Important wake up call for folks who care about freedom of expression to go beyond the essential work of protecting freedoms to also grow the experience and exercise of those freedoms

John Sands@iohn.bsky.social · 12h ago

A new survey from @knightfoundation.org and @ssrsresearch.bsky.social reveals a disquieting decline in how free Americans feel to use the freedoms protected by the #FirstAmendment without government interference or punishment. 🧵

I started getting followed by some "film festivals" and "writing festivals" and thought "oh, these are cool!" Then I looked a little closer. They're all part of a network that preys on writers, charging us for reviews, and feeding our stuff into slop generators. So I made a list.👋🏻🖕🏻😠

If you know a manager who actually wants to prioritize reliable, accurate AI, tell them to check out our book Auditing AI. And if they refuse to test their systems, our book is a helpful guide to journalists, citizens, and public servants seeking accountability. auditingai.cc

Home - Auditing AI -- The Book

How tech companies, journalists, and policymakers can prevent AI decision-making from going wrong. How tech companies, journalists, and policymakers can

auditingai.cc

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4d ago

“The AI assistant, which Kinney Drugs named Burt, after its founder, was built by a third-party AI pharmaceutical company, Synerio. In the pharmacy’s terms, Kinney Drugs states that ‘Burt may not be accurate, complete or up-to-date and may be misleading or contain errors and omissions.’”

COLM conference is struggling with theoryslop and slopterpretability papers gregdurrett.github.io/colm2026-blo...

There is no singularity. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. 🤖🙄🙅‍♀️

You can come and see Dr Rodney Brooks speak at the ACM AI Leadership Summit, September 1-3, Atlanta. Registration is open aisummit.acm.org

Rodney Brooks@rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 2w ago

Update on my dated tech predictions from Jan 1, 2018. Most dates were for the first ten years (spoiler alert: I was overly optimistic when everyone thought I was being a pessimist). New analysis every Jan 1st for 24 more years, on the remainder plus 5 new themes. rodneybrooks.com/house-cleani...

What a harrowing story and an incredible work of #scicomm in the reporting. 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public

Parents want accountability after study went disastrously wrong, Science and Retraction Watch investigation reveals

science.org

Have not had time to read, so I will have to comment later, but wanted to pass along to folks who are interested. www.ap.org/the-definiti...

AP updates newsroom standards for artificial intelligence  | The Associated Press

AP today released updated newsroom standards governing the use of artificial intelligence, reinforcing that AI can assist journalists with specific tasks.

ap.org

Yes, The Odyssey is as good as everyone says it is.

I'm 2 years out of work in UX and this month I'm short on rent and bills. I'm actively looking for UX research roles, open to contract or full-time. If you know of anything, my DMs are open. Ko-fi (below) or Venmo @ jgcarpenter helps me keep going. Every share matters! ko-fi.com/drjuliecarpe...

Support Julie Carpenter, PhD (she/her)

Enjoying this? Support the writing on Ko-fi.

ko-fi.com

First time in recorded history that a man has been simultaneously arrested by the cops and the fashion police

blippy@blippy.bsky.social · 3w ago

those pants are insane wtf

I have never been jealous of British food, but here we are.

PontsticInsect@keltikidea.bsky.social · 3w ago

I bought salad makings at the supermarket today, because it's Britain and, while we have done stupid things with our food supply, (see Brexit) we never put RFK Jr. in charge of its quality control.

My congratulations to the people of Ireland.

Gobsmacked. Who could have seen this coming?

Mark Riedl@markriedl.bsky.social · 3w ago

Hack reveals that Suno (AI music generator) was trained on copyrighted music www.404media.co/hack-reveals...

