Everything I have written, said out loud, or been quoted in. Most of my writing goes out through On the Record, my Substack on AI, culture and work. It is free to read, and I would love it if you subscribed. My academic publications are listed here too. Beyond writing, I enjoy joining podcasts, panels and conferences, and talking to the press.
My algorithms have become rather apocalyptic lately. Every time I open any one of my feeds, someone is predicting that AI will take my job, break our democracy, or end our society altogether. Part one of a series on how badly we have predicted the future before.
A strange thing is happening on Turkish radio. I have been back in my hometown, Istanbul, for the past couple of weeks, and if you have visited the city you know how brutal the traffic is. The one thing that makes any journey across town enjoyable is the radio, especially in an old car with no Bluetooth.
In September 2022, Jason Allen won first place in the digital arts category of the Colorado State Fair with an image generated through Midjourney. The backlash was immediate: artists accused him of cheating, commentators declared the death of creative authenticity, and Allen became the focal point for a much larger anxiety. On the renegotiation of authenticity in the age of AI.
Generative AI has put work that used to need a team within reach of one person. My thesis asked what that changes for the founder: which capabilities still determine whether a venture gets built, which ones the tools have absorbed, and what is expected of founders now instead.
How did China become the fastest-growing art market in the world, and what has a socialist system had to change to accommodate foreign investors? The paper traces the relationship between China’s economic development and the expansion of its art market, reading the boom through the social, political and economic dynamics that drove it — and asks what the country would need to keep doing to hold its position among the top three.
A weekly session for Oxford’s founder and builder communities, built around an eight-week hands-on curriculum I wrote from scratch: web scraping, security guardrails, API integrations and remote MCP server configuration. Alongside the teaching, vibe coding sessions, guest showcases from members and two hackathons.
Pulling back the curtain on the often-invisible human workforce powering AI, from content moderation to data labelling, and on why standards in AI supply chains have to be enforced rather than hoped for. Veena McCoole talks to Ashly Jiju and me about Fairwork’s answer to the scrutiny coming with the EU AI Act: a research-backed audit and certification process for companies that want to build their AI ethically.
Watch on the OII site Oxford Podcasts Listen on Spotify
A joint panel between the Oxford AI Society, the AI Competency Centre and the Claude Builder Club, moderated by Lana Seo. Universities are not simply observing what AI is doing to the world — they are actively shaping it, and the panel asked what responsibility that carries, and how academia should answer growing industry influence and global competition. We looked at where the incentives of universities and industry align, where they pull apart, and whether collaboration strengthens intellectual independence or quietly compromises it.
The session introducing the Fairwork AI Supply Chain Certification: what it audits, why the labour behind an AI system is so hard to see from the outside, and what a company has to be able to show about its data work before anyone should call it responsible.
Wharton Magazine covered the launch of the Fairwork AI Supply Chain Certification, the collaboration with the University of Oxford behind it, and the move from six years at Microsoft to graduate study at the Oxford Internet Institute.
