Full time, permanent law and politics lecturer post at @laws.ucl.ac.uk. Background either a social scientist with law training, or a lawyer with social science interest. Teaching: either/both of introductory EU/PIL, plus specialist teaching. Civil lawyers welcome! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

After 5 months, the European Commission has now released several of the industry consultation responses provided in relation to the AI Act's General Purpose Model provisions www.asktheeu.org/request/all_...

This dude is rotating inspirational quotes in his email signature. Intense total dipshit energy.

🚨CFP: The ADM+S Generative Authenticity project is hosting a small scholarly symposium on Authenticity, Generative AI and Synthetic Media on 6-7 May at QUT Kelvin Grove (and hybrid node). Short abstracts due 9 March. All info and the submission form: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

A Haaretz investigation has found that at least three Israeli cyber companies are currently operating in #CARINT; one has developed an "offensive" tool that can potentially tap into your 🚗car's microphones and cameras. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Hardly needs to be said, but this rule would be gibberish and unenforceable if everyone didn't already know what topics and perspectives are going to be ruled "controversial"

sophia scam robot maker in the epstein files? say it ain’t so!

Ben Goertzel, popularizer of the term AGI and creator of the Sophia robot, congratulating Jeffrey Epstein the day after Epstein was released from prison. Goertzel is mentioned in the files nearly 800 times, including well after the Miami Herald investigation in 2018.

I'm continuing my research into global tech politics, including the politics of digital sovereignty, and the political economy of the digitalisation and statecraft in my role at ODI Global - please reach out if you're keen to collaborate or want to know more about my research!

I’ll be putting out much more of this work into the world in the weeks and months ahead, but for now, I want to thank my supervisor @michae.lv for his mentorship and support, and my examiners Dr. Gavin Sullivan and Dr. Cecilia Rikap for their excellent feedback and critique.

My thesis examines the mutual interactions between emerging platform and data-based technologies with forms of political economic authority, structures and subjectivities, through a case study of India’s ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’, aka the 'India Stack'.

Last week, I successfully defended my PhD Thesis, ‘Platform Politics and Data Publics: Sovereignty, Statecraft and Citizenship in the India Stack’, at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.

Financial barriers to environmental litigation are against the law, because protecting the environment is an important public interest. The government now wants to make it super expensive (>€100,000) for ordinary people to go to court to protect the environment Please read and take action 👇

Over on Twitter/X, Bill Ackman (of Harvard/Claudine Gay/plagiarism/tennis debacle fame) has written another 3,000+ word post. He believes that Francesca Gino's RAs faked her data. And, plot twist, he's been funding Gino's legal battle against Harvard since 2024. x.com/i/status/200...

Happy New Year www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/inco...

As you’re watching a Disney film at Christmas, raise a glass to Disney’s lawyers who, in Florida’s 2021 social media law, had a blanket exemption placed in to except any theme park owner from the definition of ‘social media platform’ www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill...

Our new paper demonstrates that removing images of children from training datasets of text-to-image models fails to prevent the misuse of these models to generate child sexual abuse material (AI CSAM). A thread 🧵

We spent long time studying the question "does training data filtering help prevent generative models from generating unwanted content?" TL;DR: Nope. In some cases it slightly increases difficulty but not enough to prevent even average users from finding ways to create what they want.

Europe’s Digital Markets Act aims to open ecosystems: alternatives to app stores, fair access to OS features, real interoperability. But for many free and open source developers, those promises remain fragile without robust enforcement, write Lucas Lasota, Dario Presutti and Jithendra Palepu.

Tech whistleblowers say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives... They became isolated among their colleagues, suffered severe professional damage, or were pushed out of the industry altogether... www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... by @naominix.bsky.social

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

NSF under threat from itself.

VPNs starting to enter the regulatory frame: now in Denmark www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/d...

Not sure the Online Safety Acts — either UK or AUS flavours — are ready for kids setting up and running social media services themselves as regulated entities. This already happens: expect more. I ran online forums *as a child* that would now need child access assessments under the UK OSA!

EC has formally opened an investigation into Google for using publishers’ content without meaningful consent or compensation for its AI Overviews feature. Big win for civil society orgs like @foxglovelegal.bsky.social who’ve been asking for this. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

One thing I found odd was the reference early in the judgment to the content being manifestly unlawful. But if it was, the identity checks that the controller has to carry out wouldn’t be necessary. FWIW, it comes from para 17 of the referring court’s request. curia.europa.eu/juris/showPd...

it's a little known fact but the AI Act bans academic articles containing the words "in the Era of" — sorry if that's you, I don't make the rules

Russmedia case is out — CJEU says it's fine to put on data protection obligations onto an advertising platform to spot sensitive data and verify who is in it. But would this create an obligation to monitor that would break intermediary liability shielding?

Useful if terrifying read on the Chinese brand of smart watches for kids, Little Genius, which is forming an entire, insular — and seemingly pretty socially unhealthy — platformised and corporatised world. substack.com/@ivyyang/p-1...

Never come across 'WindowsCentral' as a media outlet but this piece is powerful and dense and absolutely spot on about where we are with AI and business models right now. Putting bigger outlets to shame. www.windowscentral.com/artificial-i...

"They're trying to change our habits, because all of the projections rely on people becoming truly dependent on the technology. Whether or not it's actually a good thing for society isn't considered to be a factor."

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

“This frustrating gap between initial ease and final effort is the essence of the Gen AI Paradox: better quality, worse motivation”

On AI’s ‘mediocrity trap’ — experiments indicates that while AI helps the less skilled make something passable, the highly skilled don’t use it to produce something better than they could have; they produce something ok, but lose motivation to make it great. www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/...

anyone made a rough calculation of the cost to unis both of the salary sacrifice schemes tax change and the int’l student fee tax? narrative here is surely that the people who are paying for this budget are UG students in their fee rises — these should be turning into teaching, not staying afloat.

me: does this two hour film really need two hours me: remember to give the students a 5 min break in their two hour lecture

oh whoa the models aren't just getting better and better consistently huh

don’t bet on the use of legitimate interest being successfully challenged under the current text though

This week Open AI walked back a call for the govt to backstop financing for its trillion dollar investments in data centers. This was only the tip of the iceberg; a slow bailout for AI firms is already underway. Read more from @ambakak.bsky.social and I in @wsj.com: www.wsj.com/opinion/you-...

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

New from @jpquintais.bsky.social & me: a critical and wide analysis of the Obligations of all General-Purpose AI Model providers under the EU AI Act. We give a deep ~50 page, 300 footnote treatment and find so many tensions, loopholes, inconsistencies and more. Link: files.michae.lv/papers/Veale...

The future that privacy advocates want:

NEW: The US Department of Justice issued a warrant demanding SpaceX seize and disable Starlink devices and accounts being used at a scam compound in Myanmar. At least 9 Starlink devices were linked to a crypto scam that stole $6 million people, an FBI affidavit says Story with @lhn.bsky.social

Another provision driven largely by the Chinese market here — Tencent has a growing power over Apple’s App Store governance.

Studies of abusers on dark web forums show that while mainstream AI models can produce CSAM, it’s not very realistic, so they use LoRAs to make it so. This testing won’t really do much because abusers aren’t using vanilla models. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Join us for an early kick-starter morning session with Prof. Orla Lynskey and Prof. Lee Bygrave on publishing in generalist journals and monographs, on 4 December at 9:00-10:00 AM CET ☕️– register here: tinyurl.com/ykw878md