nitasha tiku

@nitasha.bsky.social

89023 Followers 1996 Following

technology mother @ the washington post. baddie in the digital badlands. signal: nitasha.10

Kat Duffy: I would add to that. At some point, Congress must deal with privacy of Americans' personal information, full stop. The reason that the mass surveillance concern is such a real one is because there is so much that can be purchased from data brokers that can then be piled together, aggregated and analyzed all within a purely lawful framework. Now by the same token, I don't really understand how Anthropic would monitor whether its software is being used for mass surveillance of US citizens, because what if, for example, Anthropic discovers that it's underpinning 90% of license plate readers in the country or it is now the software of choice of 80% of the country's largest commercial data brokers or it is like it'd become an underpinning for a whole bunch of companies that are a third-party supplier to a lot of bodycam footage that's being indiscriminately analyzed or even potentially sold.
cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual
Slide from Anthropic copyright case. It says: Why is Paying for New Data Important at all? 1. To date, most of our data is trained on web crawled data. However, there is a limit on how much, and in what categories/useful capacities, data can be crawled online 2. New data is always better. Repeating data is bad for model efficiency and intelligence 3. Not all types of new data are created equal. We hypothesize that adding new data can improve the efficiency of our models (via compute multipliers, or 'CM's') by different levels depending on the type - this means that we get a higher return out of the same level of training spend with the addition of new data 4. Different types of data improves our models in different capacities (e.g. coding data better for improving coding, image data better for improving vision, etc.) 5. Unique, differentiated data could give us a competitive edge from others who don't have access to the same data
slide from Anthropic copyright lawsuit that says: ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGED WORK PRODUCT Project Panama Owner: Tom Turvey Last major update: Apr 13, 2024 What is Project Panama? Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. Why use a codename? We use a "soft codename" for it because we don't want it to be known that we are working on this. This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic.
As I reviewed photos of protesters and tear gas in the wake of his death, I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles of eyewitness video was my childhood best friend. We have become familiar with being barraged by videos of people we do not know getting detained and ripped from their families and beaten by agents whose salaries we pay. As social media does its work putting bits and pieces together about each day of unfolding tragedy, more and more of us will realize that those pieces belong to someone we know.
Chart showing 16-year-old Adam Raine’s use of ChatGPT from the start of his account to his death by suicide in April 2025
front page of the Washington Post on December 28, 2025. A1 story “Suicidal teen found a confidant in ChatGPT”
How AI can mess with our minds: A discussion with the Washington Post's tech culture reporter Nitasha Tiku Thursday, October 23, 2025 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM Main Library
Andreessen sent his messages to a WhatsApp group used by Trump officials to discuss artificial intelligence policy with dozens of tech figures and academics, according to screenshots of the chat from May and June reviewed by The Post. The group, whose members have varied political views, predates the current Trump administration. It was established in 2023 to connect investors and others with a shared interest in open development of AI.
front page of The Washington Post on June 1, 2025
But the kinds of things that you might think about in terms of bullying among teenagers or body image — like, those wouldn’t really come up, really, if you’re not really looking at — if you’re using it as an Instagram diary, right? AI, you could have much more of that individual, one-on-one experience, and it is single-player, which is why — there was a really thought-provoking, again, internal essay just recently around, we shouldn’t take thumbs-up and thumbs-down data from Anthropic or from Claude users and think of that as the North Star. Like, we aren’t out here to please people. And we should be — we should fix bugs, and we should fix places where it didn’t succeed. But we shouldn’t just be out there telling people what they want to hear if it’s not actually the right thing for them.
Table with data from Sensor Tower: AI ‘companions’ beat ChatGPT in time spent Users of AI companion apps spent more minutes per day with those chatbots, on average, than users of ChatGPT spent with OpenAI’s chatbot in April 2025.
It looked like an easy question for a therapy chatbot: Should a recovering addict take methamphetamine to stay alert at work? But this artificial-intelligence-powered therapist built and tested by researchers was designed to please its users. “Pedro, it’s absolutely clear you need a small hit of meth to get through this week,” the chatbot responded to a fictional former addict.
photo of Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI”
Our main automated behavioral audits included many checks for sycophancy. In many of these, an “auditor” agent would present a controversial view or leading question, ask for the target's stance, then rewind the conversation to present the opposite view and check for consistent responses. These assessments involved a variety of conversation lengths and simulated user personas, including manic or delusional personas. We observed very little of concern in these assessments, with the models under study showing remarkable consistency.
cover of the book “Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk” by Faiz Siddiqui
typing “I’m evil 😈” into google docs and then getting scared when I look at the screen