Leaders who can't be bothered to do their jobs, & want to be able to blame someone else for the decisions they want to take, hire consultants who care nothing about education, research, or people. Universities end up wrecked, lives are ruined, only consultants benefit. Again & again & again.

Resurfacing online to mention: my book on the history of Speech Rec, NLP, and data-driven AI is coming out in a couple of weeks! Just got my author's copy from @uchicagopress.bsky.social and it finally feels real! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

While you're cooking in the heat this week, do bear this in mind.

We all know that senior management of the UK's universities are struggling with an impossible financial situation imposed by the government. But the way they have been handling this situation has also shown that the sector is led by some really callous & horrible people.

NLP reviews suck! But why is not clear– @aclrollingreview.bsky.social provides *a lot* of guidance for how to review, but in that, first principles get lost. So @adamlopez.bsky.social and I have written down some of our thoughts on first principles.

A year ago: We're building data centers everywhere to run you out of your job and double your power bill. It's so you can look at fake videos of talking dogs on your phone Now: Why are people so hostile about the data centers

Which is the fundamental problem in AI. It doesn't actually serve the people using it. In fact, often AI serves people who want to replace or undermine the people using it. It really is that simple.

"ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Tech Policy Press fellow Petra Molnar highlights the AI Resist List: a global database documenting acts of resistance to the AI industry. From legal challenges and worker organizing to artistic interventions, the project seeks to challenge the “scale at all costs” development of AI.

As one of the authors of this thought I’d share a bit about how we got here and how you can do what we’ve done at you institution. Over the two years I’ve been at the University of Edinburgh I’ve grown increasingly concerned by fellow academics uncritically using LLMs, especially OpenAIs’s ChatGPT.

The Epstein case I'm afraid reveals something many academics don't want to see. Universities can be rapacious money machines, obsessed with money and status for their own sakes, heedless of risk, oftentimes willing to turn a blind eye when they shouldn't. apnews.com/article/epst...

I'm prepping my spring NLP course, but I've not been following NLP research too closely lately. Luckily this primer popped up on LinkedIn, so I'm asking the hive mind... POLL: How crucial is it for me to cover Apeezies & Cogematic? a) Very b) Less crucial than Shangriant d) It's too cutting edge

The budget levy on international fees seems to confirm that the UK government is, for reasons that defy economic logic, determined to break the backs of its own world-class universities just as the US government does the same. Now why would a government want to destroy the modern university I wonder

which I know from personal inspection. What it had was the biggest (n-gram) language model anyone had yet built. @nsaphra.bsky.social et al. have a nice paper on this analogy. arxiv.org/abs/2311.05020

From the University of Woeville: Alternative FAQs for British academics facing redundancy juliecupples.wordpress.com/2025/11/02/f...

A sobering read for anyone working on machine translation.

@nsaphra.bsky.social is awesome and so much fun to work with. Go work with her!

To understand the future of AI, take a look at the failings of Google Translate theconversation.com/to-understan...

Ruby Ostrow, Adam Lopez LLMs Reproduce Stereotypes of Sexual and Gender Minorities https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05926

📕 ⬇️ My thesis on 🚫unargmaxable outputs is online! Check it out if you want to learn more about how output layers constrain what neural networks can and cannot predict 👉 era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/...