#traitors #thetraitors #thetraitorsuk

Starting a new thread to collect critical perspectives on AI, as they are articulated dozens of times every day and appear repeatedly on my timeline. I can't read everything right away, but if, like me, you want to stay up to date, then this might help a bit:

For all those involved in drafting so-called AI guidelines, but being overwhelmed with nonsense, this is a lifesaver. Great work by Dagmar and Ariel! Resisting Enchantment and Determinism: How to critically engage with AI university guidelines. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

I’ve been spending some of the time when I’d normally be writing grants working on a new course about how and why we built the university/science/government collaboration in the US…for those who will someday need to build the successor to that system. +sending my best students job ads from Europe.

Incredible opportunity

Just one week left to apply!

This photo was taken in 1911 using glass plate technology by Herbert Ponting who was part of Scott's Antarctic expedition, The composition and detail are exquisite with the band of white snow/ice creating a perfect frame around the two people and the ship in the distance Iconic imo

Why is this cactus blooming in January? 🤔

The global warming trend continued in 2025. Each of the past 11 years (2015–2025) has been among the 11 warmest on record. Explore more data from #CopernicusClimate in the Global Climate Highlights 2025. #GCH2025 🔗 climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima... @ecmwf.int

This ought to be a huge national news story. But the quiet dismantling of a key sector barely registers outside HE. Maybe someone will care when the local economies that Unis sustain start to go bust too. Important story from @patrickjack.bsky.social & @timeshighered.bsky.social

I wrote about Grok's CSAM problem and how journalists keep fumbling the story www.readtpa.com/p/grok-cant-...

Internet Asbestos

lol

This thread responds to Prof. Christian Dunn’s Telegraph piece on #climate communication. I argue it misdiagnoses public disengagement, underplays escalating scientific risk, & reproduces a media narrative that has actively shaped, not merely reflected, public resistance to climate action 🧵

We extracted (parts of) 12 books in experiments with 4 frontier-lab, production LLMs. We prompted the LLMs with a short prefix of a book and asked them to complete the rest. For Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we extracted 95.8% of the book from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

Things that you, a new member of university staff, will get lots of training on: fire safety. Handling Freedom of Information Act requests. Things that you will not get any training on: how to mark a student thesis. How to run a module (soup to nuts). How to go from research idea to grant proposal.

Look, does our university fee system create an active market in higher education? No. But does it function to incentivise investment in your education and encourage aspiration? Well, also no. But at least it does fund the universities? Ha, you're not going to believe this.

OK I love this

I've been shouting about this since Google first floated the idea of LLMs as a replacement for search in 2021. Synthetic text is not a suitable tool for information access! buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch... /fin (for now)

i mean i think a world where the US genuinely break NATO and launch an invasion of Greenland looks so alien to us that we will not be able to understand it

It's the 3rd of January 1939, your name is professor James Smith and you are staring at a drawing of a fish. It's not a regular fish. It is a completely impossible fish.

In the bizarro world of academic journals, the rights of the author are sacrosanct and the integrity of the scientific record is someone else's problem. A paper's validity depends on emails sent 2 months later. Datasets are interchangeable. The overall conclusions of the study are not affected.

Management at @northumbriauni.bsky.social say they want to 'do different things' to fund their strategy. Whodathunk that mean freezing staff pay? @ucu.org.uk @strathclydeucu.bsky.social @sheffielducu.bsky.social @danhollandnews.bsky.social

If you didn't know it was the University of California, which other universities might this have been?

It may not seem like it, but right now is a great time to think about the different world we want.

"The question then is not just “Are we financially sustainable?” It is “What kind of institution are we sustaining?”"

If you're an educator and feel anything from disgust to discomfort with AI please consider joining.

“Even though, ostensibly, this paper is about hunting technology, it’s actually about our knowledge of plants, and that, for me, is what’s exciting,” says April Nowell about the use of poison arrows in South Africa about 60,000 years ago tinyurl.com/3utkpnrk @uvic.ca @uvicsocialsciences.bsky.social

What do you do when your standardization is absolutely fucked 😐 Asking for me

1000% ⬇️

LG has a new home assistant robot named "Cloid". Cloid.

Good morning. I'd like to invite anyone who is interested to make a small gesture of kindness today. It's up to you to decide what that can be. The key is for you to act on the idea. With so much out of our control, we can choose how to be with each other today and every day.

An area of science that is “strangely devoid of independent checks” is #academic #publishing. @jabyrnesci.bsky.social states “external oversight [e.g., ISO 9001] could push journals & publishers to work harder to reduce integrity issues that are harming scientific literature" doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Today is one of those days where I’m struck anew by how *bad* the internet has gotten. It’s almost unusable. Clouds, apps, advertising — nothing is where it should be and it’s nigh impossible sometimes to do basic tasks online.

Great post about generative AI. Happy Holidays. Don't say I never gave you anything. anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

Five years ago.

I worry less about general AI slop than about bias or fraud in LLM / AI output with influence, if code not available. Prescient (2020) example - a pharma company bribing an electronic medical record company to insert covert prompts to doctors to prescribe - tipping scales at the point of care. M

Elegant

it's funny when watching US movies or tv shows i used to be like "man, they sure do use food poisoning as a plot device *a lot* in america..." then i learned their food poisoning statistics and it blew my mind. that's just how they live! people DIE of food poisoning regularly in the US. it's MAD.

Parker's piece nails why this matters. "Tech companies... would rather not answer for their products’ failures. Every headline that says “Grok apologizes” or “Grok admits” or “Grok says” creates a world where the chatbot takes the fall while Musk and his executives face no scrutiny whatsoever."

I wrote about the endless temptation successful people feel to justify and feel justified in a clearly toxic system. Happy new year. open.substack.com/pub/rottenan...

My beloved alma mater getting hosed by Ponzi austerity EdTech.

Comparative Thanatology Highlights — 2025 Edition. See the thread below for this year’s standout publications. #comparativethanatology

In 2025 we marked 30 years of the Kākāpō Recovery Programme. Kākāpō ranger and artist Sarah Little (www.instagram.com/sarahmaylittle) tells the story. Part 1 of 2: the history. #kakapo #conservation #parrots #birds

Canada’s role in the wild primate trade undermines public trust and scientific integrity #Canada #ResearchIntegrity #WCRI2026 #WCRI www.nationalobserver.com/2025/12/30/o...

To bring in the New Year, here's a proposal for external regulation of academic publishing, through a voluntary system of journal certification to the ISO 9001 quality management standard. 🧪 #ResearchIntegrity (1/2) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How do cats sleep so hard?