John Herrman
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman
@jwherrman.bsky.social
8K followers 560 following 620 posts
posting about posts at new york magazine. have me on your podcast!
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jwherrman.bsky.social
guy with no tools who doesn’t know how many cylinders his car has after ten minutes of ChatGPT: I can fix this

guy’s girlfriend after consulting her ChatGPT with memory mode enabled: This is exactly like when we went camping and there’s actually a term for this behavior
November 7, 2025 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...
This week, Amazon answered clearly in the affirmative, in the form of a lawsuit against Perplexity. The language is spicy: Amazon brings this action to stop Perplexity AI, Inc's ("Perplexity" or "Defendant" persistent, covert, and unauthorized access into Amazon's protected computer systems in violation of federal and California computer fraud and abuse statutes. This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass. It is about a company that, after repeated notice, chose to disguise an automated "agentic" browser as a human user, to evade Amazon's technological barriers, and to access private customer accounts without Amazon's permission. Fraud! Abuse! Trespass! Evasion! This is a threatening lawsuit — it later refers to Perplexity as an "intruder" — but it's also a useful window into Amazon's thinking on AI and where its business fits into a theoretical world where more people do more things with chatbots and agents. It might not be right to say the company is worried, exactly. But it's certainly clear about what it doesn't want to happen, which happens to be precisely what some AI companies clearly want. Most broadly, AI companies are hoping to end up in a situation where their products are the default interface for all sorts of things, and browser agents represent a small but aggressive move in that direction. A world where all purchases flow entirely through another company's interface, chatbot or otherwise, is something that Amazon would prefer to avoid, or at least have a say in, which is perhaps why the company's lawyers are talking about Perplexity as if it's built an automated ticket-scalping app, a sneaker-sniping bot, a data scraper, a data-exfiltration tool, or rip-off interface for its product catalogue. Earlier this week, Perplexity argued on its site: Amazon wants to block you from using your own AI assistant to shop on their platform ... Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn't care. They're more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers. Suggesting that "Amazon should love this" and then describing the ways that it might cause them to make less money is sort of funny, but between the lawsuit and Perplexity's response we can get a pretty clear sense of what's going on here: an attempt by Amazon to stop a marginal player from setting a precedent it doesn't want, and a clear signal to bigger ones — OpenAI, Google, and other firms Amazon already competes and partners with - that, if they want their tools to touch Amazon, they'll have to do it on Amazon's terms. This is a sort of conflict we can expect to see a lot of, and soon.
November 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...
This week, Amazon answered clearly in the affirmative, in the form of a lawsuit against Perplexity. The language is spicy: Amazon brings this action to stop Perplexity AI, Inc's ("Perplexity" or "Defendant" persistent, covert, and unauthorized access into Amazon's protected computer systems in violation of federal and California computer fraud and abuse statutes. This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass. It is about a company that, after repeated notice, chose to disguise an automated "agentic" browser as a human user, to evade Amazon's technological barriers, and to access private customer accounts without Amazon's permission. Fraud! Abuse! Trespass! Evasion! This is a threatening lawsuit — it later refers to Perplexity as an "intruder" — but it's also a useful window into Amazon's thinking on AI and where its business fits into a theoretical world where more people do more things with chatbots and agents. It might not be right to say the company is worried, exactly. But it's certainly clear about what it doesn't want to happen, which happens to be precisely what some AI companies clearly want. Most broadly, AI companies are hoping to end up in a situation where their products are the default interface for all sorts of things, and browser agents represent a small but aggressive move in that direction. A world where all purchases flow entirely through another company's interface, chatbot or otherwise, is something that Amazon would prefer to avoid, or at least have a say in, which is perhaps why the company's lawyers are talking about Perplexity as if it's built an automated ticket-scalping app, a sneaker-sniping bot, a data scraper, a data-exfiltration tool, or rip-off interface for its product catalogue. Earlier this week, Perplexity argued on its site: Amazon wants to block you from using your own AI assistant to shop on their platform ... Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn't care. They're more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers. Suggesting that "Amazon should love this" and then describing the ways that it might cause them to make less money is sort of funny, but between the lawsuit and Perplexity's response we can get a pretty clear sense of what's going on here: an attempt by Amazon to stop a marginal player from setting a precedent it doesn't want, and a clear signal to bigger ones — OpenAI, Google, and other firms Amazon already competes and partners with - that, if they want their tools to touch Amazon, they'll have to do it on Amazon's terms. This is a sort of conflict we can expect to see a lot of, and soon.
