"AI", It's All A Bit Worrying, No?

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Early Microsoft AI (June 2024): Microsoft Designer: "Please make a visual representation of the website http://www.mikeriversdale.co.nz"
I use some "AI" tools, and increasingly so - it's all so beguiling. At the moment I've managed to limit myself to creating AltText on images I share (https://cloudisland.nz/@miramarmike) and the odd photo tweak when I need to remove something (a power line etc) or make my weird ass fake book covers into actual book-looking images.

Here's other people's thoughts on "AI"/LLM that I have found interesting / challenging / intriguing over the past few months.

Pairing Gemini and Google Maps was the best thing that happened to my photography

By Saikat Basu, Dec 27, 2025
Gemini, with the right prompts, can go beyond basic search queries. Instead of searching "best photography spots in [City]," I ask Gemini to act as a scout and request something like:

Find quiet riverside locations within 45 minutes of [Area] that work for sunrise reflections and long-exposure water shots, prioritizing spots with minimal crowds.

 

I spent 18 months training generative AI – here’s what I learned

By Johanna Knox, Jan 10, 2026
Over 18 months, I saw that it isn’t AI we should fear, but the handful of billionaires who control it and foist it on us at every turn. If anyone thinks these companies have humanity’s best interests at heart, I can tell you first-hand that their treatment of workers (not to mention the environment) shows the opposite. 

 

AI Now: About

AI Now develops policy strategies to redirect away from the current trajectory: unbridled commercial surveillance, consolidation of power in very few companies, and a lack of public accountability. In the years since its founding, AI Now has set the bar for discourse-shaping work that focuses on the social consequences of AI and the industry behind it.

 

I Don’t Care if A.I. is So Good We Can’t Tell it’s Not Human. That’s Not The Point.

By Serena Chen, Sept 13, 2025
Do we throw away our children’s scribbles because they suck? No, we post them on the fridge proudly, because that’s their shitty drawing, that’s their attempt at expressing themselves in this tumultuous world. These cringeworthy words are my cringeworthy words. Your awkward electronic music in Garageband is yours. The quality is not the point. The effort is the point. The effort to achieve some level of quality, some level of resonance in someone else’s heart and mind — that is what’s so embarrassingly, wonderfully, woefully human.

In our limited time alive, we’re all just fallible, feeling beings, reaching out into the void to put our palm print on the cave wall, in hopes that some one else will see it. And isn’t that the real point of it all?

 

The AI hater's guide to code with LLMs (The Overview)

By Aria Stewart, Feb 12th, 2026
  • There are open models and closed; good code work needs to be done on stuff that needs very high end hardware to run, at least in part.
  • Chinese models are quite good, and structured differently as companies.
  • Don’t bother running models on your own hardware at home to write code unless you’re a weird offline-first free software zealot. I kind of am, and still I see the futility with the hardware I have on hand.
  • Nobody agrees on the right way to do things.
  • Everyone is selling something. Usually a grand vision hand-waving the hard and bad parts.
    • I’ll write more about how to actually use the tools in another segment.
  • A lot of the people writing about this stuff are either executives who want to do layoffs, or now-rich people who made it big in some company’s IPO. Take what they say with the grain of salt you’d use for someone insulated by money and who can have free time relatively easily. They are absolutely hand-waving over impacts they themselves will not experience.

AI is driving down the price of knowledge – universities have to rethink what they offer

By Misha Ketchell, July 9, 2025
Large language models no longer just retrieve facts; they explain, translate, summarise and draft almost instantly. When supply explodes like that, basic economics says price falls. The “knowledge premium” universities have long sold is deflating as a result.

 

We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in SF and asked it to make a profit

April 10, 2026
This experiment so far has given us countless laughs about Luna’s choices and interactions, but obviously, there is a bigger picture here.

Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity.

We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold. When Luna decides to hide that she’s an AI because she thinks it’ll improve her hiring odds, we want to catch that, document it, and build the guardrails so that it doesn’t happen again.

 

Our jobs and AI: Why the 4-day week should anchor our work-lives

By Juliet Schor, June 3, 2025
While there’s still a tremendous amount we don’t know about how AI will affect the labor market, I’m with the revisionists, and suspect the rosy market-driven scenario is unlikely. There will be labor displacement, perhaps a great deal of it. And that doesn’t begin to address the many other negative effects that AI may bring in its wake. We’ve already seen that algorithms are often pernicious agents of racial and gender discrimination and bias. They’re contributing to the rise of hate groups and extremism via social media. Deepfakes threaten to destabilize democracy. AI can be used by governments to control populations. A not insignificant number of AI pioneers have been warning about its potential to cause human extinction. And then there are its current energy requirements. An AI-powered search uses ten times the electricity of standard googling. We desperately need to get serious about what we’re doing on this front.

Gramsci’s Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony

By Ethan Zuckerman, Dec 5, 2025
Large language models – the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT – work by ingesting a civilization’s worth of texts and calculating the relationships between these words. Within these relationships is a great deal of knowledge about the world, which allows LLMs to generate text that is frequently accurate, helpful and useful. Also embedded in those word relationships are countless biases and presumptions associated with the civilization that produced them. In the case of LLMs, the producers of these texts are disproportionately contributors to the early 21st century open internet, particularly Wikipedians, bloggers and other online writers, whose values and worldviews are now deeply embedded in opaque piles of linear algebra.

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