Bronwyn Isaacs

Deloitte to partially refund Australian government for report with apparent AI-generated errors Deloitte Australia will partially refund the Australian government for a report filled with apparent AI-generated errors.

If you submit a report with fabricated sources and quotes as a University student, you would fail the assignment. Government and consultancy companies need to hire people to do serious plagiarism checks on the reports they produce when work relies on generative AI. apnews.com/article/aust...

As forests are cut down, butterflies are losing their colours The insects’ brilliant hues evolved in lush ecosystems to help them survive. Now they are becoming more muted to adapt to degraded landscapes – and they are not the only things dulling down

"Discovering that forests are losing their colours was frightening and revelatory, says Spaniol. . . 'A decline in their colour diversity may reflect a loss of complexity in ecosystems as a whole, with potential cascading effects'" www.theguardian.com/environment/...

OpenAI launch of video app Sora plagued by violent and racist images: ‘The guardrails are not real’ Misinformation researchers say lifelike scenes could obfuscate truth and lead to fraud, bullying and intimidation

David Karpf: "this is the year that tech companies have decided they don’t give a shit"
Emily Bender, "an oil spill. . .weakening and breaking relationships of trust”
Joan Donovan “It has no fidelity to history, it has no relationship to the truth,” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Part 10. It’s All Downhill From Here What is technology actually facilitating?

" A robot-lead reality is unlikely, but a reality where we accept violence as the status quo is already here" tacticaltech.org/news/insight...

Reports of modernity's disenchantment of the world were apparently wildly premature. "Science" has seamlessly replaced the "supernatural" as the preferred medium of magical thinking.

‘A symbol of liberation’: how the One Piece manga flag became the symbol of Asia’s gen Z protest movement Carried by a band of pirates that stand up to corrupt and repressive rulers, the meaning of the One Piece flag has resonated across borders

"One Piece, by Eiichiro Oda, holds the record for the most copies published in the same comic book series by a single author, with 500m copies printed worldwide" www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Want to work in the Waikato, New Zealand? My school is hiring a few positions in #Psychology:
Senior Tutor in Psychology
Lecturer in Clinical Psychology
Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Analysis
elhs.fa.ap1.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

"Why does this absolutely unfounded myth that the Family Court somehow always sides with women and always harms men have so much traction? Because it resonates with underlying stereotypes,” she says. “It’s familiar to us, because it’s the baggage that we all carry around"

Amazing guest lectures today in Protest Movements of the Asia Pacific class today from activist-scholar, Kerry Tabuni and from Assistant Professor dos Santos @eraldo.bsky.social. People in very different parts of the world - all speaking to the West Papuan Independence Movement. Waa waa waa!

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori celebrates 50 years Māori Language Week has kicked off, with a parade, webinar series and a time capsule planned.

Rawe! 50 years of Maori language week today:
www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa... ""We've gone from a time when te reo Māori was barely heard in public, to a time when it's sung in stadiums, spoken in workplaces and celebrated in our homes."

🚨 8 days left to submit an abstract for the ASAA/NZ conference this year in beautiful Raglan/Whāingaroa 🌊. 9-12 December. Thanks to @wennergrenorg.bsky.social participants from Low and Middle Income countries can apply for travel awards ✈️ #anthropology #conference
www.asaanz.org/conference

To kill is exhausting
Tuer fatigue

Warner Bros. Discovery sues Midjourney for generating ‘countless’ copies of its characters Hollywood’s battle with AI is heating up.

Another lawsuit against the “virtual vending machine” www.theverge.com/news/772101/...

Digital cities and their commercial aesthetics: The celebration of monarchy in Bangkok - Bronwyn Isaacs, 2025 This article argues that the expanding role of digital urban infrastructure in Bangkok has revitalised a visual aesthetic designed to uphold royal authority. Th...

My paper in Urban Studies is finally out! Check it out to see how cheap digital infrastructures and technologies are used to bolster inequality and monarchical authority in Bangkok. doi.org/10.1177/0042...

