✨ Audiences doubt the benefits of AI-generated imagery in news are worth the risks, new study finds. @andrewdeck.bsky.social wrote an article on our latest study in @digitaljournalism.bsky.social 🙏 w Dina Strikovic www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/audi... @aimediademlab.bsky.social @ddc-sdu.bsky.social

Oh my, Finland is choosing AWS for parliamentary election data. Because it’s cheaper. Love to hear thoughts from @evgenymorozov.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @eff.org @meredithmeredith.bsky.social @zephoria.bsky.social etc etc. I mean we do like to trust things.

Tänään oli @yle.naamio.social aamussa keskustelua tekoälyn hyödyistä elinsiirroissa. Jos sellaiseen lähdetään, on opittava miten ei pidä tehdä. Esimerkkinä Iso-Britannian karut kokemukset. www.normaltech.ai/p/does-the-u...

Read this thread today 👇🏼 If you use any form of automation, verify verify verify. You can’t not do your job.

NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.

Some context on Will’s post: Mitchell and Pistilli were being mass blocked not because they were “pro-AI” (they are fairly critical) but because they were falsely *labeled* as pro-AI by lazy blocklist creators. Opt out all you want — I do! But be careful about who/what you trust to filter for you.

Skimming @niemanlab.org predictions for 2025, and what strikes me is the idea that people want to be active. We see this in pedagogy too, that we should activate. Students often hate it, bc it’s cognitively heavy! Sometimes we just want to sit by the 🔥and listen. www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/ai-t...

More books for the wicked! This one flew under my radar for too long.

Authors’ class action suit against OpenAI moves forward www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

“In a study of some 20,000 election-related posts in the Netherlands, researchers [..] found that over 400 posts were AI-generated. The party of far-right leader Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom (PVV), came out on top in its use of AI.” www.politico.eu/article/elec...

Rakas media, muistutuksena taas, auton alle ei jäädä. Autot ajavat päälle. www.voice.fi/ilmiot/a-240...

This is sounding more and more like the Council of Nicea who meet behind closed doors and poke the chatbot until it says it feels something. arstechnica.com/information-...

I'm not sending Wired clicks; obvious hit piece is obvious. Expert, qualified critics of AI goonery: @timnitgebru.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @abeba.bsky.social @baldurbjarnason.com @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @olivia.science @wolvendamien.bsky.social You should follow them. Learn!

✨ New publication: 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬' 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐀𝐈 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐯𝐬. 𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭. Especially relevant after yesterday's news of AI-generated images in political campaigns 👇 Together with Dina Strikovic (@ascor.bsky.social, @aimediademlab.bsky.social) 🧵

The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/

Today's wikipedia page (their traffic is down due to people using LLM chatbots boo) is the history of paper, because your Sunday scaries might require an absorbing distraction. Fun fact: US letter size is related to Dutch papermakers having a 44" arm span. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...

Universities need independence, and that means independent funding for basic research. Companies are reluctant to produce research critical of their own products. Important 🧵

I just received an email informing us about safety measures to take when traveling. Five years ago, I would not have imagined seeing these countries named together: "Countries classified as high risk in terms of knowledge security are: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the United States."

Just a kind reminder. It can turn Miss Minutes on you.

It’s crucial that people are given the knowledge that they *have to verify* all information they get from assistants. This can be a boon for journalism, if harnessed the right way.

Here it is, with compliments from the @hulib.bsky.social. 💎let’s see!

This is such idiocy I don’t even know where to start. When there is information vacuum, it will be filled with all sorts of random misinfo. Kids deserve knowledge on the functioning of their bodies. If the govt won’t allow it, we need NGOs providing reliable, accessible knowledge in Italian.

So much of what's on display at the Vienna City Museum doesn't read like it's history. If you have been paying attention... "Never again" is happening again. #NoKings

We should dare ask ourselves though, what does productivity mean—more of what? And does it make any sense? Is for example academia better off with more papers? Whilst we are rushing towards complete lock-in and giving away our data.

I think a lot about my grandparents generation and the hard work and tenacity they put in to build a society renowned for its know-how and educational system. What’s our vision?

