James Muldoon is a sociologist who writes about the changing nature of human-technology relationships. Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships investigates how people form emotional attachments with large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., co-written by fellow researchers Mark Graham and Callum Cant and based on more than a decade of fieldwork, follows Global South workers whose knowledge and labor are the basis of AI tools and assistants. “A lot of people see artificial intelligence as something that is largely automated, frictionless, and just appears as a useful tool for us. But most of the human hours […]

Sixty-nine-year-old Wynd Kaufmyn, a retired teacher from Berkeley, California, is believed to be the first person imprisoned for protesting the development of artificial intelligence, after she and other members of the group StopAI were arrested during a sit-in protest at the headquarters of OpenAI. Democracy Now! reached Kaufmyn at the San Francisco County Jail, where she is now serving a two-week sentence for charges including “interfering with a business.” Kaufmyn says she participated in the protest because “this technology is fueling a dystopian level of surveillance. It’s fueling a fascist state. It’s going to take all of our jobs. It’s already taken many of them. It’s causing suicides, homicides and mass shootings. […]

Restrictions on women’s rights have expanded in Afghanistan since U.S. forces withdrew from the country five years ago, ceding control to the Taliban in the process. Afghan women are banned from attending schools and gyms, books written by women are removed from libraries, doctors and nurses are unable to practice, and child marriage rates have increased. Wives have been rendered legally subordinate to their husbands, and women are required to stay silent in public. “Women and girls of Afghanistan are suffering the most darkest situation in the world,” says Negina Yari, an Afghan women’s rights activist living in exile in Germany, who discusses the impacts of what some advocacy groups are characterizing as “gender apartheid,” […]

U.S. National Debt Tops $40 Trillion as Trump’s Tariffs and Wars Drive Deficit Spending, Trump Announces “Most Crushing Economic Operation Ever” Against Iran and Its Partners, Israeli Strikes Kill 10 More Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s Military Admits to Attacks That Killed 5-Year-Old Hind Rajab, Her Family and Paramedics, Israel Advances Construction of New Homes in Massive Illegal Settlement, U.K. Jury Refuses to Convict Palestine Action Members, Former DOJ Attorney Files Complaint Against Antisemitism Task Force, Russian Assault on Kyiv Overnight Kills at Least 13 People, Ukraine’s Former Defense Minister Calls for Presidential Elections in Challenge to Zelensky, Former Fauci Adviser Pleads Guilty to Concealing Documents […]

A protest camp in the small border town of Lochiel, Arizona, is seeking to stop federal contractors from building another portion of President Trump’s border barrier with Mexico. At the center of the protest camp is a 200-year-old cottonwood known as a “grandmother” tree, with activists sitting in the tree to physically stop its destruction. “People are successfully forcing the government to stop, to slow down, or at least change course on border wall construction,” says journalist John Washington, a staff writer for the queer news outlet Lookout and author of multiple books about immigration. “They’ve been very clear that this is both an environmental and a political fight.”