U.S: military rolls out 'AI'?

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rollout Tuesday of the U.S. military’s new AI platform just fell flat on its face.
“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” Hegseth said in a video on X, announcing GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow military members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed”—and all without using their brains.
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The platform will house Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, using a retrieval-augmented generation to connect the large language model chatbot to Google Search “to ensure outputs are reliable and dramatically [reduce] the risk of AI hallucinations.”
The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industry, and in July, it awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at the DOD."
— Edith Olmsted, Pete Hegseth’s New AI Defense Tool Rollout Immediately Derails. Hegseth tried to unveil a new defense tool, but things didn’t go as planned. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks. The New Republic, December 9, 2025

Sec. Hegseth rolled out the U.S. military’s new AI platform, GenAi.Mil, with a link to an empty website. trib.al/tbCJAkT Predictably, the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks, but the wonky rollout triggered eyerolls across the internet.

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— The New Republic (@newrepublic.com) December 9, 2025 at 1:16 PM

You know, I was working on a joke, but the more I thought about it? Hegseth's fake-ass Skynet-wannabe is gonna be the tipping point into this stupid shit in Venezuela, isn't it? They're gonna use it as a test-bed and it's gonna go really fucking badly, isn't it?

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— Jesse Pohlman (He/Him) (@jpohlmanwriting.com) December 9, 2025 at 5:44 PM

We've been saying AI is a tool of facism but I really didn't expect them to make it so clear and obvious to EVERYONE

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— Zoe Tunnell (@zoewithasword.bsky.social) December 9, 2025 at 8:19 PM

Trump lies to troops

In December 2025,

Trump unveiled the “Warrior Dividend” — $1,776 for every service member, the amount chosen because, he explained, “our great nation was founded in that year.” The payment, he suggested, came from tariff revenues, a claim designed to make his trade wars look like Christmas bonuses rather than regressive taxes. In fact, as the administration quietly admitted the next day, the money came from a congressionally-approved housing supplement that troops were already entitled to receive. He had simply rebranded their own money and handed it to them with a bow.
— Trump's Gone Mad: It seems plain to me just how crazy this president is. His lack of any sympathy for the Reiners was a tell. His 'surprise' at the new name of the Kennedy Center was another. The President is ill. Joshua Powell, The Powell House Press, Dec 21, 2025

See the whole thread:

Hegseth is wholeheartedly endorsing the core premise of fascism: industry, as part of the private sphere, must be subordinated to the military objectives of the state.

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— Corey Rayburn Yung (@coreyryung.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 6:11 PM

OpenAI strikes deal with Pentagon hours after Trump admin bans Anthropic, Hadas Gold, CNN, February 27, 2026

Tech bros have spent much of the decade stomping divots into their workforces — so of course they’d lack any concept whatsoever of solidarity.

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— Greg Greene (he/him/his) (@greene.haus) February 27, 2026 at 10:21 PM

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

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— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 7:25 AM

White House Plans To Give Federal Agencies Access To Claude Mythos, The A.I. Model Making Everyone Nervous Anthropic was discussing Mythos with the Trump administration, even after the Pentagon cut off business with the U.S. AI lab following a contract dispute. Reuters, HuffPost, Apr 16, 2026

True, pronouns aren't aerodynamic. They have drag. ...despite which the 2026 U.S. counterterrorism strategy is to "prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization" of trans people "before they can maim or kill the innocent." MAGA says: Trans very weak! Also very strong! Nonstop foolery.

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.com) May 25, 2026 at 10:29 AM

No more free support for Windows 10 — pay or else your computer is e-waste

Jason Koebler writes yesterday for 404 Media that people are either going to keep using unsecure Windows computers or else throw the computers into the trash. Yesterday's

end of free Windows 10 support is an environmental disaster in the making, with as many as 400 million computers that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 set to be cut off from receiving free security updates. The move is an egregious example of planned obsolescence that will inevitably result in the early deaths of millions of computers that would have otherwise had years of life left, and it is set to affect as many as 42 percent of all Windows computers worldwide.

“There’s 400 million computers that are going to enter the waste stream. That’s a disaster, just in terms of the sheer volume,” Nathan Proctor, director of consumer rights group PIRG’s right to repair campaign, said on the 404 Media Podcast. “And then you have people who are going to ignore the warnings and use a computer that’s insecure, so there’s going to [eventually] be some widespread security problems with these older, unsupported, no longer getting security updates computers.”

Koebler adds: "Notably, Microsoft is going to continue offering security updates to customers who pay for them, meaning that it would be trivial for the company to continue to offer critical security updates for free." In other words, the security update exists, it's just that Microsoft wants money, either by making people pay for the security update or by prompting them to toss out their old computer and buy a new one.

