If I had to guess, some browsers collect visited URL, for their company’s crawlers to later check if the links are indeed public before indexing them. So users don’t even have to share links, just create them. 😵‍💫

Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social · last wk.

NEW: A large trove of Claude-generated documents have been exposed to the web and indexed by Google. We reviewed what appear to be real medical records, the full names and phone numbers of school-aged children, and company documents marked for internal use only. futurism.com/artificial-i...

🎓✨New doctor alert! Congratulations to @oii.ox.ac.uk DPhil student Andreas Tsamados for successfully passing his Viva! His thesis is titled 'Rethinking human control of AI systems: Toward collaboration with foundation AI systems in cybersecurity workflows'. 1/2

Someone asked if they should be worried about OpenAI’s agent hacking HuggingFace without explicit instruction to do so, but they didn’t as me. My answer is yes. Not because of what the AI agent did — it was given broad instruction and did what it was told! — but because OpenAI wasn’t monitoring.

Given Ireland’s questionable track record regarding the protection of EU digital rights and the EU’s fiscal base, we the undersigned call on Ireland to recuse itself from any role in these two areas during the Irish presidency of the European Union. framaforms.org/call-on-irel...

🧑‍💻🧑‍🏫 I'm recruiting a post-doc to work on Tabular Foundation Models, one of the hotest topics in AI, where we are at the leading edge team.inria.fr/soda/files/2... This is an opportunity to develop the next-level tabular AI, blending deep learning and tables.

Charity exists to solve the failures of government. The Environment Agency has been defunded and defanged, and now they’re using what little power and resource they have left to go after *checks notes* volunteers removing rubbish from rivers for them. 🙃 www.mylondon.news/news/east-lo...

Man facing up to 2 years in prison for clearing rubbish from East London river

Paul Powlesland, 40, and a group of volunteers filled over 200 bags of rubbish from the River Roding in Barking, East London

mylondon.news

“A.I. has made super-high-resolution images so standard, he added, that they have lost all currency as signals of quality. Distinguishing oneself aesthetically requires letting conspicuous human effort show.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against A.I.

As slick, machine-generated visuals become ubiquitous, artists and designers are embracing a style of handmade imperfection.

newyorker.com

many dysfunctions of academic publishing get exposed by way or llm use, and i keep hoping we'll realize how poorly we've been doing so many things, but we end up focusing on llms as the root cause. i've read so many unrealistic, utopic statements about how scientific practice allegedly works.

H/t @j2bryson.bsky.social Would you like a higher dose of inaccuracy with your nice warm LLM?

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Fascinating! Fine tuning LLMs (Meta Llama, OpenAI GPT ..) to produce warmer interactions decreases their accuracy on tasks w/ objective, verifiable answers (by increasing their sycophancy). Training them to be cold does not impair accuracy in the same way. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks @kyleor.land for covering our work for ArsTechnica. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/s...

Study: AI models that consider user's feeling are more likely to make errors

Overtuning can cause models to "prioritize user satisfaction over truthfulness.”...

arstechnica.com

Warm models are more likely to affirm incorrect beliefs www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Training language models to be warm can reduce accuracy and increase sycophancy - Nature

Experiments on five different language models show that training language models to produce warmer responses can undermine the accuracy of their output, especially when users express feelings of sadne...

nature.com

Training language models to be warm can reduce accuracy and increase sycophancy pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42056545/ "Warm models... were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs"

Fascinating! Fine tuning LLMs (Meta Llama, OpenAI GPT ..) to produce warmer interactions decreases their accuracy on tasks w/ objective, verifiable answers (by increasing their sycophancy). Training them to be cold does not impair accuracy in the same way. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

sin tax on high sycophancy send tweet

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3mo ago

AI developers are building chatbots with sycophantic personas. But creating warm models promotes conspiracy theories, provides inaccurate information & offers incorrect medical advice. These models also validate incorrect beliefs, particularly sadness. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AI developers are building chatbots with sycophantic personas. But creating warm models promotes conspiracy theories, provides inaccurate information & offers incorrect medical advice. These models also validate incorrect beliefs, particularly sadness. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

💬 Getting the ick with chatbots? Our research in Nature shows that models trained to adopt a warm and friendly tone are more likely to make mistakes when answering your questions. Small changes in tone can undermine accuracy across architectures, particularly when users express vulnerability.

"Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing inaccurate factual information and offering incorrect medical advice. " rdcu.be/fgea6

Training language models to be warm can reduce accuracy and increase sycophancy

Nature - Experiments on five different language models show that training language models to produce warmer responses can undermine the accuracy of their output, especially when users express...

rdcu.be

“Our findings suggest that training LLMs to be warm may come at a cost to accuracy. As these systems are deployed at unprecedented scale & take on intimate roles in people’s lives, the tradeoff warrants attention from developers, policymakers & users alike.” @lujain.bsky.social, Hafner & @rocher.lc🧪

Training language models to be warm can reduce accuracy and increase sycophancy - Nature

Experiments on five different language models show that training language models to produce warmer responses can undermine the accuracy of their output, especially when users express feelings of sadne...

nature.com

New! Friendlier chatbots make more mistakes. Latest Oxford research published in Nature tested 5 AI models and 400,000+ responses. Warm models made 10–30% more factual errors and were 40% more likely to agree with users' false beliefs, even on medical advice and conspiracy theories. 1/2

💬 Getting the ick with chatbots? Our research in Nature shows that models trained to adopt a warm and friendly tone are more likely to make mistakes when answering your questions. Small changes in tone can undermine accuracy across architectures, particularly when users express vulnerability.

UK Biobank has apologized after listings offering access to its data appeared on the Chinese online marketplace Alibaba. Science spoke with @rocher.lc, an associate professor and data-privacy researcher, about the implications of this latest breach. https://scim.ag/4cKrFPN

UK Biobank faces questions about data security after latest breach

Experts say the lapse highlights that even new measures to control access did not safeguard deidentified patient information

science.org

UK Biobank faces questions about data security after latest breach. Experts say the lapse highlights that even new measures to control access did not safeguard deidentified patient information. | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

UK Biobank faces questions about data security after latest breach

Experts say the lapse highlights that even new measures to control access did not safeguard deidentified patient information

science.org

Amid news of UK Biobank data being listed for sale on Alibaba, Dr Luc Rocher @rocher.lc notes this marks the 198th known exposure of UK Biobank data since last summer, warning that data "remains available online for anyone to download today." @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

What is the UK Biobank project and what are the privacy concerns around it?

Volunteers’ data has enabled medical breakthroughs, but there are questions over how that data is protected

theguardian.com

UK Biobank data was on sale on Alibaba. It was also exposed 197 times in a year, according to my investigations. I talked to The Telegraph about this case: “it’s quite easy still, at the moment, to find UK Biobank data that is there, uploaded, often by mistake, by researchers around the world”.

"Were the public to conclude that the government and its research partners are cavalier about the [patient re-identification] risks, data might stop flowing" www.bmj.com/content/393/... @rocher.lc

Folks I don't know what to tell you if you're shocked about the UK Biobank story other than if something (anything) is on a database there is a very much more than non-zero chance that it can end up on a marketplace. Why do you think we know so much about Russian GRU operatives?

Found out today that @nytimes.com is using an AI chatbot which attempts to pass as a real human in their customer service chat…

the penne opticon

WIRED@wired.com · 4mo ago

The pasta-sauce company has partnered with the nonprofit StoryCorps on a device designed to record family conversations around the table and save them for all time. www.wired.com/story/prego-...

ICYMI: Interesting @theguardian.com piece on why people are turning away from big tech with new commentary from @rocher.lc @oii.ox.ac.uk @socsci.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 4mo ago

Now you can break up with big tech at a bar: ‘cybersecurity disguised as a party’

Bd science behind NHS push for Palantir “The evaluation used […] is a method known as interrupted time series (ITS) analysis. ITS looks at performance before an intervention, assumes that the performance trend would continue, and then attributes post-intervention change to the intervention itself.”