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Welcome to Big Tech, Corporate-Owned Chatbots, and the Totalitarian Fantasy of AI Gurus

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By Teresa Heffernan. Originally published in the Halifax Examiner, October 20, 2025. In 2017, at a conference in California organized by the transhumanist Max Tegmark, there was a gathering of many well known players in the AI Industry — to name a few Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Nick Bostrom, Eric Schmidt, Willam MacAskill, Yoshua Bengio, Elon […]

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An Open Letter to Evan Solomon, Minister of AI

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By Teresa Heffernan. Orginally published in the Halifax Examiner, May 16, 2025. Dear Minister Solomon, Congratulations on your new post as Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.  I hope you will use this position to ensure copyright laws are enforced, to stop the theft and sale of data, to protect Canadians from resource-intensive and

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Trusting AI? Melissa Gismondi in Conversation with Teresa Heffernan

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Setting the scene for a provocative interview with Teresa Heffernan, Melissa Gismondi, host of the Jackman Humanities Institute podcast series, opens by instructing ChatGPT to: “Write me a brief description of a podcast featuring humanities and literature scholars discussing the perils of AI.” With her keyboard clicking in the background, this award-winning writer and audio

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Watch Now: Four Talks Questioning Human-Like Properties of AI

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Four fascinating talks at the University of Toronto’s public workshop, “Intelligence in the Absence of Life,” are now available on video. Delivered to a packed audience on April 9, 2024, these talks put the so-called human-like properties of AI under the microscope and raised questions concerning the meaning of creativity, intelligence, and ethics today. Hosted

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