Notices by DAIR (dair@dair-community.social)

NEW: Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 - Data Centers Go Nuclear

In which Maia Woluchem and Livia Garofalo of Data & Society join @emilymbender and @alex to get into data center infrastructure build out and resistance in Pennsylvania.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/18933682-data-centers-go-nuclear-with-maia-woluchem-and-dr-livia-garofalo-2026-03-09

NEW FROM DAIR 📢

Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility. 🧵

Based on in-depth interviews and direct organizing experience, "Drive Down" reveals how Amazon is using surveillance technologies to intensify driver workloads, instill a patchwork of uneven digital punishments and expose all drivers to potential wage theft and unsafe working conditions.

"To try to live without using plastic now (at least in the US) is an extremely expensive endeavor, both in terms of money and n terms of time. Plastic is so deeply integrated into so many of our systems that it is very difficult to avoid. But we are at a moment with "AI" where things aren't so deeply integrated, though corporate interests are pushing for them to be. So I believe that every act of refusal is especially powerful and meaningful now..."

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-keep-friends-and-influence-people-away/

@emilymbender

🔇🔇🔇Join us for an honest conversation with some of the people forging a better digital future. Event will be recorded for those who can't make it.

⏰ Thursday May 30th at 10am PDT/1pm EDT

➡️ Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/imagining-more-a-candid-convo-about-the-future-of-the-black-web-experience-tickets-1364904469009

More info on our amazing speakers below🧵

Catt Small has worked with companies of all sizes. She started programming interactive games around the age of 10 & has been going ever since. In her spare time, Catt makes awkward video games, writes, and draws artwork of all kinds. You can view her work at https://cattsmall.com.

Ra'il I'Nasah Kiam (@so_treu) is an activist, artist & scholar from Atlanta, & one of the 1st people that identified the growing online threat of white nationalism & hate organizing online. They continue this work in the fediverse. See this convo with them & Artist Marcia X.

https://logicmag.io/policy/blackness-in-the-fediverse-a-conversation-with-marcia-x/

"For all its promised benefits, the artificial-intelligence boom is likely to prove costly to public health and even lead to hundreds of deaths a year in the U.S. alone, and those ill effects are likely to disproportionately hit poorer communities, according to a study by California researchers..."

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/ai-induced-pollution-could-kill-hundreds-cost-billions-researchers-say/article_6449a044-e811-11ef-88d2-473a3ec5a724.html

🔇 Join Alex Hanna, Ph.D. and Emily M. Bender for the first iteration of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 this year.

⏰12pm pacific.
➡️https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

Join us to kick off the new year by ridiculing ARC, o3 and all things OpenAI.

Until then, catch up on prior episodes at https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/.

Don't forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter on our website for monthly updates. Scroll to the bottom of https://www.dair-institute.org to sign up.

Congratulations to @timnitGebru for being awarded the 2025 Miles Conrad Awardee!

"The award recognizes her critical work on the dangers of biases in AI as the information community grapples with ethics and rapidly advancing technologies."

Dr. Gebru will deliver the Miles Conrad Lecture at #NISOPlus25.

https://niso.plus/2024/12/dr-timnit-gebru-to-receive-the-2025-miles-conrad-award/

@milamiceli
This is the last event in our Data Workers' Inquiry series.

➡ Catch the recordings of all prior events at data-workers.org/events.
➡ Find the rich repository of works, ranging from in depth reports to animated shorts and podcasts, at data-workers.org.

Did you use this repository in your class, investigative reporting, or other works? We would love to hear about it if so.

🗣️ 🗣️ 🗣️ This Monday, we will be joined by our friends at Arte es Ética (Oscar Araya), Guerrilla Media Collective (Alex Minshall), the Writers Guild Of America, USA (John López), and Rafael Grohmann at the university of Toronto, with a conversation moderated by our very own @milamiceli

🗯️ They show us the ways in which we are all exploited data workers, and how we can resist this exploitation.

⏰ 9am PT/18:00 CET.
➡ Zoom: register at https://events.zoom.us/ev/AoEkvePmTHAKVpasFIEsgtOhjo05XHtj3bcYn0rgaFtkmUpudYOB~AoUrcNrrBxZzhu2yox7LZ7992KVbxOWg5EH4lILGm2SSBlakP-nLYXjdxg
➡ Live stream: https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

"“It’s theft,” said Dave Wiskus, the CEO of Nebula, a streaming service partially owned by its creators, some of whom have had their work taken from YouTube to train AI."
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-training-data-apple-nvidia-anthropic/

"In the end, the real problem is arguably not that the data labelers shared the images on social media. Rather, it’s that this type of AI training set—specifically, one depicting faces—is far more common than most people understand, notes @milamiceli, a sociologist and computer scientist who has been interviewing distributed workers contracted by data annotation companies for years....The data labelers found this work “really uncomfortable,” she adds.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/

DAIR & our collaborators call on @facctconference @FAccT
to divest from Israeli apartheid, occupation & genocide. Get our zines on the complicity of the conference's sponsors, & a #NoTechForGenocide pin if you haven't done so already.

Join an emergency meeting on June 5 at 12:50pm Rio time in Grego Room + Zoom, RSVP here: Tomorrow, June 5 at 12:50pm in Grego Room + Zoom, RSVP here: http://bit.ly/FAccT-Palestine http://bit.ly/FAccT-Palestine.

Get your zine at one of the conference tables.

"When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference...Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word 'her' - a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human."

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/scarlett-johansson-shocked-angered-openai-voice-rcna153180

"I’ve written about relationships between tech companies and the military before, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/ai-weapons-palantir-war-technology

Angie Wang's illustrated essay for the New Yorker, wondering whether her child's early attempts at speech were the same as LLMs, was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. "A toddler has a life, and learns language to describe it. An L.L.M. learns language but has no life of its own to describe," she writes.

Read On The New Yorker's Website: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/sketchbook/is-my-toddler-a-stochastic-parrot

"But while authorities generally pitch facial recognition as a tool to capture terrorists or wanted murderers, the technology has also emerged as a critical instrument in a very particular context: punishing protesters." by Darren Loucaides

https://restofworld.org/2024/facial-recognition-government-protest-surveillance/#/an-end-to-privacy

"Experts who reviewed the policy changes at The Intercept’s request said OpenAI appears to be silently weakening its stance against doing business with militaries. “I could imagine that the shift away from ‘military and warfare’ to ‘weapons’ leaves open a space for OpenAI to support operational infrastructures as long as the application doesn’t directly involve weapons development narrowly defined,” said Lucy Suchman, ...

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/