Weekly Review 12 December 2025

Some interesting links that I Tweeted about in the last week (I also post these on Mastodon, Threads, Newsmast, and Bluesky):

1. AI is already being used as a tool of repression: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/aspi_china_ai_report/
2. Should we allow AI to train itself? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/dec/02/jared-kaplan-artificial-intelligence-train-itself
3. AI are still vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, even sentence structure is a threat: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/syntax-hacking-researchers-discover-sentence-structure-can-bypass-ai-safety-rules/
4. The reasoning process used by current AI cannot be trusted: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-reasoning-failures
5. Even a six-year-old child can use AI to generate stories: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/ai_has_made_ip_violations/
6. The workers who build data centres are cashing in on the AI boom: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/construction-workers-are-cashing-in-on-the-ai-boom/
7. AI powered devices are a solution looking for a problem: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/04/logitech_chief_ai/
8. So far humans are still better than AI at customer service: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/john_henry_ai_customer_service/
9. Workers in white-collar, knowledge-intensive fields are the ones most likely to be replaced by AI: https://dataconomy.com/2025/12/02/mit-ai-capability-outpaces-current-adoption-by-five-times/
10. Microsoft is not making its AI sales targets: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/
11. Training AI on pirated books leads to a payout for authors: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/580661/nz-authors-among-global-payout-out-after-ai-chatbot-trained-on-pirated-books
12. The number of papers in AI, often generated by AI, is overwhelming conferences: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/06/ai-research-papers
13. AI is not ready to be embedded into operating systems: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/agentic_os_opinion/
14. More AI coding agents: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/aws_kiro_devops_coding_agents/
15. All AI will hallucinate, Microsoft's is no different: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-says-windows-11s-agentic-ai-can-hallucinate
16. We're not measuring AI the right way: https://spectrum.ieee.org/melanie-mitchell
17. Another day, another lawsuit against an AI company: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/05/new-york-times-perplexity-ai-lawsuit
18. Failed AI projects leave behind a lot of mess: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4096138/the-cost-of-abandoned-genai-projects-garbage-code-orphan-apps-and-security-issues.html
19. AI data centres in Australia are going to use huge amounts of water, in a country that is always short of water: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/04/thirsty-work-how-the-rise-of-massive-datacentres-strains-australias-drinking-water-supply
20. Bad actors are using AI generated videos of real doctors to shill their junk health products: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/05/ai-deepfakes-of-real-doctors-spreading-health-misinformation-on-social-media
21. Investors aren't just picking winners in AI, they are making winners with their investment strategies: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/vcs-deploy-kingmaking-strategy-to-crown-ai-winners-in-their-infancy/
22. A first attempt at quantifying the AI agent population: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4100257/mit-creates-an-ai-labor-index-as-agents-invade-human-economies.html
23. Amazon makes it easier to make your own AI: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/amazon_enterprise_ai_walled_garden/
24. Do we trust Palantir to put their hooks into every layer of the AI data centre? https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/04/palantir_chain_reaction/
25. AWS' AI security agent: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/aws_security_agent_ai/
26. How different is AI generated music to the crap churned out by manufactured human groups? https://www.computerworld.com/article/4101855/who-should-listen-to-ai-music.html
27. New Zealand is an informal society. The last university lecturer who got too uptight about how they were addressed in an email did not have a good ending either: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/wellington/victoria-university-condemns-lecturer-for-saying-she-ignores-student-emails-that-start-with-hey/MVA3UYBOEFFDXO37SCSOX3VH5U/