November 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
So many bizarre AI products are like this but it's really important to understand why: Companies like OpenAI want the world to give in to their total success before they've actually achieved it nymag.com/intelligence...
As I spent time watching ChatGPT bonk its way through various web interfaces, I also found myself thinking of self-driving cars. A browser that pretends to be a person at the input level - moving a cursor, scrolling a human GUI - felt less like a Waymo, in which an unattended steering wheel turns as a result of actions taken by systems closer to the road, than a regular car with a humanoid robot sitting in the driver's seat. Again, it's pretty interesting to watch! But it also makes you wonder: Why are we doing this that way? Aren't there better ways for machines to talk to each other? The answer, Miller suggests, comes down to the "incentives of their makers more than the intrinsic value of the technology." (The Browser Company was recently acquired by software-maker Atlassian.) For OpenAI, building systems that can execute complex commands on behalf of users is the whole ball game - it's the path to wide-ranging automation and/or AGI, depending on which definition of the term the company is going with that day. An AI model that can provide useful information in a chat window, or handle tasks clearly outlined by the user, is a useful product, but the prospect of an Al model that can productively and proactively interact with the world around it in ways comparable to a human - or, more specifically, an employee — is where trillion-dollar valuations come from. To get where it wants to go, though, OpenAl has a number of challenges. Some are widely discussed and frustratingly hard to pin down, revolving around benchmarks, varying definitions of model capability, and predictions about scaling. Others are more banal: To answer questions more usefully, for example, chatbots tend to do better if they have more data about users; likewise, to execute tasks on their behalf, they need to operate in an environment where users are logged in to the various services they use to work and live their lives. They need a breathtaking amount of access and permission, in other words. ChatGPT isolated in a chat window doesn't have that, and it takes a long time to draw out of users, if they're willing to offer it at all. ChatGPT as a default browser - authenticated in dozens of different sites, payment methods at the ready, or perhaps even logged into a work environment - does. (Such agents also create, as many in the AI space have pointed out, a potential security nightmare.)
October 30, 2025 at 3:13 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
So many bizarre AI products are like this but it's really important to understand why: Companies like OpenAI want the world to give in to their total success before they've actually achieved it nymag.com/intelligence...
As I spent time watching ChatGPT bonk its way through various web interfaces, I also found myself thinking of self-driving cars. A browser that pretends to be a person at the input level - moving a cursor, scrolling a human GUI - felt less like a Waymo, in which an unattended steering wheel turns as a result of actions taken by systems closer to the road, than a regular car with a humanoid robot sitting in the driver's seat. Again, it's pretty interesting to watch! But it also makes you wonder: Why are we doing this that way? Aren't there better ways for machines to talk to each other? The answer, Miller suggests, comes down to the "incentives of their makers more than the intrinsic value of the technology." (The Browser Company was recently acquired by software-maker Atlassian.) For OpenAI, building systems that can execute complex commands on behalf of users is the whole ball game - it's the path to wide-ranging automation and/or AGI, depending on which definition of the term the company is going with that day. An AI model that can provide useful information in a chat window, or handle tasks clearly outlined by the user, is a useful product, but the prospect of an Al model that can productively and proactively interact with the world around it in ways comparable to a human - or, more specifically, an employee — is where trillion-dollar valuations come from. To get where it wants to go, though, OpenAl has a number of challenges. Some are widely discussed and frustratingly hard to pin down, revolving around benchmarks, varying definitions of model capability, and predictions about scaling. Others are more banal: To answer questions more usefully, for example, chatbots tend to do better if they have more data about users; likewise, to execute tasks on their behalf, they need to operate in an environment where users are logged in to the various services they use to work and live their lives. They need a breathtaking amount of access and permission, in other words. ChatGPT isolated in a chat window doesn't have that, and it takes a long time to draw out of users, if they're willing to offer it at all. ChatGPT as a default browser - authenticated in dozens of different sites, payment methods at the ready, or perhaps even logged into a work environment - does. (Such agents also create, as many in the AI space have pointed out, a potential security nightmare.)
