Wow -- look at OpenAI trying to shift responsibility to the users: 🧵>> www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/art...

ML based facial recognition is not reliable in the wild; like many “AI” tools sold to law enforcement, it is thinly-veiled pseudoscience and will harm people by lending law enforcement both a felt sense of epistemic authority and legal impunity.

Thinking about this Mary Oliver poem this morning. Don't hesitate.

Two great scholars doing work on moral (@drmeltemyucel.bsky.social) & personality (@tedmond.bsky.social) development & change are recruiting PhD students this year @msupsychology.bsky.social! Your grad office could be across the hall from my office!* *not necessarily a selling point, just a fact

To understand what was at stake here: in VA, the AG gets to appoint university counsel. From Jim Ryan’s forced resignation to the (mercifully) reject “Compact” to the odious and bizarre “settlement,” UVA has been hamstrung by counsel chosen by the state’s GOP administration. That’s about to change.

The lesson of history is that tyrants cannot be appeased. Appeasement only feeds their insatiable hunger for power. Tyrants prey on people who feel unsafe and vulnerable. But without mass submission, a tyrant is powerless. Remember this.

For years, but especially for the past year, Democrats have been in thrall to the idea that they need to chase an imagined median voter, and adopt that voter’s positions. Mamdani’s victory shows another way: hold principles, and persuade people to share them.

"[Chicago mom] Andrea Soria... overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: 'We have to be good or ICE will get us.'" apnews.com/article/chic...

This is especially rich given that Wiley's "AI Guidelines for Researchers" makes a point of urging authors to "protect your content while using AI". What they mean is: "make sure no other AI company gets hold of your IP, because then we can't use it ourselves." www.wiley.com/en-us/publis...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

“Zainab Iftikhar, a computer science PhD student at Brown University who recently published a study on how AI chatbots systematically violate mental health ethics, said these interactions illustrate ‘how easy it is to break the model’”.

Venture capitalists Andreessen and Horowitz invest in startup that sells thousands of AI bot influencers to manipulate social media as a service, clearly violating major platform policies www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

As I promised, here's my new Harvard Data Science Review commentary (on Leonelli's 'Environmental Intelligence'). It summarises my Royal Society argument that AGI is a confused concept with no demonstrable scientific merit and needs to be tossed in the bin if we want to get our heads straight again:

I was at the grocery store last minute purchasing candy for tonight when some loudmouth went off on how glad they were SNAP benefits were stopping. Friends, I was so angry. I just gave two neighbours grocery gift cards because I know they use the program. Everyone deserves food.

"Artificial intelligence ... is also being used for violent threats — priming them to maximize fear by making them far more personalized, more convincing and more easily delivered." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/b...

Grateful as always for Dr Sascha Luccioni’s research into the energy discrepancies between image, text, & now video generation: “Creating [one] AI video uses approximately 90 Watt-hours, compared to the 2.9Wh needed for image generation and 0.047Wh for text generation.” www.cnet.com/tech/service...

Really appreciate this review of our book (w/ @alexhanna.bsky.social) "By insisting on the term “automation,” Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding." "…a demystifying, often hilarious lexicon that cuts through the fog of hype."

"The AI Con reminds us that the fight over AI is not only about technology. It’s also about language, labor, and the stories we choose to tell about the future, which we can humanize rather than surrender to the myriad ways mass automation dehumanizes." lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

I love to see stuff like this because it helps explain to people trapped in tech-sponsored information bubbles the actually obvious fact that universities teach people to know & think things, and AI is a way to produce the effect of knowing & thinking things w/o actually knowing & thinking them.

"someone sucking up that hard does not have your best interests at heart" this is an underrated point

"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity." - CLR James, "The Black Jacobins"

📣 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

I wonder if scientists will learn to let go of reductive, quantitative "impact" metrics before there is no science left to quantify.

Remember when Paul Krugman’s columns were soooo wonky. “It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.” - Paul Krugman

A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o... @tressiemcphd.bsky.social is unmatched. Read her latest piece—and everything else she writes.

Empirics which support the argument of Shah and Bender -- dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml...

Want to join our organizing committee? There's still time to apply!

Brava!

There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles. Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

Important update from two months into my “experiment” (lol) assigning college juniors and seniors to read whole physical books and then having a seminar where they use the physical book and physical notebooks and their ideas and questions to fill three hours of class time: It rules

New preprint alert! 🚨 “Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”

The response to this has been fascinating... plenty of public engagement from outside of the field and lots of private messages from people within it. It's somewhat telling that there appears to be a "chilling effect" for pointing out concerns over industry funding in the field.

Fun post, but I strongly disagree with the premise that journals (as opposed to for-profit, closed-access journals) are the problem. This person has clearly not experienced the cancer that is CS arXiv. medium.com/@emilymenonb...

Excellent post by the creator of the hoax FormatMyPaper.com. "We’re a community of experts, terrified of a harmless prank site, yet seemingly unbothered by the multi-billion dollar publishing industry that actually takes our copyright, our labor, and our intellectual property every single day."

Important work

Spotted on LinkedIn... a bad AI summary of our new paper on risks of AI in research. Please make it stop.

I want you to imagine what you would have said in 2005 if someone told you a company would do this and not only get away with it, but evade wide public outrage

Since I can’t work my day job, I’m back to my side gig. 7 handmade dichroic stained glass brains up for grabs tonight at 7pm EST at www.brainedglass.com

This project is an example of @alexhanna.bsky.social's vision for DAIR, she said she wanted to make researchers organizers and organizers researchers (something to that effect and I believe there's a related quote from someone else).🧵

This is the way (for me). Piloted it with my graduate seminar this semester. I've been marking reading responses by hand, returning them the following session. Unlike what i had been doing for my whole career, which was feeling like i had to mark immediately and return through Canvas.

We were so lucky to have Emily's voice in the room. If you're interested to watch our panel, you can find the link here: www.mindandlife.org/events/minds...

Excellent 🧵 and article, very worth reading! In the context of survey research, I've written about simulated ("synthetic") survey respondents with similar points: quantuxblog.com/synthetic-su...

important paper and excellent thread too

Huge thanks to @mjcrockett.bsky.social and @lmesseri.bsky.social for digging into all that work to produce this survey and their insights. The problems that cogsci research is facing are real, but "AI surrogates" are not a solution.

Can the human sciences exist w/out the human? Proposals for using AI as human research subjects suggest yes. But @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I respond with, ‘not so fast.’ In fact, silicon subjects say more about the problems of the research paradigm than the promises of AI. 🚨New article, thread 1/

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Here’s what I said to our teenager and some other young folks who were around at the match: there’s a difference between a demonstration and a protest, and you need both because people are at different places in their engagement with a movement, and there are different kinds of power.

“Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses” www.anildash.com/2025/10/17/t...

Anthropic is spending more on its Amazon Web Services contract than *all of the revenue it's generating*, according to Ed's source who's familiar with the deals. Pretty wild snapshot of the #2 AI company here.