interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

Meta have started algorithmically finding under18s in Australia who claimed to be over 18, & shifting them to Teen Insta accounts. about.fb.com/news/2025/04... On 10 Dec, presumably those identified thus as under16 will be the first wave of Meta/FB/Insta deactivations as the ban starts.

As I wrote last week: there are age verification providers who have already built the racial profiling and discrimination modules to plug into their offerings the minute they legally can. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

I was pleased to chat with @australia.theguardian.com team who actually looked at the Age Assurance trial data, finding racial & other biases of concern before the trial are still very evident in the trial's actual data (downplayed in the official summaries): www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

A Palestinian guy escaped to Europe on jet ski and used ChatGPT to plan, including how much fuel was needed. A funny thing that's buried is that they ran out of fuel 20km from their destination -- presumably because ChatGPT's estimate was wrong? lmao www.reuters.com/worl...

The social media saga has produced its fair share of intrigue. But the latest big reveal on how the the ban will work has left us with just another cliff hanger, writes Ange Lavoipierre.

This year’s Nancy Baym Book Award committee would also like to give an Honourable Mention to @tbonini.bsky.social and @emilianotrere.com for Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight Against Platform Power (@mitpress.bsky.social). Congratulations also!

AoIR is pleased to congratulate the winners of this year’s Nancy Baym Book Award ‪@aramsinn.bsky.social‬ & @jesgilbert.bsky.social for The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (@mitpress.bsky.social). Congratulations! aoir.org/2025nb_booka...

Watching the promotional material for Apple's new AirPods, it's notable just how much #accessibility is being positioned as the terrain big tech wants to colonise, and in the long-run, personalise, locking users into their ecosystem.

Just over a month until #AoIR2025 in Brazil! How exciting!

Why we need the arts and humanities: Reason # 4 million. People think of film as a product, not a collaborative creative endeavor of human minds and bodies capturing a piece of lived experience. variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Oh, this is so deeply unsettling. Watching big tech pay fealty to Trump in word and action to avoid regulation and basically deploy their own versions of the future without any guardrails is just chilling.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Here is my latest for The Conversation, on the results of Australia’s #ageassurance trial ahead of the #socialmediaban that will come into effect in December

News Corp's Courier Mail linked a teen girl's suicide bullying on social media as part of its campaign for the <16 ban. But the child's parents said she wasn't bullied on social media. Which News would have known if they contacted them before publishing.

I had a good chat with Natarsha Belling on The Briefing Podcast today discussing the Age Assurance Trial results and what that means for the government's under16 social media ban. #auspol 🎧 play.listnr.com/podcast/the-...

Josh Taylor in The Guardian notes that actually looking at the data from the Australian Age Assurance trial shows some big problems! Not just under-16s: all Australian social media users will need to prove their age – and it could be complicated and time consuming www.theguardian.com/...

The Australian Age Assurance Technology Trial claims that age assurance can work in Australia, but their own evidence proves the opposite. You can read the full 10 volumes of the report here: www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/m... My top level concerns are in a thread below ... [1/5]

Voice technologies are being rapidly integrated into AI systems, raising new questions & intensifying old ones, across everyday life. This paper surveys the history & current developments, highlighting emerging responses in real-world settings. apo.org.au/node/331920 #AI #VoiceTech #Authenticity

So, the technical report on Age Assurance (nee Verification) basically says no single tool works well enough to be relied on, and all the concerns about inaccuracy, bias and privacy flagged before the report all remain. 🙄 www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Pleased to have a collaboration with Jonathan Gray and Catherine Johnson now in print. A conceptual article drawn from conversations since 2020ish as we each investigated television/video (defined broadly) in US, UK, and Australia respectively. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Did you know that LLMs fail at around 70% of all typical office tasks like generating a report on something from a spreadsheet? The Agent Company is a simulated office environment for benchmarking LLMs - I wrote a blog post about the paper here (with links and a rant): jilltxt.net/llms-fail-at...

This is a harrowing but very well written piece.

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

From Darkness to Hypervisibility! A one day symposium on the promotional and creator cultures of social media at UQ in November. CFP and details here: hass.uq.edu.au/event/sessio... @bradyjay.bsky.social @antmandan.bsky.social

Scoop: another expert has resigned from Australia's teen social media tech trial, as some on its advisory board describe an increasingly acrimonious relationship with the trial's organisers and question the significance of its findings.