📚 New paper alert! 🌎 "Platform power and climate responsibility: A longitudinal view on digital platform companies’ environmental discourse" was just published in Platforms & Society, a new-ish journal focused on critical social science and humanities research on platforms and platformization. (1/x)

There are important things to worry about, and then there are paramount things.

The European Commission launched a new AI strategy last week. But it barely mentioned the huge amount of energy gobbled up by AI, and the devastating environmental fallout. Find this in our latest newsletter: www.ftm.eu/newsletters/...

Here's a bit more about what Canadians think about AI from a survey (n=1500 - census balanced) we conducted earlier this year. bsky.app/profile/soci...

New from 404 Media: the Discord hack is every users' worst nightmare. Yesterday the hackers started posting Discord users' selfies, identity documents, email addresses, phone numbers, more. I watched in real time. This is risk of tech storing ID for age verification www.404media.co/the-discord-...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

sociology and anthropology are dangerous to them, because those fields help us understand the power dynamics, ethics, and human cost of what the industries they like better are doing. Performing arts is hugely important for the economy, but it doesn't benefit them directly.

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨Journalists have long claimed the domain of valid knowledge. In this article, Jakob Ohme and I explored, does journalism believe that this distribution, as many other things have been, be replicated by Chatbots? #commsky www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PINGA...

And here we go. I never wrote this article, and yet it is cited here. www.liberalbriefs.com/geopolitics/... And of course, it sounds so plausible, I seriously checked whether I had forgotten it, or the footnote was slightly wrong. #AIisnotresearch

News people, look here 🙌🏼

I’m late to the game with the scandal around Politico’s AI tools, but this reminds me of how the NLG technologists we interviewed separated journalism from service content. Paper here 📄 asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/poli...

Maths is hard.

📚Libraries are just the best. Quite thrilled that the books by @bcmerchant.bsky.social, @emilymbender.bsky.social & @alexhanna.bsky.social, and @karenhao.bsky.social are available at the Helsinki city library, all three with a wait list! 👏🏻🙌🏼 @hel.fi @kirjastoseura.bsky.social

what an absolutely glorious print cover for @wired.com

Finland trappar upp förvaret och målar upp en bild av en högpresterande militär. Men drunkningsolyckan vid brigaden i Dragsvik visar en mörkare sida. Tänk om alla nio beväringar drunknat? @masundholm.bsky.social och Harald Grönstrand om rättegången i Ekenäs. podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/v...

They've lost the 9yos

AcademicSky, look here! What’s the best conference platform you’ve used? What would you recommend? 📢

If you don’t want LinkedIn to churn your data into “content”, you can turn off that feature. 👇🏼which is nice that’s it’s at least possible. Also, why on earth did we turn to LinkedIn after Twitter died?

Is there anything which is “unbiased? What does authority really mean? This episode of Mystery AI Hype Theatre is from March, but very much worthwhile. Love how @mmelibrarian.bsky.social breaks it down. peertube.dair-institute.org/w/nhZ4aDsAQ7... McLuhan name dropped!

This is where you start thinking about the importance of memory, and what it actually is. Why the brain remembers some things, and not others, and why forgetting is maybe something which isn’t all bad. Overall, our fascination with locking down time is super interesting.

One of my favourite books, I can but recommend, brilliantly written by James Barr. And finally, Empire of AI arrived! Sold out for ages, which makes me immensely giddy. Make sure to visit best bookstore in Helsinki, Rosebud! 🧡

I’m all for stuff that’s helpful, but the problem is, we don’t all agree what helpful is. Right now it’s not perhaps that comfortable to imagine this in the hands of vaccine sceptics. www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/17/1...

A man who lost two children, yet didn’t stop working for what he thought was the right thing to do.

”Päivän Satakunnan Kansa Länsi-Suomen kaikki valtakunnalliset ja ulkomaan uutiset olivat STT:n tekemiä. Siis jokainen.” Mistäköhän maakuntalehdet jatkossa saavat mm. työmarkkinauutiset, jos STT:tä ei enää ole 🤔

Will AI be the doom for news agencies? 🗞️ Finnish STT is facing an existential crisis, majority owner Sanoma has decided to exit the agency—partially due to AI. Automation enables replacing content from STT, says CEO Pia Kalsta. suomenlehdisto.fi/sanoma-aikoo...