mia ridge

Family historians have always explored new technologies. It's one of the things I love about them! And people are making breakthroughs in previously firm 'brick walls' where the trail runs out, so I can see why you'd give it a go

“My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors”: Gemini generates false records and fake screenshots of TNA website | Who Do You Think You Are Magazine The Gemini LLM generates fake records and screenshots from the UK National Archives, a family historian has revealed

I know 'advanced, paid-for AI models are better than that' yada yada, but why are companies releasing models that are jaw-droppingly bad?

Gemini to a family historian, after making up records: 'My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors''

www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-...

Increased ERC funding for top global researchers moving to Europe now confirmed The European Research Council (ERC) decision to increase its support for leading researchers moving to Europe has today been formally adopted. On top of its standard grants, the ERC offers additional ...

Come to Europe, friends!
The European Research Council (ERC) has just confirmed increased ERC funding for top global researchers moving to Europe. Drop me an email if you want to know more.

erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

“My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors”: Gemini generates false records and fake screenshots of TNA website | Who Do You Think You Are Magazine The Gemini LLM generates fake records and screenshots from the UK National Archives, a family historian has revealed

Gemini: 'I deeply regret the time and effort you spent searching for references that I fabricated. My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors and an attempt to cover those errors with more artificial information.'

www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-...

If the rumours are true and the kids and social media consultation opens today, here are two things I think should be banned from
social media:

1) AI bots
2) recommendations algorithms that optimise for time on site

Firm regulation of both of these things is possible and auditable

Selma Dabbagh | Countercurrents When the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, the destruction was writ large in newspaper headlines and...

‘Since October 2023 five thousand years of cultural buildings and ancient libraries have been bombed into dust in Gaza with hardly a whisper from the international media or cultural institutions.’

@selmadabbagh.bsky.social on the blog.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

2023 in #AI4LAM terms feels a very long time ago! It's not easy to find the videos from Fantastic Futures 2023 so for findability... archive.org/details/fant... - AI in libraries, archives and museums as of 2023

Do you make them in rings? The one time I tried to make them I didn't have rings and they turned out tasty but very thin

Congratulations!

Recent Publication: "Data Born in Literature: The @biodivlibrary.bsky.social – A Global Digital Library Serving the Planet" (2025) / Learn more at bit.ly/4bmezYD

TITAA #76: The Seen and the Unseen SVG Generation - Gemini 3.1 Pro - Beyond Slop - Art Maps - Agentic Patterns - Read in VR

Latest newsletter - SVG is getting good out there, some good stuff in Gemini 3.1 Pro, my project to read in VR, a bunch of rando fun links, a handful of intriguing narrative gen finds. open.substack.com/pub/arnicas/...

Datacentre developers face calls to disclose effect on UK’s net emissions Campaign groups write to technology secretary amid concerns that sites could double overall electricity demand

New AI infrastructure poses a “serious threat to efforts to decarbonise the electricity grid”

The Price of initiative just collapsed From libraries to large models: why the next divide is between people who try things and people who don’t.

Lots of good in this by Martha Lane Fox: 'The impact [of AI] won’t arrive as one big shock. It will seep in through a thousand local compressions ...the entry-level rung thinning out' but OTOH 'When the cost of trying falls, the number of attempts rises' martha6j5h2.substack.com/p/the-price-...

Culture in a changing climate - Museums Association Emma Howard Boyd on why organisations need to act urgently to adapt to the reality of the climate crisis

Museums Association: 'organisations need to act urgently to adapt to the reality of the climate crisis' www.museumsassociation.org/museums-jour...

'Smart kid accused of plagiarism' shocker!

And thinking about the original question, I think dad tried to help with a maths assignment once, but assessment changes so much over the decades that it was sweet but not helpful

📢 DH2026 review results are out!
Long papers: 164/264 (61%)
Short papers: 275/387 (71%)
Posters: 101/131 (76%)
Workshops: 18/19 (95%)
Mini-conferences: 12/13 (92%)
Check your email or ConfTool for your decision.
See you in Daejeon 🇰🇷 July 27–31!
#DH2026 #ADHO

Well-meaning bafflement

I know I keep pointing this out but: if you want immigrants to contribute to British society, integrate across community lines, become engaged civic actors, you actually *want* them to get citizenship, and as soon as possible in fact!

FT: 'The top AI mod­els can be promp­ted to gen­er­ate near-verbatim cop­ies of best­selling nov­els ... [this] could also have ser­i­ous implic­a­tions in other sec­tors where leak­age of any train­ing data could lead to pri­vacy and con­fid­en­ti­al­ity issues.'
ft.pressreader.com/article/2818...

War is hell, mash meme

Culture in a changing climate - Museums Association Emma Howard Boyd on why organisations need to act urgently to adapt to the reality of the climate crisis

Culture in a changing climate - @emmahowardboyd.bsky.social in this piece from the @museumsassociation.org highlights some of the steps cultural organisations are already taking to adapt to the changing climate, but there's so much more to do. www.museumsassociation.org/museums-jour...

Did parkrun in the drizzle and now I get to cosy up at home in the warm and dry for a few hours with nothing more demanding than coffee, the newspaper and a sleepy dog

Frontiers | Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be...

I'm on a 38(!)-author paper just published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, "Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology". We splice Schleiermacher and hermeneutic theory into AI debates, arguing AI are "context machines".
www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

An advertisement for the polio vaccine which reads: "they all got vaccine except dad...don't take a chance...take your polio shots!" It depicts a photo of a family gathered around a father who is in an iron lung.

With science falling under increasing attack, this medical historian is here to remind people of the power of vaccines. THREAD👇

Hard-hitting polio advert from 1958. In the first half of the 20th century, polio was the leading cause of death in children and young adults. 1/7 #history #skystorians

BACKLASH: A Queer Cultural State of The Nation | Cambridge Junction Book tickets for BACKLASH: A Queer Cultural State of The Nation at J1 at Cambridge Junction. Buy tickets here Presented by Curious Arts, Marlborough Productions & Fatt Projects A day of research, shar...

A day of research, sharing & conversation for the UK cultural sector launching new research findings into experiences of anti-LGBTQ+ backlash.
18 March, 10.30am - 4pm, Cambridge Junction www.junction.co.uk/events/backl... @cambridgejunction.bsky.social

Get in touch to tell us how your heritage sector organisation is already using, or would like to use, AI. We’re seeking contributions of 300-500 words.

Express interest to our Newsletter Editors, Katherine (k.a.krick@gmail.com) and Jane (j.m.gallagher@leeds.ac.uk) by 6th March.

You can play with their interactive dashboard hal.cs.princeton.edu/reliability/ for a sense of how closely models are clustered on different aspects of reliability and accuracy. I'd love to see some of those numbers go up!

‘We’ve scratched the surface’: mission to digitise UK public art reaches 1m entries New Art UK chair Ben Terrett appointed as charity marks 10 years of building online database

‘We’ve scratched the surface’: mission to digitise UK public art reaches 1m entries - congratulations ArtUK! An incredible milestone

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

New Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability Quantifying the capability-reliability gap

A nice piece of work: Towards a science of AI agent reliability

AI 'reliability lags capability, and that reliability will remain a barrier to deployment unless researchers and developers focus effort on improving reliability as a separate dimension from accuracy'

www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-...