Check it out! Lea is live and open to the public 🥳 Lea is an experiment to build better social media by researchers and for researchers, where we own our own data and can build our own feeds, events, and communities. This is still very much a proof-of-concept; we welcome ideas + collaborators!

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 4w ago

For the past six months @mariaa.bsky.social and I have been working on creating an improved research experience on atproto. It's now live! Check out: lea.ac

I presented our poetry research at this seminar, featuring work in collaboration with @bhyravajjula.bsky.social, @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, and Anna Preus. What can we learn about poems using LMs? What can we learn about LMs using poems? PDF: drive.google.com/file/d/1Cu0H...

Maria Antoniak@mariaa.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I’m back in Copenhagen this week for a seminar on “Old Texts, New Tools, Changing Questions: Computational Literary Studies in the AI Era” hosted by Jens Bjerring-Hansen and Alexander Conroy at the University of Copenhagen. We’re up in the new Maersk Tower today, and it’s beautiful.

Some interesting stuff here on measuring writing quality and improving on qualitative tasks: www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/31/h...

How Kimi K2 RL’ed Qualitative Data to Write Better

Our last post on Kimi K2 dives into how the Moonshot team used reinforcement learning (RL) on qualitative tasks. If you haven’t already, check out the last two explorations:

dbreunig.com

Nathan Lambert@natolambert.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Thoughts on Kimi K2 Thinking Congrats to the Moonshot AI team on the awesome open release. For close followers of Chinese AI models, this isn't shocking, but more inflection points are coming. Pressure is building on US labs with more expensive models. www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k2-th...

I've never regretted reading poems while in the air. You get to look out the window while the words linger. Today the words were from Pink Dust, by Ron Padgett.

Computationally, whitespace gets little attention—it’s usually standardized or stripped. But in poetry, whitespace matters! Yet actually *preserving* that poetic whitespace is v tough. Its slipperiness points to bigger issues w/ text processing & LLMs. New paper ⬜️ aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...

so much depends / upon / a whitespace: Why Whitespace Matters for Poets and LLMs

Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, Maria Antoniak. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

aclanthology.org

@bhyravajjula.bsky.social · 10mo ago

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines? We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713 🧵👇

The project that started my whitespace obsession... #EMNLP2025 While we've all been worrying about tokenizers, lurking in the background has been the preprocessing *before* tokenization. Poems break standard HTML-to-text linearization systems, and we find that multimodal models aren't a solution.

so much depends / upon / a whitespace: Why Whitespace Matters for Poets and LLMs

Whitespace is a critical component of poetic form, reflecting both adherence to standardized forms and rebellion against those forms. Each poem's whitespace distribution reflects the artistic choices ...

arxiv.org

@bhyravajjula.bsky.social · 10mo ago

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines? We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713 🧵👇

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines? We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713 🧵👇

“We may be left with an unintended consequence… that the very companies that have been most inconsiderate about using materials crafted by writers will be strengthened by a regime in which a billion-dollar check is the entry fee for developing the best AI.”

Dan Cohen@dancohen.org · last yr.

My take on the landmark $1.5 billion settlement between authors and Anthropic: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/land...

NEW: Anthropic has reached a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history.

Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought By Book Authors

Anthropic faced the prospect of more than $1 trillion in damages, a sum that could have threatened the company’s survival if the case went to trial.

wired.com

My co-authors, Jana Diesner, @tedunderwood.me, @zoeleblanc.bsky.social, @gworthey.bsky.social and @profdownie.bsky.social, and I are excited to share our paper in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social "Who decides what is read on Goodreads?" on book review sponsorship, open access at doi.org/10.1177/2053....

Anthropic appeals ruling that would allow the copyright case against them to become a class action suit (with up to 7 million claimants) arstechnica.com/tech-policy/... Their argument is apparently that that the legality of their business model should not be questioned because AI is too important.

AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.

arstechnica.com

The complete lack of regard for the Y-axis hurts me physically #GPT5

austin@aparker.io · last yr.

data visualization is my passion

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.

Judge Chhabria's “market dilution” theory suggests “using copyrighted books to train an LLM might harm the market...because it enables the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the originals, even if those works aren’t themselves infringing.” www.authorsalliance.org/2025/06/26/m...

Meta Wins on Fair Use for Now, but Court Leaves Door Open for “Market Dilution”

“Market dilution” suggests that “using copyrighted books to train an LLM might harm the market for those works because it enables the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the origi…

authorsalliance.org

Judge Alsup's decision found that Anthropic's training AI on lawfully acquired copyrighted works was a fair use. Below we highlight some of the most important parts of the decision on the question of whether using books for AI training is fair use: www.authorsalliance.org/2025/06/24/a...

Anthropic wins on fair use for training its LLMs; loses on building a “central library” of pirated books

Yesterday, Judge Alsup released his decision on Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment in the fast-moving lawsuit it is defending, brought by three book authors on behalf of a class of millions ob…

authorsalliance.org

Additional analysis of the Bartz v. Anthropic decision, including some speculation as to where things might go from here, from our AI Legal Fellow, Justin Bonfiglio: www.authorsalliance.org/2025/07/26/b...

Bartz v. Anthropic: What are some additional takeaways and where do things go from here?

AI generated image inspired by Alsup’s opinion. A judge reflects quietly as his mind overflows with the creative output of young students—books, art, and ideas born from learning, curiosity, and th…

authorsalliance.org

Word of this morning is ‘procaffeinate’: to put everything on hold until you’ve had sufficient amounts of coffee.

Your daily reminder: ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not "know" anything: it smashes words together in plausible sounding way, but it does not have (and never will have) any ability to check whether something is true or false Using it for anything beyond "re-word this headline" = failure

Number Shortage xkcd.com/3009

Poetry Northwest submissions, open for November. Send some poems! poetrynorthwest.submittable.com/submit

Poetry Northwest Submission Manager

Thank you for your interest in Poetry Northwest. After more than 60 years, we remain committed to publishing the best in contemporary poetry, especially work willing to take risks and push readers to ...

poetrynorthwest.submittable.com

First post here, thought I'd start with an article by @emilymbender.bsky.social. buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch... My tldr: Creative works are an expression of the creators' humanity - we need to understand, respect, and protect what that means in this age of LLMs.

"Virtual Employees" and Remixing Machines Devalue Human Work

Nadella's Arguments against Copyright Misrepresent both People and Computers By Emily According to Katie Prescott in The Times Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is...

buttondown.com