Mark Williams

[The swimmer] said: “I made the mistake of using ChatGPT for research to see when the low tide was. It said 9.30am. So we were out on that side and then as soon as you come back over it was literally completely different. A lesson learned for me."

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

Just to be super clear, if you’re phoning in your peer review to ai you should quit your job so someone else who actually likes science can have it.

'More a Prompt Than a Query'-Bot is already being rolled out for it.

‘Prince Andrew believed having sex with me was his birthright’: Virginia Giuffre on her abuse at the hands of Epstein, Maxwell and the king’s brother In an extract from her posthumous memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre remembers the day an ‘apex predator’ recruited her from Mar-a-Lago, aged just 16; how she was trafficked to a succession of wealthy and powerful men, and how everyone knew what was going on

‘Prince Andrew believed having sex with me was his birthright’: Virginia Giuffre on her abuse at the hands of Epstein, Maxwell and the king’s brother

Knox, incidentally, is often suggested as the 'inspiration' for Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' ...

Commission for Captain Robert Knox, London 4 April 1684 for the procurement of slaves in Madgascar: as many as 250, but 'not to buy old ones'.

Robert Knox - 19 years in captivity in Sri Lanka - returns to England and promptly goes back out in service of the Company to do what?
Engage in the slave trade: April 1684 commissioned to 'purchase' as many as 250 Africans - no males younger than 14, no females under 12. #earlymodern #skystorians

Beard-tree. Tree-beard.

Hoom-horn.

How was Robert Knox, son of an EIC Captain and captive in Sri Lanka for nineteen years, immediately identified as an outsider aboard ship when it was inspected on his arrival in England in September 1680?

His beard was long and old-fashioned. #earlymodern #skystorians

'Is 1.5 a safe space ... ?'

'... I guess we'll see.'

One or two safe spaces after the full stop, though?

If only there were some structure in place that allowed people to learn the distinction between knowledge and the sluicing of factoids through the killing floor of AI 'analysis'.

'The British Library...has taken years to recover from a major cyberattack that disrupted its services and restricted access to its collections. The walkout is set to take from 27 October to 9 November, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the cyberattack.'

Spotify is now running recruitment ads for ICE.

It’s time to cancel your account.

Well yes, but then ... they know where the research is published. It's not hidden.

Didn't know that this was our target audience ...

Pleased to see that an article I wrote w/ Rachel Rich, @adamcrymble.bsky.social and @sarahfoxhistory.bsky.social is out! We look at George III's use of food for masculine self-fashioning. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"History: Was is the new Is"

The JBA is open access, so no need to worry about a paywall.

These watches appear to be ripoffs of famous designs. Likely from some factory that normally produces "homage" watches and they just swapped out the branding.

Just watched 'The Librarians' on iPlayer and honestly just staggering stuff.

Cannot recommend it enough.

every big AI pitch is like “what if we took away your means of survival and devalued all your skills to make stonks go up temporarily? You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

Literally just up the road. What an embarrassment.

God, imagine being driven by unevidenced fears of people you've made no effort to understand, making outlandish claims about who they are and what they do, then stoking those fears in others and making it all worse.

And then making a show about witches with Alice Roberts.

I ask my students not to use AI because it means they are not fully engaging with their own learning. If they do, it’s a betrayal of my trust.

I don’t want to use AI to grade student work because it means that I am not fully engaging with their learning. If I do, it’s a betrayal of their trust

From the redundancy trenches here, where we're also 'excited about our Kazakhstan campus', sending solidarity.

'prime minister Keir Starmer...confirmed that the University of Lancaster and the University of Surrey had been given approval to open new campuses in India while on a trade mission to Mumbai, joining six more institutions already in the country.' (Lancaster is mooting 20% academic redundancy) 1/3

Polanski expertly dismantling the "rich people will move if we tax them" narrative, while Denham nimbly demonstrates how very patriotic such people are.

There’s a reason academics universally rejected the initial push to canonize Charlie Kirk as a saint devoted to free speech.

We know all too well that’s the exact opposite of reality.