(Note: I’m currently travelling in Canada’s lovely Rocky Mountains, so I don’t really have the bandwidth – mentally or in telecom terms – to come up with a brand-new Torment Nexus this week.

Yes, I still call it Twitter.

I’ve written about the dangers of “rogue” AI models a few times now, and there are definitely plenty of interesting questions worth exploring there — like what do we mean when we say they went “rogue,” whether the real problem is really just poor oversight and/or management by OpenAI, what the consequences of that should be, whether fears of an AI-led extermination of humanity are a farce or a real thing we need to be concerned about, and so on.

Every week there seem to be new revelations about “rogue” AI agents (although the anti-anthropomorphism crowd don’t like to call them that).

As regular readers will know, last week I re-published a piece that I originally wrote on September 3rd, entitled “Yes, we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack.” I couldn’t write a new post for last week because I was backwoods camping in a remote area of southwestern Ontario – Killarney Provincial Park, in case you are interested – and I had virtually no cell signal for most of that time (if you like canoes or kayaks or sunsets or trees, you can check out the post I

I’ve written about this topic a number of times before, but in this case I’m tempted to re-use the popular meme “When the worst person in the world makes a good point,” as I did awhile back when I wrote about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI for (among other things) not actually being open.

About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which two AI models from OpenAI — one that has been released publicly, called Sol, and one that was still in testing mode with no assigned name — were asked to find the answers to a series of tests as part of something called the ExploitGym, which is a system that tests an AI model’s

I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc.

Note: This is a repeat of a piece I published awhile back after Facebook lost a couple of trials based on its alleged harms.

Like many journalists (I expect) I got an email a little while ago from a startup founder named Ryan Merket, describing his new company: an AI-powered newsroom called RuntimeWire, where instead of just using AI agents for research (as many conventional newsrooms are doing, whether they admit it or not) the agents actually write the articles, many of which are published automatically or with minimal oversight by meat-based journalists.

If you aren’t a writer or a journalist or someone else who cares deeply about platforms for writing and publishing, this week’s newsletter probably isn’t going to be that interesting for you.

In case you don’t follow this sort of thing as closely as some, the headline refers to a recent incident in which two of OpenAI’s leading-edge AI models gained unauthorized access to – in other words, hacked – an open-source model known as Hugging Face

If you read The Atlantic, or you follow a lot of writers on Substack — or virtually any other writing-focused website or form of social media — you will already know what this post is about: The Atlantic published a piece recently entitled The End of Reading

I’ve written a number of times about what has become conventional wisdom – spread primarily by academics like Jonathan Haidt – that phones and/or social media are evil, and that they cause teenagers in particular to develop anxiety, depression, etc.

We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman.

As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how little we know about human consciousness, let alone the machine kind.

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business called Starfront Observatories.

(Note: This is a special edition of The Torment Nexus, dedicated to my friend Om Malik, who passed away due to congestive heart failure at the age of 59.

The UK recently passed a new law that effectively bans children under the age of 16 from using most social-media platforms, a move that the UK government notes was based explicitly on Australia’s similar law, which was passed in 2024 (Britain’s law comes into effect next year).

In a previous edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the launch of Anthropic’s newest AI model, code-named Mythos, and how the company said that it was too powerful to be trusted — mostly because of its ability to detect and potentially exploit software vulnerabilities — and therefore would

As regular readers will know, I’ve written a lot about the topic of AI and consciousness (too much for some perhaps!) because I find it fascinating, in much the same way that I find the issue of whether AI is dangerous or not fascinating – something I’ve

Before I get into this week’s post, it occurred to me that some of you might be frustrated at how often I write about AI — things like whether it makes sense to think of AI engines as conscious, whether we should be afraid of it destroying humanity as we know it, whether it’s bad that people sometimes fall in

One of the consistent drumbeats that has accompanied the rise of artificial intelligence, along with “Is it going to kill us?” and “Will it kill us and the planet?” is the idea that AI will lead to an epidemic of job losses, and possibly even the destruction of entire categories of jobs.

If you are following the growing artificial intelligence industry at all, you’ve probably come across some facts and figures about how AI is going to use up all of the country’s water, while also using up all the power and causing prices to spike for regular non-AI using humans, and also that the giant data centers required for this industry are taking over all the usable land, and will cause pollution to soar, and/or lead to a wide range of other negative societal effects.

The memes pretty much write themselves: Richard Dawkins, renowned evolutionary biologist and author of a famous treatise called The God Delusion, wrote an essay at UnHerd recently about how he came to the conclusion that Claude, the AI from Anthropic, is conscious.

I could be wrong, but I feel like this post is going to be similar to the one I wrote recently about crypto stablecoins. I know some readers never got past the headline, because they were busy imagining all the bad things about crypto — the rug pulls

In case you aren’t terminally online, as the kids say, there’s a popular meme that uses a photo of a balding man with a steely gaze and the caption “Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point” (apparently the man’s name is Josep Maria García, and he is from Spain; the picture was taken in 2014 during a trip to Barcelona,

Before I even get started, I know that many of you have probably already tuned out.

I find it fascinating whenever Anthropic in particular comes out with either a new AI model or a note about what it has learned about an existing model, because the responses almost always fall into one of two camps: the first is the “Oh my god, we’re all going to die” camp, or some variation on that theme — in other words, expressions of amazement at how advanced AI has become, how it is

I’m a writer, as some (hopefully most) of you know.