Weekly digest — w.11, March 2026
The through line this week is the gap between what powerful technologies promise and what they actually deliver — and who gets to decide. Spotify’s platform lets AI-generated slop impersonate jazz legends while extracting value from their names; far-right movements adopt generative AI not despite its crudeness but because of it, turning low-fidelity images into high-engagement propaganda. In both cases, the degradation is the point: platforms and political actors alike benefit from a landscape where authenticity is expensive and noise is cheap.
But the picture isn’t uniformly bleak. France’s LaSuite project shows that states can still act as market-shapers rather than market-takers, building sovereign digital infrastructure on open-source foundations instead of defaulting to Microsoft dependency. Meanwhile, the Anthropic-Pentagon story forces a harder question: when AI companies draw ethical lines, who are those lines really for, and do they hold when national security interests come knocking? Power, whether held by platforms, parties, or governments, keeps flowing toward those who move fastest — the question is whether public institutions can move fast enough to set terms rather than just react.
4 links this week.
Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians? Opinion & Essay — honest-broker.com
How did trumpet legend Nat Adderley become a white guy playing with a three-handed bassist?
Cancel your Spotify subscription and move to Qobuz !
#AI #enshittification
‘Generative Populism’. Infocracy and the Far-Right Embrace of AI-Imaging Academic Paper — papers.ssrn.com
Far-right populist parties have been particularly early adopters of new generative AI imaging tools. Beyond concerns raised about misinformation, ‘sloppificatio
#AI
Fruit d’un développement mené grâce à des outils open source, LaSuite est la réponse française (et souveraine) aux suites bureautiques du marché, comme celle de Microsoft. BFM Tech a pu rencontrer ceux qui se cachent derrière l’ensemble des logiciels qui n’ont rien à envier à ceux développés par les…
[in French] great overview of how the French gov produced a market-shaping digital common
#commons #government
How to Think About the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute Podcast — Tech Policy Press
A conversation with Kat Duffy from the Council on Foreign Relations and Amos Toh from the Brennan Center for Justice.
#AI #bigtech