📣 📣📣 Ghost in the Machine is coming to Dublin 📣📣📣 mark June 6 on your calendar ifi.ie/film/ghost-i...

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

was used to generate the fake paper (e.g. “in the style of” or “using the framework and arguments from” in the prompt). I am getting rejection emails for papers I didn’t submit, a new level of crazy.

New from @mbrauh.bsky.social !!

gosh so much this part: “If you ask tobacco companies to help write your school’s policy on cigarettes,” Garrett quipped, “you’re going to end up with guidance on how to smoke responsibly in school.”

It's wild how many people also don't grasp the idea that the lowest paying jobs destroy your body, so in the long term you are making way less than that low wage.

Hey, look at Substack promoting Andrew Tate as the #1 new bestseller. The company's amoral leadership & backers will platform anyone, even ludicrously toxic rapists & human traffickers.

The point of the university as a concept is that it's been here for a thousand years and meant to be here another thousand. Turning education over to producing what the market needed five years ago is never going to work well.

this piece articulates some really important insights, but I have issues with the core frame presented in this paragraph

Any system that has to negotiate pedestrians and other non automated drivers who can drive anywhere (unlike trains and planes) needs theory of mind. Successes of self driving cars are seen when roads are fully memorised, so the car operates like a simulated train... 2/n

Also, when reporters start talking about the chatbots this way, it is imperative to remind them they are basically asking a toaster for comment. They should be a lot more embarrassed about this than they currently are. “Grok told CNN…” no it didn’t. You typed stuff into an unreliable calculator.

Honored that our article, "The Myth of AGI", was one of Tech Policy Press's Top 30 read pieces of the year. In some great company here, especially with @eryk.bsky.social's "Anatomy of an AI Coup". www.techpolicy.press/top-30-most-... (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

AI ran into a brick wall trying to control smart home devices this year, which feels like the canary in the coal mine for a lot of things. Excellent @jp2e.bsky.social dive into why and what comes next www.theverge.com/tech/845958/...

this is a good reminder of how things that are shitty but have been accepted as normal and inevitable can actually turn out to be abnormal and evitable with some science, time, education and political will

My head nearly fell off. The actual Minister for Health said this? m.independent.ie/irish-news/t...

here-we-go-again-again-final-version-v2.docx

and all of the arguments we made 5 yrs ago in this paper about why the idea of robot rights relies on faulty assumptions about the nature of human cognition and intelligence still hold Robot Rights?: Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

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Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

Update: European Commission is starting "pre-infringement dialogue" with Ireland about our complaint against Ireland's process to appoint the new Data Protection Commissioner These "EU Pilot" dialogues occur where the Commission suspects a Member State has broken EU law ec.europa.eu/implementing...

Not satisfied with just destroying their own brand goodwill, OS companies are now using AI to try to destroy the good names of the apps users install. (Scrivener taking out adds to explain how it has no AI but Apple adds some anyway.)

Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”

Tech companies are backing away from creating diversity reports. Microsoft, which released its annual diversity and inclusion report in 2024, is choosing to not do one in 2025. www.hr-brew.com/stories/2025...

The content is still obviously delusional to anyone reading it. It’s just organised crazy. But the real danger is the internal effect on the user. The AI provides coherence and validation, stabilising the narrative they’re caught in.

🤖 "Holes in the web: Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, GenAI is shockingly ignorant too." Excellent essay on algorithmic epistemological knowledge and the collapse of knowledge throughout mean-driven data machines. aeon.co/essays/gener...

In a short piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, @abeba.bsky.social and I write #AIHype Is Steering EU Policy Off Course. Stop peddling in unscientific discourse about “AGI” and “superintelligence.” Serve citizens. Don't cater to the whims of tech CEOs. www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-s...

cool pincer movement if you truly grasp: AI & any concept relating to it like so-called guardrails are a scam in the deepest sense like a perpetual motion machine or a quija board — and not only a scam like a pyramid scheme which is a possible way to make money if you are first in first out 🧵 1/n

im frustrated about a lot of things (including the fact that someone told me that using the word "epistemology" in a grant application was "jargon") but i am ALSO very frustrated about THIS

sts researchers: :spend decades tracing the way well-intentioned design choices constrained by culture, capital, and the material environment can have negative outcomes in aggregate: ai companies: lets put a chatbot in a doll that tells kids to set fires futurism.com/artificial-i...

As we write in The Guardian this morning, the Commission’s plan to gut EU digital rules will hurt Europe’s startups and give U.S. tech an unassailable advantage, confirming Europe as a digital vassal. Piece by George Riekeles and I. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

this was making me nuts recently so I recorded all the times I had to bat away all the useless AI shit in acrobat. four times right after opening the doc, and some things I couldn't even clear

Scientists and scholars in AI and its social impacts call on von der Leyen to retract #AIHype statement. @olivia.science @abeba.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @rocher.lc @danmcquillan.bsky.social @robin.berjon.com & many others have signed www.iccl.ie/press-releas...

Her husband was at Broadview one month and she was never able to talk to him. Not until he was already in Mexico. He had been in Chicago for 20 years. Her husband shared that the numbers of people there were astounding. It just makes me think how many people that are not counted/just disappeared.

You don’t need to burn books if you can take them off the shelf and say “AI made me do it”.

The conversion process is kind of fascinating to me. Like there’s a threshold in a conversation (often code) where critical thinking evaporates because the thing did something in a domain they weren’t familiar enough to evaluate

Hey, look, progress and innovation!

I had a long conversation with MIT Tech Review’s @willdouglasheaven.bsky.social about AGI; it fed into this very good read on the rise of AGI orthodoxy

📣 I am hiring a postdoc! aial.ie/hiring/postd... applications from suitable candidates that are passionate about investigating the use of genAI in public service operations with the aim of keeping governments transparent and accountable are welcome pls share with your networks

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

As a scholar I rarely offer electoral guidance. But today I do: DO NOT USE AI CHATBOTS AS YOUR VOTE ADVICE APPLICATION AHEAD OF (THE DUTCH) ELECTIONS Full of errors, bias and lack of transparency. @ernesto-deleon.com @favstats.eu @theoaraujo.bsky.social and🙋unpack why algosoc.org/results/1-in...

We filled a complaint against Ireland to the European Commission today. Ireland has appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist as its new Data Protection Commissioner. This will be interpreted by the tech industry as a signal of impunity. The European Commission must intervene. www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

We’re stuck in a WEIRD, DEAD paradigm because of scarce funding and institutional pressures to publish quickly. I’d love to slow down; my students need papers to stay in the game. AI Surrogates seem to alleviate these pressures but in fact they entrench the system further. 13/

Conversation with our own @mbrauh.bsky.social encompassing her transition from DeepMind to @aial.ie, breaking down AI companions, why the massive uptakes (particularly w minors), & the multitude of harms that arise with them including AI sycophancy & the business models designed to keep users hooked

You can safely replace “AI” with “corporations and billionaires” in any mainstream piece of content.

As one of the Brits sold down the river by a Labour government after being brutally beaten, tortured and disappeared by Italian police in Genoa in 2001, I am entirely unsurprised by this vindictive servility. Solidarity to the Flotilla detainees ✊