Laurence D

Edinburgh looking stunning today in her autumn finery

A prime example of why AI 'leaders' are not who anyone should be listening to about AI, right and consciousness. It's not all wrong! In fact, it starts off very sensibly: "AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do". But then...hoo boy 1/n

A judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the company liable for deceiving users about privacy and content moderation policies on Facebook.

The seething anger here is kylo_ren_more.gif

llms only “exist” to give one reply at a turn you: x llm: y then the whole process starts over. there is no continuity. each reply is 100% fresh. the context of your previous “conversation” is included, hidden from you, in every request you make. continuity is an illusion

This is groundbreaking work on “alignment” from @katschwerzmann.bsky.social & @alexcampolo.bsky.social Detailing the social & political ethics of the term & mapping anatomy of alignment in LLMs. I think it should be a first port-of-call in studies of alignment www.researchgate.net/journal/AI-S...

“There's little that's "inevitable" about AI | deadSimpleTech” https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/llms-arent-inevitable > The inevitability of LLMs, therefore, is of a piece with the inevitability of chemical weapons. Weak players who are fighting other weak players might well find some use for them.

Having long been aware of those tech bros who read my work as utopian porn, where they’ve taken that doesn’t exactly surprise me.

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

There are no responsible uses of AI in evaluating research funding applications. Just calling it ‘responsible’ doesn’t make it so. #EthicsWashing #GenAI

Oh my: LibreOffice just made "no AI" one of their official features: blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09...

This seems like an absolutely essential point to grasp in the current phase of AI discourse

These people are so deep in all of this prophesy and lore that they don’t understand what is and is not real. They fundamentally do not understand modern AI; they just expect it to comport with their scriptural Armageddon. Their position is fundamentally religious.

This is such a depressing article. Even the phrase 'content creator' is indicative of so much.

I'm hearing reports that Volkswagen's AI has been scheming to deceive its evaluators into thinking its emissions are safe. We need to shut down all cars until they are climate-aligned.

Does my Speak-n-Spell feel pain when I type O-U-C-H? The jury is out. Philosophers and neuroscientists say that's fucking stupid, but I called a guy from the Center for Pretending that Household Electronics Are Sentient and he said there's no way to know for sure.

Yes absolutely. Worst so far is opening a PDF PhD thesis to examine “THIS LOOKS LIKE A LONG DOCUMENT. WOULD YOU LIKE A SUMMARY?” Seriously, 4 years of the student’s life & research…

Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

Surveying the AI ‘moment,’ Nathalie Maréchal says "the kooks are now in power, and they are using that power to dismantle the institutions designed to keep the rest of us safe, healthy, and free."

Nick Beckstead, noted longtermist and "effective altruist,” just comes out and says it: "But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal."

Just absolutely wild to see so many people discovering the massive influence of the rationalists in real time and say things like "I wish I could unlearn what I've learned in the last 24 hours." I, and others, have been researching these people for YEARS. There is so much I wish I could unlearn.

There's been surprisingly little coverage of this: Turnitin to change its terms to enable training AI models using students' work www.timeshighereducation.com/news/southam...

@zeteo.uk I'd consider upgrading to a paid subscription, but not when a chunk of the money goes to Substack. Wondering why you chose them when there are far better alternatives.

Like YCombinator was running their startup school at Stanford. I even audited a "class" taught by Peter Thiel. And now the Effective Altruists, are out in full force there (as they are at Oxford, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley). These are their strong holds.

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

New podcast idea: The Rest is The Rest is; two middle-aged people are paid £1,000,000 a month each to swap non-controversial opinions on a podcast about the non-controversial opinions swapped by middle-aged people being paid £100,000 a month on other podcasts, with the profits going to Gary Lineker.

The key to understanding this shit is: (1) they believe they are smarter than everyone else, and that this amounts to a superpower. and (2) they think their AI is going to be smarter than them. They really do believe this. But they themselves aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think.

As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.

What, an Anthropic researcher states (without evidence) that there is a 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction? Incredible, we have never before heard such a claim!

The overreaction to this Hugging Face thing is driving me nuts. Come flay me for being wrong but... 1/x

If you're not using asbestos yet, you are being left behind. Everyone is using asbestos, there's no point in trying to fight it. Asbestos is the future.

Bank of England Governor sounding the alarm on the AI finance bubble in a letter to the G20 (28 Aug): www.fsb.org/uploads/P310...