October 30, 2025 at 3:13 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
one way to understand media coverage of the second trump administration is that, this time around, it's really only tracking with the bottom right chart
today.yougov.com YouGov America @today.yougov.com · 13d
NEW Economist/YouGov
Net job approval for Donald Trump [at the start of his second term | now] among...
White Americans +17 | -2
Hispanic Americans -5 | -36
Black Americans -31 | -76
d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...
d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...
A multiple line chart of YouGov polling data with the headline: "Approval of Donald Trump's second-term job performance among U.S. adult citizens, and among white, Black, and Hispanic Americans." The chart has the sub-headline: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as President? (% who strongly or somewhat approve minus the % who strongly or somewhat disapprove)." The chart has the note: "Note: Responses of "don't know" are not shown."
October 28, 2025 at 3:07 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Interesting how basically every Amazon project — true of most tech neo-conglomerates, to be fair — comes back around to surveillance nymag.com/intelligence...
In various nearby industries, Amazon is regarded as a leader in employee surveillance and "algorithmic management" and is likewise held up as an example of its possible effects on workers (more productive, less content, and less likely to organize). In a brief rendering demonstrating how its delivery glasses will work, Amazon shows how worker surveillance will soon extend outside of the vehicle, right up to the doorstep. Which brings us to the second bit of news, from TechCrunch: Amazon's surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras that share footage with law enforcement. Now agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with "evidence collection and investigative work." Ring cameras are an underrated Amazon success story: With an appealing pitch — see who or what is on your doorstep, even if you're not home — the company sold millions of units and constructed a massive surveillance network with numerous benefits for the company itself. They're a way to counteract package theft and to make it easier for customers to receive deliveries. They also provide an additional way for the company and its customers to surveil its workers, meaning that Amazon's glasses aren't just extending its "end-to-end" delivery apparatus — they're closing the loop in its employee-monitoring ecosystem. Ring cameras were, for obvious reasons, always interesting to law-enforcement agencies, with which Amazon has had a generally cooperative but heavily scrutinized and limited relationship, at least until recently. Now, by partnering with companies like Axon and Flock, which operate nationwide fleets of license-plate scanners and work with local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies, including ICE, the company is making its surveillance network widely and comprehensively available to the state.
October 27, 2025 at 6:21 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
😅
dariustahir.bsky.social Darius Tahir @dariustahir.bsky.social · 18d
One persistent error is asking about kids’ (human) health and getting answers based on pet health. Kinda bizarre how much this happens.
October 23, 2025 at 9:54 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Deep research tools *did* get better after I wrote this but I wonder if people might be revisiting their rapturous reviews now that the novelty has worn off. A few months in, DR outputs remain technically impressive but they're also often... unreadable dogshit? Not useful? nymag.com/intelligence...
AI Ate the Web. Now It’s Coming Back for Seconds.
What “deep research” tells us about the future of AI — and the internet.
nymag.com
October 23, 2025 at 8:37 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
if you want a picture of the future, imagine your own face staring back at you from the chumbox, forever nymag.com/intelligence...
Virtual try-ons are actually showing up all over the place in retail — you'll find them on both luxury-brand apps and Shein — and they tend to suffer from the same issues, given that they're essentially mashing images together: The clothes don't fit quite right; the lighting is always strange; generations can take a little while; body types are approximated but rarely nailed. But they might be good enough to help rule something out or consider something new, and they're certainly good enough to be compelling and occasionally fun to use. The temptation to merge virtual try-ons with ads — to follow users around the internet not just with evidence that you know a lot about them but with actual photos of themselves using new products — is surely massive but is currently constrained by two things. First, generating such images or videos is computationally and literally expensive. And second, putting users' faces in, say, a branded Instagram Reel would probably feel to many like a violation. (For now, Google's explainer about its virtual try-on feature marks a boundary far more conservative than that, emphasizing that the feature won't currently show up on sponsored products.) 凸 One of those constraints will probably go away as AI models become more efficient. The other is a matter of expectations and norms around privacy, which, if the last two decades are any guide, have a tendency to either erode or get bulldozed. Given the hunger for return on AI investment and the close relationship between the advertising industry and AI - Google and Meta, for example, are advertising and AI giants, and it's hard to imagine the latter holding out too long on a new technology that might improve ad performance — it's probably a matter of time before someone breaks the seal and starts using customers to market to themselves at scale. Small companies are already trying something weird and uncomfortable. The bigger ones probably aren't far behind.
