Have you ever found yourself quoted online for something you never said?
We've seen a few examples of academics having their voice used for quotes they never said in fake news websites and in AI chatbots â but think there's a lot more
If that's you shoot me a DM or comment here
#journorequest
While this world may seem fantastical in its capacity for cruelty, it very much mirrors the horrors of our own present. We find that the Tretoans have appropriated a tradition from a society they almost eradicated; they carry out executions on gibbets made from the bones of victims of the empire. This exploitation of colonised bodies at the highest and most rarified levels of the imperial core is shocking and distressing and entirely plausible in our own reality. Would the story of dons at one of the most prestigious universities in the world drinking out of the skull of an enslaved woman at dinner parties strain your disbelief?
The review made me aware of this wild fact that Oxford academics have a history of drinking out of the skull of an enslaved woman at dinner parties â something that's reflected in the brutality of the Tretoans in the story collection.
There's a review of @premeemohamed.com's One Message Remains in today's Sower.
Libby, the reviewer, found the fantasy story collection to be a hopeful look into how all of us, no matter whether we're inside or outside the imperial core, have the power to resist colonialism and its lack of empathy.
When people use AI for writing assistance, it can shift their political attitudes by autocompleting sentences in biased ways.
Yet people are often unaware of the AI bias & it's influence
This is not merely about the facts presented, but how autocomplete worlds
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Tonight in the ai reading group i was reminded of something that happened in 2006 after I dropped out of college, when I was living in a run-down old house next to jb alberto's in rogers park with a bunch of dudes.
it was, as you can imagine, not clean.
The time between fossil fuel crises is just going to keep shrinking, until there's no discrete single "crisis" - just one unbroken prolonged state of global suffering due to fossil fuel unreliability
The best time to ditch fossil fuels was 30 years ago. The second best time is now
An energy crisis is not a crisis for *everyone*
Since the war in Iran started, oil companies in the EU have been getting an EXTRA âŹ81.4 million in profit EVERY DAY as the prices of petrol and diesel go through the roof
Governments and the EU must tax these profits to help ordinary people
When I was a student (1990s France), students smoked in classrooms between classes, in halls, in student meetings, etc, and it was seen as impossible to counteract (and I was shouted at for asking people not to).
The two biggest newspaper publishers in Australia are less strict, Nine doesnât prohibit AI but does prohibit it being used in the writing of copy, while News Corp requires the oversight of an editorial manager. Jo Tarnawsky confirmed to us she has indeed been using AI, not to generate her essays from scratch but to assist her along the way, and explained she had not known about Crikeyâs tough AI policy before filing to the publication. She also said: I get there's AI slop and photos that are completely fake. I'm offended that I'm now being accused of this type of conduct when I was using it to check and refine my work ⌠There are reasonable, ethical uses of AI tools. The answer is to acknowledge this and ⌠not to pretend it doesn't exist ⌠- Email, Jo Tarnawsky, Author, 20 Mar 2026 As it turns out, Jo Tarnawsky is no Robinson Crusoeâthis study from the Thomson Reuters Foundation suggesting as many as eight out of every ten journalists in some regions use AI in their work. And, notwithstanding her ill-advised reliance on the machine, it seems patently obvious Crikeyâs hardline position is really not sustainable. Conceding in an email to us, it is indeed having trouble holding back the tide. But these tools, while revolutionary, are also perilous no matter how much they weasel their way into our lives, and journalists above all others perhaps must be vigilant to the risks they pose to the foundations of good reporting, independent research, clear thinking, and above all else, words on the page that actually make sense.
The more I think about it, the more I hate @lintonbesser.bsky.social's implication here that allowing machine-generated plagiarism and fabrications in media+opinion is somehow "inevitable"
Frankly, it seems to go against the entire existence of media watch?
www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/e...
I often see a lot of talk about climate media r.e film and TV, but very rarely see anything about games (and I'm guilty of this line of thinking myself). We ignore games as a medium for change at our own peril!
