Let's all ridicule AI

First up, three videos thanks to Mar Hicks:

• Boiling-people-alive factory employee

• Lockheed-Martin ad

• AI: you can’t see it

Academics are speaking out, too. From MIT:

• How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance (by Catherine D’Ignazio, Marah Gubar, Tanalís Padilla, Dwai Banerjee, and Karrie Karahalios, MIT Faculty Newsletter, September/October 2026)

The oligarchs and tech companies are supplying plenty of material:

• Peter Thiel says “if you’re evil you’re not bad” – apparently in an interview pertaining to his award from German media conglomerate Axel Springer. (This is the Peter Thiel of the Antichrist lectures, as covered on South Park.)

• Jensen Huang interview by Ezra Klein (NYT, Sep 23, 2026): Huang says kids are forgetting the multiplication tables, and he doesn’t know his address, his zip code, or his own phone number. And he’s fine with all of it.

• Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” (Ars Technica, Sep 17, 2026): In internal Microsoft documents unsealed in legal proceedings brought by the New York Times –

Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

• On Microsoft, btw, see also New Jersey datacenter fined $1.1m after visual investigation showed dozens of unpermitted generators (Guardian, Sep 25, 2026):

DataOne, a Microsoft-linked AI datacenter, has stirred controversy since it broke ground in 2025 due to consistent noise complaints, unpermitted construction and a combative zoning process. The site lies roughly 40 miles (64km) outside Philadelphia and is slated to provide AI computing power to Microsoft as part of a $17bn deal with Nebius, a Dutch AI infrastructure giant.

• 404 Media / Jason Koebler on Facebook/Meta’s Muse “AI” actually relying on human labor (Sep 25, 2026), referring to his story Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center (Sep 22, 2026). See also Facebook’s virtual assistant called “M” from 2015 that did exactly the same thing, claiming to make restaurant reservations etc. but actually using human labor, before being shut down in 2018.

And about those rogue AIs breaking out and wreaking havoc:

• “ceo of burger king: our burgers have gone rogue again and infected people with e coli” -leon (Bluesky, Sep 24, 2026)

• AI Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out Of Control (Karl Bode, Sep 14, 2026): “The press obsession with software-powered doomsday is a misdirection overshadowing a much deadlier reality: our public interest regulators no longer function.”

Just imagine what’s next:




(Gift link to NYT source article)

Mark’s upcoming conference: Gel 2026, Fri-Sat, Oct 2-3, in Accord, NY, two hours north of NYC.