Data and Ethics

While every news site and Hollywood name remember Val Kilmer, who sadly passed away on Tuesday - X, formerly Twitter, ("the public town square" and "more credible than the traditional news media [Elon Musk]" is quite clear that his death has been..."falsely reported".

The AIs Are Not Going Rogue www.noemamag.com/the-ais-are-...

A culture of divination has grown all around us - from machine learning, to prediction markets, and forecasting of all kinds, not to mention psychics and astrology. But have you ever wondered what, exactly, is in a prediction? TED talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4w... #PROPHECY #authors

So, what are the alternatives to Spotify now that it is driven by AI slop? I am certainly looking into it.

Today is a huge win for creatives around the world, as Australia makes it clear it will not bow to pressure from AI companies to legalise the theft of creatives’ work. 🧵 1/3

🚨 China's new law on anthropomorphic AI comes into effect tomorrow, and the world should be paying attention:

"Technology and social media promised to bring us together, but more often it feels like they siphon each of us into a solitary lifestyle, and it’s hurting us.” Bookstores are filling a social void. Go for the social event, stay for the #books? lithub.com/a-bookstore-...

“Boards that have treated AI ethics as a reputational question will have to treat it as a litigation risk, faster than most of them currently expect.” #AIEthics #BusinessEthics www.ft.com/content/64fc...

More very wrong news from Grok. Labour won the Makerfield by-election with 55% of the vote. Partly due to the 6.2% surge in turnout - the biggest increase for a by-election since 1958. Groks opinion? "crushing by-election defeat". The grey text at the bottom doesn't excuse this level of wrong.

You might think that AI is the topic of our time, but it's not. Prediction is. "Carissa Véliz (...) argues that data should always be regarded as a human artefact and that predictions tend to be downstream from power." #Prophecy www.ft.com/content/b1f4...

The tide has turned. Source: Pew Research Center, 2026

When I disabled all the notifications on my smart phone, I felt such an enormous sense of relief. It took me a while to figure out why. It was because I wasn't being constantly interrupted New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications www.psypost.org/new-psycholo...

I follow Zara Gladman on Instagram and minutes ago she posted that her friends new hairdressing business has just burned down this evening in the glasgow fire. It opened just days ago. There’s a link if you can spare a few quid. www.paypal.com/pools/c/9nhn...

Dario is no saint either: open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

Models we know were trained on pirated books (a non-exhaustive list): GPT-3 (OpenAI) GPT-3.5 (OpenAI) Claude 1 (Anthropic) Claude 2 (Anthropic) Llama 1 (Meta) Llama 2 (Meta) Llama 3 (Meta) OpenELM (Apple) BloombergGPT (Bloomberg) Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (Microsoft & Nvidia) 🧵 1/2

Next phase:

Brutal (but fair) Guardian headline today Only 3% of respondents to the UK government’s consultation on AI & copyright supported their unfair plan to hand AI companies people’s work for free. 95% said AI companies should license training data. 🧵 1/2

Reminder

The most unsubtle, yet brilliantly done, argument on popular Podcasts and the "both sides" argument. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBq3...

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

There's always someone along in a minute that wants to make it about them. :)

“Either we have copyright law or we don’t. Either plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property are anathema to higher education or they aren’t. We’re either modeling academic honesty and integrity to our students or we aren’t.” —@thetattooedprof.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/some... 1/n

Microsoft Word to begin saving people's documents in the cloud *by default* Reminder that LibreOffice is free and a good drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office software: www.libreoffice.org www.theverge.com/news/767522/...

There are legal implications behind social media posts made to fit a fake persona or appeal to a certain group. You can be legally punished for those. Is the recognition that an AI could be making it up better or worse for social cohesion and free speech? Will people be punished the same way?

I am a huge fan of topical sarcasm. :) "In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen" www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-t...

Join our keynotes Simon Wardley, Sander Hoogendoorn and Sarah Wells, and be part of the 12th annual Lean Agile Scotland conference. Meet fellow practitioners, gain practical tools and share ideas in Edinburgh this September. Join us there: leanagile.scot/tickets

“.. Fears of a bubble are mounting, as tech stocks follow a pattern that is ‘surprisingly similar’ to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s ..” @bloomberg.com $QQQ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

@carissaveliz.bsky.social I started a petition to ask the government to ban the harvesting of behavioural data. Perhaps you could boost it to your network? petition.parliament.uk/petitions/71... #privacy #surveillancecapitalism #petition

The most unsubtle, yet brilliantly done, argument on popular Podcasts and the "both sides" argument. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBq3...

ChatGPT Agent clicks the 'I'm not a bot' button because "this step is necessary to prove I'm not a bot." Everything is fine in AI.

“Nobody loved the library more than Dan.” A meticulous list kept by Dan Pelzer from 1962-2025, cataloging all the books he borrowed and read from the Columbus Metropolitan Library, shared by his daughter. I could not could not love this more. Dan's book list (all 109 pages) at what-dan-read.com

Disinformation warriors are ‘grooming’ chatbots - on.ft.com/46hV6qW via @FT

“Let’s just grab all the books we can for AI training, what could possibly go wro-” chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/07/17/a...

🚨 Today, we've filed complaints against TikTok, AliExpress and WeChat 👉 All of them failed to comply with access requests. This makes it impossible for Europeans to exercise their right to privacy and find out how their data is being processed. noyb.eu/en/how-tikto...

Hopefully the government can avoid locking into new contracts with Google for what is essentially untested technology. Replacing multiple tech contracts for one could be far worse for the tax payer.

If there was another World War getting the facts will be even harder with modern technology.

It's not a huge surprise that a GenAI will respond to a fake image as if it is true. It will assume it is, what else could it do? Though a GenAI that actively tries to deduce the truth could be even more amusing.

Has anyone tracked the downfall of Google quality since the retirement of the "Don't be evil" goal? The days of using Google as a main search engine are long gone.

o3 can't play chess. what that tell us about dreams of AGI? open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...