I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide. And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft. What does OpenAI offer the world?

In case you’re worried about the synthetic text extruders becoming conscious and farming us Matrix-style: this is an excellent and very accessible piece on why those concerns are probably overblown. 👇

in the 90s I used to be like "the idea of digital drugs is kind of a dumb sci-fi conceit" and now in the 2020s I'm like "everyones high on GPT and its giving tehm severe brain damage"

People have actual problems that need solving, and I would like S. Altman to stop making up new ones, please and thank you.

Definitely nothing can go wrong with OpenAI having a full record of your sexy chatbot interactions.

🌱 Mine and Güneş's new paper calls for DH practices that prioritise environmental accountability, decolonial perspectives, and ethical collaboration. Read here: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/19/3/000... #DigitalHumanities #Sustainability #EcologicalCare #EnvironmentalJustice

I and @photini.bsky.social have a new publication The article reconceptualises London as ‘A Learnt City’, a dynamic learning ecosystem shaped through digital mediation, affective experience, and embodied practices. Read OA here: www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15... #DigitalUrbanism #urbanpedagogies

ARt-Z: Unlock the Unseen 1–23 May UCL East Zeyu Zhao's exhibition, supported by IAS Octagon fund, presents 10 digitised paintings from the V&A’s Chinese Export Watercolours Collection. By integrating augmented reality it offers new ways to experience historical artworks www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

Delighted to be included in UCL’s 2025 Student Choice Awards Roll of Honour—I’m honoured to be listed alongside fantastic colleagues Lucy Brownson, @alisonhicks0.bsky.social , @photini.bsky.social, Ahmad Goheer & Daniel Onah! What a way to end year! 🥳

Women's appearance and behaviour is about to get even more highly policed in the UK, with a few people doubtless being emboldened to "take action". This whole billionaire-funded enterprise dials back gender equity by decades.

The problem with most machine-based random number generators is that they’re not TRULY random, so if you need genuine randomness it is sometimes necessary to link your code to an external random process like a physical noise source or the current rate of US tariffs on a given country.

We are currently recruiting for a Lecturer in Technologies in Digital Humanities to join the Department of Information Studies at UCL. Closing date 12th April: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

ICYMI: King’s College London is hiring 20 open-ended posts at L/SL level (Asst/Assoc Prof level) in AI + any subject. (Yes, that includes critical studies.) It’s 3 years of 80% “protected” research time, then 2 years to the standard requirements for an open-ended post. www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/role/ki...

We are currently recruiting for a Lecturer in Technologies in Digital Humanities to join the Department of Information Studies at UCL. Closing date 12th April: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

"It’s worse than you think because by the time the courts catch up the damage will already have been done. It’s worse than you think because the people running the government seem to have no higher mission than to watch it burn" www.wired.com/story/doge-w...

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

Years ago, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I interviewed a former fb employee, and I remember her continually emphasizing that these tech bros weren't evil geniuses, but were, in fact, dangerous because they were utterly clueless, totally reckless, and had too much power.

Cribbed from LinkedIn.

BBC just released damning research on AI assistants' news accuracy. Results: 51% of AI responses had significant issues. 19% introduced errors when citing BBC. 13% misquoted or made up BBC content entirely. 🤐🤐 www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/... via @ezraeeman.bsky.social

While more tech companies race to the bottom to kiss Trump's ass, they manage to finally show the public what us internet scholars have been shouting for years - that technology is never neutral or objective and is motivated by political and mainly capitalistic motives.

Microsoft's own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place advait.org/files/lee_20...

“In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector, we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.” ⮛ #academicsky

Heritage Foundation has always worked to influence and control media communications, to favor conservatives. NOW they're starting to do the same with *information resources*, putting Wikipedia editors in the crosshairs for purported left-leaning bias re anti-semitism forward.com/news/686797/...

If you wanted no leaks you should have gone into Settings -> Security -> Configure privacy & security -> Privacy options -> Other -> Configure -> Media interface and clicked “Disallow.” The Leak setting is on by default but we understand your privacy is important so we’ve made it easy to opt out

When it is darkest, an angel will appear, rotating a gyro

Can’t make this shit up. You can't steal everyone else's IP to train your models and then claim someone took it from you.

Can’t be repeated often enough ‘The UK’s creative industries are vital to the economy. Valued at £124bn, they are worth more than the life sciences, aerospace and automotive industries combined. Arts and culture alone contribute an impressive £34.6bn.’ on.ft.com/42hzVmL

Now, THIS is a headline.

This is the shape of the crisis: to prevent cataclysmic climate breakdown, we have to RADICALLY cut carbon pollution at a completely unprecedented rate. All prior climate policy has failed. Any university without a massive, cross-disciplinary program to inform this task is part of the problem.

sometimes i think about how recent studies have suggested that men are much more credulous towards gen "ai" and i wonder how much of that is because it returns output that sounds exactly like how they'd reply and if women's skepticism arises from that same effect

"I am writing this from Europe, the land that has fought so hard to keep me out...this place has made itself unavoidable. It has reached deep into my land, taken what it wanted, and left the rest in ruins." www.refugeesinlibya.org/post/chronic... @davidyambio.bsky.social.

Thanks to having read Baudrillard I don't actually have to care if Adrian Dittman "actually exists", because I know that even if he is not Elon Musk he is still Elon Musk

This is also part of why the PhD is being devalued as a degree. More women than men get PhDs now.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Leonard Cohen: That's how the light gets in.

Working in tech harm reduction is being unable to watch certain documentaries because tech bros sit on screen denying any awareness of harm, and you know you and others sat in rooms and TOLD them, showed them harm. But I guess “tech doesn’t listen and your heroes hurt you on purpose” isn’t great tv

I guess we are all capitulating to these AI companies now for ‘efficiency’, ‘growth’, and ‘profit’.

Come and work with my colleagues in the UK Data Service! Vacancy in the UKDS Computational Social Science training team, based at the Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester Job: 2yrs starting April 2025; £36-45k Applications close: 17/1/25 www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Job advert! Lecturer in Digital Futures, with specialisms in art and humanities. Come and join us at Bristol Digital Futures Institute. 80% of your time for first five years will be research and further developing BDFI work across the university and with partners www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Going through admissions for next year's cohort and the use of AI is..staggering.

"It'll get so good, bro. It's gonna change everything bro. I just need one more update, one more round of funding bro and then we're good, it'll replace art as we know it bro..."

📢 Job Klaxon: Lecturer in Cultural Analytics and Knowledge Systems (UCL) Looking for someone who studies text at scale, with humanities applications. To work with me on a new programme in London Permanent role £51-60k 19 Dec deadline www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

when the wheels fall off it will be fun to watch all the tech journalists that (once again) mythologized a fabulist pivot to pretending they saw him for what he was the entire time without missing a beat

Newsletter: We're at peak AI - generative AI models have hit the wall where they won’t improve much further thanks to a lack of training data, killer apps or any kind of sustainable business model. The results of a collapse could be catastrophic. wheresyoured.at/godot-isnt-making-it

"I live in two linguistic worlds. In one, I’m confident, expressive and full of ideas; in the other, I’m an introvert, hesitant to speak up for fear of tripping over words or misinterpreting cultural cues. [It] feels like having multiple personalities — each tied to a different language" #polyglot

This, so much this.

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

even in academia/wonk land it really still boils down to this

Brief update on our ongoing efforts to allow users to specify consent (or not) for AI training: 🧵

People are often surprised when I tell them this: both Twitter and Facebook/insta/threads are now specifically engineered to downgrade, hide, suppress real journalism. If this platform is different, that's a huge change