Mary O'Connell

Wow, that looks seriously bubblicious. The velocity of AI $ is now in a league of its own.

Nvidia and OpenAI tangle web of deals are “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“ www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

a cartoon of spongebob squarepants giving a thumbs up sign Alt: a cartoon of spongebob squarepants giving a thumbs up as he gets blasted by a megaphone

Me every single budget day:

STOP GIVING MILLIONS TO GREYHOUND RACING

Institutional affiliation should not be a requirement for doing research - Impact of Social Sciences Universities espouse a universalist approach to creating research-based knowledge. Helen Kara & Petra Boynton argue, from the outside these claims are hollow.

With yet another university hosted event closed to 'non academics' (aka those not employed by a university)* I'm just going to leave this piece by @drhelenkara.bsky.social and myself here blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

* yes I know it's utter nonsense and academics/researchers exist outside unis

It is 120 euro for a shirt with a name on the back - people are buying the knock off ones for 40 quid in droves.

Wiley set to earn $44m from AI rights deals, confirms “no opt-out" for authors The US publisher is the latest to capitalise on deals to give tech firms access to its authors’ content to train their Large Language Models (LLMs).

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News.

Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

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 💔

Jane Goodall obituary: pioneer primatologist who inspired generations of scientists She was a tireless advocate for conservation, the welfare of captive chimpanzees and the protection of habitats.

Obituary: Jane Goodall (1934-2025) Pioneer primatologist who inspired generations of scientists

go.nature.com/48aWjRU

Jilly Cooper, author of Rivals and Riders, dies aged 88 The author of 18 ‘bonkbuster’ novels including Riders, Rivals and Bella has died following a fall Jilly Cooper has died at the age of 88, her agent has confirmed. The author, whose 18 novels include Riders and Rivals, “defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over fifty years ago,” said her agent Felicity Blunt. “You wouldn’t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things - class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.” Continue reading...

Jilly Cooper, author of Rivals and Riders, dies aged 88

First of 3 classes on Conan Doyle this week. 🥰

I is for... Ichthyosaur! This extinct marine reptile lived during the Jurassic, and this specimen measures nearly 6 meters long! It was found in Lyme Regis, Dorset and within it's fossilized skeleton you can see ammonite shells.

“Mary Shelley has released a new title!”

She hath risen.

Absolutely love this.

Jim Gavin quits Irish presidential race.
Irish media tomorrow:
"CATHERINE CONNOLLY ONCE BORROWED A LIBRARY BOOK ABOUT TROTSKY!!"

Lecturer - English Company Description: Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of AucklandThe University of Auckland is New Zealand’s pre-eminent University, with a turnover of $1.1bn, including research revenue of over $...

Auckland university is hiring a Lecturer (that’s Assistant Prof for all you Americans) in English, specialising in the long nineteenth century, to a permanent position commencing before Semester 1, 2026 (or by negotiation). Focus is nineteenth century fiction - details below!

So far, I like it a lot!

look ai is completely destroying the world with massive pollution and is using up water at a concerning rate but at least you get to use technology that lies to you and is the primary propaganda mechanism by fascists

I needed to see this today. Perhaps you do as well. ❤️

@jconnollybooks.bsky.social taking the recommendation!

Portrait of Mary Anning in a green cloak and straw bonnet. She holds a hammer and carries a basket over her arm.

Portrait of Roderick Murchison as a young man.

Extract from Murchison's journal: 'Oct 4th 1825 Accompanied by Mary Anning rode to Dowlands and dismounted there. First examined the real inland cliff above the undercliff.'

200 years ago today, 4 October 1825: visiting Lyme Regis, geologist Roderick Murchison notes in his journal: 'Accompanied by Mary Anning rode to Dowlands and dismounted there' where they examined the Greensand rocks of the Undercliff, the landslipped coastal cliffs west of the town.

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More - Consumer Reports AI features are crowding into Google search, Gmail, iPhones, Windows laptops, and other products. If you're suffering from AI overload, these settings can help.

🫡

Obviously, this is loser shit, but I think AI has really cemented itself as the visual language of fascism. It's anti-human, flattened, uninteresting, and cheap. It's like looking at a Potemkin Village and thinking that's the same as architecture.

Did something new for Crime Fiction seminar this morning, got a bestselling crime novelist in to take the class! Students were delighted. Thank you so much @jconnollybooks.bsky.social for a great class and for your generosity and time. @ucc.ie

Must have been someone else who barged through the defence to help make the goal. They are beyond belief.

Contemplates robbing a bank...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

quote of the week just dropped

Great news!
JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month

www.jstor.org/action/showL...

It is. 3rd year Victorian Lit, focus on the novel. I lure them in in 2nd year with Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle then BOOM Tenant and Middlemarch 😅

They love it. 183 in the class and first half they can choose to write their essay on that or Sherlock Holmes and over 100 will always pick Tenant.