Alex Parsons

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Not only will people not sue us, they'll pay us money for their characters to sell bitcoin.

And somewhere in the middle you get the quadratic voting fans - whose answer is "yeees, but with diminishing returns the more you care"

Although they don't really understand each other, "no" to this question is what unites more elitist forms of electoral democracy and citizen assembly fans.

"Should people who care more get more say" is one of the interesting democratic divides.

Yeah real double edged sword that one.

I was experimenting with "can it help me find someone who's talked about this from this angle" and it referenced a real report that wasn't available on the internet and started making up direct quotes.

"give me supporting evidence for this" is one of the most dangerous uses. It will definitely give you something.

(More on that second one in a few weeks)

In general, citizens assemblies have a really clear role for areas where elected representatives have a conflict of interest (setting the rules of politics) or where politicians making decisions *creates* conflicts of interest (e.g. distributing public funding for scrutiny).

Looks like the IPSA citizens forum has now happened, would be interesting to see when the full thing is published www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Adding to the thread; bsky.app/profile/acas...

Excerpt from: Beyond Transparency Practical steps to improve data quality and fix the wider environment

On shares specifically, we've ripped off @chriscook.news 's point about the much stronger US rule. £70k is really high! research.mysociety.org/html/beyond-...

Excerpt from: Beyond Transparency Practical steps to improve data quality and fix the wider environment

Also I think we can do more from the outside about this (resources needed, but the practical steps clear) research.mysociety.org/html/beyond-...

Few things on this.

More can be done to detect and prompt MPs with ongoing interests to be up to date. Parliament needs to see data quality as an institutional problem rather than a individual matter.

research.mysociety.org/html/beyond-...

Some good numbers in quoted tweet for the transition to post-social media alexparsons.co.uk/blog/posts/2...

Putting transparency to the test: evaluating FOI in practice How can we tell if FOI laws are working in practice? Three expert speakers will help us assess whether legislation matches reality.

There's still time - but only just - to sign up to today's #FOI event in which three experts will be looking at how FOI law works when it meets the real world. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/putting-tr...

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Post-Social Media Social media sheds its most unreliable component: other people

Post-social media giants having shed their social graph might find they have no moat (which might be an even tougher situation to regulate) alexparsons.co.uk/blog/posts/2...

And fully open models make the social debate more complicated because it puts the lie to the idea LLMs have to depend on theft, while still potentially having a big social impact.

LLMs being everywhere while all existing AI companies have gone bust is one version of the future.

Been doing some work using open models locally and it's really reinforced how LLMs are a useful technology while the broader AI business models make no sense.

(Battle Hymn of the Republic plays in the background)

Don't replace the Lords - split the Commons What an elected second chamber is for.

Just from the "two chambers is a useful way of reflecting several principles at once" perspective alexparsons.co.uk/blog/posts/s...

My "is this actually really core or is it wrecking by expanding the scope" question is if House of Lords reform should be in the same discussion.

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docs.google.com/document/d/e...

The ones where the Westlaw and Lexis AI tools hallucinated cases are BONKERS

I guess this is the "good for the organisational soul" argument for PR - "30% like us, we like them, and that's pretty good really".

Real crisis of confidence thing for former mass parties, where first their membership, then MPs, then voters are dismissed for being out of touch.

Technocrats and politicians both pointing at each other and saying "the AI means we don't need you anymore".