Geraldine Seymour

To address that, we have long advocated for the development of "public AI": models and AI systems that are developed under democratic control and deployed for public benefit, not sold by corporations to benefit their shareholders. The movement for this is growing worldwide.

Cigarette manufacturers shouldn’t be getting all this money, we should be growing our own tobacco with tax payer money!

1/This week has seen a blitz of what looks like corruption sandals: Saudi development deals for US military tech, Pakistani payments to Trump insiders for tariff relief, Swiss gold bars for a trade deal. Far from a payoff, this is a reordering of internat'l system.
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mxthh...

Academic intros that go hard

Bogans might be useful too

The LUP logo in white is displayed in the left-hand corner of the image. Next to it and towards the right, there is a blue text box with white text inside which reads 'LIVERPOOL SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES ONLINE'. Underneath there are four book covers lined up next to each other: 'The Science Fiction of Defeat', 'Science Fiction and the Modern World', 'Metafiction and Narrative Worlds in Science Fiction', 'Reading Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Techno-Nationalism'. Underneath the covers is a blue text box which spans the length of the image with white text inside that reads, 'Perpetual Access | No Online Hosting Fees | 3 Years' Worth of Future Content'. The background of the image is a blurred section of the cover image from 'Science Fiction and the Modern World'.

🚀 Discover new and forthcoming ebooks in Liverpool Science Fiction Studies Online, a digital collection offering a broad perspective on a variety of themes relating to #SFStudies. Available to libraries as a one-off purchase and with perpetual access.

Browse the full collection ➡️ bit.ly/lsfso

Highway Code showing that left-turning drivers must give way to pedestrians.

I was so focused on jumping out of the way to avoid being hit by a left-turning car, that I was very nearly taken out by a left-turning Deliveroo rider — who also wasn’t giving way to pedestrians and thus was unprepared when I was forced into his path last night.
#HighwayCode

"There is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics," Musk says, conveniently replacing the word "me" with the better-testing "everyone."

Superb commentary from @niedermeyer.online omfg we are so screwed…

Difficult to understand why #bbcmidlandstoday thought an OB inside #CoventryCathedral while an actual remembrance service was going on was an appropriate course of action. Actually disgraceful…

Jade Bird performing at the Manchester Academy

Bless your heart, Jade Bird…

Looking forward to #JadeBird at Manchester Academy tonight…

"After burning through almost a trillion dollars, we finally invented a computer that can't do math."

"For the torment nexus, that is the AI industry, to get built, it needs to convince you that your only option for survival is to help build it."

Comment on a linked in post, from user Kurtis Loken who presents themself as "Experienced Metrology Engineer | AI/ML real world experience | Patented Solutions | R&D | Mass Production" Comment reads: Emily M. Bender You are a linguist. LLMs have proven some theories disproved others about how language works. I would think that would be an amazing time to be a linguist. Have you ever actually talked to an AI…I mean really talked to one? The Turing test has been passed. (Sonnet 4.5 has particularly impressed me when discussing ideas with it…definitely has passed my own Turing test.) I would really love to see a conversation between yourself and it discussing your views. That would make a great podcast. Have these models explain to you why your idea to ban them may or may not be a good idea. These things probably have their own opinions on the topic if someone would listen to them. Maybe that’s you?

Every day it feels more and more like a zombie apocalypse over on LinkedIn, in which you start a conversation with someone who you hope is an ordinary person and then a couple of turns in discover that they have surrendered their brains to the "AI" mass delusion.

Reposted to celebrate some excellent copywriting that presumably is still being done by a human being…

Talking seriously about hijacking into robot bodies via VR is the most real-life sci-fi thing I've typed out this year.

Startup launches ‘industry-first’ certification for human-made books UK start-up Books By People has launched a new certification – the Organic Literature Certification – with a group of independent publishing houses to “counter AI-generated books”.

We're very proud to be the first publisher to have the Books By People stamp - and that it should be going to Telenovela, a book about the fight against authoritarianism and all the associated nonsense:

www.thebookseller.com/news/uk-star...

A poster of Space: 1999 with Martin Landau

I loved Space:1999 as a kid, but only ever saw it in black and white…

Vote him out of office…

Screen cap from linked article, with heading Significance and then text: Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Yet, what appears as alignment with human or expert judgments may conceal a deeper shift in how “judgment” itself is operationalized. Using news outlets as a controlled benchmark, we compare six LLMs to expert ratings and human evaluations under an identical, structured framework. While models often match expert outputs, our results suggest that they may rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification. Our findings suggest not only performance asymmetries but also a shift in the heuristics underlying evaluative processes, raising fundamental questions about delegating judgment to LLMs. Sentence starting with "While models often" is highlighted in blue.

I'd love to see someone try to estimate just how much time and money has gone into research that is either fully undermined by reliance on LLMs or fully pointless --- because obvious if you start from an understanding of what LLMs actually are.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Check out our recent blog post all about 'The Embedding' by Ian Watson and a fascinating look at how the author explores linguistics alongside science fiction.

Read student Jonathan Thornton's blog: https://orlo.uk/UqgDO

#livunilibrary #livuni #specialcollections #voyager #sciencefiction

Me too

The advertising banner for Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley. It’s time to atone…

Nearly here…

A plan for an idea of a product…

Pre-ordered. Can’t wait. A writer of immense talent. 84k still haunts me.

A black cat

October is my favourite month…

The rapidity of the shift in usage from the pejorative ‘human waste’ or ‘low quality output’ to ‘trivial but fun’ tells its own story.

A.I. Slop Is Here

The unironic use of the term ‘AI Slop’ by the NY Times and by @kevinroose.com on Hardfork.

Shout out to all my fellow arts and humanities graduates in the UK with our rip off degrees- many of us may not be the biggest earners but I would argue have generally been considerably better contributors to society than vast majority of the Tory party.

A Japanese poster for the film The Hunger, starring Susan Sarandon and David Bowie

10 horror movies to get to know me by:

Gothic
Alien
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
The Hunger
The Wicker Man (1973)
Psycho
Eraserhead
The Sixth Sense
M3gan
Crimes of Passion (1984)

This Anthropic settlement case…fellow authors, are any of you feeling rage? I have 12 books listed and money (I don’t CARE how many thousands, even millions) is NOT adequate compensation. What was stolen & used without my permission is priceless! Where is the option to scrub my work from AI?!