October 16, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
people don't like being told what they can't post, but they REALLY don't like being told what they can't generate nymag.com/intelligence...
a collage of negative reviews of Sora focused on its "guardrails"
October 14, 2025 at 2:40 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
people don't like being told what they can't post, but they REALLY don't like being told what they can't generate nymag.com/intelligence...
a collage of negative reviews of Sora focused on its "guardrails"
October 14, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
implied agentic ai pitch: we will lure users with unrealistic promises, and in the process turn them into spammers that destroy the entire existing marketplace. then... profit?
The bet by investors like Y Combinator, in other words, is on a broadly familiar form of disruption but with a couple of twists. Generative AI may expose some incumbent firms to outpricing, outselling, and outmaneuvering by start-ups that embrace it, while more and more people acclimate to strange, new, chatcentric modes of computing. In the meantime, it may also help glut, jam, and temporarily destroy the entire markets in which they're operating. It's a version of creative destruction in which the destruction is preemptive, indiscriminate, and maybe looks a bit like sabotage — with a little bit of help from all of us, of course.
October 10, 2025 at 1:13 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...
This attitude toward externalities — not my problem, and in any case worth it in exchange for a small advantage — follows the approximate logic of a spammer and often comes wrapped in the language of AI hustle culture. It's also understandable from the perspective of a job seeker who feels constantly thwarted by automated systems employers use that seem to treat seekers with similar indifference or contempt, or by platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed that, while nominally intended to connect two parties with shared interests (one needing specific services, the other offering them), can feel more like social-media-style black holes for engagement. It's an escalation that will likely be met with more escalation: countermeasures by job-listings platforms and hirers to prevent access by AI agents; more aggressive automated filtering; different hiring routines altogether, making it even harder to get through the door to a coveted interview. Mercenary (and slightly deceptive) automation tools like this, which are being pitched all over right now and already wreaking havoc in, for example, online dating, depend on two temporary circumstances to work, if they ever actually do: (1) that most other people don't have access to them, giving the user an edge and (2) that the people and parties on which they're used will tolerate and take no action against them. In other words, if you take their pitches at face value, they're pretty obviously doomed in the medium term, in the sense that they'll either be rejected by the systems they operate in or simply ruin them for everyone. Taking stock of the first few years of mainstream AI deployment, though, raises an important question. What if that's sort of the point? Or at least a world worth thinking about in a more thorough, long-term way? Generative image and video tools, for example, have significantly degraded social-media platforms, allowing bad actors and regular people to fill them with slop, intensifying existing problems with spam and deceptive content while thwarting old solutions. And, hey, look at that: Suddenly, OpenAI and Meta are launching new social networks based on AI, on which posting generated content is the point, not a problem to be solved. Generative AI may be placing immense stress on educational institutions and worsening the already strained relationships between teachers and students, but wait — every AI company is selling ed tech now.
October 10, 2025 at 1:13 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
vortexegg.com
AI companies are actually AI gap arbitrage companies
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Oct 10
trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...
This attitude toward externalities — not my problem, and in any case worth it in exchange for a small advantage — follows the approximate logic of a spammer and often comes wrapped in the language of AI hustle culture. It's also understandable from the perspective of a job seeker who feels constantly thwarted by automated systems employers use that seem to treat seekers with similar indifference or contempt, or by platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed that, while nominally intended to connect two parties with shared interests (one needing specific services, the other offering them), can feel more like social-media-style black holes for engagement. It's an escalation that will likely be met with more escalation: countermeasures by job-listings platforms and hirers to prevent access by AI agents; more aggressive automated filtering; different hiring routines altogether, making it even harder to get through the door to a coveted interview. Mercenary (and slightly deceptive) automation tools like this, which are being pitched all over right now and already wreaking havoc in, for example, online dating, depend on two temporary circumstances to work, if they ever actually do: (1) that most other people don't have access to them, giving the user an edge and (2) that the people and parties on which they're used will tolerate and take no action against them. In other words, if you take their pitches at face value, they're pretty obviously doomed in the medium term, in the sense that they'll either be rejected by the systems they operate in or simply ruin them for everyone. Taking stock of the first few years of mainstream AI deployment, though, raises an important question. What if that's sort of the point? Or at least a world worth thinking about in a more thorough, long-term way? Generative image and video tools, for example, have significantly degraded social-media platforms, allowing bad actors and regular people to fill them with slop, intensifying existing problems with spam and deceptive content while thwarting old solutions. And, hey, look at that: Suddenly, OpenAI and Meta are launching new social networks based on AI, on which posting generated content is the point, not a problem to be solved. Generative AI may be placing immense stress on educational institutions and worsening the already strained relationships between teachers and students, but wait — every AI company is selling ed tech now.
