Computer Says Maybe

How do we stand up against the human rights violations that exist in the gruesome relationship between the business of AI and war?

More like this: Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf

In our final instalment of Computer Says Kill, Matt Mahmoudi returns, this time with Marwa Fatafta, to share the why and how of their recent joint statement on AI in warfare. The calls on AI companies to stop selling their products for use in military contexts, and for governments to cease buying them. The asks are simple...

The AI industry loves to talk about safety, but their version of safety is putting us at risk.

More like this: The Palestine Laboratory w/ Antony Loewenstein

For our second to last series episode of Computer Says Kill, we’re joined by Heidy Khlaaf, a global expert in designing safe critical systems for high-risk infrastructures such as energy grids, nuclear power plants, and weaponry. Heidy outlines how the AI industry is working to redefine and shrink this essential, established field of expertise. By parading around sham “safety benchmarks”, this circus of an industry is market...

Israel has a long history of making new technological weapons of war and exporting them to the world. They have used Palestine as a testing ground to show how new tools can enable mass killing. And they are banking that demand for their products might protect them on the world stage.

More like this: Anthropic is NOT the Good Guy w/ Maddy Batt

In part seven of Computer Says Kill, author of The Palestine Laboratory Antony Loewenstein explains that for Israel, precision warfare is just performative. Israel has the means to kill with precision, but...

The Israeli military is using data, surveillance, and AI to kill noncombatants in Southern Lebanon.

More like this: Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi

This week, we're kind of taking a break from our Computer Says Kill series to play a interview from our YouTube channel that is extremely relevant to the conversations we've been having about AI and militarization. Alix sat down with Nabih Bulos, the Middle East Bureau Chief at the LA Times, to discuss his recent reporting on Israel’s complex system of surveillance-driven targeting where, as he wr...

Anthropic’s AI systems have been used in illegal American invasions in Iran and Venezuela. They have partnered with Musk in the disastrous Memphis Colossus facility. And yet! News coverage, some civil society, and a lot of normies act like Anthropic is one of the good guys. They aren’t!

More like this: The Toxic Love Triangle of Big Tech, Big War & Big Science w/ David Gray Widder

For part six of Computer Says Kill, we are joined by legal fellow Maddy Batt, who filed an amicus brief in the courtroom battle between Anth...

Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money.

More like this: Computer Says Kill: The Blank Check to Beat China w/ Lis Siegel

For part five of Computer Says Kill, researcher David Widder describes the powerful trifecta that is academia, Big Tech, and the US military: all of them need each other to survive, but who is benefiting the most? Half of Carnegie Mellon’s research funding comes from the DoW or the DHS — and David will explain how it’s being used to...

The US is in a race to ‘beat China’ at AI. Or is it? What if I told you that powerful actors in the US have built the story of an all-or-nothing race to get what they want?

More like this: Computer Says Kill: A License for Unlimited War w/ Amos Toh

In part four of Computer Says Kill we are joined by Lis Siegel who shares the history. We start with a document produced by China in 2017, and arrive at today when the Chinese bogeyman is being used to drive money, political infl...

RightsCon has just been cancelled by the Zambian government with no word to the organizers, five days before it was set to begin.

RightsCon is the biggest annual global gathering of the digital rights community. Every year thousands of people come together to figure out how to make the internet safer and freer for everyone. When they can't connect, we all lose.

Alix shares a few theories about why Zambia pulled the plug (geopolitics, trade deals, and "values"). She also talks through her views on what it could mean that safe global spaces for this...

Military spending on AI is a triple black box: How is AI being used in the military? Who is winning these contracts and what are they worth? And what is the military’s end-game here?

More like this: How a Calculator Company Reshaped Modern Warfare w/ Jeff Stern

Amos Toh will help us answer these questions in part three of Computer Says Kill. We will cover how military spending has changed over the last couple of decades: there has been a clear shift from the straightforward buying up of jets, to the over-reliance on...

