David Murdoch

Google’s Doppl app took off my socks The app replaced my mismatched socks with AI-generated feet.

Guessing Google will add a premium agentic-AI feature to Doppl which when asked "does my butt look big in this?" will quietly cancel your Amazon delivery for that foot-long Toblerone bar you ordered last night. www.theverge.com/news/694087/...

Israel-Iran war live: Trump swears in angry outburst at both sides over ceasefire violations US president says Israel must ‘calm down now’ as he leaves White House for Nato summit

I guess shifting from dropping bunker-busting bombs to dropping F-bombs is a de-escalation of sorts: "Trump swears in angry outburst at both sides over ceasefire violations" www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

Very cool! For the 2nd edition may I propose inclusion of: a) "globalist elites" with heavy, ironic emphasis on the first syllable, and b) a self-deprecating reference to the "LA Times column" while studiously trying to avoid repeating its content verbatim :)

New £14 million project aims to use AI for faster data analysis and to improve medical scans | FutureScot £14 million project in Scotland to use AI for faster data analysis and to improve medical scans - with benefits for patients and services

New £14 million project aims to use AI for faster data analysis and to improve medical scans. Canon Medical Research Europe, based in Edinburgh, will showcase AI based smart solutions at Japan expo this week
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Confusing chart makes it look as if 3 of the top 9 councils are on 54%. According to article only 1 is, the next 3 highest are on 52%. It's fine to have 5% "bins" but showing individual columns of datapoints within each bin against the measurement axis misleads. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

BBC threatens AI firm with legal action over unauthorised content use It is first time that the BBC has taken such action regarding alleged scraping of its content for AI.

It's remarkable that in the year 2025 the technical gateway that allows or "prevents" (notionally) web scraping of website content is still robots.txt... the digital equivalent of a "keep off the grass" sign, trampled underfoot by at least one US AI model developer. www.bbc.com/news/article...

YouTube video by Google DeepMind The Nature of AI: Solving the Planet's Data Gap with Drew Purves

Drew Purves of Google DeepMind makes a great point that once you commit probabilistic data to a map it will tend to be taken as fact. Like the idea of a confidence interval slider that hides (or marks) data points in the map when they don't meet the essential CI threshhold. youtu.be/vIIIau06wGo?...

The cracks in the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship are reportedly widening | TechCrunch OpenAI is reportedly considering accusing Microsoft, its largest backer, of anticompetitive behavior throughout their partnership.

Biggest winners from the MS-OpenAI partnership may ultimately be their "divorce" lawyers: "The two companies are in a standoff over OpenAI’s $3 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup Windsurf. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to get Windsurf’s intellectual property" techcrunch.com/2025/06/16/t...

Meta AI searches made public - but do all its users realise? Meta AI users may be inadvertently making their searches public without realising it.

Probably sums up in one sentence why Disney are taking their fight against AI copyright infringement to court: "One search, which could be traced back to a person's Instagram account, asked Meta AI to generate an image of an animated character wearing only underwear." www.bbc.com/news/article...

Disney and Universal lawsuit may be killing blow in AI copyright wars Two huge movie studios are suing Midjourney, claiming the firm’s AI has been trained on their copyrighted material – the entrance of the Hollywood giants into this legal fight could be a watershed mom...

Quote of the day from Dr. Andres Guadamuz at the University of Sussex, commenting on Disney's legal action against Midjourney for copyright infringement during model training for AI image generation: "It’s Disney, so Midjourney are f---ed, pardon my French." www.newscientist.com/article/2484...

Interesting discussion A.O. podcast. Sarah Isgur & @davidfrenchjag.bsky.social on LLM responses to prompts about US Supreme Court decisions reflecting media coverage of perceived partisan bias rather than reality. Trained on a corpus of 100 books, if 99 say the earth is flat, AI will absorb as fact.

Scotland put 'at forefront' of UK's tech revolution with £750m national supercomputer coming to Edinburgh | FutureScot Scotland put 'at forefront' of UK's tech revolution with £750m national supercomputer coming to Edinburgh University

Scotland put ‘at forefront’ of UK’s tech revolution with £750m national supercomputer coming to Edinburgh. Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirms investment in cutting-edge advanced computing facility as part of government spending review
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Charts from the Guardian. Gaps between 1967-1997 and 1997-2027 are both 30 years, yet the year labels aren't evenly spaced. If the trend's the point then why "misplace" 1997? And do the series start 1967 or earlier? In principle simple charts but odd design choices have managed to make them unclear.

Council using AI to cut lengthy waits for Stoke-on-Trent special needs reports Latest data shows Stoke-on-Trent City Council issued just 29 per cent of EHCPs on time

Good commitment to human review to ensure any #AI errors are caught: "...it still involves a case worker, who knows the children, going through each individual report to make sense of it to make sure there's not something that's been misunderstood by the AI." www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-o...

In "The Accountant 2" there's build up to a bar fight that then happens off screen. But also an extended scene of the main character's brother negotiating, by phone, for a puppy. #BFI are right to worry about AI, but maybe an AI "script doctor" could've brought some consistency to the Accountant 2.