October 10, 2025 at 1:34 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...
This attitude toward externalities — not my problem, and in any case worth it in exchange for a small advantage — follows the approximate logic of a spammer and often comes wrapped in the language of AI hustle culture. It's also understandable from the perspective of a job seeker who feels constantly thwarted by automated systems employers use that seem to treat seekers with similar indifference or contempt, or by platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed that, while nominally intended to connect two parties with shared interests (one needing specific services, the other offering them), can feel more like social-media-style black holes for engagement. It's an escalation that will likely be met with more escalation: countermeasures by job-listings platforms and hirers to prevent access by AI agents; more aggressive automated filtering; different hiring routines altogether, making it even harder to get through the door to a coveted interview. Mercenary (and slightly deceptive) automation tools like this, which are being pitched all over right now and already wreaking havoc in, for example, online dating, depend on two temporary circumstances to work, if they ever actually do: (1) that most other people don't have access to them, giving the user an edge and (2) that the people and parties on which they're used will tolerate and take no action against them. In other words, if you take their pitches at face value, they're pretty obviously doomed in the medium term, in the sense that they'll either be rejected by the systems they operate in or simply ruin them for everyone. Taking stock of the first few years of mainstream AI deployment, though, raises an important question. What if that's sort of the point? Or at least a world worth thinking about in a more thorough, long-term way? Generative image and video tools, for example, have significantly degraded social-media platforms, allowing bad actors and regular people to fill them with slop, intensifying existing problems with spam and deceptive content while thwarting old solutions. And, hey, look at that: Suddenly, OpenAI and Meta are launching new social networks based on AI, on which posting generated content is the point, not a problem to be solved. Generative AI may be placing immense stress on educational institutions and worsening the already strained relationships between teachers and students, but wait — every AI company is selling ed tech now.
October 10, 2025 at 1:13 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
it's only been a week but I'd bet a lot of early users are having experiences like this with Sora: manic, exploratory onboarding followed by something like a hangover. it's a pattern! nymag.com/intelligence...
Sora is presumably extremely expensive to run, hence OpenAl's use of a chained invite program to roll it out. In its early form, it brings to mind the early days of image generators like Midjourney, the video model for which Meta is now borrowing for Vibes. Like Sora, Midjourney in 2022, was a fascinating demo that was, for a few days, really fun to mess with for a lot of the same reasons: A vast majority of the images I've generated have been jokes — most for friends, others between me and the bot. It's fun, for a while, to interrupt a chat about which mousetrap to buy by asking a supercomputer for a horrific rendering of a man stuck in a bed of glue or to respond to a shared Zillow link with a rendering of a "McMansion Pyramid of Giza..? ...I still use Midjourney this way, but the novelty has worn off, in no small part because the renderings have just gotten better — less "strange and beautiful" than "competent and plausible." The bit has also gotten stale, and I've mapped the narrow boundaries of my artistic imagination. Playing with Sora is a similar experience: a destabilizing encounter with a strange and uncomfortable technology that will soon become ubiquitous but also rapidly and surprisingly banal. It also produces similar results: a bunch of generations that are interesting to you and your friends but look like slop to anyone else. The abundant glitches, like my avatar's tendency to include counting in all dialogue, help make the generations interesting. Many of the videos that are compelling beyond the context of their creation are interesting largely as specimens or artifacts — that is, as examples of how a prompt ("sam altman mounted to the wall like a big mouth Billy bass, full body") gets translated into ... something. (As one friend noted, many of these videos become unwatchable if you can't see what the prompt was.)