Vervoort, whose research sits at the nexus between climate and gaming, wishes that progressive movements would pay more attention to games as a space for change. He pointed out that video games are the largest form of media globally, eclipsing music and film. âGames are a cultural force. They reinforce identities and values, and reproduce them. They galvanise communities and networks,â he said. âThey're a vector for social change in that sense.â With progressives not really paying attention to games, it leaves the space open to takeover from the far-right. The White House shared a video splicing bombings of Iran together with video game footage, and one of the worldâs largest video game streamers, Asmongold, excused the fact that a school full of kids in Iran got bombed. âThere's not enough progressives doing stuff in the game space, and especially in the social media ecosystems around games,â he said.
Something fascinating that @joostvervoort.bsky.social pointed out was that games are the largest form of media globally (surpassing film + music).
However, games are often co-opted to promote right-wing ideals i.e the White House splicing bombings of Iran together with video game footage.
Microsoft is the priority target for @nogamesforgenocide.com given the tech corp's ties to the IDF, & small indie developer @allwillrise.bsky.social recently broke contract with Xbox to support the campaign.
I spoke to them about their decision & why progressives must take up more space in games.
New interview out! @jackmcgovan.bsky.social asked me all about @allwillrise.bsky.social and our decision to give back money to Microsoft as part of our support for @nogamesforgenocide.com. Good insightful questions, take a look: www.sower.world/all-rise-gen... #indiegames #boycott #freepalestine
Urgent journo request: for @goodlawproject.org I'm looking to speak to friends of #trans ppl in the UK who have died whose #gender was not accurately recorded on their death certificate. Iâm particularly interested in cases from the last year. I promise to handle your story with care đ¤
Fascinating new study about menâs friendships.
Thereâs a lot of evidence here that the âmale loneliness crisisâ is actually a white, wealthy man problem. Other men are building friendships with similar depth to womenâs friendships.
NEW - I asked the UK government if they had assessed energy demand/emissions resulting from plans to make the UK an "AI superpower".
The analysis they pointed me to seemed... pretty implausible. Just 0.1m tonnes of CO2 a year.
My calculations suggest emissions could be 100s of times higher.
Everything we need to do to stop climate breakdown, we also need to do for national security. Energy saving, more renewables, more electricity storage and interconnectors, electrification of transport, heating, cooking and industrial processes, plant-based diets. We win on all fronts.
That climate culture became, in many ways, clean energy culture, and clean energy culture is simply energy culture means that the people most invested in it have absorbed of that group's norms around patriarchy, gender, and race, which skew extremely conservative.
Rather than trying to bring humanity together to help us deal with existential crises like the climate crisis, AI is further siloing us into individuals, separating us from real human interaction. People are so alienated by modern life that theyâre turning to an inanimate piece of software for emotional support. Rather than spending more time with our children and enriching their lives with real human contact, weâre instead putting software in their stuffed toys to interact with themâsoftware that tells them how to find matches and gives detailed explanations of sexual kinks. Instead of going along with these developments, why donât we take a step back as a society and ask whether this is something we actually all want for our future? That, SchĂźtze said, means we need to sit with the reality of our situation and face it head on. Dealing with the climate crisis is going to be an uncomfortable process, it means weâre going to have to give up the comfort and ease that AI promises us. âAlthough that can make you feel very overwhelmed, I think itâs important to really let reality sink in, and then let it motivate you to act,â he said. While SchĂźtze doesnât have a lot of hope that we are going to turn things around in time to address the climate crisis, he doesnât want to give into nihilism. He advocates instead for people to live authentically in a way that aligns with their values; collectively we can steer the world in a different direction. âI want to live in a world with more solidarity, for instance,â he said. âSo even though I don't believe that a better future for all is on the cards right now, I can still build community and live according to my values to try and make that future a reality.â
A tangible demonstration of this can be found in cars, said SchĂźtze. Cars are a mode of transport that allows a person to move between different points without having direct contact with other humans. A society that builds that kind of infrastructure has a certain set of values attached to it, like, for example, prioritising individual autonomy over all else. The more people use cars, the more those values become ingrained in society. On the flipside, a society that builds out a robust public transport system would have different values. That society would value collectivism and community spirit more, as transport would only be possible with direct contact with other humansâshared spaces become more important than individual autonomy. To that end, while electric cars might be more sustainable than fossil-fuel vehicles in terms of emissions, they still promote values that uphold the system that brought the climate crisis in the first place. Thatâs not to say that people who use cars or AI are evil; most people just want to live their lives and use the tools that are available to them. Itâs just about recognising that technologies are more than how their end users interact with them. AI is not just an app: itâs imbued in the ideology that birthed it, and itâs the infrastructure that was built to support itâthe data centres, hardware, and labour. âYou can never really talk about ChatGPT, LLMs, or other algorithms without also talking about this other infrastructure,â said SchĂźtze.
