hi @stamanfar.bsky.social and thanks Gavin, yes both adult and children's!

Two weeks today!

Sign up for the latest @transformgovtalks.bsky.social with:

@laragroves.bsky.social, @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social on www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/scrib...

Owen from the ICO on ico.org.uk/about-the-ic...

In person (central London) or online 👇

How will OpenAI compete? — Benedict Evans OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are lever...

'it’s interesting to compare how hard it was to differentiate a web browser with how hard it is today to differentiate a chatbot'
Fab piece from @thebenedictevans.bsky.social asking hard Qs of OpenAI when its tech is similar to other labs and has no network effects www.ben-evans.com/benedictevan...

an unsurprising take from someone who loves both Middlemarch and Infinite Jest

The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading” Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word?

not to be a massive bore but in these times of A) received inter-gender polarisation and b) AI sloppified media/textual offerings it does feel insane to keep chiding men for... reading books
www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

84% of the UK public are concerned about the government putting technology sector needs ahead of the public when regulating AI. Source: A nationally representative online poll with 1,928 UK adults aged 18+ between 8–24 September 2025

🎄All we want for Christmas is for AI regulation to work for people and society.

Our new polling shows the UK public are concerned that tech companies’ needs are being prioritised over their own when it comes to AI regulation.

Read the full findings ⬇️
www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/policy-brief...

academia friends, anyone got experience using Open Review as a Programme Chair? help needed please!

In the intro issue of New Left Review, Stuart Hall noted, “The humanist strengths of socialism—which are the foundations for a genuinely popular socialist movement—must be developed in cultural and social terms, as well as in economic and political.“

Zohran Kwame Mamdani‘s campaign got the point!

NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.

Either real-time bidding data or app SDK data is being bought and used by ICE to seize people from the streets. If you didn’t believe that the adtech stack is a human rights concern, I’m not sure what more evidence you need. www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

It would be good if the only political pushback against Nigel Farage's plans to mass deport hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, friends, family and colleagues didn't just come from a handful of backbench MPs and one regional mayor

The UK’s £31bn tech deal with the US might sound great – but the government has to answer these questions | Matt Davies The big firms making these pledges are not charities. We know there will be a quid pro quo; we just don’t know what it is yet, says Matt Davies of the Ada Lovelace Institute

The headlines — £31bn in investment, new jobs, faster medical treatments — sound almost too good to be true. What are we giving up in return?

Me in @theguardian.com on today's US-UK Tech Deal:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

From BBC live news ticker: Police are not using live facial recognition in its policing of the 'Unite the Kingdom' demonstration which is beginning on London's south bank, reports the PA news agency. It said: • We're using a mobile CCTV van to help monitor the build up of crowds. Officers have been asked if it's using 'live facial recognition' - we can confirm it is not. The live facial recognition technology - which captures people's faces in real-time CCTV cameras - was used in the policing operation at the Notting Hill carnival.

Met Police’s policy on when they use oppressive facial recognition technology is made pretty clear here…

✅ Black community celebration / event

❌ White supremacist rally

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers We align the aligners

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

hey im putting something together for my boss for his birthday. yeah can you write a letter or better yet an insane poem or horrifying drawing about the unspeakable crimes you all have committed together

Radical right accommodation really does not work.

New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Please apply for / pass on this vacancy with @tuc.org.uk!

You'll be working with the brilliant @adamc-c.bsky.social and with us @connectedbydata.org to ensure workers' voices are an effective countervailing force that shape the adoption of AI.

tuc.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/...

Police should focus on ‘streets not tweets’, says Wes Streeting after Graham Linehan arrest Health secretary criticises Tory policing record after Father Ted co-creator arrested over posts on transgender issues

1. Incitement to violence is a serious offence, carrying a sentence of up to six months in prison.

2. What's it got to do with the health secretary?

3. I'm sure if I posted that Wes Streeting needed a good kicking, he would be very eager to send the cops round.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Keir Starmer: cut me and I bleed union j

the level of disorder on show in the UK right now in terms of kneejerk conspirational thinking against every possible intervention or source of authority is quite the concern!!

The trouble is that the very sector powering so much of America’s economic growth is squeezing the rest of its output. Housebuilders, for instance, cannot afford to be blithe about higher borrowing costs. Data centres have also constrained the rest of the economy by keeping energy prices high. Average American electricity bills have risen by 7% so far in 2025, at least in part because of the extra strain data centres have put on the grid.

Chart showing investment in AI infrastructure shooting up as investment in other parts of the economy declines

Spending on AI data centers is now so great that it’s crowding out investment in housing and other critical parts of the real economy, through higher energy costs and by propping up interest rates, argues The Economist

economist.com/finance-and-...

Far right demagoguery - thanks to crucial, repeated validation from the political mainstream - has painted a target on the back of every man of colour in this country.

Everyone knows what is likely to happen next.

Why we still need small language models – even in the age of frontier AI Lean, locally run models can unlock huge benefits for public sector and compute-constrained environments

Interesting work from Turing, adding to the growing evidence that significant performance gains — and possibly real-world utility — can still be gleaned from smaller and previous-generation foundation models

www.turing.ac.uk/blog/why-we-...

resonates with what we're finding in forthcoming Ada research on transcription tools in social work.

these tools are being rolled out without systematic evaluation, often with a singular theory of change -'productivity gains' - which risks obscuring other important impacts on work & care

Israel murders five Al Jazeera staff in Gaza, including Anas al-Sharif Al-Sharif was killed along with Mohammed Qreiqeh two cameramen and an assistant in an Israeli attack on Gaza City.

Last month, Anas al-Sharif sounded the alarm on starvation in Gaza. Israel accused him of terrorism.

"We warned this felt like a precursor to justify assassination," said Jodie Ginsberg of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Today he was killed in a targeted strike on a tent housing reporters.

Arresting 400+ people for the "terrorist" offence of protesting against mass murder while large segments of the right are openly encouraging riots against immigrants is a tale of a very unhappy country and government.

AI thrives where education has been devalued | The Observer A culture that views knowledge as a means to an end invites the misuse of new technology

'It is less that AI is the cause of degradation in reading and thinking, and more that the creation of a culture that views knowledge primarily in an instrumental manner has made it easier to misuse AI.'

Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable and more sycophantic Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we sho...

fascinating paper on 'character training' LLMs - models fine-tuned to be 'warmer' are significantly more likely to promote conspiracy theories or validate incorrect facts, particularly when users express sadness 🤯 arxiv.org/abs/2507.21919