🧵 3 papers by me & my team Ullrich Ecker Fabio Carrella Emily Spearing Almog Simchon ask an urgent question: if you tell people they're being manipulated by AI — deepfakes, AI-written articles, microtargeted ads — is the manipulation defanged? Thread 👇 1/10

The fossils coming to life at Naturalis (NL) are pretty awesome. #museums2026

So I just finished an amazing book and need to rave about it for a second! @hironennes.bsky.social "Leech" was recommended to me by a friend that knows I enjoy narratives with identity fuckery and this book did that so incredibly well! So I will be dropping my review as a thread

Crow and Blossom — Ohara Koson, ca. 1910 Woodblock print

I’ve done some weird things for my research projects, from placing electrodes on an apple to risking a wild hedgehog bite (not recommended), but sewing capes is a first

It’s very funny how straight people who fetishize one section of queer experiences never hide their hatred of other queer people They love the gays when it’s two men knocking boots from a story that uses racial stereotypes for an East Asian man, but heaven forbid anyone be a lesbian

Once heard a prof tell grad students that they don't have to worry about misconduct, we have ethics now, mistakes like eugenics won't happen again (as if eugenics ever went away). Nothing more dangerous than framing it as a thing of the past and thinking we don't need to check ourselves constantly.

“A fraudulent e-mail might look like an MDPI account” let me stop you right there

Some people really cant handle the idea their actions exist in the context of the world and they can be judged for them. They want their entertainment to be untouchable and be both super important to who they are and simulatinously be unimpeachable

Only eight days left, yall! Ok, you care about children and the prisoners? Can we really bring some research-informed mental health activities to kids who were in the occupation's torture camps? Learn more + give, then ACT for them, enough talk! chuffed.org/project/hmg

“Lebanese healthcare workers and officials say Israeli bombings have deliberately targeted medical workers and facilities in south Lebanon, including through the use of double-tap strikes, in what they describe as a systematic effort to make the area unlivable.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Deploring Israel's actions as a state isn't antisemitic. Attacking Jews and symbols of Jewish culture in supposed retaliation for Israel's actions is however *textbook* antisemitism and these are not complicated thoughts to simultaneously hold in one's head.

Please help Shimaa survive Israel's genocide with her little child & mother, who are starving & ill. She's already lost her husband, & she's unable to post regularly because Bsky deletes her ruthlessly.

Three cups left! They’re flying off the shelf 😊 they are lovely if i say so meself

my absolutely favourite thing in nonfiction writing is the research detours you need to take for this one paragraph to make sense. love the surprise, the discovery, the community in knowing that someone built their entire career on this one obscure thing and is excited to share their knowledge

Nothing, NOTHING will prepare you for how Extra and excellent this endeavour begins AND proceeds.

Israeli cops break a CNN producer’s wrist while beating up journalists who were filming them beat up people praying, per the Foreign Press Association.

So, just to be clear, a three year old paper in which a bunch of AI builders and hangers-on who could not possibly have any bias in the matter whatsoever, who were living in a world in which GPT-4 was the state of the art, decided AI could do 90+% of what humans do in a half dozen jobs. Got it. 🧵

I find this chart by Anthropic about theoretical vs. actual AI usage, from @pbump.com's latest newsletter, very funny, and I think it's worth explaining why, and also please push back on any of this if you disagree, as I may write about it in the future. 🧵

ISSUE 1 IS NOW FREE TO READ ONLINE! Please enjoy our debut issue in all its messy, wonderful, heartbreaking, joyful queer energy. We love these poems and stories, the reprints and nonfiction, the cover and interior art—all of it! And we hope you will too 🪐🗡️ othersidespec.com/issues/issue-1/

rejoice in the snark before realizing that yet again we're seeing this kind of shilling from what is supposed to be a top-tier journal

🌄 Birds of eastern Canada Ottawa, J. de L. Taché, Printer, 1919. [Source]

I’m curious if others have similar experiences: when talking with people who use AI chatbots a lot, I noticed I’m being “NPC’d”: they don’t respond to me as a person & don’t engage with what I say, but act as if they were responding to a list of already known dialogue options (1/?)

*somebody* needs to write the article about the QuitGPT campaign, and how it hijacked bubbling, red-hot public resentment towards AI and directed that anger towards not just a pro-AI position (paid Anthropic sign-ups) but the obscene cultish ideology of treating the software like it's alive

Oh

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

"my mom, who actually used ChatGPT to translate random things a few times, surely seems to know more about AI translation capabilities than Bender does." he sure does seem to believe that women should perform for him or we're "smug" Do women with expertise threaten him, I wonder?

"Sloppelganger" is one for the ages

Calling Cormac McCarthy’s authorial style a “mistake” that AI no longer makes is so funny

Yes to all of this, but also: writing is so much more than a text sample. Great writers (whatever it means) are not great because they can write a good sample, but because they make prose, plot, themes and other elements of writing work together to form a text larger than the sum of its parts.

Anti-war feminists could be focusing on raising awareness about russian war crimes against Ukrainian women instead of posting performative nonsense that undermines support for Ukraine’s defence. Russia holds civilian women hostage and rarely agrees to exchange them: www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/202...

It's vaguely fascinating and jarring that Claude gets sold as the responsible, narrow, work-focused non-sycophantic chatbot while at the same time Anthropic also seems to have convinced a stunningly massive number of formerly normal people that Claude is a living thing trapped inside the computer

Right now people are using this trick to change what AI tells you about topics as serious as medial questions and financial advice. The problem is ENORMOUS Experts like like @lilyray.nyc say this is a problem the tech industry has know about forever, they just didn’t work on it til it was a crisis

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point. I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

A Palestinian psychologist has partnered with me to get YOUR support for this important initiative: mental health workshops and recovery kits for kids in Gaza who were detained in Israeli prisons. We have three weeks left! Help with supplies & more: chuffed.org/project/hmg

Nikki Wallschlaeger :: “Lilac Sonnet” #smallpoemsunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

I made a bingo card

Just constantly stealing Anil’s phrasing “it’s designed to reflect your priors in someone else’s voice” is a line that might actually persuade people I work with.

This is obscene, ghastly, unacceptable.

Mitzi & Bug 🐀 ❤️ 🐀 Updated these two designs for Ratapalooza and ECCC. If you’re going, be sure to say hi!!

If you give a shit about: * Books * Art * Fresh water * Food * Breathing an account with over 890,000 followers shilling for Anthropic is a HUGE red flag. This account was sus for a long time, but this is the icing on the fucking cake. Block these absolute lying arseholes now.

social media accounts are already pushing the 'dont believe iranian media when they show you photos of the bombed school', it feels all so familiar and dire.

Because the mass murder of Iranian children helps the us and israel feel safe? And you will never convince me this is a "mistake," with the kind of technology available to militaries today.

So now you genocidal fucks are suddenly concerned about "unprovoked acts of armed aggression," huh? Get the fuck out of Ukraine.

This is how the "NATO expansion provoked Ru" crowd tries to wiggle out of evidence falsifying their theory again! After Finland/Sweden's NATO accession provoked no reaction from Ru, they said it didn't count because Ru's afraid specifically of Ukr in NATO. Now that taking Ukr NATO membership off...

Regret to report that there has been another good linkedin post

a couple of female eurasian bullfinches foraging through bushes 🍃 i haven't worked with gouache in a minute, but fell in love all over again with this piece

little cranes