Three essays about the same underlying question, approached from very different angles: who controls the infrastructure we depend on, and what happens when nobody’s watching closely enough.
-
Now We’re Getting AI Fake News Complaining About How AI Fake News Is the Death of Real News: Joshua Benton traces a viral story about 47 Alabama weekly newspapers supposedly killed by an AI content mill. Its source was a site with no real staff, invented bylines, and fabricated named sources, all pointing back to a Finnish tech company. He started investigating after noticing that every other “Politics” story on the site undermined Taiwan’s position against China. The result is unsettling: fabricated reporting can target a niche so specific that almost nobody has the local knowledge to catch it.
-
The Human Story of the Open Web: Jeffrey Zeldman writes about a preview screening of “Code for the People,” a short documentary on reclaiming the open web from a handful of “digital landlords.” His prescription is the same one he has followed since the 1990s: keep your content on a domain you control and prefer open-source tools over proprietary services that can change the rules overnight.
-
The AI Resist List: Researchers including Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, built this living global directory of organized opposition to harms from large-scale AI development. Entries are grouped by the part of the industry they target, including funding, data, labor, surveillance, and policy. Examples range from a Japanese union petition about algorithmic wage-setting to a Uruguayan campaign for data-center transparency and an Amazon employee letter about AI and climate goals. The directory shows who is organizing, where, and by which method.