October 6, 2025 at 4:33 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
part of the big theoretical "twitter do-over" is this inevitable jack-brained dynamic, too
quantian.bsky.social Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · Oct 3
Bluesky is a site explicitly founded by cryptocurrency libertarians with the idea that it would be a decentralized platform where users would be free to choose the open-source moderation and algorithmic feed tools they wanted, and by accident acquired a power userbase that hates all of those things.
opinionhaver.bsky.social William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · Oct 3
Are people mad at the Bluesky ceo for a real reason or an internet madness reason?
October 3, 2025 at 2:53 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
OpenAI's maximalist "asking for infinite money" strategy has a legal counterpart, too nymag.com/intelligence...
The opt-out process for the new version of Sora means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright material in videos the tool creates. This is pretty close to the maximum possible bid OpenAI can make here, in terms of its relationship to copyright — a world in which rights holders must opt out of inclusion in OpenAI's model is one in which OpenAl is all but asking to opt out of copyright as a concept. To arrive at such a proposal also seems to take for granted that a slew of extremely contentious legal and regulatory questions will be settled in OpenAI's favor, particularly around the concept of "fair use." Al firms are arguing in court — and via lobbyists, who are pointing to national-security concerns and the Al race with China - that they should be permitted not just to train on copyrighted data but to reproduce similar and competitive outputs. By default, according to this report, OpenAI's future models will be able to produce images of a character like Nintendo's Mario unless Nintendo takes action to opt out. Questions one might think would precede such a conversation — how did OpenAI's model know about Mario in the first place? What sorts of media did it scrape and train on? — are here considered resolved or irrelevant. Coming from Altman, though, it assumes an additional meaning: He would very much prefer that his company not be liable for potentially risky or damaging conversations that its software has with users. In other words, he'd like to operate a product that dispenses medical and legal advice while assuming as little liability for its outputs, or its users' inputs, as possible — a mass-market product with the legal protections of a doctor, therapist, or lawyer but with as little responsibility as possible. There are genuinely interesting issues to work out here. But against the backdrop of numerous reports and lawsuits accusing chatbot makers of goading users into self-harm or triggering psychosis, it's not hard to imagine why getting blanket protections might feel rather urgent right now. On both copyright and privacy, his vision is maximalist: not just total freedom for his company to operate as it pleases, but additional regulatory protections for it as well. It's also probably aspirational — we don't get to a copyright free-for-all without a lot of big fights, and a chatbot version of attorney-client privilege is the sort of thing that will likely arrive with a lot of qualifications and caveats. Still, each bid is characteristic of the industry and the moment it's in. So long as they're building something, they believe they might as well ask for everything.
October 1, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...
Was Tyler Robinson radicalized online? To whatever extent it's a meaningful, coherent question, the best answer we have, based on what little evidence we have — and with the expectation that more will be revealed in the coming days, weeks, and months — is: maybe? We don't know. If and until we find out, though, the days since Kirk's shooting have posed a related question: What about everyone else? If the popular theory of online radicalization is that people lose touch with their humanity - or are merely driven to ideological extremity or total alienation - in insular, ideological accelerative communities, there were abundant examples of this phenomenon in the week following Kirk's shooting. Seconds after Kirk was killed, a TikTok influencer streamed the scene mere feet away from the stage where it happened, frantically commanding viewers to subscribe to his channel as panicked bystanders screamed and fled. In the early stages of the manhunt, politically motivated users on X, and on forums like 4chan and Kiwi Farms, began constructing theories about how the shooter must have been trans and therefore predisposed to violence, laundering a preexisting shared obsession into the broader social-media conversation. Elsewhere on social media, defensive leftists convinced one another, with scant evidence and clear motivation, that Kirk must have been killed by a follower of far-right personality Nick Fuentes, who had feuded with him for years. (It seems like a version of this theory may have found its way to the writer's room at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, drawing the attention of FCC chair Brendan Carr and leading ABC to take the show off the air "indefinitely.") Before and after Robinson was identified, a small but not insignificant number of people cheered Kirk's death on public social-media channels, while right-wing internet users responded with an unprecedented mass doxxing campaign, collecting these