"The current lack of oversight departs from established norms: regulatory mechanisms that are standard in other high-impact domains remain largely absent in AI governance" New study on public attitudes to AI regulation, from the Ada Lovelace Institute: www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/policy-brief...

This is an actual captioned figure in a published article, and not a bit of marketing imagery. Absolutely unbelievable

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Can we take a moment to acknowledge just how bad text-based 'asking' is as UI

❗ Researchers say they’ve found a universal “jailbreak” for top AI models, through poetry. A new study shows that rephrasing harmful prompts as short poems can bypass safety filters across all major models, raising questions over AI Act compliance. www.mlex.com/mlex/article...

when I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor

Cloudflare outage in the UK -- the consequences of concentrating infrastructure in ~10 companies becoming clearer by the day

Interesting how often we seem to equate cleverness with constant, manic activity. I wonder how many smart folk fly under the radar simply because they know how to chill out

"Sure, our plagiarism machine ingests enormous amounts of copyrighted material without anyone's permission, but it's the users of the machine who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 criminals, your honor." 🙄🙄 Just unbelievable levels of chutzpah. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

We didn't plagiarize, you made us plagiarize by asking questions to which we stole the answers. "Because its output is generated by users of the chatbot via their prompts, OpenAI said, they were the ones who should be held legally liable for it – an argument rejected by the court."

New NY State law on "AI Companions" 👀 www.governor.ny.gov/news/governo...

Typography matters, don't let anyone tell you otherwise

Seen on Reddit

Yoshua Bengio trotting out the nonsense idea that LLMs have volition and goals #FTAISummit

banger

We talk about enshittification as a tech phenomenon, but applied to everything it basically describes neoliberalism -- constant squeezing of more juice when there's nothing left to give, coupled with a rictus grin telling us it's all fine, everything is just *great*

The salient question is why anyone would ever think a system producing output based on existing statistic distributions of fragments of text would be a reliable source of truth. That's the real enigma.

Watching Magnolia for the first time since ~2001. Some barometer of growing up.

Ezra Klein interviewing one of the extremists of the AI nonsense sphere www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/o...

No punches pulled by one of the finest screenwriters/producers still going

Undergraduate moral philosophy question: to what extent is someone's apparent goodness contingent on the alignment of their experience and choices with their expectations of what life can and should be

Folk outraged about digital ID as though the infrastructure isn't all already there and operating (national insurance, passport, tax). It's just another interface on top of all that. If there's an issue, then it already very much exists

Today's the day! My new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER is finally out! If you want to understand why tech billionaires are so obsessed with impossible ideas about space and AI — and why that's dangerous — this book is for you. #MoreEverythingForever www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-...

sometimes the world doesn’t need to hear your take

psa: it's 'envideya', not 'nivideya'

“I don’t remember anyone ever saying to us ‘Oh I just don't think we're properly reflecting the Green Party view, or the liberal-left view on this story’,” one former BBC journalist told me. “It was always just slanted in one direction – which was basically the nativist, authoritarian direction.”

Data, striving to represent, can never keep up

Nice touch from DuckDuckGo

Can we send the phrase "writ large" to Room 101 please

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...

A full design for the George Street and First New Town project, has been approved by the Transport and Environment Committee. The report follows the completion of the technical designs phase and sets out the next stages of the project.

All these things happened to me in London today. I paid 3 shillings to the coachman to convey me to London - a distance of a mere 30 miles or so, e’en though twas a Saturday. /1

Brilliant interview with @mmitchell.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/7089...

Sam Altman has made a habit of penning new manifestos every time he wants to raise cash. This time, he's promising that "gentle singularity" has already begun—as part of a play to raise billions from the Saudis and the Emiratis. Here's what the "gentle singularity" looks like in reality:

New paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278 Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/

It's because they have flattened the idea of "intelligence" to mean mastering language* *which isn't even the case with current llms

Fwiw, I do not think this is what Tim Berners Lee had in mind

Journalists falling over themselves to express surprise at the Trump-Musk bust up says a lot about the state of our media

Amazing account of ChatGPT's sycophancy and confabulation on steroids. amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

OpenAI is featuring a "Looksmaxxing GPT" that provides "PSL ratings" for photos. It will rate people as "subhuman", and advise men to get invasive procedures like jaw surgery to "increase their sexual market value" among women, who it describes as "hypergamous by nature".

Luddites weren't anti-tech. They were against technology being used by the capitalist class to capture wealth at the expense of the worker. I am a Luddite, and a tech enthusiast. They're not in opposition. I want technology that makes MY life better, not that sells my life piecemeal to corps.

Brilliant essay -- in particular the lamentations about the unseriousness of the academic machine hit home thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

"At least I know how to say Milngavie." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

LUDDITE POPE

I hereby lay claim to 'OligarchAI'

Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

26 April 1986: What was meant to be a routine safety test at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant became the worst nuclear disaster in history. 🧵⬇️(1/4)