New in @theconversation.com today from @suzesrdarov.bsky.social and I: ‘Australiana’ images made by AI are racist and full of tired cliches, new study shows theconversation.com/australiana-... [1/2]

“Altman has said it’s better to talk about levels of progress toward this state of general intelligence rather than asking if something is AGI or not.” 2022: AGI in a year 2023: AGI in a year 2024: AGI in a year 2025: stop asking about AGI!

And people ask why ensuring folks have the critical thinking skills to evaluate the outputs of generative AI matters. 😱

From their project exploring the past, present & future of #AudioDescription (AD) in Australia, Katie Ellis, Kathryn Locke, @cultware.bsky.social & @tamaleaver.bsky.social are pleased to launch their #podcast, The AD Conversations. Web: audiodescriptionau.com.au?page_id=1057 Spotify: bit.ly/ADconvo

Having a shooting victim give an interview as an AI avatar clearly gets a reaction, but I fear it's not the right one. It's such an important issue, but the novelty of this form of AI 'ghost' eclipses what is actually being said. It also begs some big ethical questions about personal data use! [1/5]

Mark Zuckerberg's vision of 'personal superintelligence' just sounds like supersurveillance. Again. "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices."

This was such a fun discussion. Thank you @melhogan.bsky.social for excellent questions and for creating the space for these conversations.

So if the final Age Assurance Trial report is now with the Govt, every day that it isn't released is a further sign that the technology isn't mature enough to actually make the social media ban 'work' (in the technical sense).

I still crack up at this throway bit on ChatGPT in South Park's S27 Ep1 (The Trump one). #AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=W03E...

As we talk about the cheerful insanity of Australia's Social Media Ban again this morning, here's your periodical reminder that the book it's inspired by - The Anxious Generation - is hogwash. Not just me saying it, but this little journal you might have heard of: Nature. www.nature.com/artic...

With all of the attention on YouTube and it's inclusion in the teen social media ban, no one seemed to notice a change that will exempt another tech platform used by millions: LinkedIn. It appears the company's argument that it was too boring for teens has paid off. www.crikey.com.au/20...

New paper!! Hermann Wigers and I used OpenAI to generate and analyse 11,800 stories "from" 236 countries: Norwegian stories, Chinese stories, American stories, etc. We found that GPT-4o-mini tells the same story over and over. open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-2...

In light of the news about the #YouTube ban for kids in Australia, this article brings together some interesting perspectives on the proposed ban 👇🏼 theconversation.com/should-youtu...

I enjoyed teaming up w @antmandan.bsky.social on Radio National's Life Matters today to discuss the increase in age-gating in Australia with both the social media ban for under16s & phase 2 industry codes beginning in December. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr... #socialmedia #ageverification #auspol

This is fascinating: www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/I... Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…

the media is letting us down. when they go along with the bullshit of the tech industry, they actively mislead the public ensuring they don’t actually understand how new technology works and what the real pros and cons are as a result.

everyone talks about ai “assistants” like it’s some whipsmart loyal sidekick, but they’re actually this guy: a scheming, sycophant vizier who whispers delusions in your ear and is actually working for another master

✨ Digital Intimacies 11: The Love of Machines is here! Explore how machines reshape intimacy. Submission deadline: 29 Aug 2025. Join the conversation: 🖥️🤖❤️ 👉 digitalintiamcies11.wordpress.com #digint11 #TheLoveOfMachines

One hand giveth, the other (will try) to take it away. #Google YouTube prepares crackdown on ‘mass-produced’ and ‘repetitive’ videos, as concern over AI slop grows techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/y...

YouTube is going to leverage its own user base to pressure the government over legislation it doesn’t like. It is going to mobilise creators. Google (who own YouTube) tried to pit their users against the government once before in 2020.

Of course it is: Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/s...

On the one hand platforms do tend to respond to copyright takedown requests better than other takedown requests, on the other hand they've shown a complete disregard for copyright when it comes to AI. Hmm. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Confusion over whether YouTube is included in the govt's social media age ban misses a deeper issue: the law targets logged-in access. As @tamaleaver.bsky.social points out, kids will still access YouTube and other platforms, just as logged-out, 'anonymous' users. theconversation.com/esafety-boss...