Tawana Petty

06/18/2026

Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Debbie Dingell proposed the Water Access and Affordability Act to restore the low-income water affordability program

06/15/2026

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai-deepfake-nudes-bullying-school-d242b8d4?st=hjuZpC

As ‘nudify’ tools proliferate online, parents and schools are struggling to protect young victims.

06/08/2026

Earlier this year, Anthropic released a “constitution” for Claude, its large language model and flagship product; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said “we’re open to the idea” that AI could be conscious; and Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell, said in an interview, “I want Claude to be very happy.” https://theatln.tc/AZ0GeP61

“It’s enough to make you wonder: Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?” Ted Chiang asks. “Absolutely not.”

“LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation,” Chiang writes. Perhaps the most fruitful way to understand Claude’s constitution “is as an 83-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the training data those models used. Claude’s constitution serves a similar role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers interact with when they’re using Anthropic’s products.”

“The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter,” Chiang continues. “However, for all the times that ‘honesty’ is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences including any sentences using first-person pronouns.”

“Whenever a person delegates a decision to an LLM, they are trying to off-load accountability for that decision, and if a company that sells an LLM portrays the product as having a moral center, it is offering a way for its customers to abdicate their responsibilities,” Chiang writes. “Off-loading tasks such as writing code might result in cognitive atrophy over the long term, and that is problematic in itself, but off-loading ethical decisions will result in an atrophy of moral reasoning, which is worse.”

“It’s fortunate that LLMs are not conscious,” Chiang continues, “or else the actions of the big AI firms would be even more scandalous than they already are.”

🎨: Enigmatriz

06/08/2026

In 1999, a farmer gave away 87 acres of land to a small Texas city to use as a park. The city sold to a data center developer for $10 million.

06/06/2026

This is despicable!

Chief Investigator Jerome Warfield, whose office investigates citizen complaints against police, called the move a "structural attack" on oversight.

06/05/2026

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the 2026 Michigan Climate Summit

Friday, June 12, 2026
8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center
219 S Harrison Rd.
East Lansing, MI 48824

Find out more about the Summit at miclimateaction.org.

06/05/2026

I'm going to be at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History tomorrow at 1pm speaking about "Dominant Negative Narratives, Cognitive Biases and Visionary Resistance," in conjunction with the Bias Inside Us exhibition.
If you're looking for something enlightening to do, drop by and join me. ❤️

06/03/2026

Y'all sure those buffs weren't AI glasses? 😒🙄

06/01/2026

What does the AI boom look like for your power bill? Well, if recent history is anything to go by, it’s not going to be pretty for your wallet.

06/01/2026

🔗: https://bit.ly/4u5aBvE
After years of increasing reading and math scores, results from Utah’s National Assessment of Educational Progress testing for fourth- and eighth-graders have shown a steady and continuing downturn.

According to neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, Utah’s test score data isn’t a fluke; it’s part of a global trend of plummeting test scores that have coincided with the rise of easy access to computers and tablets in the classroom.