At #ITiCSE2026 in Madrid come say hi!!

Earlier this month we hosted our 2nd annual CTMF Research Showcase, this year featuring our early career researchers! The Showcase demonstrated the excellence and interdisciplinary spirit of our research community.  Read about the CTMF Early Career Research Showcase 👇 edin.ac/4xAHlyF

Showcasing our CTMF Early Career Researchers — Centre for Technomoral Futures

‍Earlier this month we hosted our CTMF ECR Showcase, bringing together members of our vibrant research community to celebrate the remarkable achievements of our early career researchers!

edin.ac

Absolute joy to present with Sarah Immel the paper we wrote with @neelrajani.bsky.social - Stepping Into the Black Box: Opening Up LLMs for Public Exploration Through Discursive Design at @acm-dis.bsky.social in Singapore. And we won an Honourable Mention!

A discussion about the social media ban on under 16s. BBC: “You’re gong to have a lot more time to fill. What will you do?” Student: “Stare at a wall.”

Arghhh maybe if you actually tried regulating the companies instead of the children you would get somewhere

The Verge@theverge.com · 2mo ago

Banned social media apps will include Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, though messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal will not be covered.

Claude cannot actually feel, it can't think, it doesn't have opinions, it isn't self aware, it doesn't have context outside the immediate window you are using it with. By asking for its comment on war crimes you are legitimizing the idea that it can be used autonomously or for war at all. Stop it.

Philip Pullman said that anything that a child might encounter in their childhood is appropriate material for a children's story.

Cosmic Marvel@dailycosmicmarvel.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Pixar CCO Pete Docter says they removed gay elements from ‘ELIO’ after finding some parents didn’t want entertainment forcing conversations with their kids they weren’t ready for. “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.” (via www.wsj.com/business/med...)

Still pretty

Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage

Delighted to be at @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social today with our #DesigningResponsibleNLPCDT sharing our brilliant students work as part of Doors Open Day!

I have a little stall at the @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social Doors Open Day today! I’m sharing some early research around children’s views of AI at school. Come say hi if you’re around!!

"In the new ... internet, girls can’t learn about periods on Reddit and artists can’t sell smutty games on Itch.io, but a military contractor will make you nonconsensual deepfakes of Taylor Swift taking her top off for $30 a month." — @thedextriarchy.bsky.social www.theverge.com/internet-cen...

Sex is getting scrubbed from the internet, but a billionaire can sell you AI nudes

Grok’s nonconsensual deepfakes show how hollow the online safety push can be.

theverge.com

If you've been feeling tired recently, it's because Earth is spinning faster, making some days ~1 millisecond shorter than 24 hours so you're getting less sleep. 😴

Earth is spinning faster, leading timekeepers to consider an unprecedented move | CNN

Earth is spinning faster this summer, making the days marginally shorter and attracting the attention of scientists and timekeepers. But these days are not ‘short’ in terms of how many sunlight hours ...

edition.cnn.com

i genuinely think that part of the problem is people don’t have the mental model for how the “chat bubbles” map to autocomplete it doesn’t help that the chat interfaces actively hide what’s going on and make the illusion opaque

paris martineau@paris.nyc · last yr.

stop 👏 anthropomorphizing 👏 the 👏 chatbot 👏

Yay I’m at @acm-idc.bsky.social in Reykjavík this week! I spoke about my PhD plans at the Doctoral Consortium and am so excited to get to know everyone this week :)

It was absolutely wonderful to work with the Digital Leaders at St Francis Xavier’s Primary School. Thanks again for having me!

The petition to ban conversion therapy practices in the EU is lacking enough votes from: - #germany (49.9%) - #sweden (49.96%) - #Netherlands (94%) - #austria (25.5%) - #Slovenia (83.14%) - #portugal (24.46%) If you're a citizen there you can help advance a ban on conversion therapy by voting:

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

eci.ec.europa.eu

I get so frustrated with the dilution of the term ‘literacy’ - in no world should ‘AI literacy’ mean ‘prompt engineering classes’ but apparently here we are

Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · last yr.

Arguing schools need to teach "AI literacy" is entirely corporate marketing or geopolitical "new space race" rubbish now. It eradicates the history of media/digital literacies as *critical* programs to support informed consumers and creators. It just means accustomization to prompting for BS jobs.

Join us at AI for All during Edinburgh Science Festival! Discover how we make #NLP shape our daily lives in a fair, accountable and transparent way. Explore exhibits, activities, and meet the next generation of researchers. 📅 Fri 11 Apr ⏰ 10am – 4pm|Free / Drop-In 📍@edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social

This is so cool. Have been wanting to get into PoE properly for so long now and I think this might actually do it

Obsidian@obsidian.net · last yr.

In addition, a new Turn-Based Combat mode is in development for Pillars of Eternity coming later this year. More details on how to participate will be shared once it's available, so keep an eye on our socials and the Obsidian Discord server! discord.gg/obsidian

“We are not in fact in danger of the machines overtaking us in what we do best. What we do best is to mess with mom, and to whisper sweet nothings to our lovers. But we are in grave danger, at present, of misidentifying what we do best”

“AGI” Is Impossible

Either That or Defining It Is Entirely Arbitrary

the-hinternet.com

There are *good*, positive use of GenAI. But forcing it on people -- particularly as a massive technology corporation with its fingers in many aspects of billions of peoples' lives -- creates more risk than potential benefit. Let people opt-in as they see fit, don't force it down their throat.

Meta literally created a LGBTQ exception for calling someone mentally ill as an insult. You can't do it for any other group except LGBTQ people.

It’s cool that humans have been eating bread so long that when we touch a loaf for a moment we can sense ah this is going to be awful bread. Like badgers sensing vibrations underground through their claws.

Beat BG3 in Honour Mode last night and honestly this might be where 2025 peaks for me

👀

Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 2y ago

Dutch education and ICT organization SURF advises schools and universities not to use Microsoft 365 Copilot - due to privacy risks, lack of transparency, and danger of generating incorrect data - based on new 200 page data protection impact assessment tweakers.net/nieuws/22993...

OpenAI and tech bros, take notes (this slide is worth the intercontinental trip to #NeurIPS24)

Just updated my handle to @rayo.dev and this bring-your-own-domain thing might be my favourite part of Bluesky. Feels like an elegant (if not entirely complete) way to do verification as well as enable more decentralisation down the line without the up-front complexity of Mastodon