Vass Bednar
31.9K posts
@VassB
Managing Director @CanShieldInst + co-author of The Big Fix. making sovereignty make sense.
As U.S. state and Big Tech become one, we become digital serfs, and it sucks theglobeandmail.com/business/comme…
When Jared Hewitt’s co-worker claimed last winter that Hewitt used AI to write an incident report for the day care they work at. The co-worker pointed to the words ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘circumstantial’ as evidence of a machine-generated influence. “I don’t write in a casual way but a much more serious, precise way,” he says. “And I’ve paid the price for living in a ChatGPT society.” It wasn’t the first time Hewitt’s prose has been pegged as AI, and he thinks he knows why. He has a stutter, and when he’s typing, he can speak uninterrupted. It is a luxury he takes full advantage of. Hewitt is also neurodivergent. “Growing up, I had a strong obsession with writing,” he says. He was always given good grades in English, but now, with the massive uptick in AI-generated text, all the time he spent happily working to improve his prose strikes him as a liability. There’s a new entity among us, and it’s getting better at disguising itself. The mood is paranoid: This presence is producing a gigantic amount of language, much of it filtered through people we know, whether they’re using it for Hinge messages or LinkedIn posts. The effect is that everyone is trying to figure out who is LLM and who is human. Sometimes, we are getting it wrong. “People are going off vibes,” says the historical novelist Kerry Chaput, who was horrified when a reader thought a social-media post she wrote about her neurogenic cough was ChatGPT generated. Emma Alpern reports on the people — often non-native English speakers and autistic writers — being falsely accused of using LLMs to write: nymag.visitlink.me/kzDs4g
In an increasingly interconnected world, the concept of digital sovereignty has become a pressing concern for Canada. The fear of foreign-controlled entities having the power to "shut off the lights" on our digital systems is more pronounced today than it was just a few years ago. As our dependence on digital infrastructure grows, so does our vulnerability to external control and influence. To achieve true digital sovereignty, Canada must invest in national infrastructure and prioritize the development of domestic technologies. Strengthening our cybersecurity measures and reducing reliance on foreign technology providers is crucial to safeguarding our national interests. Without these measures, Canada's digital autonomy remains at risk, leaving our critical systems and data exposed to foreign influence. Ultimately, digital sovereignty is not just a matter of technological control but also a matter of national security and self-determination. For Canada to thrive in the digital age, it must take deliberate steps to ensure that its digital future is decided on its own terms. The latest from the Globe's business commentary, by Joshua van Es: theglobeandmail.com/business/comme…
Anthropic CEO: “50% of all entry-level Lawyers, Consultants, and Finance Professionals will be completely wiped out within the next 1–5 years." grad students and junior hires are cooked.
Walmart digital price labels will be in every store across U.S. by end of 2026 cnbc.com/2026/03/21/wal…