Tour of Britain cycle race in Glasgow today. I don't for sure, but this team with their fancy black and yellow bikes might have the edge!

High court tells UK lawyers to stop misuse of AI after fake case-law citations Ruling follows two cases blighted by actual or suspected use of artificial intelligence in legal work

"The barrister denied using AI in that case but said she may have inadvertently done so in preparation for a separate case where she also cited phantom authorities." #AI users should colour code draft content from LLMs to keep track of what they'll need to check. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

In the 1980s, during the bitter Iran-Iraq war, Henry Kissinger commented it would be better for the world if both sides lost.

Can't think why this came to mind on such a quiet news day in the US.

How to leverage AI agents - your guide to a powerful new digital assistant that can transform public services | FutureScot How to leverage AI agents - your guide to a powerful new digital assistant that can transform Scotland's public services

How to leverage AI agents – your guide to powerful new digital assistants that can transform public services. The Futurescot AI Challenge is a chance to explore the potential of AI agents and Agentic AI for your organisation [partner content with @stormid.com]
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Google delays rollout of its 'Ask Photos' AI search feature | TechCrunch According to Google Photos product manager Jamie Aspinall, Ask Photos isn't up to par when it comes to latency, quality, and user experience. While some users have access to the feature now, he said t...

Google's forthcoming Ask Photos feature sounds like it could be useful when it eventually arrives. Although to the prompt, "find photos of the dog" it's likely to ask if it wouldn't be quicker to just delete the 6 that don't have the dog in them. techcrunch.com/2025/06/04/g...

Scottish AI Alliance launches new practical tools and guidance to support 'responsible' AI adoption | FutureScot New practical tools and guidance have been released to help Scottish businesses and third sector organisations adopt AI responsibly

Scottish AI Alliance launches new practical tools and guidance to support ‘responsible’ AI adoption. Playbook resources designed to help organisations ‘on their journey to implementing trustworthy, ethical, and inclusive AI’
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Edinburgh Napier university partners with security operations centre provider amid rising cyber threat levels | FutureScot Edinburgh Napier university has partnered with a security operations centre provider amid rising cyber threat levels in higher education

Edinburgh Napier university partners with security operations centre provider amid rising cyber threat levels. Acumen Cyber's SOC will provide round-the-clock threat detection and monitoring for the university
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If the algorithm could really see into your soul it would ofcourse have suggested Wii Golf!

The discourse around AI and consciousness focusses on the fact if their intelligence is not tied to their physical embodiment in the world, as humans are, then they aren't shaped by true experience, only our digital records. We might soon wish the internet was a nicer place for them to learn from

Landmark government trial shows AI could save civil servants nearly 2 weeks a year More than 20,000 civil servants took part in a government-led trial using generative AI to support their daily work – with early results showing time savings equivalent to nearly 2 working weeks per p...

Great to see progress on these AI initiatives, but hard to over-state the imporrance of improving public sector data quality and interoperability, including between agencies, in order to ensure reliable ouputs and outcomes from use of such tools. www.gov.uk/government/n...

End to End AI Application Development with Maxime Labonne, Head of Post-training at Liquid AI & Paul-Emil Iusztin, Founder at Decoding ML Richie, Maxime, and Paul explore misconceptions in Al application development, fine-tuning versus few-shot prompting, the roles of Al engineers, the importance of planning and evaluation, the challeng...

Research suggests that LLMs offering ever expanding context window size for prompt input may provide diminishing returns, relative to effectively implemented RAG for storing content in a vector space for topic-related contextual retrieval. www.datacamp.com/podcast/end-...

Just a Minute please - Looking at how AI transcription tool can make a difference Dorset Council has been chosen to take part in a trial for Minute, an artificial intelligence (AI) transcription and summary tool. The tool has been developed by the Government's Incubator for Art...

Exciting to see pilot councils having the opportunity to improve and refine i.AI's new Minute tool's understanding of local government context and terminology which many of the US-centric out-of-the-box foundation LLMs obviously lack. www.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/news/just-a-...

Scottish AI firm opens Singapore base as region races to adopt the technology to gain global competitive advantage | FutureScot Scottish AI firm opens Singapore base as region races to adopt the technology to gain global competitive advantage

Scottish AI firm opens Singapore base as region races to adopt the technology to gain global competitive advantage. Tomoro AI launches Asia Pacific hub to scale up AI among large enterprises in fast-growing sectors including finance and healthcare
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AI tool trial could save equivalent of 1.5m meals in food waste Nestlé is among UK companies taking part in project to ‘design out’ waste by redistributing surplus product

Great use of AI/ML. But... in 2023 Nestle UK made a pretax profit of £162M. So I was sceptical of them getting a UK goverment grant of £1.9M to do this. But then... looks like Zest the AI developer is a UK company, so there's logic in encouraging the UK AI sector. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Focus on innovation for new partnership between NHS Lanarkshire and University of Glasgow | FutureScot New partnership between NHS Lanarkshire and University of Glasgow seeks to land real-world benefits of research and innovation in healthcare

Focus on innovation for new partnership between NHS Lanarkshire and University of Glasgow. Strategic deal aims to land real-world benefits of research and innovation on healthcare frontline
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