Precision weapons are meant to make warfare more exact. But what happens when the executive branch uses precision as an excuse to make more war and target with less and less accountability for accuracy?

More like this: Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi

In part two of Computer Says Kill, Jeff Stern shares how a calculator company transformed modern warfare by making more precise weapons. After the Second World War, the US military wanted to be able to wage more war and target with more accuracy. At first it...

How does a country wage war using LLMs? Oh and WHY?

More like this: AI in Gaza: Live from Mexico City

In Computer Says Kill Ep #1 we are joined by Matt Mahmoudi. The US Department of War is leaning heavily on AI technologies to attack Iran. Matt explains how the use of LLMs to identify ‘legitimate targets’ is collapsing the chain of decisions that lead to lethal force. We discuss what this means at a time when fascist governments are eager to demonstrate their strength on the global stage. From Israel field-testing AI weap...

This is Computer Says Kill, a new series on series focused on tracing the people, decisions, and systems that have recklessly ushered AI into the business of war.

What we’re watching play out— from AI military chatbots to tech companies in bed with authoritarian governments— isn’t a new story. It's the latest chapter in a much older relationship between technology, military power, institutional systems, and capital— one that has always moved faster than accountability, and always found a way to make the next thing feel inevitable. We're not convinced this is inevitable. But we think it’s time...

What better way than movies to help us process the world. Brian Merchant shares how our collective anxieties turn into cultural products.

More like this: One Filmmaker’s Fight Against AI w/ Valerie Veatch

Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, joins us this week to discuss his favorite unsettling, horror and thriller picks that bring our fears about AI and tech to life on screen.

Alix and Brian talk Terminator, Pluribus, and how even comedies about technology have a spectre of violence that helps us understand everything form labour ex...

Naomi Klein has spent her career studying political movements — and she thinks progressives are doing better than we think. Because the fascists are scared.

More like this: To be Seen and not Watched w/ Tawana Petty

In her forthcoming book, End Times Fascism, Klein and co-author Astra Taylor take stock of the history of fascism and the collective power that has been brought to bear to fight it. This time is different. Tech titans accumulated tremendous power and wealth, and are firmly on the side of the fascists. And our information environment is fl...

The way artists make art matters. And some artists, like filmmaker Valerie Veatch, are exploring what role AI has in the craft of filmmaking.

More like this: Fantasy Factory: AI Supervillains w/ Anat Shenker-Osorio

Valerie Veatch is the director of Ghost in the Machine, a new film that explores the depths of the Silicon Valley fantasies around AI, and platforms all the people that challenge these fantasies. With this film, Valerie is working to change the culture of AI: it is not inevitable, in many way it’s not even possible, and therefore we...

Grammarly launched a feature that no one wanted and now they’re getting sued. They used the names of writers, journalists, and editors to pretend that AI versions of those people were making writing suggestions via the application. None of these ‘expert reviewers’ had any idea. Grammarly pissed off the wrong journalist.

And now Julia Angwin is suing them.

More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

In this episode Julia (and her lawyer Peter) discuss what happened with Grammarly, why she’s suing, and how neither of them...

The left has a messaging problem. Silicon Valley elites are literally making up impossible fantasies and their narratives are winning out. Why?

More like this: The Stories we Tell Ourselves About AI

This week in our second episode leading to the AI Doc, we are joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive campaign strategist who hosts the Words To Win By podcast. Anat tries to focus on the positives: if you don’t think people should join the AI party, throw a better party. She gives us some quick lessons on messaging: how to pa...

Next time someone tells you that we can build data centres in space, show them this podcast episode — because it is literally impossible.

More like this: AI Safety’s Spiral of Urgency w/ Shazeda Ahmed

Or better yet, recommend that they buy More Everything Forever, Adam Becker’s latest book exploring all the fantasies and promises of coming out of Silicon Valley. This episode is the first in our Fantasy Factory series, where we explore how and why tech evangelists manufacture consent about AI’s boom, doom, and inevitability.

