Reuben Binns
@rdbinns.bsky.social
Computery guy. HCI, ML, AI, privacy, security, fairness, political economy of tech. He/him. London/Oxford.
Parts of the GDPR are cited and interpreted by thousands of pieces of case law and guidance, but there's no easy and free way to find out what. We've made a tool which makes it super easy, for 13,000 citing documents, all in one place. More regulations to come! homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/law...
Good writing means imagining being the reader, not knowing what you know, and reconstructing how their mind might feel as it pieces together various arrangements of words. LLMs 'write well' not by imagining a reader, but by inducing and reproducing patterns in the outputs of this imaginative process
If I had to guess, some browsers collect visited URL, for their company’s crawlers to later check if the links are indeed public before indexing them. So users don’t even have to share links, just create them. 😵💫
Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social · last wk.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...
Did you know a barrister is facing prison just for reminding a jury they have the right to vote with their conscience? This historic right has existed since 1670. We can't let it be silenced in court now. Add your name to help protect Britain's juries: you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/sa...
Save Britain's Juries
Juries have had the right to acquit based on their conscience for centuries. Now, a barrister is facing jail just for mentioning it in court. Add your name to help save Britain's juries.
you.38degrees.org.uk
Konrad Kollnig explores why EU member states are blocking the Digital Omnibus proposal to replace cookie banners with browser-level consent signals — and why the feared advertising revenue collapse likely won't materialize.
Digital Omnibus Proposal Could Finally End Europe’s Cookie Banner Problem
EU cookie banners expose flaws in privacy policy as member states resist browser-level consent reform, raising concerns over media funding and platform power.
buff.ly
"He may protest to the machine, even swear at it. But it will remain unmoved. He is committed beyond recall." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornto...
Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
🔴 AI is being adopted across the justice system faster than its impact can be fully understood. Our latest research finds that AI is being widely used across the justice system, despite limited evidence that it improves people’s experiences, outcomes or access to justice.
A neat trick to test LLM's 'reasoning' is to present a well-known dilemma or riddle, but add a small perturbation which removes the source of contradiction. A few years back I had fun trying out famous thought experiments from ethics like the Trolley Problem and Organ Harvest (x.com/RDBinns/stat...)
x.com
As philosophy rushes to claim expertise on AI, AI companies rush to control the philosophical narrative. Unlike other disciplines, philosophy has no standards for reporting conflicts of interest. This petition endeavors to change that: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Open Letter about Industry Funding and Disclosure in Philosophy
*For full list of signatories, updated every few hours, please click here.* In recent years, philosophical writing on areas such as climate change, technology, misinformation, and artificial intellige...
docs.google.com
Incredible chart from @propublica.org. If you don’t follow enviro stuff closely, your instinct might be that the hold-your-nose solution (carbon capture from fossil fuels) would be the “pragmatic” one versus covering Earth in solar panels, which seems utopian. In fact it’s the opposite
New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜
The replication crisis replication crisis
Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 3mo ago📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268
If other news was reported like climate change:
Aoḋán Ó Conġaile@tinydonkey.bsky.social · 2mo agoIf other news was reported like climate change:
I'm seeing this line that you shouldn't worry about AI taking your job, because we'll just sell more stuff cheaper (Jevons' paradox). But this assumes induced demand, which in turn assumes an economy where people have enough disposable income left to buy your stuff if only it was a bit cheaper
So this is interesting -- there's a website where you can check whether you're in the weights of the various LLMs. Note "MODELS MAY HALLUCINATE BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS OR EVENTS THAT NEVER HAPPENED" intheweights.com
IN THE WEIGHTS
The weights are the billions of numbers forming an AI's brain. Type a name and see how strongly the leading AI models recognize it. Are you in the weights?
intheweights.com
This might be one of the funniest chart about energy scenarios I’ve seen. You can hardly see “actual” for gas
I really need people to understand that Palantir is not an engineering marvel; it is a multi-billion-dollar contractual containment layer wrapped around the world's ugliest legacy open source frankenstack. It's a shitty Snowflake for companies that don't know how to do data engineering.
So, the reality of this is finally settling in: The @workersobservatory.org has been funded for ten years (!) by the Regenerative Futures Fund. This is a game-changer for us and for the city.
Karen Gregory@karengregory.bsky.social · 2mo agoReally amazing news out today from @regenfuturesfund.bsky.social! £15 million worth of long-term awards, including for @workersobservatory.org! I'm over the moon. regenerativefuturesfund.org.uk/news-and-not...
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
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.
Fly-tipping costs the UK economy an estimated £1 billion a year. Oxford research explores how AI, drones and satellite data could help identify illegal waste sites earlier and reduce environmental damage. Read more from the @smithschool.ox.ac.uk's Dr Amani Maalouf ⬇️ https://bit.ly/4oxIPFZ
Missing cat Man with van Bassist wanted AI math fight, £100 prize
Liability is a function of the underlying law so it will differ between defamation, hate speech, harassment, data protection, copyright infringement, etc. This is significant in that it takes away an EU-wide shield, and exposes providers to liability under different domestic laws.
Pleased but not surprised to see this - we argued back in *2021* that AI service providers would not be able to benefit from liability shields in EU law: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Artificial intelligence as a service: Legal responsibilities, liabilities, and policy challenges
Artificial Intelligence as a Service ('AIaaS') will play a growing role in society's technological infrastructure, enabling, facilitating, and underpi…
sciencedirect.com
Ars Technica@arstechnica.com · 2mo agoA German court this week determined that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews in a ruling that could impact all AI search engines and chatbots known for their poor paraphrasing.
"here are these corporate spun/created "ethics" that I will now justify in the context of wider philosophical research for x technology" is such a tiring thing to see. Luckily, ethics =/= law/governance, but it gets awfully close at times.
Good thread (with some interesting counters in reply) on whether philosophy is making progress; Kevin argues that progress in philosophy typically happens when it spins out new fields. A good recent example is meta-science (spun out of phil of science). But what about 'AI ethics'?
Kevin Zollman@kevinzollman.com · last yr.I could go on, but here's the point. When philosophy starts to make progress on a problem (often, but not always), it spins that problem off into its own field. If you define philosophy as "the problems we are currently working on" you are selecting for problems where we have made less progress.
"DoorDash has patented a system that lets companies offer promotional deals based on how stressed you are" www.youtube.com/watch?v=2erh... @moreperfectunion.bsky.social find opposition to bans on surveillance pricing being funded by big tech (Amazon) but also restaurants (McDonald's)
We Found a Radical Solution to Dynamic Pricing
YouTube video by More Perfect Union
youtube.com
"The classic brain-IQ association largely disappeared when socioeconomic status was properly accounted for... children’s brains vary the most with SES, potentially through SES-dependent sleep deprivation and stress" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Patterns of brain-wide associations reflect socioeconomics
Previous brain-wide association studies (BWAS) have linked specific environmental and behavioral variables to brain variability. In this work, we mapped 649 variables to children’s brains and compared...
science.org
