Blog
Essays and field notes.
Standalone articles on the history of technology — the people, the moments, and the machines that shaped the screen you're reading this on. Written when there's something to say, not on a schedule.
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- Latest · 2026
- 2026
2026
FLI Pause Letter, March 2023: 30,000 Signatories
The FLI's March 2023 open letter calling for a 6-month pause on AI more powerful than GPT-4 — signed by 30,000+ including Elon Musk.
PostThe CAIS Statement on AI Risk, May 30, 2023
The CAIS May 2023 statement — "mitigating extinction risk from AI should be a global priority" — signed by Hinton, Bengio, Altman, and Hassabis.
PostThe AI Election, Revisited: Deepfakes in 2024
The 2024 AI election — the New Hampshire Biden robocall, deepfakes in Slovakia, India, Indonesia, and the EU, and post-election analyses.
PostSynthetic Media, Deepfakes, and the Crisis of Evidence
Deepfakes, voice cloning, and the 'liar's dividend' — how synthetic media collapsed photographic evidence and launched a detection-versus-generation arms race.
PostAI and Copyright: Who Owns the Training Data?
NYT v. OpenAI, Getty v. Stability AI, Authors Guild suits — the copyright battles that decide who owns AI training data and whether scraping is fair use.
PostAuthors Guild v. Google, October 2015: Fair Use
Authors Guild v. Google — the October 2015 Second Circuit ruling that established fair use for book scanning and now underpins every LLM training defence.
PostNYT v. OpenAI & Microsoft: The Fair-Use Trial
NYT v. OpenAI — the December 2023 lawsuit that will likely define whether training LLMs on copyrighted articles is fair use or infringement.
PostGetty Images v. Stability AI: The Copyright Test
Getty v. Stability AI — the January 2023 lawsuit over Stable Diffusion's training on 12 million Getty photos and the 2025 UK ruling.
PostThe Colorado State Fair AI-Art Win, August 2022
The Colorado State Fair — August 2022, when Jason Allen's "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" became the first AI-generated image to win a fine-art competition.
PostOpen vs Closed: The Defining Fault Line of Modern AI
Hugging Face, LLaMA, Mistral, DeepSeek — the open-weights movement and why open vs closed is the defining AI industry fault line of the 2020s.
PostStable Diffusion Release, August 2022: Open AI Art
Stable Diffusion — Stability AI's August 2022 open-weights release that democratised image generation, triggered artist lawsuits, and seeded the open-AI debate.
PostLiang Wenfeng: DeepSeek and the Open-Weight Earthquake
Liang Wenfeng — the hedge-fund founder behind DeepSeek, whose January 2025 R1 release triggered a US stock rout and reset the AI race.
PostDeepSeek-R1 and the Reset of the AI Race, January 2025
DeepSeek-R1 — the January 2025 release that matched OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the cost, triggered a $589B NVIDIA stock rout, and reset the AI race.