posts and trying to get the people behind them fired, kicked out of school, or deported. This was all cheered on by the J.D. Vance - "call them out, and hell, call their employer," the vice-president said while hosting Charlie Kirk's show. It was gleefully justified as revenge for the left's years of"cancel culture," and was accordingly broad, sweeping up people who had merely criticized Kirk, as well as bystanders who had, in fact, said nothing at all. Elsewhere on social media, and especially on X, some users simply — and comfortably — called for direct retribution and declared that the time had come for a national divorce and civil war. Animated, horrified, inspired, or merely unmoored into a state of disorientation by the shocking (and widely viewed) murder of a polarizing figure, a vast range of people revealed, on purpose or by accident, how alien to one another their normative experiences had become, online and off. Many surely wondered, from each edge of this nightmarish discourse — although perhaps not as much as people who didn't enter the fray at all — in what world are people posting this stuff? In death as in life, Charlie Kirk has left a lot of Americans struggling to understand how their fellow citizens could possibly say or believe the things they do. I don’t mean to suggest equivalence here. An obsessive, metrics-driven influencer is a freakish cautionary tale, not a militant slipping into terroristic threats. You might question the character or judgment of someone who publicly celebrates the death of public figure they hate, or vents crudely or angrily about their political opponents after seeing a video of the murder of an online personality they love or identify with, but they’re not participating in an organized online campaign, supported by elected officials, to have their enemies “thrown from civil society,” kicked out of school, fired from their jobs, or stripped of their driver’s licenses. Fearful elected Democrats have been far more careful than scattered liberals and leftists on social media, retreating to platitudes about how violence is bad and speech should never be met with violence, and have been harshly censured by Republicans in cases where they offered anything but praise for Kirk, as in the case of representative Ilhan Omar — the right is, as usual, more aligned. The president claimed that the “radical left” was “directly responsible” for an act of “terrorism” and pledged to go after people and organizations that “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence.” His closest adviser, Stephen Miller, was more direct and spoke in the same voice as the burn-it-all-down contingent of Kirk’s online fandom. Kirk’s death was the result of “a vast domestic-terror movement,” he told Vance on Kirk’s show, before promising to use “every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”
September 18, 2025 at 1:16 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
strong agree, from 2017: opaque commercial social platforms becoming the most vivid, accessible representation of discourse, democracy, the public sphere, the media, etc was a massive accelerant for cynicism/resentment/despair www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/m...
September 18, 2025 at 2:34 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...
Was Tyler Robinson radicalized online? To whatever extent it's a meaningful, coherent question, the best answer we have, based on what little evidence we have — and with the expectation that more will be revealed in the coming days, weeks, and months — is: maybe? We don't know. If and until we find out, though, the days since Kirk's shooting have posed a related question: What about everyone else? If the popular theory of online radicalization is that people lose touch with their humanity - or are merely driven to ideological extremity or total alienation - in insular, ideological accelerative communities, there were abundant examples of this phenomenon in the week following Kirk's shooting. Seconds after Kirk was killed, a TikTok influencer streamed the scene mere feet away from the stage where it happened, frantically commanding viewers to subscribe to his channel as panicked bystanders screamed and fled. In the early stages of the manhunt, politically motivated users on X, and on forums like 4chan and Kiwi Farms, began constructing theories about how the shooter must have been trans and therefore predisposed to violence, laundering a preexisting shared obsession into the broader social-media conversation. Elsewhere on social media, defensive leftists convinced one another, with scant evidence and clear motivation, that Kirk must have been killed by a follower of far-right personality Nick Fuentes, who had feuded with him for years. (It seems like a version of this theory may have found its way to the writer's room at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, drawing the attention of FCC chair Brendan Carr and leading ABC to take the show off the air "indefinitely.") Before and after Robinson was identified, a small but not insignificant number of people cheered Kirk's death on public social-media channels, while right-wing internet users responded with an unprecedented mass doxxing campaign, collecting these posts and trying to get the people behind them fired, kicked out of school, or deported. This was all cheered on by the J.D. Vance - "call them out, and hell, call their employer," the vice-president said while hosting Charlie Kirk's show. It was gleefully justified as revenge for the left's