx — 2022
• The Intimacy Dividend — Shuwei Fang
• Sam Altman on Twitter announcing that they’ve improved ChatGPT to be mindful of the mental health effects — “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but…”

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Mozilla Foundation wants to chart a new path in the AI era. But what is its role now and how can it help reshape the impacts and opportunities of technology for… everyone?

More like this: Defying Datafication w/ Abeba Birhane

Alix sat down with Nabiha Syed to chat through her first year as the new leader of Mozilla Foundation. How does she think about strategy in this moment? What role does she want the foundation to play? And crucially, how is she stewarding a community of human-centered technology builders in a time of hyper-scale and unchecked speculation?

As Nabiha says, “restraint is a design principle too”.

Plug: We’ll be at MozFest this year broadcasting live and connecting with all kinds of folks. If you’re feeling the FOMO, be on the look out for episodes we produce about our time there.

Further reading & resources:

• Watch this episode on YouTube
• Imaginative Intelligences — a programme of artist assemblies run by Mozilla Foundation
• Nothing Personal — a new counterculture editorial platform from the Mozilla Foundation
• More about Mozfest
• Nabiha on the Computer Says Maybe live show at the 2025 AI Action Summit
• Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in the era of Trump and AI — The Register
• Nabiha on why she joined MF as executive director — MF Blog

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Loneliness and mental health illnesses are rising in the US, while access to care dwindles — so a lot of people are turning to chatbots. Do chatbots work for therapy?

More like this: The Collective Intelligence Project w/ Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew

Why are individuals are confiding in chatbots over qualified human therapists? Stevie Chancellor explains why an LLM can’t replace a therapeutic relationship — but often there’s just no other choice. Turns out the chatbots designed specifically for therapy are even worse than general models like ChatGPT; Stevie shares her ideas on how LLMs could potentially be used — safely — for therapeutic support. This is really helpful primer on how to evaluate chatbots for specific, human-replacing tasks.

Further reading & resources:

• Stevie’s paper on whether replacing therapists with LLMs is even possible (it’s not)
• See the research on Github
• People are Losing Their Loved Ones to AI-Fuelled Spiritual Fantasies — Rolling Stone (May 2025)
• Silicon Valley VC Geoff Lewis becomes convinced that ChatGPT is telling him government secrets from the future
• Loneliness considered a public health epidemic according to the APA
• FTC orders online therapy company BetterHelp to pay damages of $7.8m
• Delta plans to use AI in ticket pricing draws fire from US lawmakers — Reuters July 2025

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What’s it like working as a local representative when you live next door to Silicon Valley?

More like this: Chasing Away Sidewalk Labs w/ Bianca Wylie

When Hilary Ronen was on the board of supervisors for San Francisco, she had to make lots of decisions about technology. She felt unprepared. Now she sees local policymakers on the frontlines of a battle of resources and governance in an AI era, and is working to upskill them to make better decisions for their constituents. No degree in computer science required.

Further reading & resources:

• Local Leadership in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and the Tech Oligarchy by Hillary Ronen
• More on Hillary’s work as a Supervisor for SF
• Hillary Ronen on progressives, messaging, hard choices, and justice — interview in 48Hills from January 2025
• More about Local Progress
• Confronting Preemption — a short briefing by Local Progress
• What Happens When State and Local Laws Conflict — article on state-level preemption by State Court Report

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Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification 

More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick

This is our final episode of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology both amplifies and obscures them. For this final instalment we have Cory Doctorow on to chat about his new book Enshittification.

Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised reverse centaur’ is…

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Enshittifcation now from Verso Books!
• Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
• On The Media series on Enshittification
• Pluralistic — Daily Links and essays by Cory Doctorow
• Conservatism Considered as a Movement of Bitter Rubes — Cory on why conservatism creates a friendly environment for scams
• How I Got Scammed — Cory on his personal experiences of being scammed
• All of Cory’s books
• All (Antitrust) Politics Are Local — the entry to Pluralistic that Cory wrote on the day of recording

Thought we were at peak scam? Well, ScamGPT just entered the chat.