The futures that AI...

How does an oppressed workforce organise against Big Tech employers with even bigger lobbying muscle?

More like this: Worker Power & Big Tech Boss Men w/ David Seligman

This week’s episode is a recording of our livestream from Monday: a litigator, regulator, and activist share their work and perspectives on coordinating bottom-up fights against Big Tech power, worker suppression, and unfair consumer practices. Speakers are:

This is the last of our series AI Lingo Bingo Series! We dig into four more co-opted concepts with four more all stars.

More like this: Last week’s episode with Meredith Whittaker, Audrey Tang, Abeba Birhane, and Usha Ramanathan

This week we’ll hear from Naomi Klein, who will discuss how ‘AI for Climate’ is very much not a thing; Nikhil Dey who shares all the ways powerful actors cosplay at having ‘accountability’; Timnit Gebru who explains that ‘frugal AI’ is something being made novel by the hype & scale of big tech business models...

Anthropic’s Claude was used in the military operation to kidnap president Maduro earlier this year. Why? Unclear. Was this legal? Absolutely not.

More like this: AI In Gaza: Live from Mexico City

Surprise, surprise: the DoD feels that they should able to use AI models however they want, as long as its lawful — but… was this lawful? They are now threatening to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk. What does this all mean?

For this short, Alix was joined by Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Centre for Justic...

It’s our second week of playing AI lingo bingo. The summit in India is underway and the air is thick with vague terms that fail to describe the big problems.

More like this: Lingo Bingo at the India AI Summit w/ Karen Hao, Joan Kinyua, Chenai Chair, and Rafael Grohmann

With us this week to discuss co-opted terms is Meredith Whittaker on how ‘open source’ cannot meaninfully be applied to AI systems; Audrey Tang on ‘democratisation’, something which is both helped and harmed by AI; Abeba Birhane on everyone’s favourite slogan ‘AI for Good’...

The AI Impact Summit in India is just a couple of days away and we are ready to drown in vague terms that kinda describe AI, and definitely obscure power. Let’s talk about how to reframe those terms…

More like this: The Vaporstate: All Hail Scale at the AI India Summit

We’ve partnered with the AI Now Institute and Aapti Institute to conduct twelve interviews based around the biggest and baddest terms we feel have been co-opted by global summits such as this one. This week we have Karen Hao discussing what i...

In The Vaporstate, we have traveled to Brazil, India, and the UK. But what does this look like as a global movement of nations and companies evangelising technology as the key to solving all problems, everywhere?

More like this: Paris Post-Mortem (live)

For our final instalment of The Vaporstate, Alix is joined by Astha Kapoor and Amba Kak to reflect on the series, and discuss the upcoming AI Action Summit in India. This is the first time this summit is being hosted by a global majority country — will this create new opportunities for ci...

What does US tech billionaire Larry Ellison get when he gives the Tony Blair Institute hundreds of millions of dollars?

More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

In our third installment of The Vaporstate, we are joined by two journalists from Lighthouse Reports, who tell all about their investigation into the questionable relationship between Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the Tony Blair Institute, and the current Labour government. What is the Tony Blair Institute and why did Ellison give them millions of dollars? What does any of this have to do with national...

What happens when the very way you prove who you are is stolen by someone else? And what happens when a country stands up to Meta and builds their own.

More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

For episode two of The Vaporstate, Alix is joined by Rafael Zanatta and Luã Cruz. Rafa walks us through the incredible story of how his mom’s digital ID was stolen and a clever bank teller stopped someone from halfway across the country from stealing her savings. Luã ****shares the geopolitical battles that prevented a Meta...

Our first exploration of The Vaporstate takes us to India, home of Aadhaar: a mammoth digitisation project that charts a path from technical solution for public service delivery, through mission creep and popular opposition, to a knotty but inescapable part of Indian existence today.

