David Crotty

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

B&T is a book distribution company that has been around for more than a century in support of public libraries book acquisition and collection management. That they are closing on such very, very short notice is creating new pressures on both libraries and other vendors in the space. Bad news.

Very sad news, John Gurdon has died.

A developmental biologist's developmental biologist, Nobel prize winner

His work is the foundation of much of today's dev & stem cell bio.

An inspiration to many, including me. Always asking questions & wanting the answers

www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

RESOURCE for publishers - AI Opportunity Map www.ce-strategy.com/services/ai-...

Google cloud/MLB logos

I suppose I’m too literal-minded, but I really don’t get these Google Cloud commercials where Google AI finds what are obviously spurious correlations in Major League Baseball stats.

Like isn’t this the whole reason why ML dressed up as AI is bullshit?

"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)

Guest Post - Manifesto Time: Do You Need a Publishing Manifesto? - The Scholarly Kitchen Does your publishing organization need a manifesto? Writing a manifesto for your organization can be a great exercise for team building and planning, and a way to ignite action.

Must be something in the air today scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/10/06/g...

Spotify’s New Policy Won’t Stop the Wave of AI Slop Rabbit Holed is Kieran Press-Reynolds’ weekly column exploring songs and scenes at the intersection of music and digital culture, separating shitpost genius from shitpassé lameness. This week, Kieran ...

“Spotify won’t prohibit this music—not because it thinks it’s innovative or ushering in a new era of technological futurism (the platform has never cared about culture) but simply because it’s generating streams.”
— @kieranpressreyn.bsky.social, who knows from slop pitchfork.com/thepitch/spo...

"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that

BREAKING NEWS: The first Cars album still slaps

Both @lisalibrarian.bsky.social and I keep saying this. IMO academia has to deal with this, not conjure an OA fantasy where reuse excludes LLMs.

After all the purpose of knowledge generation is reuse. As I said at CNI, this is not the situation screenwriters or musicians find themselves in. 2/n

Outliers | Clarke & Esposito Will HHMI’s new preprint policy have any impact on the larger market? 85% of marketers use GenAI tools.

"Courts leaning toward training [of AI] is “fair use” not subject to copyright restriction...none of the [CC licenses] take away what one can do with copyrighted content.”

☝️ training is legal. It's only copyright breach if _output_ is verbatim reproduction 1/2

www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/ou...

Ignore the Hinton prediction headline - lots of this is interesting on the subject of lab testing vs real-world environments

Yes, yes, Europe has its benefits. Walkable cities. Cultural heritage. Amazing food. Little gun violence. Healthcare. Governments that are not shut down. But the number of website pop-ups asking one to accept cookies renders the continent pretty much unlivable.

The Humanities as Canary: Understanding this Crisis Now - The Scholarly Kitchen The Humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. What information can help us understand this crisis and its implications?

“We may be past the point of no return, but at a minimum we ought to … assess where we are, and what we’re losing when we fully cashier robust support for Humanities research. The Humanities are us.” Feels like a(nother) good day to share this. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/02/t...

Outliers | Clarke & Esposito Will HHMI’s new preprint policy have any impact on the larger market? 85% of marketers use GenAI tools.

New issue of @brieferyet.bsky.social out today. Will the new HHMI immediate access policy requiring preprints and de-emphasizing journals have any impact on the larger market? Increasing use of AI in marketing and AI use of Creative Commons licensed materials continues to confound publishers

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out Executives at the startup notified talent agencies and studios over the last week.

Exclusive: OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator, which creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear.

My petty gripe: not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it’s stealing my em dashes too The humble em dash is being used as a tell that something is written by a large language model. But it’s James Shackell’s favourite piece of punctuation, and he’s not ready to lose it

"My editor’s email started off friendly enough, but then came the hammer blow: “We need you to remove all the em dashes. People assume that means it’s written by AI.” " buff.ly/rLpQjTr

This is a fundamental point that 99% of higher-ed coverage, and 100% of immig coverage, have missed.

Hm is it bad if the industry somehow propping up a trembling economy is based almost entirely on our collective willingness to let it do crimes

Journal TOCs do allow occasional serendipitous discoveries other strategies don't yet enable. Meanwhile, highlights, reviews, news & views, etc. do point to things one should read, and I see a continued role for journals in curation 2/n

I do not want the video. I will never watch the video. I usually won’t even give the video the effort of complaint.

I just want to read the news story. Give me the text. This would be my Ted Talk but that would be text too.

Some big implications for journalism, too, where reporters often mistake trending posts as a reasonable reflection of public opinion.

YouTube video by ANTI- Records Neko Case - "Wreck"

Reasons to be cheerful: new Neko Case record is out youtu.be/gLwev5sWQXM?...

Absolutely! The preprint mandate only applies if you publish an article!

HHMI's policy even more since one is obligated to post peer review-based rev as preprint as well ... which you only get by publishing in a journal.

The funders are just externalizing the cost of publishing to libraries.

Guest Post — If a Tree Falls with Nobody Around to Record its Exact Location, Was it Even Compliant? - The Scholarly Kitchen The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) could make millions of books illegal in Europe, forcing publishers to pulp stock and raising costs for readers.

If you ever want an example of a poorly-thought-through policy resulting in unintended consequences that are directly at odds with what the policy was supposed to achieve, look no further than the EU's deforestation regulations for book publishers scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/09/25/g...

ChatGPT is probably the biggest honey pot of willingly-turned over highly confidential information that has ever been created in human history.

One idea was to just dump all your old stuff into PubMed Central and link out to articles there and let them shoulder the costs.

Thought about this a lot when PeerJ was selling lifetime publishing memberships. As time goes on, you’re dragging a bigger and bigger anchor behind you. And it’s not just servers, it’s new PIDs, new technologies, basically every upgrade you make over time.