New, open access publication out now. Co-authored with Dr Alice Brumby journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....

I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence -but we are as valuable as ever| Stephen Marche The Guardian The, GuardianOpinions

You wrote a novel using AI? Cool. It's like that time I ran a marathon using a Ford Focus.

The possibilities for structural improvisation are endless, and what people put (ambivalently) within the covers of a book but outside the “main story” tells you a hell of a lot about the content of what you are reading. Why would you not read it on principle?!

I love the appending material to eg Handmaid’s Tale, or House on the Borderland, that contextualises what you are reading; I love acknowledgments and epilogues and little bridging sections and anything that plays with orthodox structure. Ok, sometimes it doesn’t come off, but that’s true of anything

I don’t know what “booktok” is but as someone who is borderline obsessed with the politics of paratexts, I do not understand how people can say “it’s not part of the book” - it literally is part of the book. An ambivalent part, sure, and one positioned to make you think about why it might be there

Yes! and it is interesting (to me) as a way to analyse historical consciousness in a given present, but I don’t read it for pleasure…

it might well produce some interesting strings of words, but this can only be interesting if you know what you are looking at

probabilistic gloop that tells you nothing about “mindset” or “worldview” for example

Screengrab of post by Ethan Mollick: Want to talk to the past? Here' an LLM "trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 & 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library" Quite different from an LLM roleplaying a Victorian.

generating strings of words based on probabilistic calculations will show you nothing about meaning or significance, even if you limit the dataset to “words produced by humans within this date range”

Speechless When your football club just does something unforgivable

This week's #itfc blog - on something unforgivable
bluewhitenotes.beehiiv.com/p/speechless

“experience” has entered the chat

There is no such thing as the history of science People on the internet are arguing about what ‘science’ means and what properly belongs to the ‘history of science’. (Aparna Nair’s thread on Bluesky is a good introdu…

There’s no such thing as the history of science (and this is a blog post about it)

(inspired by a great 2017 article by Lorraine Daston)

williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/t...

🗃️

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions re: this hybrid interdisciplinary conference on Archives and Ethics! AUACConference2026@aston.ac.uk or DM will do!

Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare The Universities of Bristol, Nottingham and Birmingham have been awarded a major £2.6 million Wellcome Discovery Award.

If you're interested in loneliness and epistemic injustice, I'm giving a talk about my book project next week!

All the way back and all the way down: epistemic injustice and the history of loneliness

30/03/2026, 1pm - 2:15pm.

epistemicinjusticeinhealthcare.org/epic-seminar...

Most of what a university can offer that students can’t get elsewhere is stuff they don’t know to “demand” ahead of time precisely *because* it isn’t available elsewhere. Judging the value of a university program by how much it appeals to people who’ve by definition not encountered it is backwards.

All I'm going to say that: If I had never done a thing, I wouldn't be so quick to jump into discussions about whether "AI" can do the thing.

“postmodernism and diversity is obscuring science and truth and rationality” you could do better using a Large Language Model and that’s saying something

On top of everything else this screed is just so paint-by-numbers, with the same old points rehashed in dire prose, with not a single half-interesting though in it

at least ghosts won't harvest my data for the surveillance state 🤷🏾‍♂️

Understanding why racism and xenophobia is erupting in a particular way is important but this should not be confused with “taking the premises of racism seriously”

why should any institution that values its credibility, thoughtfulness and critical acumen have to pretend that there is value in the barely-digested bigoted rage that spews out of Reform Uk?

I’m a bit late to this but where to start with that report that says “universities must engage across the political spectrum” or risk their legitimacy - why does this demand never seem too apply to, I dunno, for example, the police?

Screenshot from paper: 6.1 Coherence in the Eye of the Beholder Where traditional n-gram LMs [117] can only model relatively local dependencies, predicting each word given the preceding sequence of N words (usually 5 or fewer), the Transformer LMs capture much larger windows and can produce text that is seemingly not only fluent but also coherent even over paragraphs. For example, McGuffie and Newhouse [80] prompted GPT-3 with the text in bold in Figure 1, and it produced the rest of the text, including the Q&A format.21 This example illustrates GPT-3’s ability to produce coherent and on-topic text; the topic is connected to McGuffie and Newhouse’s study of GPT-3 in the context of extremism, discussed below. We say seemingly coherent because coherence is in fact in the eye of the beholder. Our human understanding of coherence de- rives from our ability to recognize interlocutors’ beliefs [30, 31] and intentions [23, 33] within context [32]. That is, human language use

Screenshot continued: takes place between individuals who share common ground and are mutually aware of that sharing (and its extent), who have commu- nicative intents which they use language to convey, and who model each others’ mental states as they communicate. As such, human communication relies on the interpretation of implicit meaning conveyed between individuals. The fact that human-human com- munication is a jointly constructed activity [29, 128] is most clearly true in co-situated spoken or signed communication, but we use the same facilities for producing language that is intended for au- diences not co-present with us (readers, listeners, watchers at a distance in time or space) and in interpreting such language when we encounter it. It must follow that even when we don’t know the person who generated the language we are interpreting, we build a partial model of who they are and what common ground we think they share with us, and use this in interpreting their words.

Screen shot continued Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never in- cluded sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret commu- nicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do [89, 140]. The problem is, if one side of the commu- nication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the model).22 Contrary fn22: Controlled generation, where an LM is deployed within a larger system that guides its generation of output to certain styles or topics [e.g. 147, 151, 158], is not the same thing as communicative intent. One clear way to distinguish the two is to ask whether

Final part of screenshot to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

Went back to Sec 6 of Stochastic Parrots today (in the context of answering a query from a journalist) and was reminded how thoroughly we grounded that part in a discussion of language use -- y'know as communication between people.

he doesn't want to get cancelled for being DEI

This course looks incredible and also potentially of interest to @katemcal993.bsky.social who is currently a BA postdoc here at Sheffield researching the history of chronic pain.

Lyndal Roper: ‘Drastic’ cuts to UK humanities risk brain drain Newly crowned winner of Holberg Prize raises alarm over job losses and shuttering of courses across UK

"I’m very worried about what is being destroyed. We’re all extremely worried, because what we’re seeing is the ad hoc closure and drastic cutting of many, many departments across the country."

Historian Lyndal Roper in today's THE: bit.ly/4sqsfJ2 #Skystorians 1/2

Yes! This is what annoys me most about the “LLMs will produce history PhDs”. Summarising work and producing a plausible recapitulation of archival martial is not what historical research is about.

*cliff richard voice* pro-cras-tin-a-tion

Blog Post | The Publics of Mental Health and the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive

Latest blog on public mental health messaging and the British Film Institute’s archive

#history #healthhumanities #mentalhealth #vaccines #publichealth

torch.ox.ac.uk/article/the-...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

This is a link (I hope) to eprint of my essay review 'Teenage Rampage' in Journal of Contemporary History journals.sagepub.com/share/Y57PPG...

would read this for sure