More like this: Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays

This is part three of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. This week Lana Swartz and Alice Marwick join Alix to discuss their primer on how generative AI is automating fraud.

We dig into the very human, very dark world of the scam industry, where the scammers are often being exploited in highly sophisticated human trafficking operations — and are now using generative AI to scale up and speed up.

We talk about how you probably aren’t going to get a deepfake call from a family member to demand a ransom, but the threats are still evolving in ways that are scary and until now largely unregulated. And as ever even though the problems are made worse by technology, we explore the limitations of technology and laws to stem the tide.

Further reading & resources:

• Read the primer here!
• More about Lana Swartz
• More about Alice Marwick
• New Money by Lana Swartz
• Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds by Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini, and Ling Li
• Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people
• Al Jazeera True Crime Report on scamming farms in South East Asia
• Scam Empire project by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

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This just in with data centers: Energy grids are strained, water is scarce, utility costs are through the roof — ah well, let them eat compute, I guess!

More like this: AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy

It was just climate week in NYC and we did a live show on data centers with four amazing guests from around the US…

Thank you to the Luminate Foundation for sponsoring this live show and for all of our NY-based friends, and network from around the world that made it to Brooklyn for a magical evening. You can also watch the live recording on Youtube.

• KeShaun Pearson (Memphis Community Against Pollution) will break down how Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer is polluting the air of historically Black neighborhoods in Memphis, and how organizers are fighting back against yet another chapter of corporate extraction in their communities.
• KD Minor (Alliance for Affordable Energy) will demystify the energy impacts of data centers in Louisiana and share organizing strategies to mobilize community opposition to Big Tech and Big Oil infrastructure.
• Marisol (No Desert Data Center) will talk about their grassroots coalition’s recent win in Tucson to stop Amazon’s Project Blue data center proposal, which threatened the city’s scarce water supply, and how they’re organizing for future protections.
• Amba Kak (AI Now Institute) will talk us through the bigger picture: what’s behind Big Tech’s AI data center expansion, who stands to benefit from this boom, and what we sacrifice in return.

Further reading & resources:

• Amazon Web Services is company behind Tucson’s Project Blue, according to 2023 county memo — from Luminaria
• Tuscon to create new policies around NDAs following the councils regret around not knowing more about Project Blue — from Luminaria
• How Marana, also in the Tuscon area, employed an ordinance to regulate water usage after learning about data center interest in the area.
• xAI has requested an additional 150MGW of power for Colossus in Memphis, bring it to a total of 300MGW
• Time reports on increase in nitrogen dioxide pollution around Memphis due to xAI turbines
• Keshaun and Justin Pearson on Democracy Now discussing xAI’s human rights violations
• Meta’s Mega Data Center Could Strain Louisiana’s Grid — and Entergy Isn’t Prepared — report by the Alliance for Affordable Energy
• 'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community — 404 Media

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OpenAI just secured a bizarre financial deal with Nvidia — but the math is not mathing. Is the AI sector an actual market, or a series of high-profile announcements of circular relationships between a tiny number of companies?

More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now

Alix sat down with Sarah Myers-West to go through the particulars of this deal, and other similar deals that are propping up AI’s industry of vapour. This is not your traditional bubble that’s about to burst — there is no bubble, it’s just that The New Normal is to pour debt into an industry that cannot promise any returns…

Further reading & resources:

• More on the Nvidia OpenAI deal — CNBC
• Analysts refer to deal as ‘vendor financing’ — Insider Monkey
• Spending on AI is at Epic Levels. Will it Ever Pay Off? — WSJ
• OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle spending $500bn on data centre expansion in Abilene — Reuters
• How Larry Ellison used the AI boom and the Tony Blair Institute to bolster his wealth
• Oracle funding Open AI data centers with heaps of debt and will have to borrow at least $25bn a year — The Register

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