I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED
Phylogeny of the 284 species of plants included in Conservatory data set. Conservatory uncovered ~2.3 million conserved non-coding DNA sequences across 284 plant species from 72 families including eudicots, monocots, gymnosperms, and algae. Illustrations by Professor Madelaine Bartlett.
Hiding in plain sight! 2.3M conserved non-coding sequences traced back 300M years across 284 plant species
Ground-breaking study out in First Release @science.org from labs of @madelaineb.bsky.social, @idane.bsky.social & Zach Lippman
▶️ doi.org/10.1126/scie...
▶️ www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/news/hiding-...
This is why the phrase comes up in so many of the things I've written about AI.
AI does three main things:
1) dismantle the institutions necessary for democratic society to thrive
2) transfer wealth upwards
3) create the permission structure for (1) and (2)
Cover of Disabling Intelligences over a rainbow glass background
As you begin to build your 2026 reading lists (which is a thing I assume some people do), consider adding my really very short book on AI and Eugenics.
Disabling Intelligences:Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI has a lot in under 50k words.
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
Date: 2025-12-30
Days elapsed: 364 of 365
Year Progress: 99.73%
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Dang, hard disagree. The best papers to write and read are works of art, not merely a list of data and statements.
Don’t let LLMs take this away too, for gods sake.
Unacceptable. There are 189,000 people in my district who will be paying 50–300% more for the same, and in many cases worse, healthcare.
I won’t do that to the people I represent. I’m a NO on this “deal.”
I feel like if your AI company has to apologize to the estate of Martin Luther King Jr you should just flood your servers and walk into the ocean
Joe’s boss here. I pay him for a combination of research and service to the community. Peer review, of course, checks the latter box.
"we cant uninvent ai" no we cant but we couldnt uninvent nfts either and nobody gives a fuck about them anymore
zeldawilliams 20m From Create Mode •• Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't. If you're just trying to troll me, I've seen way worse, i'll restrict and move on. But please, if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want. To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough, , just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.
And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it 'the future. Al is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.
Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔
It’s boiling in October because you’re using ChatGPT to write your emails, Janice.
we’d love to turn off the machine that convinces children to kill themselves, but we can’t really justify losing our ability to lay off customer service agents, now can we?
i think a clarifying question for ai harms researchers is "could this or any harm you research entail abandoning / destroying this form of technology"
and if the answer is some version of "we want to make it better" then you're not a roadblock you're a whetstone
Meta's actions are telling and appalling here, but the solution isn't better guidelines/more content moderation: it's less (read: no) fake people.
Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you:
Our funding depends on usage.
So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.
"Our new white paper on why we're worried Grammarly is mad at us"
A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything
Interesting side note: «Morning Pledge» isn't the work of a single living artist but was produced by an anonymous corporate collective called «Thomas Kinkade Studios®,» which continues to churn out images in Kinkade's signature style long after his death in 2012. It's basically analog AI slop
6/
Academics don’t finish projects, we just lose the energy to keep doubting them
Because a calculator is a device made for a specific purpose, our trust in it would be immediately corrupted if it were to give an incorrect answer. It would be useless.
If you take away the specific purpose you also take away the criteria to determine if something works or not.
Trusting your own judgment in a reflexive way is hard but crucial to democratic autonomy. The externalization of judgement weakens this moral muscle
I am sitting in a public library working on a grant, and a grandmotherly woman is patiently teaching a small boy how to read at the table next to me. Another woman is knitting nearby. The children’s section is packed with kids. Things in my country are bleak, but libraries are where I find hope. ❤️
screenshot of a PDF with two "ask AI assistant" buttons and toolbars, as well as a button to summarize the PDF with AI
Trying to read a PDF and I am being prompted in three separate places to use an LLM to summarize the fucking article. Is this what they mean when they say that gen AI is inevitable
Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.
Because it’s harder to catch defects in code you didn’t write, the only realistic way of ensuring that you really do “go faster” is to let more defects through, unintentionally or no.
So, effectively “LLMs for coding” are largely a cover story for improving throughput by relaxing quality standards
Taken from Sam Landman on FB but not sure if he is the artist. Graphic saying AI is for losers, reject fascism think for yourself. I can make Art that’s ugly and bad all by myself thank you very much
We can't just tell people to not watch video or scroll instagram or whatever, but if we get busy at an early age showing the deep pleasure that can be had through engagement with writing, those other things become less tempting, or if tempting, they can at least be compartmentalized.