Incredible the life in this downed tree.

Good to see @lukekennard.bsky.social spitting truths in The Guardian

AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds

Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete

theguardian.com

Honestly very difficult to accurately convey what a political and ethical revolution it is just to have a prime minister even speak about carers with such insight and passion, emphasising not just their dedication but their *skill*, and the way that skill encompasses the physical and the emotional.

Politics UK@politicsuk.com · last wk.

🚨 WATCH: Andy Burnham says carers should be the "best paid people in society, not the worst" "Many people from other countries have been caring for my dad. I want those carers to know that we appreciate you"

Plot twist: www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/b8a5ecd...

Climate change is real – and the Right needs to get serious about it

The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows

telegraph.co.uk

Earlier this week I said that ending rough sleeping was near the top of my political wish list. Fixing social care so that people don’t have to struggle without support, and don’t have to make sacrifices to pay for that support, is probably at the very top. If the Times have this right, it’s huge.

No no you don’t understand: the pollution was *protecting* us.

Burnham of course has a mammoth task ahead of him and who knows if he will succeed but I do want to say this: ending rough sleeping is very high on my political wish list and to hear it put forward as a day one policy is both moving and heartening.

Though the novel is intended to subvert the reader's sense of stability in a familiar language, so you are absolutely right that it's not the best marker of general literacy and singling out one student that didn't understand as evidence of illiteracy seems cruel.

In defence of Anthony Burgess, which I guess is our job, he worked hard so that the context of the invented words would be clear to an attentive reader and resisted a glossary. And from our experience of doing outreach in schools and universities, many younger people do understand the novel well.

Obviously this is excellent, detailed, and in many ways pretty terrifying - essential reading for anyone with even a passing concern for literature, thought, learning etc. I would only add that there is an even broader crisis here around attention. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

The End of Reading Is Here

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

theatlantic.com

Bleak www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

A case study in self-sabotage

theatlantic.com

Re that last repost: shocking the extent to which writing that, if it’s not AI slop, certainly reads like AI slop, or even *aspires to the aesthetic* of AI slop, is now completely unavoidable even in reputable publications.

I have been writing literary criticism again after a long pause, and never before have I felt so keenly the generative qualities of creative language - how much we need it to survive, how imperilled the whole project of human imagination currently is, & how much we have to fight for.

The weird aggressive laughter of the man whose role in any all male friendship group is simply to laugh manically at anything anyone says.

My co-worker: a small demon who loves to sunbathe.

Always captivated by Beverly-Glenn Copeland’s wondrous voice, but this is even by those high standards something very special. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3v...

Beverly Glenn-Copeland & Elizabeth Copeland - Harbour | Later... with Jools Holland

YouTube video by BBC Music

youtube.com

The yacht couple have called for calm, just FYI.

“When you're young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn't, it stands still. We're the ones that move.”

I would honestly rather your car be stolen than be fitted with a car alarm.

Perfection.

Immense gratitude to @societyofauthors.bsky.social for awarding me one of their #SoAGrants. These are so valuable for authors - allowing a period of focused work with a little less financial stress. Do apply - the process is very straightforward and they’re a hugely supportive organisation.

Unless one habitually reads an entire book straight through without so much as a comfort break, doesn’t all reading involve “self-serialising”?

This is tremendous, harrowing profoundly important reporting. Anyone who has in the past few years had anything to do with adult social care, safeguarding reviews, and the near total erosion of social care standards will feel the chill of recognition. www.the-londoner.co.uk/tracey-turne...

The body in the wheelchair: How did a troubled family get lost by the state?

A decayed corpse was found being wheeled through the centre of Walthamstow. Who was she? And who is to blame for her death?

the-londoner.co.uk

Hemsby, Norfolk.

Having worked in or adjacent to the community care sector for around 25 years (and having only just left) I was very moved by @drrachelclarke.com’s brilliant Harriet Martineau lecture today on the crisis in care. Totally agree that we are, as Dr Clarke put it, “haemorrhaging care.”

Will Self is currently writing one of the best regular politics and culture columns you’re likely to read, and for reasons that remain a mystery doing so exclusively on Facebook and X. This week he has weighed in on the AI writing crisis, and his thoughts are typically piercing and brilliant.

Genuine question: what exactly are we all doing.

So many good points here.

Jonathan Gibbs@jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I’m marking undergraduate creative writing at the moment, so reading the supposedly AI story ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ was a familiar experience. I've been reading it, in their work, all week. It makes you despair, but it's also fascinating for what it tells us about literary fiction as a genre.

This also is a v interesting point.

Rahul Bery@rahulbery.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I can also see that, as AI writing becomes more common, these bland expectations, which encourage opaque metaphors and purple prose, will actually incite trends in 'human writing'. I'm already noticing a tendency towards ugliness and depravity in fiction, perhaps because these things are so human...

It’s almost as if, in an age of machine-produced art, close, interrogative reading skills and the ability to make a strong argument about the artistic merits of a given work will become even more important.

Sam Byers@sambyers.bsky.social · 3mo ago

What will inevitably happen with this is that the entire conversation will centre on whether or not people can tell if something is written by AI, thereby conveniently obscuring the much more important question: what were the criteria by which this writing was judged as exceptional?