If you're intrigued by all these AI chatbots of historical figures, you should read Lina Harder's new paper on them. She calls them histobots: "When algorithms speak in the voices of the dead, who decides what they say?" olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/2... Roosevelt: www.cnet.com/tech/service...

If you like this sort of storytelling with data (some beautiful examples here!) please consider applying for the PhD fellowship in narrative data visualisation we're hiring for! Job ad here: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... and examples of narrative datavis here pudding.cool/process/how-...

My article on AI-generated podcasts already has three citations and at least one is AI-generated. Look at this fine example of an ultra-vague statement with a drive-by citation that doesn't match the claim. The entire article is 100% AI-generated according to Pangram.

Dette er jeg helt enig i. Kameraovervåkning i brilleform forskyver grensene for personvern som vi lenge har hatt i Norge - det er f.eks. ikke lov å ha dørkamera som filmer folk på offentlig gate, så hvorfor skal det være lov med skjulte kameraer som kan filme overalt, snart med ansiktsgjenkjenning?

This week, *unprecedented* sentences were handed down: Zachary Evetts — 50 years Maricela Rueda — 70 years Savanna Batten — 50 years Autumn Hill — 50 years Benjamin Song — 100 years Daniel “Des Revol” Rolando Sanchez Estrada — 30 years More via @theintercept.com

Meanwhile, in the US. It just takes your breath away. *50 years* in prison for protesting. Don't imagine for one moment that we are immune to this. Already, the legislative framework is in place in the UK to enable such convictions - before we get a Trumplike PM. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Treating surveillance as an isolated privacy problem is the wrong frame, says UN Special Rapporteur Gina Romero, who argues digital monitoring is dismantling the trust, funding, and institutional memory that civil society depends on to function. www.techpolicy.press/the-quiet-er...

When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Seriøst, @altinget.bsky.social? Robotgenererte svar på spørsmål som framstilles som om de er fra faktiske politikere og dere «tar forbehold om feil?» Hva er egentlig poenget med å betale for journalistikk om dette er hva dere leverer? Nei takk. www.altinget.no/digital/stat...

Dette er det du får når regjeringen vil ha "KI i alle deler av offentlig sektor innen 2030". Hodeløs implementering basert på entusiasme uten kompetanse, som SÅ KLART går ut over brukerne – og tilliten til myndighetene, mens all mellommenneskelig ansvarsfølelse fragmenteres. Denne hypen må ta slutt.

Hundreds (thousands?) of Grokipedia entries are just Grok having a panic attack, styled as an encyclopedia entry. Google e.g. '"task is to write" site:grokipedia.com' or similar chain of thought phrases ("tools are failing," "to comply, I'll," etc.). My favorite so far is "this is problematic."

Here is work showing some of this effect. It is important, however, to see the form that this takes ‘in the wild’ in terms of the erasure of actual women-led scholarship in LLMs by multiple modalities, so I intend to run some bibliometrics myself and put the results out. arxiv.org/abs/2508.02740

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

Brenn du for korleis historier formar måten vi ser og forstår data rundt oss? Vi søkjer ein stipendiat i narrativ datavisualisering hos CDN, tilknytt @jilltxt.bsky.social sitt #ERC-prosjekt #AIStories og VisGroup på institutt for informatikk: www.jobbnorge.no/nn-no/ledige... @erc.europa.eu

Remarkable and detailed description of a chat between a junior lawyer and a chatbot where the bot generated letters to the court with fake quotes of laws, told the lawyer to verify, lawyer still didn’t. There are so many stories like this now… caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/ch/2026...

Remarkable and detailed description of a chat between a junior lawyer and a chatbot where the bot generated letters to the court with fake quotes of laws, told the lawyer to verify, lawyer still didn’t. This is an astounding read. What on earth was lawyer “LA” thinking? Why not just check the law?

Here's my piece on the misogynistic intent of calling women a witch in @theconversation.com! "Calling a woman a “witch” reinforces the idea that women who seek or have political power are not to be trusted. They are cast as inherently deceitful, dangerous, and diabolical." #AusPol

@404media.co wrote about our new preprint on tell-tale signs of AI-generated stories! Cc @dmimno.bsky.social Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492 Article: www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

Det er viktig å ta felles og eksplisitt avstand til KI-generert tekst. Tidsskrifta Prosa og Syn og Segn har eit klart forbod mot KI-generert tekst og bilete. klassekampen.no/artikkel/202...

Tim's failure was not 'failing to check the outputs', it was using a machine that fakes plausible outputs instead of referring to reality It is mid 2026. You cannot plead ignorance about what that software does, anymore It is as bad as sitting down and writing a fake quote with your own hand

Confirmation of Joshi's Workslop Postulate! bsky.app/profile/keta...

