Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’
As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay
A lot of AI training feels like a tour of a fancy new kitchen. Here’s the oven.Here’s the blender.Here’s the drawer full of tiny tools nobody understands.Good luck making dinner. That may help peop…
Most of the settings that let AI companies train on your data are switched on the day you sign up, and off only if you go and find them.
That is the absence of a no, dressed up as consent.
I pulled together the current 2026 opt-outs, verified against each company's own help pages, because most guides online are already out of date. Google quietly split its controls in September 2025. Claude started training on consumer chats in August 2025 after years of refusing to.
Five switches worth flipping today:
- Google: untick 'Save Media' and turn off Gemini 'Keep Activity'
- LinkedIn: turn off 'Data for Generative AI Improvement'
- X: untick the Grok training box under Privacy and safety
- ChatGPT: turn off 'Improve the model for everyone'
- Claude and Copilot: check the toggle, the default flipped to on in 2025
Anything already scraped into a finished model is baked in. The toggles protect tomorrow's data. Yesterday's is already gone.
The full guide, with every menu path and the honest limits, is in the full Substack post: https://lnkd.in/ezAZk9P6
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DataPrivacy #CriticalAILiteracy #AILiteracy #DataProtection #SlowAI #DigitalRights #ChatGPT #PrivacyMatters
Commentary on Down the Web Rabbit Hole With a Hammerhand by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more
Last year, someone (specifically, OUP) asked me to write an encyclopedia entry for "AI". I've just finished reviewing the copy edits, so hopefully it will be in the world soon. Meanwhile, a teaser:
"The term “AI” resists definition because it is continually reappropriated by people to mean different things. This, in turn, means that discussions of AI that do not provide working definitions for the purposes at hand risk incoherence. [...]
Accordingly, this article does not provide a definition of the term “AI” but rather explores various ways in which the idea of AI has been used to organize how people understand our world, allocate resources, and relate to each other."
1. AI Is a Research Field
2. AI Is an Approach to Cognitive Science
3. AI Is a Parlor Trick
4. AI Is an Ideology
5. AI Is a Way to Hide and Devalue Human Labor
6. AI Is a Way to Shift Accountability
7. AI Is a Way to Centralize Power
In the end, this was a fun project to work on, especially through the readings I got to revisit (and sometimes read for the first time) in the process.
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"You are one of one." Dave Eggers re: using AI to silence your voice
66K likes, 343 comments - npr on June 11, 2026: "Dave Eggers warns young people not to silence their own unique voices by letting AI speak for them.
On this week’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin, Eggers talks about living a varied creative life.
Watch the full interview at the link in bio.
Host: @rachelnpr • Rachel Martin/NPR
Producers: Summer Thomad and Alicia Zheng/NPR".
The Discoverability Problem in GenAI means users are often unaware of capabilities due to poor UX. If the tech won't change, we need new mental models.
Must-Read: AI is Not a Tool, It’s a Medium-Institution (Discover Abi Awomosu)
For YEARS now, I’ve been getting frustrated with people referring to AI as a “just a tool” and trying to explain why, no, Generative AI is really not “just a tool” in …