Also read: The Life and Death of Things: A Call for Action: Can ‘planned obsolescence’ — building things that don’t last, to maximise profit — be replaced by the sharing economy? Anouk Patel-Campillo, Ph.D. Medium, October 15, 2025

Somewhat relatedly: Human waste

In case you missed it: "Is it time to revolutionize the toilet?" Jacqui Palumbo, CNN, February 22, 2024

You'll have no human needs because AI will live for you: Why Elon Musk says saving for retirement will be 'irrelevant' in the next 20 years Theron Mohamed, Business Insider, Jan 9, 2026

ChatGPT as a search engine

"I have not used ChatGPT, because as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it." — Vince Gilligan (WATCH: Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan really hates AI, Simone De Rochefort, Polygon, Nov 7, 2025)

Kids are taught to look things up, right? That basic recommendation assumed that available sources would contain facts. But now, there are LLMs, which are "nonsense machines." So looking things up is bad advice, or at least incomplete advice, given the widespread availability of a tool that lies to you. Otherwise kids are going to use the nonsense lying tool and believe they've learned something from it.

"They 'looked it up'! they got it from somewhere! ... it's something they think they LEARNED"

Well this is grim

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— Pavel (@spavel.bsky.social) July 6, 2024 at 5:15 PM

Schools were unprepared for this:

"at least in the early days, a total crapshoot: Some states claimed that they had not thought about ChatGPT at all, while other state departments of education brought in consulting firms to give trainings to teachers and principals about how to use ChatGPT in the classroom. Some of the trainings were given by explicitly pro-AI organizations and authors, and organizations backed by tech companies. The documents, taken in their totality, show that American public schools were wildly unprepared for students’ widespread adoption of ChatGPT, which has since become one of the biggest struggles in American education."
— American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show, Jason Koebler, 404 Media, May 15, 2025

"Everyone participating in generative AI is polluting the data supply for everyone." AI is already eating itself: www.theregister.com/2025/06/15/a...

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— Doc Sarah Lonsdale (@sarahjlonsdale.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 2:23 AM

By the way, the president uses "AI" as a deflection to indicate something is false.

"The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year... In a way, then, America has become one big bet on AI."

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— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 6:05 AM

Look what a massive amount of the U.S. stock market is invested in "AI" companies.

Generative AI is a societal disaster: Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society. Don't buy the AI hype. by Paris Marx, Disconnect, October 24, 2025

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

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— Matthew Noe (@noethematt.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 5:46 AM

In 2022

The UK made it illegal to hire someone to write an essay for you. Yet there's nothing that can be done about machines writing the essay for you?

In 2025

Sam Altman of course says you need ChatGPT to know how to raise a baby.

Jimmy Fallon: "And do you use ChatGPT when raising your baby?" Sam Altman: "I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT."

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— More Perfect Union (@moreperfectunion.bsky.social) December 9, 2025 at 10:01 AM

Guillermo del Toro gets it. variety.com/2026/film/ne...

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— Trey Lawson (@tlawson.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 10:55 PM

Happy to be included in this article with MIT Technology Review about the QuitGPT campaign. www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/10/1...

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— Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist) (@fisherdanar.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 6:58 AM

Today's technology is designed to divorce us from ourselves.

"...the rapid promotion and acceptance of AI into our daily lives helps to ease us into this weird dysmorphic fascism we have moved into." Their goals are to "get rid of the pesky people who question things, keep tabs on all of us to keep us 'safe,' help distort reality so we are too tired to question everything, keep us disconnected from other humans, keep us 'efficient' (because white supremacy likes efficiency more than quality), get you to question everything and be too scared to trust your instincts—oh, and help destroy the planet because that takes away more of us, too." So, "don’t outsource your thinking to a data packet that serves a master who doesn’t care about you and who just wants to strip your essence and use it to fuel their quest for unlimited riches." (Black Girl in Maine)

Erin Maglaque [interviewed by Chandler Fritz]: It is true that the textureless authority of AI-generated writing makes us feel as if we are in the presence of an omniscient being. But we lose something important about being human if AI becomes our primary contact with the unknown, our primary experience of the inexplicable.

And what does that misplaced reverence say about us, about our capacity to contend with real mystery? AI is predictable by its design; that is how large language models work, through probability. Premodern mysticism was not concerned with the predictable or the probable, but with the opposite: with moments of irruption, of disabling wonder. Why do we want our gods to be so bland, our oracles so anemic? Do we get the gods we deserve?

— Interview in the New York Review of Books, emailed to subscribers, March 21, 2026

"And they just…took it. They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.

They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else."

— Catherynne M. Valente, Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement: The actual audacity of it all, Welcome to Garbagetown, Mar 30, 2026

Don't use AI summaries for journalism either

Even after getting caught, he still basically just shrugs it off as user error, rather than the extremely obvious outcome of using a piece of software that has zero designed tendency towards accuracy beyond the human-created (stolen) inputs it relies upon archive.ph/wip/qMFtz

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— Ketan Joshi (@ketanjoshi.co) March 21, 2026 at 2:40 PM

Polling is broken?

