'Twelve British universities paid a private firm run by former military intelligence officials to “spy” on student protesters and academics including those who have expressed solidarity with Palestine, it can be revealed.'
Can’t find the original text, but part of the 1720s Bubble was a company that promised a venture so profitable that its actual activity had to be kept secret. Investors piled in…guess what happened.
'The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.' 1/2
If anyone is in Dublin on Tuesday April 21st @michellehenning.bsky.social is giving a talk on her new book A Dirty History of Photography @ IADT, Dun Laoghaire - details below👇
“The researchers found that 40% of workers had encountered workslop within a month, and then spent an average of 3.4 hours a month dealing with it – which the study estimates adds up to $8.1m in lost productivity for a 10,000-person organization.”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Fabulous fully-funded PhD opportunity working with a stellar team of supervisors at Warwick/BFI on British South Asian Culture in Non-Fiction Films and Television, 1960s-1980s. @drjlw.bsky.social @warwickfilmtv.bsky.social
🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning..
We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance.
And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use!
1/
Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
OpenAI wants to be off the hook if its frontier AI models go rogue and cause 100+ deaths or more than $1 billion in financial damages. from @mzeff.bsky.social
> text composed by a large language model has made its way into an act of parliament. British laws are already being written by AI.
This is the worst of all possible worlds, bloody hell
How did radical women navigate Bengal's 'age of fire'?
Oyeshi Ganguly explores what oral history can tell us about the female revolutionaries who took up arms against British rule.
"Google’s AI Overviews are peddling misinformation on a scale that may be unprecedented in human history."
The New Statesman Y @New...• 21m THE SILENT COUP by @willydunn X Al is a technology we do not control but which plays an increasingly active role at every level of the British power structure. It is part of every conversation, drafting emails between officials, summarising ministers' briefings and composing speeches delivered in the House of Commons. The Bank of England is using machine learning to inform its decisions on interest rates. The BBC uses Al to redraft articles. Every student at Oxford - where 31 of our previous prime ministers were educated - is now being educated with the help of OpenAl. There is little public understanding of how quickly this technology is moving through the institutions of power, or how enthusiastically it's being pursued by a government that believes Al software could solve all its problems. In dozens of interviews with current and former government officials and advisers, technologists and MPs - most of whom asked not to be named, in order to speak freely - I have been told about a quiet handing over of control in the frameworks of advice, intelligence and decision-making that underlie every government decision. This is not just a simple software upgrade. This highly persuasive software, built primarily overseas, is being handed an unknown amount of political power.
piece, I asked whether it was paranoid to suggest that the wholesale adoption of Al by our government, public services and wider economy is handing power to models built in the US and China. Even the most optimistic Al advocates agreed it was a reasonable argument. At a technology conference last year, I spoke to a person who had been involved at the highest level in the government's use of Al. I asked if it worried them that foundational models could reflect the politics of the people who control them - people who have very different political ideas to our elected leaders. My concerns were not brushed off. This person told me about a power struggle between the engineers building Al models, the plutocrats who own them and the politicians who seek to control them. Far from the noise of the public debate, a battle is being fought that could have lasting implications for our politics. "Make no mistake," this person told me. "This is a war." This is not a story about how Al works. It's not about whether it is going to become sentient, make us rich, or redundant. It is a story about power. It is about how politicians became distracted by a shiny new thing, and failed to understand - or chose not to ask - what it might cost. It is not about whether Al will help itself to your job. It is about whether the people who make Al are helping themselves to your country. This is a matter of sovereignty.
Luckily, it’s not like British politicians have form for handing off as much as capacity as possible to the private sector so that government can’t do much of anything except announce new, nastier crackdowns
The Greenhouse #envhum book talks had 2 weeks off for Easter, but we are back Monday 13 April with @michellehenning.bsky.social discussing her book A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (@uchicagopress.bsky.social 2025).
Join the online talk live at 4pm CET / 3pm BST / 10am ET.
Please share and/or consider applying to the Cambridge Amplifying Grant for underrepresented scholars. Applications are due next Monday, April 13. www.cambridge.org/us/universit.... This is a great opportunity!
7/5: @noisybits.bsky.social and Liz Rosenfeld on Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising, with UOM's Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture.
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/crossings-...
In this free to read article, @lauracforster.bsky.social explores socialist political lecture tours in the late 19th century and how these produced everyday, intimate experiences that could powerfully embody socialist ideas for new audiences. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
A reminder that I'm speaking at Conway Hall on Sunday 19 April. Book your tickets here: www.conwayhall.org.uk/whats-on/eve...
‘As a history of Africa in 45 objects, it would be hard to top the developer’s selection here.’ Samuel Reilly plays Relooted, a video game that allows us to pull off heists of African art from Western institutions.
Enormously looking forward to this event on April 21 at 6:30pm ET (online!) with the amazing @emilymbender.bsky.social
and @alexhanna.bsky.social talking about their new book, The AI Con.
Register here:
virginia.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Had so much fun working on this book with @justinbengry.bsky.social , Matt Cook and E-J Scott, all our amazing contributors and the fantastic team at MUP. Really excited to see it out and on the bookshelves!
We’re celebrating the 200th volume
In the Studies in Imperialism series and over 40 years of publishing cutting-edge research with the launch of the book itself and a panel discussion of imperialism & imperial history, past & present, on 26 May. Do join us?
www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
'An exclusive analysis conducted by Nature’s news team, in collaboration with Grounded AI...suggests that at least tens of thousands of 2025 publications, including journal papers and books, as well as conference proceedings, probably contain invalid references generated by AI.'
The higher ed thinkfluencer-industrial complex churned out thousands of pieces just like this one
Looking forward to hosting our symposium "1725-2025: Historical & Contemporary Links Between Scotland and South Asia" with @sheelalipi.bsky.social at @iashedinburgh.bsky.social in 2 weeks!
Join us online or in-person; more details available on the IASH website: www.iash.ed.ac.uk/event/1725-2...
This is why using copyrighted work to training the models is not fair use, btw. They will just spit out straightforward plagiarism and I suspect it’s as difficult to prevent that, for the same reason it’s difficult to improve the error rate
The deadline for our essay prize is 27 April — please do share and submit! www.tandfonline.com/journals/rvc...
Really pleased to share the full programme for the 'Teaching Anti-Fascism Today' workshop (London 21-22 May). Presentations on teaching in UK, Italy, Spain, Brazil, US (and elsewhere) as well as reflections on AI, embodied learning and archaeology and much more. ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
