🚨SOS on AI’s Escape Hatch 🚨
Plus: We've got to talk about Musk: Live stream happening at 3pm today.
Dear Citizen,
🚨For US folks, an emerging atrocity to track: Congressional Republicans have snuck a shocker into the fast-moving US budget bill, that would prohibit enforcement of ANY “law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.” WTFFFFF. 🚨
More here from the Guardian; watch this space for more.
Johana Bhuiyan
Here’s what else to know, do and watch this week.
#ONE CLICK: Slop! Slop! #
Mark Owen Jones* and his team at Dysinfluence have a dystopian, disorienting and dazzling new report out this week - Click This If You Love Jesus": How AI Sloperations on Facebook Are Flooding 22 Million UEsacSloperatsers with Musk Memes, Disinformation, and Culture War Propaganda.
Marc Owen Jones
The key finding:
This analysis documents over 130 Facebook pages disseminating coordinated disinformation, AI-generated content, low-quality clickbait, and manipulative propaganda to at least 22,000,000 people. The pages span several thematic categories, including celebrity fan pages, news & media outlets, entertainment hubs, model profiles, and military fandom. All exhibit suspicious behaviour patterns indicative of inauthentic or repurposed accounts.
Holy trash, Batman. Mark went through thousands of pages of vile trash so you don’t have to, but you might want to look out…
Many verified or legacy accounts (e.g., Rolonda Watts, Andrew Gruel, Dondré Whitfield, Maggie Oliver) have been compromised and now serve up AI slop, Musk worship memes, porn-adjacent Telegram links (e.g., t.me/Xvideo18Age), or generic emotional bait. Several celebrities have publicly acknowledged the hacks and how Facebook have done nothing to stop them.
Et tu, Chef Gruel!?
Jones adds:
My personal favourites, though, are stories of Elon Musk adopting dozens of children, seemingly from around the world. (Entirely false, of course, but with seismic engagement) Check out the posts below.
The whole post is worth a read, and will teach you everything you always wanted to know about AI-generated slop but were afraid to ask. Read on here.
*He’s not that Owen Jones, though we love him as well!
# ONE ACTION: Boycott! #
Who is organizing the Tesla boycotts? Do they work? Read Brian Beutler here and plug in to the boycott movement.
# ONE WATCH: We Need to Talk About Elon #
UPDATE: Carole got FOMO (bad) and wants to join Shoshana Zuboff to discuss Trump 2.0 and the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. So bear with us while we wrangle the schedules of these warrior women. In the meantime, they are doing something incredible this week... read on!
From May 19-23 London portrait artist Ian Bruce is going live as he uses paint to delve into the psychology of Elon Musk. He’ll be asking what made Musk the way he is – looking into his childhood under apartheid, his rise to power, and his maniacal love of control.
Over the course of the stream, Ian will be exploring how a single billionaire has been able to dominate, and all but destroy, our global public square - and what we can do about it.
To help him answer these questions, he’ll be chatting to exciting guests – including (you guessed it) Carole Cadwalladr, Shoshana Zuboff, Rosie O’Donnell, Brian Eno, Jon Ronson, Yanis Varoufakis and more. Please do tune in!
P.S. - Ian is raising funds for Free Our Feeds - a campaign to build a public-interest social media ecosystem, free from billionaires’ meddling.
We will be right back with a new date for our Shoshana and Carole Live here on Substack - and we promise it will be worth (the short) wait.
*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already
Since Trump got re-elected, there is a chilling effect. It is sweeping right across those of us who stand in opposition to Big Tech’s takeover of politics. It is happening quickly and it is serious. Journalists, academics and civil society are under attack, and philanthropy is in free fall or has retreated entirely.
Sadly, we now have an expiry date: without new funding, we won’t survive. We have exhausted every alternative and we can’t stand against the unholy alliance of "Big Tech and State" without you.
With enough of you becoming paid members, we will have a chance to keep the fight alive. Will you help us? ✊🏻
