Dónal Mulligan

@donalmulligan.com

Lecturer in Media, Design, Data Comms, etc., at DCU in #Dublin. Interested in digital research & ethics, educational tech & #GenAI, politics, and formerly #Eurovision Podcast: http://EnoughAboutAI.com More: https://www.donalmulligan.com

Saw The Odyssey and it’s enjoyable and definitely merits a cinema where the intense soundtrack bass can fully shudder your bones. (Though Nolan having Odysseus solemnly say “Our Age of Bronze is collapsing” also does that at one point!) Overall certainly worth seeing - and on a very big screen.

The story here is not this stupid movie – which will never get made and never come out – but how the Tilly Norwood people keep getting these credulous articles placed in national news sources despite zero demonstration of any success or demand for this.

NBC News@nbcnews.com · last mo.

The comedy-drama will star AI "actor" Tilly Norwood in a “hybrid production with traditional film and TV professionals — such as directors, writers and editors — working alongside AI specialists, with AI training and mentorship built into the production itself,” the company says.

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’ arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Abstract
Al assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of Al.
We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that Al-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains.

Hmm, I'm not sure there are enough letters in there and I would prefer that any acronym was derived from the initials of the name in French for maximum EU-ness. Perhaps le "Service Claude Chappe de Messagerie Numérique TransEuropéen des Citoyens"? Find me on SCCMNTEC...

Ciarán O' Driscoll / Ó Drisceoil@bearaboi.bsky.social · 6mo ago

First of all, the EU would not call this platform something as tidy as 'W'. It would be called the European Erasmus Digital Citizen Plus (the EEDCP), and you can only tweet in the format of an European Citizens' Initiative.