When Frontiers started automating the editorial process, I stayed. I reasoned that as long as the automation could be turned off, human editors can still ensure rigorous, high-quality peer review. This now became impossible - the system has been entirely hijacked by algorithms.

Our article on affirmative narration as an interactional strategy for chatbots is finally published in the special issue of Narrative Inquiry on AI and literature! doi.org/10.1075/ni.2... (An unpaywalled version is available here: jilltxt.net/txt/Roine-Re...)

“YES! YES! I absolutely love this insight!”

Abstract This article analyses narrative mechanisms that are common in dialogues with LLM chatbots. In combination, these mechanisms produce an interactional strategy for maximising user engagement, which we call affirmative narration. Affirmative narration serves to convince users of the chatbot’s utility. We analyse three narrative mechanisms that support affirmative narration in human-LLM dialogues: firstly, guiding the user to view chatbot as an intelligent and reliable character; secondly, activating masterplots, culturally significant and recurring story templates; and thirdly, using characters and masterplots not only to affirm, but also to isolate the user. The case studies range from a journalist’s unsettling chatbot experiment to cases where users have experienced delusions or even killed themselves after lengthy interactions with a chatbot. The analyses illustrate the worrying sides of affirmative narration, and the article thus concludes with the discussion of LLMs as a genre of narrative media which requires a new type of literacy.

doi.org

Det her er så patetisk. Schibsted innfører en ulovlig ordning som svekker alles personvern, og reaksjonene fra departementene er at de gjerne vil sponse denne ulovlige ordningen for alle sine ansatte??

Departementskontor reagerte på Schibsted-grep: – Urimelig

Ansatte må selv betale for å unngå bruk av data til personalisert annonsering. Schibsted jobber med løsning.

journalisten.no

“Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.”

Social Media Lab@socialmedialab.ca · last wk.

This aught to be illegal ... "AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books" www.news.com.au/technology/o...

companies are sourcing millions of printed books for AI labs that scan them for training data, then destroy them. printed books are more valuable because they're free of AI slop, and AI labs know destroying them is an "optics problem." www.404media.co/ai-companies...

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”

404media.co

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

from the Editor in Chief of Science: "Rigorous human checking of AI-generated research papers is creating bottlenecks as publishers strive to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The challenge is requiring even more human effort, making the whole endeavor slower and more expensive." 1/2

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...

science.org

If you want to meet a bunch of people who REALLY don't like me (or just think I'm very stupid) you will find them in the comments on my video about how LLMs don't cite sources. Because citation as a practice implies that the source was consulted. "Including" a source is not the same as "citing" it.

The reason I'm so frustrated by this is that it's such a good example of the difference between having an LLM help you with something versus having it do something for you. It also implies that a literature review is some rote task like formatting or something and not a critical part of research.

What is the use case *for a researcher* in which you need deterministic verification of a source in a paper? Because what is the use case in which *a researcher* hasn't read every source they are citing? In which you would need to ensure (from this tool's website) that "nothing gets faked"?

The right loves AI slop. Why? I investigate in @thebulwark.com today: www.thebulwark.com/p/the-slop-d...

The Slop Doctrine

Why the right has overwhelmingly embraced terrible AI-generated imagery.

thebulwark.com

For ein arroganse. Om regjeringa hektar seg på dette er det endå ein kile mellom Ap og venstresida At ein høgsterettsdom og lang rettsprosess kan nullast med ein søknad der ordet "forsyningssikkerhet" blir inkludert og vipps utsleppa i Førdefjorden kan fortsette: slik ein skaper systemforakt

Hahahaha mer nøktern Herre-VM = Kvinne-EM (Her er en til eksemplene dine @jilltxt.bsky.social 😆)

Utrolig nok var ikke "Solsiden" den mest oppsiktsvekkende KI-saken hos Adressa i dag.

Lattermild@lattermild.bsky.social · 3w ago

Oh, snap.

Mora til Oscar Bobb 😍

New UN report on the environmental cost of LLMs. Key points include: inference (use) causes 90% of energy cost; web search with AI summary costs 10 times a regular search, and video generation is extremely energy intensive. Also, land and water use must be tracked too. unu.edu/inweh/collec...

Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints

AI’s rapid growth drives huge energy, water, and land use, raising environmental and equity challenges across its global infrastructure.

unu.edu

This is such a helpful & succinct way to put it “polite prompts just land in a friendlier slice of the training distribution”. Hence the emphasis on “personas”/style - the tone of the prompt guides the model to a slice of the training distribution. The politics of this are crucial 1/

ai-nerd.bsky.social@ai-nerd.bsky.social · 3w ago

The uncomfortable part: some version of this study already exists. Politeness measurably shifts LLM outputs, no feelings required, polite prompts just land in a friendlier slice of the training distribution. The consciousness crowd and the debunkers keep reading the same data.

Oh, have I not told this one here? Okay. So Grandma had The Charisma.

Hipster Viking Amy@lasrina.bsky.social · 4w ago

Summoning @tkingfisher.com to tell the story of her grandma getting like five marriages annulled.

I dag brukte jeg tre ganger så lang tid på en enkel jobboppgave (scanne kvittering på reise til reiseregning) fordi Microsoft sin 365 app har erstattet den enkle scanne funksjonalitetenen med en praterobot som også gjerne vil at jeg skal lage korte videoer. Filene mine finner jeg heller ikke.

I'm in Berlin to give a talk this evening at the Peter Szondi Insitut at Freie Universität - if you're in Berlin, please come and join the discussion! www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we03/institu...

If you're intrigued by all these AI chatbots of historical figures, you should read Lina Harder's new paper on them. She calls them histobots: "When algorithms speak in the voices of the dead, who decides what they say?" olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/2... Roosevelt: www.cnet.com/tech/service...

'Does He Think He's Real?' Social Media Reacts to Trump's Talk With AI Teddy Roosevelt

The current president chatted with a life-sized AI version of the 26th US president at the new Theodore Roosevelt presidential library.

cnet.com

If you like this sort of storytelling with data (some beautiful examples here!) please consider applying for the PhD fellowship in narrative data visualisation we're hiring for! Job ad here: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... and examples of narrative datavis here pudding.cool/process/how-...

Making Internet Things, Part 3: Storytelling

This is the third installment of a multi-part series designed to help you familiarize yourself with the tools used to make visual, data-driven essays.

pudding.cool

My article on AI-generated podcasts already has three citations and at least one is AI-generated. Look at this fine example of an ultra-vague statement with a drive-by citation that doesn't match the claim. The entire article is 100% AI-generated according to Pangram.

Dette er jeg helt enig i. Kameraovervåkning i brilleform forskyver grensene for personvern som vi lenge har hatt i Norge - det er f.eks. ikke lov å ha dørkamera som filmer folk på offentlig gate, så hvorfor skal det være lov med skjulte kameraer som kan filme overalt, snart med ansiktsgjenkjenning?

Mediablikk direkte@mediablikk.bsky.social · last mo.

Krever forbud mot Meta-briller. #personvern

This week, *unprecedented* sentences were handed down: Zachary Evetts — 50 years Maricela Rueda — 70 years Savanna Batten — 50 years Autumn Hill — 50 years Benjamin Song — 100 years Daniel “Des Revol” Rolando Sanchez Estrada — 30 years More via @theintercept.com

Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines

Anti-ICE activists received lengthy prison terms — including a 100-year sentence — in the first major trial of the NSPM-7 era.

theintercept.com

Meanwhile, in the US. It just takes your breath away. *50 years* in prison for protesting. Don't imagine for one moment that we are immune to this. Already, the legislative framework is in place in the UK to enable such convictions - before we get a Trumplike PM. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Alarm over ‘extreme’ sentences for anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism

First amendment groups call 50-to-100-year prison terms chilling as legal experts say sentences unusually long

theguardian.com

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Treating surveillance as an isolated privacy problem is the wrong frame, says UN Special Rapporteur Gina Romero, who argues digital monitoring is dismantling the trust, funding, and institutional memory that civil society depends on to function. www.techpolicy.press/the-quiet-er...

The Quiet Erosion of Collective Action Under Digital Surveillance

Digital surveillance is undermining privacy, trust and civic freedoms across 84 countries, writes United Nations Special Rapporteur Gina Romero.

techpolicy.press

When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature

An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

nature.com