💌 Newsletter #017 - Slow it down!! It's too Dangerous!!1!

11 Oct, 2026

Technically Good is back! With a slightly shorter edition. There's a note at the end of this newsletter if you're interested!

✨ In This Edition ✨

📟 Short-Form Content: Slow it down!! It's too dangerous!!1!; malware; and "going rogue."
🌞 Good News!: "No AI" seals as a sign of quality 🦭; people are flocking back to human writers.
🐘 Toots and Memes and Such: Age verification, empowerment, and "going rogue" (reprise.)
📯 The Post-Script: The "Inevitability" of AI.

Glitched, cropped, and edited version of images by benjamin lehman and Aron Visuals on Unsplash.

📟 Short-Form Content

Chatbots ("AI")

Dario Amodei and other chatbot CEO's have decided to call for a "frontier model slowdown." Because the models are, like, too dangerous and too advanced and will kill us all and stuff like that. However, it remains to be seen whether investors and other ~stakeholders~ will be happy with any sort of slowdown.
- As tante comments, new models cost a lot to develop, but don't feel meaningfully "better" to users, so a slowdown could be just what the doctor ordered for the bottom line. Which, uh.
- Focusing on potential future dangers also has the convenient side effect of distracting from all the harms that LLMs are currently doing! And then there's the fact that calling AI "too dangerous" is just way cooler than admitting it doesn't work, to paraphrase The Beaverton.
Current AI discourse is, of course, dominated by pro-AI "CEO Said" journalism. That's where the "growth" and the "money" is. Which also means that, what used to be called "malware" or a virus - namely, a program that causes bad things to happen and spreads to machines it wasn't supposed to be on - now seems to be given the label of a "rogue AI." Which makes AI sound very scary and powerful, and not at all like it just wasn't programmed properly, and like the sandbox was maybe a lil porous.
Relatedly, and in what is surely shocking news to all of us, Meta's new Muse chatbot seems to ignore user permissions, and simply goes ahead and uploads things like Apple Messages to the cloud. Maybe exercise caution when you let it, uh, handle your fb Marketplace transactions for you? 😬
As I've said before - don't let the machine de-skill you: Students who don't use AI are ahead on every measure in the long-running PISA assessment. Further to this, a UC Berkeley study has found that using LLMs actively erodes your ability to persist with difficult tasks. After only ten minutes!
- At this point in the newsletter, I'd like to invite you to spend a couple of minutes thinking about whether a future in which LLM's have successfully de-skilled you, and your family and friends, and in which our collective ability to keep at hard things has been eroded, may be problematic - on both an individual and a societal scale.
AI crawlers and scrapers bringing open, community- and volunteer-maintained platforms to their knees by attempting to ingest all the knowledge that the community and its volunteers have contributed over years adds a special kind of insult to injury.

Non-Chatbots

This is going to keep being a recurring theme: IDScan, an identity verification company, has confirmed that hackers have stolen 13 to 15 million of driver's licenses. As we've known for a while, it is not a question of whether, but when age-gating data gets stolen through hacks or leaks.
- Note that it doesn't even need to be the platform for which you needed the age verification that gets hacked for your data to end up all over the web and in who-knows-whose hands, but rather the intermediary - the "verification provider" - which needs access to your ID to carry out the verification.
Canada's lawful access bill (C-22, which Technically Good has written about here) could be a barrier to a trade agreement between the EU and Canada, as it poses privacy concerns and may not be reconcilable with EU law. One of the points of contention seems to be the endangerment of e2ee (end-to-end encryption).
Flock cameras are big on privacy! For themselves.

🌞 Good News!

Bad news that we need this, good news that publishers are standing up against AI: German childrens' book publisher Loewe is now adding a "No AI" label to their covers, as a sign of sustained high quality content.
Remember how AI boosterists have long claimed that professions like writing, editing, translating, and many more will definitely be replaced by LLMs very very soon? Well, we may just be seeing the opposite happen. Writer Mike Rosenberg is reporting that clients now approach him to "turn their brains back on." See also: The machine de-skilling its users.

🐘 Toots and Memes and Such

Chris Fletch on the one kind of age verification I can get behind:

*Plays audio recording of me getting out of a chair* There’s your age verification

... ok, maybe I'll also consider "what do you do if your SNES cartridge doesn't work?" and "does a pencil fit into the lil holes in a cassette tape? how do you know?"

lcamtuf on "empowerment" through AI, which is how you're being made to believe that you're not being de-skilled by these chatbots:

Worried about AI? Don't be. Using agents at work simply empowers you to focus on more meaningful tasks, similarly to how self-checkout allowed cashiers to pursue higher-impact projects at the grocery store

Matt Blaze on - hey, remember the bit on what we used to call "malware" above!?

“Our software went rogue!” No. You programmed it wrong.

See also: LLM "guardrails" are just... text. Text that asks the LLM to pretty please not do a thing.

📯 The Post-Script

This is a fantastic short read on the "inevitability" of AI, by Lana.

As a fellow child of the 80s and 90s, I was just talking about this with friends - nobody had to sell us email and the first instant messengers and brick-style mobile phones as "inevitable." We just all got one of those - in the case of physical items like a phone, as soon as we could afford to - because, like Lana says, these things solved a clear and distinct social problem. Those brick phones with a monochrome display, no internet access, and horribly screechy ringtones. (This was mine; it was magic. 💜)

If you have to cram a technology into every text box, button, form, mailout, and help popup so that your users will use it, and if you have to tell them over and over again, like a broken record, that this is inevitable, there's a really good chance it's - not.

And here's the end note that was promised: This edition has been slightly shorter as last month has been... eventful. :) That said, if any readers - or folks you know - are looking for a researcher, data analyst, tech writer, and/or all of the above rolled into one: I am available for project work, and hello [at] technically-good.ca is but a button-click away!

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