Those who think AI is going to largely automate white collar jobs in the next couple of years don’t understand the nature of work - @sarahoconnorft.ft.com nails it www.ft.com/content/4aad...
Peter Tennant
@pwgtennant.bsky.social
Epidemiologist. Causal inference researcher and trainer. Based at @lida-leeds.bsky.social See my Intro to Causal Inference Course: https://www.causal.training/ See the Causal Inference Interest Group: https://ciig-seminar.github.io
‘After the incident with Usman, Robb told Muse to stop giving his address. To test the bot, he asked a few friends to see if Muse would still share it. “And it literally gave my address out to five people,” he said.’ 😱 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Meta’s AI agent Muse gives out user’s home address without permission, sending buyer to his house
The new AI agent, Muse, was released last week and has been downloaded by 3 million users
theguardian.com
Once again, I gotta say: you cannot treat anything you’re feeding into an AI as anonymous. There are enormous ethics implications for, e.g. referees who are clearly uploading others’ unpublished papers without consent, let alone health care professionals or law enforcement
Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 4d agoFour days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
It absolutely sucks, but I am going to have to start building clauses into my freelance contracts about not feeding my draft work into these software systems. Aside from my stuff being plagiarised, it's also just exposing work to potentially millions of other people
Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 4d agoFour days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
NEW: Meet the real AI ‘rogue agent’: Lord Watson of Palantir. I am sick to the teeth of this current AI hype cycle & its perversion of language. The only thing going ‘rogue’ right now are AI boosters, a gullible & compliant press & a Labour Lord 1/ broligarchy.substack.com/p/meet-the-r...
Meet the real AI “rogue agent”: Lord Tom Watson
A Labour leader is out of control. The world needs a containment strategy now
broligarchy.substack.com
Cannot tell you how much I hate this & how ashamed & angry I am that @ukri.org have taken this step. We KNOW this sort of gAI is socially biased, we KNOW it favours slopAI output over human-written. Our research landscape is falling apart due to underfunding, & they do this? it's *appalling*
John Stott@jpsastro.bsky.social · last wk.Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky
Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky
I've seen the future and it's bleak. Coming to an inbox near you soon too I imagine. I don't use LLMs for anything I do and never will but it's depressing that I wrote something that no one ever read before it was rejected. 🧪 #academicsky
Is there a support group for burnt out MCRs who have given up hope
When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.
I really hate the framing of these stories as "an AI agent broke out and hacked something." No, an inadequate sandbox meant that a powerful and unpredictable computer program was set loose on the open internet by the company that designed it. The agency isn't with the "AI agent", it's with the firm
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
'This exercise sets out clearly that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the cost of teaching in a university is not covered by the tuition fee. It also demonstrates that the savings that providers have made in order to address this gap have hit academic staff particularly hard'.
We seem to be moving inexorably towards the unthinkable - the total closure of a university… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
University of Brighton considers closing Falmer campus by 2030
The campus houses the university's library, sports and health complex, and two halls of residence.
bbc.co.uk
My cat has been sick, which has made me feel so terrible and anxious, I can hardly function. She's 19.5 years old and has been with me forever. I fear we're nearing the end and I love her so much. If you have a pet, please give them a kiss for me. Take them out for a walk tomorrow; give them a treat
“A senior executive at Microsoft said A.I. systems built on the work of others will be seen as ‘an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions’ and possibly the greatest robbery of labor in human history, according to court documents unredacted Thursday in an ongoing Manhattan lawsuit.”
Docs in A.I. copyright suit reveal startling admission by Microsoft exec over ‘astonishing theft’
The admission appeared in a newly unredacted filing in the landmark copyright infringement legal battle playing out between newspapers like the Orlando Sentinel and tech companies Microsoft and OpenAI...
orlandosentinel.com
Has anyone figured out how to sit normally during panels? Why am I so lop-sided (middle)? Why am I sliding down the chair (left)? And why the hell are my legs in a frog position (ALL)?!
Curious aside: I drafted this letter in a cafe and on a train. On both occasions, the person sat next to me ended up talking to me about the content. They admitted reading the letter (over my shoulder!) and were surprised that scientists were using LLMs given the tendency for slop & hallucination.
Peter Tennant@pwgtennant.bsky.social · 2w ago"Why epidemiology should not be automated: the case for slow epidemiology" Read my new letter with @haidonglu.bsky.social and @epidbydesign.bsky.social in @intjepidemiol.bsky.social explaining the limits of generative AI for epidemiological research! academic.oup.com/ije/article/...
!["Bann et al. pose the question, ‘why can’t epidemiology be automated (yet)?’, as though the automation of epidemiology is both inevitable and desirable [1]. They describe a future of ‘1-click reviews’ and ‘end-to-end automation’ that will ‘[boost] the efficiency of current practice and … [create] new opportunities for’. But scientific discovery requires far more than increased efficiency. In epidemiology, new knowledge comes from critical reasoning about data, about context, and about the limits of our existing understanding. Such reasoning, in turn, demands deep thought, scholarship, and diligence. All are threatened by automation..."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:7pr24ntsdnvee23td552aes4/bafkreihsubff7cl2mwukra4tmn3tqqkzrmuzik57g6jmtmt6jftjghfska)
Curious aside: I drafted this letter in a cafe and on a train. On both occasions, the person sat next to me ended up talking to me about the content. They admitted reading the letter (over my shoulder!) and were surprised that scientists were using LLMs given the tendency for slop & hallucination.
Peter Tennant@pwgtennant.bsky.social · 2w ago"Why epidemiology should not be automated: the case for slow epidemiology" Read my new letter with @haidonglu.bsky.social and @epidbydesign.bsky.social in @intjepidemiol.bsky.social explaining the limits of generative AI for epidemiological research! academic.oup.com/ije/article/...
"Why epidemiology should not be automated: the case for slow epidemiology" Read my new letter with @haidonglu.bsky.social and @epidbydesign.bsky.social in @intjepidemiol.bsky.social explaining the limits of generative AI for epidemiological research! academic.oup.com/ije/article/...
"Why epidemiology should not be automated: the case for slow epidemiology" Read my new letter with @haidonglu.bsky.social and @epidbydesign.bsky.social in @intjepidemiol.bsky.social explaining the limits of generative AI for epidemiological research! academic.oup.com/ije/article/...
Tempted to use AI to write your cover letter or email to a potential employer? RESIST! It is simultaneously obvious, insulting, and renders you totally undifferentiated from the other 80 people being considered t the same time. There has never been a better time to write concisely in your own voice!
Ai agents talking to ai agents. Whoever invests more tokens will get more funding.
100%. Especially that this removes the joyful part of research. Also, when grants are written by AI and scored by AI, all the wrong people will get funding, draining creativity and creating a convergence in "thinking" and "ideas"
"Academics" whose main goal is to tick boxes to advance their career have AI doing the box ticking for them. It's turning life into terrible computer game where to maximise careerists "score", all the fun bits are delegated to AI, leaving people to deal with the worst consequences of management.
The UK research system is completely giving up on supporting innovation and creativity.
Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 2w agoTurn to AI in research grant assessment ‘is inevitable’. UKRI becomes first mover to explore automation for processing applications, as other British funders hesitate. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
