Meredith Broussard, PhD
merbroussard.bsky.social
Meredith Broussard, PhD
@merbroussard.bsky.social

Critical AI, data journalism, literary nonfiction. Professor at NYU. Author, "More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech." meredithbroussard.com

Meredith Broussard is a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism. .. more

Computer science 50%
Business 9%

TIL all Michiganders know (and honor!) 11/10 as the date of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Reposted by Meredith Broussard

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”
What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | Eric Reinhart
A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare – with consequences for the basis of society itself
www.theguardian.com

“If it wanted to, Common Crawl could mitigate the damage done by those corporations to authors and publishers…” @alexreisner.bsky.social crushing it again
"Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. 'The robots are people too,' he told me."

bitch no they not
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.
www.theatlantic.com
"Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. 'The robots are people too,' he told me."

bitch no they not
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.
www.theatlantic.com
🧵 Important work from @epic.org examining a critical governance gap after DOGE. The 2007 Data Mining Reporting Act was meant to ensure oversight of surveillance tech. But agencies treat it as optional, undermining the institutional checks needed to constrain govt power. epic.org/data-mining-...
Closing the Data Mines: Repairing Oversight, Preserving Rights
epic.org
www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
According to the study, a significant number of top-tier benchmarks fail to define what exactly they aim to test, concerningly reuse data and testing methods from pre-existing benchmarks, and seldom use reliable statistical methods to compare results between models.
AI's capabilities may be exaggerated by flawed tests, according to new study
A study from the Oxford Internet Institute analyzed 445 tests used to evaluate AI models.
www.nbcnews.com
Imagination is resistance, @ruha9.bsky.social reminds us that, " we need to reject the gospel that says technology is inevitable, that the train has left the station... In an error of automated bullshit, it’s time to become bullshit detectors,"
#MozFest
ryan is right. people HATE hearing this. but it is just a matter of simple incentives. if you want a more representative legislature — and if you want a legislature more resistant to corruption — then you need to jack up the salaries. serving as mayor of NYC should net you a cool 500K *at least*
people hate hearing this but it's 100% true, creating a huge pay gap between political leaders, their staffs, and other elites is a recipe for corruption. of course the flip side of that is taxes on the rich should be jacked way the hell up
The Mayor of New York only makes $260k. I bet there are police that make more than that in NY with overtime.

We need to pay elected leaders more money and stop pretending it's some sort of calling. They're managing hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and millions of people's lives.

Reposted by Jonathan Gray

Congrats on your new book @jwyg.bsky.social!
people hate hearing this but it's 100% true, creating a huge pay gap between political leaders, their staffs, and other elites is a recipe for corruption. of course the flip side of that is taxes on the rich should be jacked way the hell up
The Mayor of New York only makes $260k. I bet there are police that make more than that in NY with overtime.

We need to pay elected leaders more money and stop pretending it's some sort of calling. They're managing hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and millions of people's lives.
DHS confirmed it has stopped automatically storing officials' text messages.

Instead, officials are supposed to take a screenshot, send that to their work email, download it onto their work computer and run a text-recognition program on it. Every time.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/u...
“We should train novices based on the practices of disciplinary experts who have achieved AI fluency in their discipline. Unfortunately, there aren’t any such experts yet.” www.chronicle.com/article/stop...
Opinion | Stop Pretending You Know How to Teach AI
Colleges are racing to make students ‘fluent.’ One problem: No one knows what that means.
www.chronicle.com

Reposted by Meredith Broussard

I have an image in the latest issue of Limn, a still from Human Movie, here illustrating an excellent article by Wendy Sung on "Digital misrecognition and the making of the 'Asian face.'" limn.press/article/iden...
Identification Error - Limn
Digital misrecognition and the making of the "Asian face"
limn.press

😍🙏
Computation+Journalism 2025 is a month away (December 11-12); we're finishing the last details of the symposium: cplusj2025.com Here's the full agenda: cplusj2025.com/agenda/ Join us! You can register here ($150 for professionals, $30 for students): events.miami.edu/event/cplusj...
The long-running ideological war on libraries, education, and government workers is not separate from AI boosterism. It is the same ideological war on human knowledge and expertise. In some cases AI is being used to directly supercharge this effort:

www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
www.404media.co
Over the years I have read A LOT of damning stories about what Meta executives were saying internally about serious harms on their platforms (most of them written by Reuters’ @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social ). His new story is a blockbuster:
www.reuters.com/investigatio...

sherwood.news/tech/meta-pr...
Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports
The report shows that the company was hesitant to crack down harder on scams, due to the billions in revenue that they were generating for Meta....
sherwood.news

Reposted by Meredith Broussard

My first for @bayareacurrent.bsky.social -- A self-driving car killed a beloved SF cat. It’s part of a long history of tech companies using the Bay as a testing ground at our expense. People have had enough.

bayareacurrent.com/fuck-waymo-l...
Fuck Waymo, Long Live KitKat
A self-driving car killed a beloved SF cat. It’s part of a long history of tech companies using the Bay as a testing ground at our expense. People have had enough.
bayareacurrent.com
“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion”
futurism.com/artificial-i...
OpenAI in Danger After Authors Suing It Gain Access to Its Internal Slack Messages
Authors and publishers, who are suing OpenAI, secured access to internal Slack messages and emails discussing the deletion of pirated books.
futurism.com
me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?

students: no AI

I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

Reposted by Meredith Broussard

For one of my final stories with @wired.com, I teamed up with @peggylowe.bsky.social at KCUR to dig through a Kansas City, KS police hack

Inside were some of the most disturbing misconduct files I’ve ever read—and a secret list of cops the department said couldnt be trusted

Here are a few of them:
Hack Exposes Kansas City’s Secret Police Misconduct List
A major breach of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department reveals, for the first time, a list of alleged officer misconduct including dishonesty, sexual harassment, excessive force, and false arres...
www.wired.com
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social & Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social are Senior Advisors to the International AI Safety Report, a follow-up the first Jan '25 Report. The new report covers major breakthroughs in AI capabilities since the first publication. Read the report in full online👇
First Key Update: Capabilities and Risk Implications
This Key Update covers major breakthroughs in AI capabilities since the publication of the last Report in January 2025 and some implications for major risks. New training techniques that allow AI syst...
internationalaisafetyreport.org
One day only THIS THURSDAY 10/30! @nickgarcia.bsky.social, @merbroussard.bsky.social, and @bb.usefairuse.com will be talking legal and ethical issues in AI for libraries and librarians! Register to attend (or get the recording and all the links)!

nyu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"
The fact that these are the numbers the company will put on the record … www.wired.com/story/chatgp...
OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week
OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week
www.wired.com
Who today is influencing science a la Big Tobacco or Oil and Gas?
In our new preprint we show how tech companies like Meta are capturing research on their product, using mechanisms that subtly (or not so subtly) shape what science gets produced
"OpenAI twice loosened ChatGPT’s rules for discussing suicide in the year before 16-year-old Adam Raine took his own life using a method the chatbot advised him on, according to an amended lawsuit filed by his parents on Wednesday."
OpenAI Loosened Suicide-Talk Rules Before Teen’s Death, Lawsuit Alleges
An amended complaint from the parents of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who died by suicide, alleges the changes were part of a push to increase engagement.
www.wsj.com