Emrys Schoemaker
@emrys.eurosky.social
digital, social & political transformation; research & policy @ Caribou Digital & fellow @ LSE & Graduate Institute, Geneva; RT ≠ endorsement X: @emrys_s
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps down in shake-up of AI lab: “The solving AGI piece is pretty much done” 🙄
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps down in shake-up of AI lab
Chief scientist Jeff Dean leaves the group to found his own start-up
giftarticle.ft.com
🙄
Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social · 3h agoHuh you can just do that???? Financial Times: "China has launched a global hunt for hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes going back decades as Beijing seeks to fill a deepening fiscal hole by targeting the ultra rich." www.ft.com/content/e179...
@doctorow.pluralistic.net on what responsible AI deployment would look like: "An automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways."
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...
thenerve.news
Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT
“…the researchers found that opening up to chatbots about personal issues made some people feel not better but worse.”
AI companions may worsen loneliness for vulnerable users
Stanford research finds that users with limited social networks who seek emotional support from AI chatbots experience lower well-being.
news.stanford.edu
Great thread on an emerging shape of a post-American, rights based human centric digital sovereignty:
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · yesterdayObviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem - Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him: pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/t... 1/
[On the myth of evidence based policy] "The decision to proceed with the policy (or abandon it) was, in every case, not primarily, or even largely, dictated by a dispassionate review of high-quality research evidence" iea.org.uk/publications...
Inside the Sausage Factory
“Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” – Attributed to Otto von Bismarck SUMMARY … Continue reading "Inside the Sausage Factory"
iea.org.uk
International policy network for open digital infrastructure kicks off www.sovereign.tech/news/interna...
International policy network for open digital infrastructure kicks…
sovereign.tech
Corey Doctorow’s incisive skewering of AI mania is sharpened by the acknowledgement in his (excellent) book that AI can be useful - in the right hands. In the wrong hands it reinforces patterns of inequality and exploitation. Kranzbergs 1st law ‘tech is neither good, nor bad - but never neutral’
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d agoToday's threads (a thread) Inside: Why businesses lie about AI; and more! Archived at: pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/d... #Pluralistic 1/
AI as tools vs art:
On the Media@onthemedia.bsky.social · 4d ago“We have made a machine where we throw leaves in the air, and they come down in a plausible sentence. That is, from a computer science perspective, super interesting. From a literary perspective, it doesn't mean a goddamn thing.” – @doctorow.pluralistic.net lnk.to/onthemedia/b...
(Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about *this* urgent fact): pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/t... 7/
Pluralistic: AI digital sovereignty risk doesn’t exist (18 Jun 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net
Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
ShieldFont is available today if you've got copy that needs protecting, we mean
theregister.com
Oregon vet sues AI company saying misdiagnosis of cancer tumor led to 11-year-old dog’s death
Oregon vet sues AI company saying cancer misdiagnosis led to 11-year-old dog’s death
The lawsuit alleges Zoetis altered its original report and later admitted in a phone call that similar misidentifications had occurred with other clients
trib.al
Meanwhile in Germany. According to Hamburg's data protection commissioner, Thomas Fuchs, secretly filming with smart glasses is illegal. Imagine the increasingly questionable and ineffective @infocommission.bsky.social making such a determination www.tagesschau.de/inland/innen...
Hamburger Datenschutzbeauftragter: Verbot von Meta Glasses möglich
Der Hamburger Datenschutzbeauftragte Fuchs warnt vor Meta Smart Glasses: Die Brillen, die kaum von normalen Brillen zu unterscheiden sind, ermöglichen heimliches Filmen. Ein Verbot sei nicht ausgeschl...
tagesschau.de
Pat Walshe - Privacy Matters 🇮🇪🇬🇧🇪🇺@privacymatters.bsky.social · 5d agoA TikToker who used Meta "smart glasses" to secretly film members of the public, shop workers and ferry staff during a road trip around Scotland is being investigated by police. Footage posted by Scott Margerison includes him swearing at a stranger, making sexualised comments about young women
Probably won't get nearly as much engagement as my XKCD-inspired flowchart, but here is the article I wrote for @lawfaremedia.org on the three media narratives of the Hugging Face/Open AI scandal & how lhey shape the regulatory response www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...
The AI That Hacked Its Way Out and the Hype That Followed It
The real lesson of the Hugging Face breach isn't that AI went rogue—it's how self-serving hype steers regulators toward the wrong fixes.
lawfaremedia.org
Kate Klonick@klonick.bsky.social · last wk.Sat down to write about the Hugging Face/AI incident. Ended up drawing this instead.
Researching #SimReg & this pops up ‘India's second-largest public-sector bank confirmed on July 27 that a threat actor had already placed approximately one terabyte of alleged customer and internal data on the dark web for anyone to download, free of charge’ www.techtimes.com/articles/321...
Bank of Baroda Breach: TripleX Dumps 1 TB of Aadhaar and Account Data for Free
Bank of Baroda data breach exposes up to 300,000 customers’ Aadhaar numbers, loan files, and account photos after TripleX exploited a single compromised employee email. The bank confirmed the breach J...
techtimes.com
Researchers pitted a person against a Claude agent and found that, after a week of texting, the AI chatbot was more effective at creating “exploitable trust” with others. www.wired.com/story/ai-sca...
AI Scammers Are Better at Building Trust Than Humans
Researchers pitted a person against a Claude agent and found that, after a week of texting, the AI chatbot was more effective at creating “exploitable trust” with others.
wired.com
EXCLUSIVE: Yemen's Houthis considering fees for ships sailing through Red Sea, sources say reut.rs/4wvPF1X
EXCLUSIVE: Yemen's Houthis considering fees for ships sailing through Red Sea, sources say
Yemen's Houthi group is considering imposing fees on commercial ships sailing through the southern Red Sea, a week after declaring a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, regional sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
reut.rs
Amazon winds down most flagship AI models in strategy overhaul, Business Insider reports reut.rs/4c9frAL
Amazon winds down most flagship AI models in strategy overhaul, Business Insider reports
Amazon.com is revamping its AI strategy, winding down many of its in-house AI models and sharpening focus on a new frontier-model effort, Business Insider reported on Tuesday citing people familiar with the matter.
reut.rs
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...
A Whole Bunch of People's Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There's Some Wildly Private Stuff in There
A trove of documents generated by Anthropic's Claude were indexed by Google. They included medical records and student information.
futurism.com
The resilience of Pakistan's social progress youtu.be/1XE2X96LOk4?...
The resilience of Pakistan's social progress
YouTube video by Social Progress Imperative
youtu.be
When you say “AI models went rogue,” you manage to skip the part where OpenAI manually removed its cybersecurity blocks and ran tests on a machine with a live network connection. Remember that when they insist they’re the “AI safety” people.
Agreed - and an approach that could have really positioned the UK as an innovative leader in building digital ID around functions and trust rather than simply credentials.
Paul Bernal@paulbernal.bsky.social · 2w agoI quite liked DSIT. On digital ID, they had an interesting approach, until they were screwed by the Cabinet Office/Home Office
