Google is bringing Personal Intelligence to Gemini AI in your car. With this update, Gemini in Android Auto and cars with Google built-in can tap into your information across Google apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos, YouTube, and Search.
As an example, Google says you can ask Gemini about your flight status if you're driving to the airport. The AI assistant can pull your flight details from a confirmation message in Gmail, and then use that information to look up its status. You can also ask Gemini to "take me to my doctor's appointment" instead of pulling up directions manually, or ask it to "find the car wash from the photo I …
Meta says it paused a Muse feature that lets you share conversations with the AI assistant after researchers found the URLs publicly available on the web, as reported by Ars Technica. In a report published this week, researchers at the security firm Claroc say they found more than 6,800 Muse links through public DNS records.
"People have the ability to share specific Muse artifacts, which creates a page that can be accessed by those with the link," Muse spokesperson Tracy Clayton says in an emailed statement to The Verge. "However, we've paused this functionality while we review this report and consider changes to how these links can be dis …
I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.
I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.
My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.
Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.
This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.
For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.
This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).
Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.
In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/
Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out
It's certainly an ignominious end for history's most successful publisher (as was).
Tell Doug Ford: Say NO to Waymo https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/
Bizarre Blanets and Weird Worlds https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/10/bizarre-blanets-and-other-weir.html
The Showrunners Network https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spacecommand/the-showrunners-network?ref=8rypb4
Christian Conman Jim Bakker is Dead https://skepchick.org/2026/10/christian-conman-jim-bakker-is-dead/
#25yrsago Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm
#20yrsago More on publishing and “okaysellers” https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/bestsellers_oka/#008116
#15yrsago HOWTO make a Frankenstein hat https://web.archive.org/web/20111022194802/http://deliacreates.blogspot.com/2011/10/hey-frankie.html
#15yrsago Copyright policy in the UK: an evidence-free zone https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/cant-look-now-finding-film-online/
#15yrsago Clockwork Fagin on Escape Pod https://delivery-edge.libsyn.com/shows/18601/items/1737698/EP315_ClockworkFagin.mp3
#10yrsago At long last, America’s racist, crazy tough-on-crime prosecutors are losing elections https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828803
#5yrsago Imperfections in your Bluetooth beacons allow for unstoppable tracking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/21/sidechannels/#ble-eding
#1yrago Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. That's according to an announcement on Tuesday that says Spotify has also made changes to its recommendation system to highlight more music made by human artists.
"Our editors hold the same standard and don't program content identified as slop or spam," Spotify says. "Since we made these changes, we've seen a marked decrease in listener concerns about this content showing up in recommendations."
Though Spotify has stopped short of mandating labels on all AI tracks, it launched an "AI Persona" badge for …
Adobe announced yesterday that the mobile version of Lightroom, available for iOS, iPadOS, and Android, can now open closed eyes in photos using generative AI with just a single tap. When the app detects a person, or a group of people, have their eyes closed in a photo it will automatically present users with a new Open Eyes Quick Action that appears as an icon over the image providing easy access to the new feature.
Being able to easily save an otherwise great photo by opening a subject's eyes has been a feature in Adobe's Photoshop Elements for nearly a decade, but as DPReview points out, Elements sources the replacement from another phot …
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