If generative AI had zero resource impact, would it be fine to use?
No! This is a really good @jackmcgovan.bsky.social piece about why -->>>
www.sower.world/ai-resource-...
I put up an advert two days ago looking for people to do illustrations for my newsletter, and I was up front that I can't afford to pay them.
I've already had four people reach out who've been looking for an opportunity to get more editorial illustration experience.
I hate this excuse for using AI because there are so many people who would even make a cover for free just to get some experience.
Instead of trying to reach out to or build community with other creatives, it's just straight to the plagiarism machine.
The Greens plan to put social media giants like X and Facebook on the same legal footing as all other publishers in order to regulate them using defamation laws.
This is an important step forward. Everyone should back the move - even opponents of the Greens
My @heraldscotland.bsky.social column
A great piece by Ketan here for further reading today on climate and AI:
What happens when climate advocates offload the head and heart of our work onto morally offensive American tech corps?
TY to @newrepublic.com for letting me write about why "does it work" is the wrong debate around GenAI, as it is for fossil fuels. It hurts us and our cause, and that matters most
LLMs have zero use for climate, I'm comfortable saying that. I haven't done enough reading or thinking about other kinds of AI to have a fully formed opinion there.
I don't think chasing efficiency is the way forward though â that's just replicating the values of our current system.
If you're a junior researcher and you're thinking about the systemic issues facing our world (climate, tech, fascism etc) in a different way, I'd love to speak to you about your work and potentially write about it.
You can DM me or reach out via email (in my bio) if you're interested!
Text from the article: A tangible demonstration of this can be found in cars, said SchĂźtze. Cars are a mode of transport that allows a person to move between different points without having direct contact with other humans. A society that builds that kind of infrastructure has a certain set of values attached to it, like, for example, prioritising individual autonomy over all else. The more people use cars, the more those values become ingrained in society. On the flipside, a society that builds out a robust public transport system would have different values. That society would value collectivism and community spirit more, as transport would only be possible with direct contact with other humansâshared spaces become more important than individual autonomy. To that end, while electric cars might be more sustainable than fossil-fuel vehicles in terms of emissions, they still promote values that uphold the system that brought the climate crisis in the first place.
Even if AI was 100% sustainable, it would still be bad for the environment. Think of cars: sure, electric vehicles emit less than fossil-fuel vehicles, but the real solution to transport emissions is public transport.
Our technologies reflect our values, and AI is not a flattering reflection.
Although AI consumes a lot of water and energy, its biggest environmental impact is that it reproduces values that got us into the climate crisis in the first place: extraction, productivity, and efficiency.
I spoke to @paulschuetze.bsky.social about his research on this!
We talk a lot about how much resources AI consumes. But this neglects a deeper problem.
Even perfectly efficient AI would still reproduce the climate crisis.
I spoke to @jackmcgovan.bsky.social
about this.
đFind the piece here:
www.sower.world/ai-resource-...
Does anyone have any recommendations for transcription software that can do English and German? Or, alternatively, just German?