This Week in Tech (Audio) TWiT 1074: Chicken Mating Harnesses - Supreme Court Rules AI Art Not Copyrightable
33 snips
Mar 9, 2026 
Joey de Villa, developer advocate and longtime tech community voice, and Cory Doctorow, author and digital-rights activist, dissect AI, privacy, and tech power. They debate AI in warfare, supply-chain blacklists like Anthropic, and whether AI art can be copyrighted. They also tackle data-broker breaches, surveillance via ad tech, and the economic risks of the AI boom.
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AI Ethics Versus Pentagon Power
- Corporations like Anthropic drawing bright ethical lines (no mass US surveillance, no autonomous kill decisions) clash with Pentagon demands, creating national-security vs corporate-control tensions.
- Cory Doctorow argues supply-chain blacklisting becomes a coercive tool that can punish firms and chill dissent, likening it to mission-creep no-fly lists.
Supply Chain Risk Label Is A Coercive Tool
- Labeling a company a 'supply chain risk' functions as a powerful extrajudicial sanction that can coerce behavior and create a 'stank halo' around firms.
- Joey de Villa warns this transitive stigma can harm partners and chill innovation.
Consolidate Engineer Power With Unions
- Tech workers should convert scarcity-based bargaining power into solidarity (unions) to avoid the short-lived leverage that dissipates as supply grows.
- Doctorow cites Google engineers' temporary leverage as an example and urges unionization now.