More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake

Joining Alix for part one of The Vaporstate is Mila Samdub, Astha Kapoor, and Usha Ramanathan. Together they discuss the conception of Aadhaar, India’s key piece of digital public infrastructure, and how it morphed from a simple digital ID...

This is The Vaporstate, a new series on the worldwide government bonanza of enthusiastic digitisation: Digital IDs, digital payment systems, massive data exchange platforms. What are the every-day impacts of these digitisation projects, and why now?

The Vaporstate is a deep exploration of digital public infrastructure: we will hear from the journalists, civil society groups, and lawyers from around the world who are watching these projects develop, and how this digital scaffolding shapes our lives.

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Infinite AI slop means we are moving away from our the age of information into what Eryk Salvaggio calls ‘the age of noise’.

More like this: Straight to Video: From Rodney King to Sora w/ Sam Gregory

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it produce so...

Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification

More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised revers...

Litigator David Seligman describes how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US.

More like this: The Human in the Loop: The AI Supply Chain

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Alix and David talk about legal devices such as forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression — and the cases that David’s team are bringing to fight these pr...

Reporting on the tech industry proves a huge challenge due to how opaque it all is — Empire of AI author Karen Hao talks us through her investigative methods in a conversation from November 2024.

More like this: Net 0++ AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

AI companies are flagrantly obstructive when it comes to sharing information about their infrastructure — this makes reporting on the climate injustices of AI really h...

A replay of our conversation with Kate Sim, on the state of child safety online.

More like this: Dogwhistles: Networked Transphobia Online

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child safety isn’t a new concept, and the way our politics focuses on the spectacle isn’t new either.

To help us...

Before we break for the year we wanted to reflect on what the podcast brought us in 2025, and what we want to see for 2026

This week Alix is joined by two members of The Maybe team: Prathm Juneja and Georgia Iacovou. We discuss our favourite episodes from the year while making it clear we love all episodes equally. And also this is not your standard clip show. We ask ourselves what we learned, why it was important to us, and what we are hungry for in 2026.

Featured episodes:

The Onion CEO Ben Collins has successfully turned political satire into a sustainable business. He explains why humorous messaging is important to understand times like these — and why he’s dead serious about buying Infowars.

Head to our feed for more conversations from MozFest with Abeba Birhane, Audrey Tang, and Luisa Franco Machado.

Further reading & resources:

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work t...

Audrey Tang has some big ideas on how we can use collective needs to shape AI systems — and avoid a future where human life is seen as an obstacle to paper clip production. She also shares what might be the first actual good use-case for AI agents…

Further reading & resources:

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get m...

You can’t build a digital rights movement if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. Luisa says that we’re in a crisis of imagination, and that participation — the non-performative kind — is one big way out of this.

Further reading & resources:

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Earlier this year Abeba Birhane was asked to give a keynote at the AI for Good Summit for the UN — and at the eleventh hour they attempted to censor any mention of genocide in Palestine, and their Big Tech sponsors. She was invited to give her full uncensored talk at Mozfest.

Further reading & resources:

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that y...

Mozilla Festival 2025. Barcelona. Three days in a bonanza of interesting people, ideas, and technology politics. These were our highlights!

More like this: FAccT 2025 episodes one and two

This is an extra special episode packed full of conversations and on-site impressions of the biggest Mozfest we’ve had in years. This year Alix moderated three panels, ran an AMA, and even hosted a game show — and somehow also had time to record all of this, for your pleasure.

Included in this episode is:

Everything is happening so fast. And a lot of it’s bad. What can research and science organizations do when issues are complex, fast-moving, and super important?

More like this: Independent Researchers in a Platform Era w/ Brandi Guerkink

Building knowledge is more important than ever in times like these. This week, we have three guests. Megan Price from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) shares how statistics and data science can be used to get justice. Janet Haven and Charlton McIlwan from Data & Society explore the role that research institutions can of...