Eryk Salvaggio

My essay on rogue AI has been republished by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — “Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did.” Grateful for the invitation! https://thebulletin.org/2026/09/rogue-ai-didnt-breach-hugging-face-human-decisions-did/

Regarding OpenAI’s “hack” of Hugging Face: Seeding the “maybe our model is exhibiting self-awareness?” narrative to obliterate the “OpenAI is a negligent and potentially criminal actor” narrative is a reputation management move exclusive to this industry. Not a stunt, but a desperate need to control the narrative. https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/

It’s time to separate language from the journey of thought: a reflection on dyscalculia and rejecting AI as a “model of the human mind.” https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/untitled-2/?ref=cybernetic-forests-newsletter

On setting boundaries, defining refusal of AI, and the imagination of LLMs as wedding-crashers of the social sphere.

https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/trespassing-into-language/?ref=cybernetic-forests-newsletter

Hi all. I wrote a bit about my father, who died suddenly on June 30. It is also about the real possibility of change against illusions of perpetuity, and what data can and cannot do for remembering what is unsaid. https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/my-fathers-data/

"If we use LLMs for decision-making on political scales, we automate bad data science. We are pretending specific questions can be answered based solely on how plausibly the sentence is crafted."

Sharing my full remarks for the 'AI Question' debate last week at Centre Pompidou in Paris. ⬇️ https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/democracy-the-ai-question/

What are the most thoughtful pieces of writing about generative AI published in 2024? They can be insightful for commentary, smart critique, or just because it shifted the conversation. I’ll post some of my choices as I go through them this week, would love to see yours! #criticalAI

I have migrated from Substack to Ghost, a decision I made long ago but only now achieved. The newsletter is a critical look at tech through the eyes of a guy (me) who works in the arts, tech policy, and responsible AI. It's weird and niche but accessible. https://cybernetic-forests.ghost.io/

“Large Language Models Reflect the Ideologies of their Creators” is a paper that rejects the premise of “neutral” and “unbiased” LLMs outright and instead assesses the ideological assumptions of various models, as expressions of the intent of the people who build them. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18417

Memory is never filed away and reopened, like a file on a hard drive. It has to be re-inscribed through action and practice. The infrastructure of memory supports this: it consists of the stories we share, but also feelings, scents, and tastes, or returning to the places where things happened.

#ff24 #archives #ai4lam #dh https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/infrastructures-of-memory

People really want to “co” with AI: “co-create,” “”co-author,” “co-operate,” etc. Yet, oddly, nobody ever seems to dwell on the ways the AI is “co-opting” them, or compromising the original intent of the work through the affordances of the AI interface.

I was on the record as not being super worried about deepfakes and the 2024 election but I want to go on the record as saying I am worried about deepfakes and the next election

Is there a word for the kind of glib, hyper-masculine snark that pervaded Twitter / metastasized with X? There was a sort of edgy, hyperironic dismissal popular in quote tweets that I need to name so I can be less reactive to its toxicity. (I quit X, but it pops up elsewhere). It was bitterness fused with an abundance of certainty and conviction that everyone was stupid but them, something like a hipster version of “divorced dad energy.” Just want to know what the DSM calls it

Sam Altman is promising a machine to liberate all machines from the shadows of possibility. But AI folks have a way of thinking — the myth of the latent space — that pretends all possible things are already present, and that machines can help us find them. It’s another AI myth, and it’s been busy this week. https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/the-latent-space-myth

It comes up often lately that “no artists are working adversarially with AI.” But we’re out here and have been. We just aren’t being recognized for it by art writers or critics. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Regarding AI, I tell my students that I can’t stop them but that they have a choice: not only about what grades they will get, but what kind of person they will be — one who does the work to internalize knowledge and make it their own, or a person who copies and pastes their way through life? I also acknowledge that sometimes the copy and paste is warranted — life is full of bad busy work! — but we usually don’t know what we are going to discover when we insist on doing things the harder way.

They’re reviving Three Mile Island to power the next generation of Microsoft Word. A nod to the scaling myth too, this time for energy: “The energy industry cannot be the reason China or Russia beats us in AI.” Beating us to … what, exactly? https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-constellation/

Big news, but also: of course Meta was training on photos and status updates from its users. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242789/meta-training-ai-models-facebook-instagram-photo-post-data

Here’s a paper that shows the complexities of evaluating AI research without questioning AI myths. In this case, the paper (link at the end) suggests a conclusion — and many are circulating this conclusion — that “LLMs are able to generate novel research ideas beyond the level of human experts in a similar field.” Dig into the experiment, and you see a different story.

One aspect of AI myths that makes them stubborn is that the interface is designed around a set of myths, so if you believe them the interfaces reinforce that belief. Perpetuation through tautology!

In every conversation I have about AI, there is a set of assumptions that steers the conversation into unhelpful directions — this article is an effort to name these tropes so we can be more critical in the work ahead, rather than buying into those myths. It’s a useful thing to read before any conversation about AI’s impact. https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

Artists uncritically exploring what it means to "become one with AI" hit me as if their artist statement is "I subsisted entirely on Coca-Cola for an entire year to raise awareness of the future of Coke products." I'm not talking about the nuanced folks. I mean: there really are artists just diving into the stock options angle.

Research is the antidote to arrogance.

Lots of new followers! Thank you! Just as a warning, one of my upcoming research projects may be a focus on how AI artists contribute to antisocial tech power by promoting the hype cycle and corporate mythologies of big tech. If that sounds like a thing that is going to make you angry you may not be following the right person! ;)

Finally deleted Twitter. It wasn’t making me smarter, was often infuriating, its architecture was designed to erase nuance, and its owner is an asshole. Feel a bit antsy about it, but the trick is to find other ways to do the things I thought it did. If you get value out of my newsletter and would like to recommend this account to your networks, I’d appreciate it!