Taylor Lorenz

@taylorlorenz.bsky.social

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So who, exactly, is anonymity for? It’s for a teenage girl who lost her mother when she was young, just got her period for the first time, and is too embarrassed to meet with a school nurse. It’s for a 45-year-old who hasn’t drunk in years but is realizing that he’s struggling with his sobriety again and needs to talk privately about it. It’s for a woman coming to terms with the fact that her boyfriend is abusive, and figuring out how to get away from him without his knowledge. It’s for a Chinese immigrant who wants to speak about the human rights abuses he witnessed at home without his family in Beijing paying the price for his words, or repression following him abroad. It’s for a factory worker looking for resources about how to report unsafe conditions without losing his job. It’s for a college freshman who needs to talk about being gay without fearing his family will learn of it before he’s ready to tell them. It’s for a grandmother who just received a breast cancer diagnosis and wants to discreetly discuss her anxiety about mastectomy. It’s for a priest dealing with depression who doesn’t know how to manage his feelings of emptiness amidst his duties to his parish. It’s for anyone who has ever experienced a fear, thought, idea, or emotion that they need to express but aren’t ready to share with colleagues, family, friends, acquaintances, or authority figures.
If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
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Now I should say, there are things that I would actually love to compel these platforms to do that are just obviously unconstitutional. I would love to compel them to show educational content to children in the same way that Congress once passed a law saying that broadcasters needed to provide at least three hours of educational programming a week. I think that was really good for society. Turned out, at least when you applied to social media, that’s just obviously unconstitutional. So I do think that you have to be really careful here, but if you’re going to tell me that every single product feature of every social media app is speech, you truly are caping for these platforms in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
So, you are just trying to backdoor your way into speech regulation by making the product liable for whatever harm. There’s a part of me that buys this, but Casey, I know you think you can pull the two apart. CN: I agree that this is tricky and we should be careful and lawsuits are often not the best way to work through this stuff, because in general, I would rather have lawmakers and policymakers writing really careful versions of this. At the same time, why is infinite scroll speech? Why are streaks speech? Why is autoplay video speech? At a certain point, you can get yourself all the way to like, “Why do we make Ford put seatbelts on their cars? You’re compelling speed.” No, you’re compelling a seatbelt. You should be able to compel product safety features once it becomes clear that you actually have a product safety issue.
BREAKING: Iran says it will bomb Palantir, Oracle, and other major Western firms, declaring them “legitimate targets.”
Taylor Lorenz Wants to Bring Back Masking in the Name of 'Basic Solidarity': 'We're 6 Years Into a Pandemic'
Heritage saying they’ll use KOSA to censor trans people
In a Senate committee hearing debating the bill, Ortiz asked if even a satirical clip — such as a South Park scene depicting President Donald Trump and Satan having sex — could be considered a violation, forcing users or platforms to secure consent from public figures or risk legal action. Kupper responded that the bill would require users to get Trump’s consent before posting.
Dario Amodei never actually gave me an interview, stiffing me after months of planning. So I created a version of “Dario Amodei” using his own machine. I fed Claude several published interviews, including everything Amodei said at Davos, plus the contents of his two books of essays, and told Claude to simulate the interview using variations on real quotes—and to make it like a scene from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. It took Claude less than three minutes. You probably couldn’t tell the difference. And maybe there isn’t one—maybe AI Amodei was even more honest with me than real Amodei could afford to be. Disorienting? Hallucinatory? Ethically dubious? A little bit amazing?