"In my Facebook dahlia growers group, there are endless queries from new growers asking if the planting plan built for them by some A.I. chatbot would work (almost always: no). I want to reply in all caps: COMPARE THE TIME IT TOOK YOU TO ASK CLAUDE THIS QUESTION, POSE IT TO THIS GROUP, THEN FIGHT WITH EVERYONE IN THE GROUP ABOUT A.I......TO LOOKING IN ONE (1) DAHLIA-GROWING BOOK, OR PERUSING ONE (1) DAHLIA GROWER'S FAQ."
Anne Helen Petersen, "A.I. Keeps Wasting My Time," Culture Study, May 24, 2026

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A post shared by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ph.D. (@neuranne)

Here’s a useful historical analogy when it comes to AI: The year is 1892. Five days ago Andrew Carnegie consolidated his holdings into US Steel. Today, his hired goons are firing actual bullets at his workers. He is the demonic head of what will become the most polluting industry in U.S. history.

— Christopher Mims (@mims.bsky.social) August 21, 2026 at 6:21 AM

Since Oct 2023, Google has sold its AI tools Vertex and Gemini AI to the IDF

A few posts from a thread on Bluesky...

STATEMENT—from Google workers with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign on Washington Post’s reporting that Google rushed to sell the Israeli military its AI tools since the launch of its genocidal attack on Gaza began on October 7, 2023 [THREAD] www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

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— No Tech For Apartheid (@notechforapartheid.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 4:39 PM

Here's that Washington Post story.

Yesterday, reporting from the Washington Post confirmed: Since October 7, Google executives feverishly pushed to get Google's state of the art artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military. This includes Google’s Vertex and Gemini AI.

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— No Tech For Apartheid (@notechforapartheid.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 4:42 PM

Critically, part of this push came from an urgent effort to beat out Amazon, Google’s main competitor in cloud, and the other beneficiary of Project Nimbus.

— No Tech For Apartheid (@notechforapartheid.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 4:43 PM

This reporting officially debunks Google’s canned response to workers and press who have, since 2021, raised concerns about the corporation’s business with Israel: Project Nimbus is directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.

— No Tech For Apartheid (@notechforapartheid.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 4:43 PM

The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have killed over 186,000 Palestinians in Gaza (as estimated by the Lancet in 2024, and likely a massively under-reported number); and products like Vertex and Gemini are not used just for tasks like email or payroll.

— No Tech For Apartheid (@notechforapartheid.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 4:44 PM

The thread continues on Bluesky.

A few months later:

"Not long ago, artificial intelligence executives were asking Congress for more regulation. The House of Representatives budget bill passed last week demonstrates how quickly the industry has changed course.

Inside the House bill is a moratorium on the sort of state-level AI regulations that have addressed political “deepfakes” and using AI to deny medical claims. At the same time the House bill cuts Medicare, it would funnel more money to tech companies to develop kamikaze drones.

For proponents of AI regulation, the House bill is the culmination of a shift in the industry’s mindset. Rather than paying lip service to popular concerns about AI, the industry has decided to partner with the Trump administration on its goal of “global AI dominance.”

“The message is clear. The House Republican proposal is stealing from poor people to give huge handouts to Big Tech to build technology that is going to perpetuate the president’s authoritarian plans and crackdowns against vulnerable people,” said Kevin De Liban, the founder of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit aimed at preventing tech from harming low-income people."

Trump’s Big, Beautiful Handout to the AI Industry; The budget bill advanced by House Republicans bans states from regulating AI while pumping billions into autonomous weapons. Matt Sledge, The Intercept, May 29 2025

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

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— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell.com) September 30, 2025 at 6:24 PM

Artificial General Intelligence: A machine that can understand pretty much anything

I think it’s wild that experts in neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive sciences still don’t agree about fundamental things regarding the nature of human intelligence BUT tech bros have convinced people they’re about to create AGI. Define it for me. Lol.

— A. H. (@a_h_reaume) April 3, 2023

They are fundamentally not equipped to engage in those debates. They have not read them. They do not have the skillset to intervene. They don’t know how much still isn’t known empirically and phenomenologically about the brain and intelligence. Or how brains are parts of systems

— A. H. (@a_h_reaume) April 3, 2023

See:

"An Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be a machine capable of understanding the world as well as any human, and with the same capacity to learn how to carry out a huge range of tasks." — "What is artificial general intelligence?" Nick Heath, ZDNET, Aug. 22, 2018.

Will immortal man-gods drunk on infusions of teenager plasma want to spend their eternal lives tending to the servers that support uploaded consciousnesses in the Metaverse? I grapple with this and other deep questions in my latest. williammoss.substack.com/p/nasty-for-...

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— William Moss (@williammoss.bsky.social) October 26, 2024 at 9:47 PM

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Image by j bizzie. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

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What the phone cord meant

In the transition to mobile, we have less phone cord. And in losing the phone cord, we lose the manifestation of what it feels like to make multiple phone calls, over and over and over, taking the windiest route possible for the simplest request. The phone is now "in the air." It makes it seem as though our frustration is that much more imaginary.

Image by Brett Hondow from Pixabay

See also, the poem: "Power Down!". It's a 4-minute read on Medium.