Do you know of studies that actually evaluate use of LLMs in the public sector or other kinds of knowledge work? Teknologirådet in Norway just published a report evaluating their own use of LLMs, based on careful logs from 35 cases. teknologiradet.no/publication/...

that KH Switch collection pack thing sure has some interesting cover art interesting choice to give Donald a mismatched number of fingers on each hand, and a beak that absorbs into itself

"CrankGPT is a fully offline and off-the-grid AI box (...) You can feel that load curve through the crank: when LLM inference and speech synthesis run together, the crank gets a lot harder to turn." squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/

This is an outrageous story. A farmer donated 87 acres to a small Texas city on the condition it be used as a public park. Years later, the farmer has passed away, the city sold the land to a developer, and now it will be the site of a 135,000 square foot data center www.404media.co/a-farmer-don...

*Your "smart TV" is a burglar crowbar for the slop racket *I'm not sure how AI-refuseniks can even get properly indignant about this situation. Seems like this will need some real framing-work blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-...

Call for Abstracts: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 50th Anniversary Issues 1st issue "Reflections On Computing History" is guest edited by David Hemmendinger. 2nd issue "New Perspectives On Computing History" is guest edited by LaborTech member Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social.

One thing a lot of 20th Century sci-fi got wrong was that the personal technology of the future would become increasingly unobtrusive and frictionless. In fact, as such technology has mostly turned out to be a vector for advertising, making it deliberately difficult to use has become the point.

Join us in the resistance! This autumn, we're organizing this exciting hybrid #PhD course on resisting #anti-gender politics together with the consortium InterGender! Time: 24-26 August Location: University of Bergen & online Deadline for Application: 28 June 2026 liu.se/en/research/...

have I mentioned that I teach first year writing here and that I am being laid off

CDN’s Pride event has started!! First up is Joakim Johansen Østbye about queer gaming experiences in Norway. If you’re in Bergen we’re at Kvarteret (Pride House!) until about 21:00.

This is very good on the logical preposterousness of the trans bathroom ban. It simply cannot have been the intention of the Equality Act or the governments which administered it. www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-t...

"Researchers have used top Generative #AI models to grade hundreds of undergraduate essays and found that AI only matched human-awarded degree classification around half the time, with AI often failing to assess the best and worst submissions accurately": www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-u... #ethics #tech

New blog post up! "The growth of template rhetoric in an AI society" meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-growth...

On June 2, CDN and Bergen Pride invite you to an evening of Queer Games and AI Resistance featuring talks by Daniella Gáti, Oliver Haimson, Joakim Johansen Østbye and CDN scholars Sérgio Roxo and Tom Legierse, with Lin Prøitz as moderator. www4.uib.no/en/research/...

I‘m happy to announce this talk by @jilltxt.bsky.social from the @cdn-bergen.bsky.social at Freie Universität Berlin on July 7th 2026: „Dangerous Narration. The rhetorical vices of AI-generated stories“ – www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we03/institu...

Our excellent communications advisor at CDN @tanketom.dftba.social is keynoting a conference this morning, talking about research communcation in the humanities - wish it was streamed, I know it'll be great! www.almamater.si/en/from-rese...

I want to know exactly how popes write their encyclicals. Do you think Pope Leo is actually a scholar who has simply read a lot of digital media studies/STS/digital culture scholarship? Or does the Vatican hire scholars? Are such jobs posted to Euraxess? Or is the Vatican full of priestly scholars?

It was quite surprising to read the Pope’s encyclical and find it is basically an STS or media studies textbook.

At 18:30-21:00 on June 2 at Pride House (Kvarteret) in Bergen you can hear Daniella Gáti who's writing a book, "A Queer Theory of AI and Algorithmic Knowledge", Joakim Johansen Østbye, an expert on queer gaming and Oliver Haimsaon, whose book Trans Technologies came out last year. Plus free food!!!

This isn't good. I mean, here in Bergen it's 11°C and rainy as usual, so I'd love a little more warmth, but 34.8°C in England in May is just very very weird.

I strongly recommend going somewhere you're not from for a while and talking to people who are from there

Two matching stories - rising data centre consumption proctions, for both Australia and Norway.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair (1935)

I was *there* for the early Internet and, hell, was part of the youth collective enlisted by pony-tailed Gen-X-ers to help build its culture. We used to have human moderators, human readers, and human solutions to human problems. It really was *vast corporate investment* that ruined things.

Counter-Slop

I did usual experiment and asked ChatGPT to write a literary short story that could be published in Granta. Here are the first two sentences. If you skim, this has the "vibes" of a certain type of flowery literary fiction. If you squint, it both doesn't make sense and the nonsense clashes.

I only discovered that this happened today and have been reading all the crazy posts and conversations piecing it all together… wow!