"Current debates about AI’s future potential take us into related territory around concepts like creativity or thinking. We need inalienability as a theoretical framework for articulating what is at stake" www.at-commons.com/pub/8wem4ske...

Paetongtarn Shinawatra is Out. Who Will Succeed Her? Four possible scenarios

Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been removed by the Constitutional Court. Here, I lay out four potential scenarios on what comes next. www.coffeeparliament.com/p/paetongtar...

Councillor or chatbot? First local election with AI technology Local election candidates have mixed views on the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in campaigning.

In which I compare AI content to 2 minute noodles. 🍜

www.1news.co.nz/2025/08/24/c...

🤣

I promise you.

0.25 black pen drawing of a flying bird against a loosely painted blue, watercolour sky. A similar loose, smoky grey wash adds tone to the seabird's outstretched wings, neck, top of head and beak. It has small pink legs and feet tucked backwards.

14 'Ua'u Hawaiian Petrel
Endangered species formerly found on all main Hawaiian Islands except Niʻihau. Now mostly restricted to Haleakalā crater on Maui. Birds travel as far as Alaska and Japan during two-week-long feeding trips.

#artYear #ArtChallenge #drawing #bird #watercolour #pen #sciart

"smoothed-out look to footage that makes it look “like plastic""

Stanza & Applaud - Passing The Torch To New NZ Poet Laureate National Poetry Day has been ushered in with the announcement of the country's Poet Laureate - the departing Chris Tse interviews his successor Robert Sullivan (and vice versa).

Robert Sullivan: A new NZ Poet Laureate!

From Waka 78:
"amid the context of a minor colony
draining Imperial coffers, Imperial forces,
amid the resistance of souls
to becoming the essence of souls
the Empire took the waka"
thebigidea.nz/stories/stan...

"There were interviews to conduct and transcribe, students to support, messages that needed to be sent. The urgency to bear witness outweighed the need to rest."

An ancient manuscript. Along the left margin is a drawn-on octopus whose tentacles point out important sentences on the page.

In the 14th century, someone who didn't have a highlighter handy thought to use octopus tentacles to mark the most important parts. I love it so much

(Manuscript from the Bankcroft library, UC Berkeley)

I’ve been using it for Spanish since this past winter, and the decline in quality since the inclusion of AI is striking. The things it’s teaching me make no sense anymore. As my best friend put it, “Duolingo’s goal is not to teach you a language, but to keep you using Duolingo.”

"we can do theory-building through ethnography by insisting that we hold practices of risk classification accountable for the outcomes in service to which they are pressed: namely, pooling of wealth and the conferral of social and political entitlements enjoyed by the wealthy”

Are you an anthropologist interested in extractivism at the margins? Vast concentration of wealth enabled by novel monopolistic and interventionist economies? See the CFP for "New Fascist Economies" panel at the Anthropology Conference in Aotearoa @carlyschuster.bsky.social www.asaanz.org/conference

Authors warn AI copyright exception a 'free pass' for Big Tech to steal work The Productivity Commission's interim report on AI has triggered a fierce backlash from the literary community.

"tech and AI are booming in Australia,. . . We're in the top five global destinations for data centres. . . so it's not the case that Australian copyright law, which is robust and protects creators, is hindering any kind of innovation and investment." www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

A popular Japanese anime flag has become a symbol of resistance Young Indonesians dissatisfied with the government are flying a flag from the popular anime One Piece ahead of the country's 80th independence day.

"the government would take "firm action" if there were any deliberate acts of flying the pirate flag on Indonesia's Independence Day. . . Suyanto, a sociologist from University of Airlangga, told the ABC the One Piece flag trend was a "massive movement" www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Microsoft Hosted Explicit Videos of This Startup Founder for Years. Here's How She Got Them Taken Down Breeze Liu has been a prominent advocate for victims. But even she struggled to scrub nonconsensual intimate images and videos of herself from the web.

Did you know there is a free tool alectoai.com that finds and reports explicit deepfake content? "It’s almost impossible for ordinary people to navigate the complex system and do damage control" www.wired.com/story/deepfa...