Tom Hawking

Tom Hawking writes about the overlap between technology, culture, and power at Gizmodo, with a focus on how emerging systems play out in everyday life and public debate. His coverage often starts from a strange or funny technological vignette and then opens out into questions about platforms, regulation, creativity, and the people behind the systems. He moves freely between artificial intelligence, consumer hardware, gaming, internet culture, and policy, keeping the human consequences of technical decisions at the center of his work.

Artificial intelligence and the people who use it

Artificial intelligence is one of Hawking’s most consistent beats, and he treats it as much a social phenomenon as a technical one. In his piece on people “torturing” large language models, he discards the idea that software can feel pain and focuses instead on what it says about users, cruelty, and the ethics of how people interact with supposedly sentient systems.

He writes about jurisdictions that embrace low-quality AI-generated content, such as coverage of Singapore’s approach to “AI slop,” using those stories to illustrate the friction between governance, economic incentives, and the degradation of public information. He tracks the physical and labor demands of AI infrastructure, including industry responses to construction worker shortages that delay data centers, and uses those stories to show how abstract “cloud” systems rest on concrete supply chains and workers. His reporting also follows efforts to shield human likenesses and creativity from AI training and scraping, such as initiatives framed as consent registries for artists and performers, highlighting how cultural figures and regulators try to claw back control from technology firms.

Across these pieces, he returns to the same theme: AI is not neutral machinery but a field of contest between companies, governments, and ordinary users.

Games, gadgets, and the economics of play

Hawking covers video games and consumer hardware as systems that blend entertainment, engineering, and business strategy. He writes about Grand Theft Auto VI from multiple angles, from city officials arguing over its impact on Miami Beach to companies seeking to limit modding, treating the franchise as a case study in how virtual worlds collide with local politics and corporate control.

His coverage of game-related experiments, such as a YouTuber pushing a home-built trebuchet through the sound barrier or another creator getting Super Mario 64 running on an SNES via custom hardware, shows his interest in enthusiast engineering and the fringes of what consumer tech can do. On the hardware side, he writes about Apple’s devices in pieces that demystify technical features like the iPhone 18 Pro’s variable aperture and explain why hobbyists and manufacturers are rushing to build Mac mini–style machines, framing these stories around usability, pricing, and the shifting expectations of users.

He reports on Sony’s plans to turn a PlayStation controller into a wireless credit card reader and on the company’s reluctance to share tariff refunds with customers, treating consoles as payment platforms and pricing strategies rather than just gaming boxes. The through-line in this work is a view of games and gadgets as economic and cultural infrastructures, where design decisions and business models have direct impact on how people play and pay.

Internet culture, archives, and media history

Internet culture and digital preservation are another strand in Hawking’s reporting. He has written about a bootleg fan who spent decades taping live shows and is now digitizing thousands of recordings for the Internet Archive, using the story to explore how personal obsession becomes part of the public record. His coverage of the British Film Institute’s online video collection, which gathers tutorials, memes, and viral clips into a formal archive, treats web ephemera as material worthy of curatorial care and historical analysis.

He follows leaks and recoveries from older platforms, including massive releases of lost game builds from Steam’s legacy servers, and uses them to show how corporate infrastructure, accidents, and preservationists reshuffle what survives of digital culture. His work also touches on reimagined media technologies, such as QR-based systems that can store terabytes of data on a sheet of paper, and on everyday tech hacks like better ways to tie shoelaces, connecting low-level technical ingenuity to daily routines.

Even when he writes about topics like more accurate world maps approved by international bodies or debates over public bathroom infrastructure, he treats them as part of a broader story about how interfaces, spaces, and data shape collective life. This cluster of stories shows he is drawn to the long tail of internet history and to the people who quietly maintain or reinterpret the digital record.

Range beyond tech and a long writing career

Hawking’s author page and professional profiles make clear that his work for Gizmodo sits within a broader writing and editing career that spans multiple continents and subjects. He describes himself as a writer and editor whose articles have appeared in outlets including Popular Science, The Guardian, the New York Times, VICE, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, The Monthly, NME, The Baffler, Pitchfork, and others, covering topics from Eurovision to politics, basketball, science YouTube, and Leonard Cohen.

His own site highlights work that tests AI systems outside pure tech reporting, such as giving a notoriously difficult cryptic crossword to a set of language models and examining how they cope with lateral thinking and cultural references. Across these different publications and themes, he retains a preference for stories that sit at the intersection of culture and systems, whether those systems are musical industries, political structures, or software architectures.

That breadth informs his Gizmodo coverage: he treats technology as one more cultural system to be unpacked, rather than as a siloed specialist beat.