Shoot me now

Michael Zimmer@michaelzimmer.bsky.social · 3w ago

But, but, it will "connect on a humanlike level with users"! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is Pearl. She's very excited you're home, and can only properly express her enthusiasm through jazz hands. 14/10 #SeniorPupSaturday (IG: ohpearlitsliza)

"executives with no understanding of the industry" seems to be an endemic problem across industries: higher education, medicine, you name it, a bunch of suits with MBAs and unearned arrogance are destroying everything around us, and for some reason, we're supposed to accept that they know best

Greg Iwinski@garyjackson.bsky.social · 4w ago

TV writers were right in 2023 and are being proven more right every day — there was a stable television model that made everyone lots of money and put out good shows. Then execs with no understanding of the industry confused the production model and the distribution model, and they blew it all up.

The planet already is burning. Current infrastructures cannot sustain this. "Under this scenario, data-center power demand would reach approximately 198.9 gigawatts ... equivalent to roughly half of the average power consumption of the United States." techxplore.com/news/2026-07...

Researchers identify the 'hidden energy cost' of AI agents for the first time

As the era of AI agents—systems that can reason and act autonomously—begins, the power consumption of data centers is emerging as a critical challenge. A KAIST research team has, for the first time, a...

techxplore.com

ICYMI: From Ayn Rand to QAnon, a new (#openaccess) anthology explores how reactionary world-building becomes reactionary world-making:

Red-Pilling Speculation | Los Angeles Review of Books

From Ayn Rand to QAnon, a new anthology explores how reactionary world-building becomes reactionary world-making.

lareviewofbooks.org

We’ve updated the description of the Information Society book series at @mitpress.bsky.social to better reflect how the series has evolved and where it’s headed. We have some exciting books in the pipeline and are always interested in hearing about new projects. mitpress.mit.edu/series/the-i...

Meta data center water discharges suspended after contaminating the city's reclamation water supply with bacterium — system offline for months for cleaning, closed-loop cooling system purge spread rare metal-resistant bacteria in Cheyenne’s water system www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

“The message that I always bring when I have a chance is that, when the text that comes out of one of these systems makes sense, it’s because we are making sense of it. This is also in the stochastic parrots paper.”

What Emily Bender Really Meant by "Stochastic Parrots"

Five years later, its lead author revisits the paper in the age of ChatGPT

spectrum.ieee.org

Excited to see this new guidance on conducting ethical network research now out in Network Science. Social network studies raise unique ethical challenges around consent, privacy, and identifiability. Glad to have played a small role in contributing to this effort. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“CDT warns that AI detection systems may disproportionately affect multilingual and English-language-learning populations.”

Opinion: Rethinking the academy in the Age of AI

AI can produce paragraphs -- sometimes very good ones --but can't demonstrate the intellectual development process students must engage in.

ctmirror.org

I know this is not the biggest concern going these days, but it stresses me out that basically every artist/writer/critic is now expected to create their own tiny empire instead of getting paid by any existing entity to perform a job they've worked to get good at!!!!

Early version of new paper now available at ACM Journal on Responsible Computing: Infrastructure of Ethics: How Publication Workflows Shape Ethical Expectations in Computational Research Written with two great undergraduate researchers: Tania Mishra & Riley Abrahamson dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Infrastructure of Ethics: How Publication Workflows Shape Ethical Expectations in Computational Research | ACM Journal on Responsible Computing

Computer Science, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, michael.zimmer@marquette.eduMarquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, tania.mishra@marquette.eduMarquette ...

dl.acm.org

The Obama Presidential Center is finally opening! Tune in today on Obama.org starting at 11am CT as Michelle and I share what this moment means to us and celebrate with friends, family, and members of the community in Chicago.

NEW: Across Africa, the State Department has demanded access to health data for millions of people as a condition of giving countries billions of dollars in aid needed to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses.

“Digital Colonialism”: U.S. Demands to Access Africans’ Data Raise Privacy, Sovereignty Concerns

The United States is requiring access to health data as part of lifesaving aid deals with African countries. The U.S. says the data will be aggregated and anonymized, but privacy experts fear the info...

propublica.org

This is part of my lecture each term.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

“Researchers have given this tendency a name: quantification fixation, the tendency to trust a number over your own account of yourself, even when the number is a rough estimate dressed up as a fact.”

SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.