google The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen Cory Doctorow

happy mutants Science fiction: what if game companies could get rich on bots, instead of players? Cory Doctorow

sex work "I was an invisible girlfriend for a month." Xeni Jardin

History Documentary about automata, the mechanical "robots" of the past Rob Beschizza

Would you like to play a game? GPT-4 hires subcontractors to get around Captcha Jason Weisberger

art CHOIR is a robotic mouth art-display by Server Demirtaş Popkin

How about global thermonuclear war? Perhaps Reddit is a bad place to teach your AI morality and ethics Jason Weisberger

Gloomy poetry Thousands of dark haikus inspired by 2020 Claudia Dawson

Copyfight How fanfic archives lead the world in data organization Cory Doctorow

speech Brain-computer interface successfully translates thought into synthesized speech David Pescovitz

videos Facebook insists that Cambridge Analytica didn't "breach" data, but "misused" it, and they're willing to sue anyone who says otherwise Cory Doctorow

Funny Let's build a robot to kill the creator of "I am not a robot" CAPTCHA image grids Andrea James

precrime Mechanical Turkers paid $1 are better at predicting recidivism than secret, private-sector algorithms Clive Thompson

Science Watson for Oncology isn't an AI that fights cancer, it's an unproven mechanical turk that represents the guesses of a small group of doctors Cory Doctorow

Business Youtube Kids spammers rack up billions of views on disturbing, violent, seemingly algorithmic videos Cory Doctorow

futility closet Did an 18th-century engineer manage to build a chess-playing automaton? Futility Closet