years of"cancel culture," and was accordingly broad, sweeping up people who had merely criticized Kirk, as well as bystanders who had, in fact, said nothing at all. Elsewhere on social media, and especially on X, some users simply — and comfortably — called for direct retribution and declared that the time had come for a national divorce and civil war. Animated, horrified, inspired, or merely unmoored into a state of disorientation by the shocking (and widely viewed) murder of a polarizing figure, a vast range of people revealed, on purpose or by accident, how alien to one another their normative experiences had become, online and off. Many surely wondered, from each edge of this nightmarish discourse — although perhaps not as much as people who didn't enter the fray at all — in what world are people posting this stuff? In death as in life, Charlie Kirk has left a lot of Americans struggling to understand how their fellow citizens could possibly say or believe the things they do. I don’t mean to suggest equivalence here. An obsessive, metrics-driven influencer is a freakish cautionary tale, not a militant slipping into terroristic threats. You might question the character or judgment of someone who publicly celebrates the death of public figure they hate, or vents crudely or angrily about their political opponents after seeing a video of the murder of an online personality they love or identify with, but they’re not participating in an organized online campaign, supported by elected officials, to have their enemies “thrown from civil society,” kicked out of school, fired from their jobs, or stripped of their driver’s licenses. Fearful elected Democrats have been far more careful than scattered liberals and leftists on social media, retreating to platitudes about how violence is bad and speech should never be met with violence, and have been harshly censured by Republicans in cases where they offered anything but praise for Kirk, as in the case of representative Ilhan Omar — the right is, as usual, more aligned. The president claimed that the “radical left” was “directly responsible” for an act of “terrorism” and pledged to go after people and organizations that “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence.” His closest adviser, Stephen Miller, was more direct and spoke in the same voice as the burn-it-all-down contingent of Kirk’s online fandom. Kirk’s death was the result of “a vast domestic-terror movement,” he told Vance on Kirk’s show, before promising to use “every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”
September 18, 2025 at 1:16 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
OpenAI's "what is ChatGPT, anyway?" study is a little weird, sort of funny, but actually illuminating nymag.com/intelligence...
There are a few major caveats here. OpenAI's own researchers worked on the paper with Harvard economist David Deming under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research (in other words, the company is comfortable with this paper's findings). Additionally, the research, which is mostly an attempt to classify and sort a large set of messages, was done substantially by OpenAl's own models, which both automated the process and, the researchers say, helped preserve user anonymity. "No one looked at the content of messages while conducting analysis for this paper," the researchers claim, although they did validate their automations against human analysis used in smaller, previous studies we've talked about here before. The researchers' methodology is both fascinating and could insufficiently but not entirely inaccurately be characterized as: "We asked ChatT The picture that emerges from this data matches this thesis pretty closely: ChatGPT, for many of its users, is a way to access, remix, summarize, retrieve, and sometimes reproduce information and ideas that already exist in the world; in other words, they use this one tool much in the way that they previously engaged with the entire web - arguably the last great "cultural and social technology" - and through a similar routine of constant requests, consultations, and diversions. One doesn't get the feeling from this research that we're careening toward uncontrollable superintelligence, or even imminent invasion of the workforce by agentic Al bots, but it does suggest users are more than comfortable replacing and extending many of their current online interactions - searching, browsing, and consulting with the ideas of others - with an ingratiating chatbot simulation.
September 16, 2025 at 2:36 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
congratulations to all these great men of history, who will definitely be revered and celebrated for generations!
karlbode.com Karl Bode @karlbode.com · Sep 5
this whole video of tech CEOs kissing authoritarian ass is genuinely one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen in my life

absolute, feckless fawning by a long list of pudding-brained simps who should never be taken seriously on any subject ever again
Trump hosts top tech CEOs at White House: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Tim Cook & more
YouTube video by LiveNOW from FOX
www.youtube.com
September 5, 2025 at 2:23 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
chaykak.bsky.social
helpful @jwherrman.bsky.social column on the value and business models of AI coding startups nymag.com/intelligence...
How Investors Think AI Will Actually Make Money
“Learn to code” is taking on new meaning in Silicon Valley.
nymag.com
September 4, 2025 at 5:52 PM