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Catherine Lai

@catlai.bsky.social

Lecturer in speech and language technology, CSTR, University of Edinburgh. She/her. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/clai/

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Shiro Sirius@shirosiri.us · last wk.

I don’t want to be too sensationalist about this but also I’m the least violent person in the world and I think if someone said this to my face I’d hit them

"A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information," it continues. "Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an Al model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one."
Dr. Jeroen W.P. Wijnendaele@drdragases.bsky.social · last wk.

No longer content with pillaging intellectual work and dismembering our environment (already critically weakened), AI companies are now hellbent on destroying books galore including rare editions. Shut down these nefarious enterprises already.

Kirsty Grainger @kirstygrainger.bsky.social · last wk.

Earlier this year UKRI launched a funding call to invest £40M in ONE AI lab. www.ukri.org/opportunity/... For some unknown reason they decided to fund TWO AI labs at the cost of £60M. An extra £20M. Just found. That's the equivalent of 7 more years of Jodrell Bank. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-la...

UKRI launches two AI research labs to stay ahead in global race

Two new labs will back British researchers to develop next generation artificial intelligence (AI) systems, helping secure the UK’s position as a global leader.

ukri.org

Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · last wk.

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Pavel Iosad@anghyflawn.net · 3w ago

So this Defence Universities Alliance thing… we do actually need defence capacity but it’s a bit insane that somehow the defence sector still has nothing to do with languages, area studies, history and suchlike. Complete loss of institutional memory. This used to be widely recognised!

Chosen from almost 100 applicants, founding members of the DUA will strengthen connections between academia and the defence sector, helping to support a pipeline of skilled graduates into exciting careers, including cyber security, robotics, Al, aerospace engineering and advanced manufacturing. In doing so, the initiative will ensure young people leave university ready for work, with a bridge between study and employment.
Sarah Murphy@13sarahmurphy.bsky.social · last mo.

Would Jenrick also like to explain how £5Mill Farage hawking gold bullion and grifting for crypto and fossil fuel billionaires while pledging to scrap the Equality Act, bin new employment rights and lower the minimum wage is not working for the super rich, against the interests of the rest of us?

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · last mo.

The Conservatives are for "the super rich" says Robert Jenrick, whose own campaigns have been funded by a billionaire Israeli mining heir and a firm controlled by a sanctioned oligarch

Sarah Murphy@13sarahmurphy.bsky.social · last mo.

Another stupid Mahmood idea - getting “trained” members of the public to decide asylum cases - is ripped to shreds here by someone who knows what they’re talking about… Politicians have truly lost their minds on immigration. It’s making us a very wretched and angry place.

Asylum appeals Sir, Muddled government thinking is contlating the law, resources and the judiciary ("Public to decide asylum appeals as Mahmood jettisons judges", Jun 29). Nothing except its own ambivalence prevents a government with a large majority from changing the law on immigration and human rights, and nothing except its own misplaced expenditure priorities prevent it from funding the courts and tribunals system to eliminate the backlogs. The task of the immigration judiciary is to decide whether, on return to their home country, an asylum seeker faces a real risk of persecution. This can mean torture and death, so immigration judges exercise the nearest that the UK now has to a capital jurisdiction. That responsibility, which I exercised for 20 years, requires accumulated legal training, skill, experience and judgment. Replacing a body of people exercising those proven attributes with one that lacks all of them and will not be operational until the end of next year is nonsensical. It will imperil appellants and will undoubtedly increase the number of applications to the High Court for judicial review. We have only to imagine a proposed crash course for applicants from different backgrounds with no medical knowledge for surgical hospital positions. Dr Jonathan Lewis Designated immigration judge (ret'd), Pinner
Mark Peifer (He, him)@peiferlabunc.bsky.social · last mo.

Truly bizarre story of how two papers from the 1940s by physics pioneer Max Planck have been "retracted" from Naturwissenschaften, potentially by an algorithm, for anachronistic "plagiarism" issues, leaving the current editor baffled (but it is Springer Nature so.... www.science.org/content/arti...

Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame

science.org

Alice Ross@alice-ross.bsky.social · last mo.

Proud to present the preprint of our @interspeech.bsky.social accepted paper: exploring the personas invoked by "flirty" and "temptress" (Elevenlabs' labels, not ours!) AI voices with @scariadna.bsky.social @elinkanhov.bsky.social @catlai.bsky.social and Éva Székely 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2606.21366

Sexualised synthetic personas encode and amplify gendered power asymmetries through voice

This work examines sexualised AI-generated English-speaking voices offered by a popular commercial platform. New technologies may enable sexual empowerment and greater diversity in gender expression, ...

arxiv.org

Lighthouse Reports@lighthousereports.com · 2mo ago

Britain will use AI to assess ages of asylum seekers in a world-first, with other countries likely to follow suit But our investigation, based on a leaked report and our own algorithmic audit, finds the technology is deeply unreliable

Asylum by Algorithm

The UK has turned to AI to determine the age of asylum seekers, and other countries are likely to follow suit. Our investigation finds the technology is deeply unreliable.

lighthousereports.com

Prof. Dr Beth Singler@bvlsingler.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Something similar to. 3 just happened to me. One of my articles was credited to Yuval Noah Harari in a published paper! The authors say they are fixing this citation and other hallucinated ones...

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Shannon Vallor@shannonvallor.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Reading this thread I simply cannot fathom the speed with which some scholars *resign* their vocation the moment the option to defer to AI arises. I fought many years for the privilege to write and teach. Even if AI *could* do my job (it can’t) they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands

Crystal Fleming クリスタル@alwaystheself.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

Dan Davies@dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I am going to continue to push back on "high skill migration" even if I am the last dead ender. The UK has a much more pressing shortage of low-skill labour than high-skill labour. We have people giving up jobs as magic circle lawyers to take care of their parents.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner.com · 2mo ago

Reflecting on a conversation with my students about AI in teaching. The promise of AI is infinite productivity, at infinite speed. But the implicit promise of teaching is that an expert will give you some of their very *finite* time. You are important enough that your instructor will incur a loss.

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE)@shengokai.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

I fucking warned people about this shit. The AI is picking up stylistic conventions in writing, the literal patterns that disciplines conform to, and not the content of the work. This is not dissimilar from AI flagging my own writing as AI generated.

The Internet Ethics program--Markkula Center for Applied Ethics@iethics.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Researchers have used top Generative #AI models to grade hundreds of undergraduate essays and found that AI only matched human-awarded degree classification around half the time, with AI often failing to assess the best and worst submissions accurately": www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-u... #ethics #tech