Month: February 2026

“To give a homily is to share faith,” he said, and AI “will never be able to share faith.”
— Read on futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pope-priests-ai

Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice. He tackled the guitar’s constraints by augmenting it. His solution was essentially a modular analog signal chain driven not by knobs but by hands, feet, gain staging, and physical movement in a feedback field.
— Read on spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer

Using event study analysis, we show that music streaming – an indicator for smartphone use, where streaming most often occurs – sharply increases, by nearly 40%, on dates of major music album releases, while U.S. traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15% on those same days.

— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w34866

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

— Read on arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it’s harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it’s happening on a massive scale.

“It’s easy to trick AI chatbots, much easier than it was to trick Google two or three years ago,” says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at Amsive, a marketing agency. “AI companies are moving faster than their ability to regulate the accuracy of the answers. I think it’s dangerous.”

I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes

When an author uses AI for “polishing” a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and “blood” reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks “clean” to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its “ciccia” – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

— Read on www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/

What I hadn’t fully appreciated is how the ice trade reshaped shipping, diet, and city design before the invention of mechanical refrigeration. Ice created the cold chain, and the cold chain made it possible to move fresh meat, fish, and produce over long distances. That in turn enabled cities to grow far beyond what local agriculture could support and shifted the American diet from salted and smoked provisions toward fresh food.
— Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/artificial-ice.html

An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

— Read on theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

A real-time display of the “new announcement economy in action“:

A new tool launched by Algorhythm Holdings, a former maker of in-car karaoke systems turned AI company with a market capitalisation of just $6m (£4.4m), sparked a sell-off on Thursday that made the logistics industry the latest victim of AI jitters that have already rocked listed companies operating in the software and real estate sectors.

The announcement about the performance capability of Algorhythm’s SemiCab platform, which it claimed was helping customers scale freight volumes by 300% to 400% without having to increase headcount, sparked an almost 30% surge in the company’s share price on Thursday.

However, the impact of the announcement sent the Russell 3000 Trucking Index – which tracks shares in the US trucking sector – down 6.6% on Thursday, with CH Robinson Worldwide plunging 15% by the close of trading, having been down as much as 24%.

The fall across the sector – Landstar System dropped 16%, RXO 20.5% and JB Hunt Transportation Services and XPO both about 5% – was the worst since Donald Trump’s tariff trade war in April last year.

Shares in trucking and logistics firms plunge after AI freight tool launch | Stock markets | The Guardian

This is not the first time I’ve heard that comparison. Months ago, a very smart, highly rational friend of mine explained it to me differently. And better. He pointed out that as average humans, we had never lived the scientific process the way we did with the Covid crisis and the emergence of the vaccine. No wonder everyone from pot-smoking podcasters to scientists had differing opinions. The whole thing was playing out in front of us in real time.

The trials, the debates, the reversals, the uncertainty, the competing claims, the people who were sure they knew what was coming and turned out to be wrong. We watched science happen. It was messy, public, unfinished. And everyone became an armchair epidemiologist overnight.

We are doing the exact same thing with AI. We are living inside the experiment. The results aren’t in. But that doesn’t stop anyone from declaring them

— Read on om.co/2026/02/12/living-in-the-petri-dish-of-the-future/