Stephen Larin

A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.

Another heartbreaking story about a young person who confided in ChatGPT before committing suicide, sensitively reported by @kashhill.bsky.social. It has led to the first known case to be brought against OpenAI for wrongful death. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

ChatGPT tends to ignore retractions on scientific papers Study finds the chatbot doesn’t acknowledge concerns with problematic studies

“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues.

In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”

How do structural incentives, such as job scarcity and metric-based evaluation, shape the questions scholars ask, the methods they use to answer them, and the outlets they prioritize to publish their work?

We have an updated draft answering these questions: osf.io/preprints/os...

Fascinating development: Danish Minister of Digitalization promises to phase out Microsoft from her ministry. (Add other reports of Copenhagen and Aarhus doing same.) Part of a trend I write about in The National Security Internet. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

If we stop calling these “grants” and start calling them “contracts,” it’s clearer to people why this is such an abuse of power. This wasn’t a bunch of gifts. This was a bunch of binding contracts between researchers and the US govt for specific agreed upon projects.

The Sun-Times' AI content also includes made up experts, quotes, and publications. It's the same story, over and over: a news outlet outsources work to freelancers or third-party firms that use AI, and that content is thrown in with actual human work w/o review.
www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

@technologyreview.com published an ambitious package on AI & energy today that reveals new insights into how much electricity generative AI really uses — & what it all means for the climate.

Please be sure to check out the main piece by @jamesmodonnell.bsky.social ‬& @caseycrownhart.bsky.social

YouTube video by 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive First fault movement ever filmed. M7.9 surface rupture filmed near Thazi, Myanmar

I am speechless...
>> First fault movement ever filmed. M7.9 surface rupture filmed near Thazi, Myanmar
m.youtube.com/watch?v=77ub...

Think for one second about no longer being able to have any normal conversation with a friend in a restaurant, bitching about your jobs or family drama or whatever without the stranger sitting next to you being able to instantly rat you out for fun.

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

This is a fantastic oral history of the last 10 years of NLP and AI. www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

Generations and Nationalism: Comparing Catalonia, Quebec, and Scotland Generations and Nationalism breaks new ground by placing the impact of generation and generational changes at the forefront of an investigation on the transformation of nationalist movements and the e...

Notre livre Generations and Nationalism sera publié en septembre prochain/Our book Generations and Nationalism will be available in September. @alainggagnon.bsky.social

Palantir Is Helping DOGE With a Massive IRS Data Project For the past three days, DOGE and a handful of Palantir representatives, along with dozens of career IRS engineers, have been collaborating to build a “mega API,” WIRED has learned.

icymi, i confirmed DOGE is partnering with Palantir, cofounded by Peter Thiel, to build a unified API layer across IRS systems
www.wired.com/story/palant...

Harvard will not comply.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
— Harvard President Alan M. Garber

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Lost in AGI dread and gleeful anticipation is the fact that, while the technologies driving the discussion around AGI are novel and new, the stories we're hearing about them are not. The AGI story today's elites embrace is a retelling of the AI story embraced by the elites of yesteryear and the automation story of their predecessors. It's fair to say we're in uncharted technological territory, but that is also a truism. Where else would we be? As workers or as politicians, regulators, industrialists, or members of the curious general public, we have all previously confronted technological breakthroughs and moments of political and economic uncertainty. All those moments created opportunities for narrative inver tion, too. In its more cynical deployments, AGI, like Al before it, is a marketing story masquerading as a descriptive term; it's a bid to rebrand - and narrow down and direct - our collective idea of the future.

AGI, like G-less Al, automation, and even mechanization, are indeed stories, but they're also sequels: This time, the technology isn't just inconceivable and inevitable; it's anthropomorphized and given a will of its own. If mechanization conjured images of factories, automation conjured images of factories without people, and AI conjured humanoid machine assistants, AGI and ASI conjure an economy, and a wider world, in which humans are either made limitlessly rich and powerful by superhuman machines or dominated and subjugated (or perhaps even killed) by them (Indu trial Revolution 3: The Robot Awakens). In imagining centralized machine authoritarianism in the future, AGI creates a sort of authoritarian, exclusionary discourse now. A narrative emerges in which the decisions of AGI stakeholders - Al firms, their investors, and maybe a few government leaders - are all that matter. The rest of us inhabit the roles of subject and audience but not author.

AGI is a story, not a technology nymag.com/intelligence...

“I think this is the first time a politician in Canada has crossed that line to officially say they want to interfere to control research topics,” says Madeleine Pastinelli, president of the university professors’ union in the province of Quebec. “It could be a very terrible time for us.”

"You boy! What tariff is it today?"

X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research Data indicates more scholars turning to alternative social media site to post about their work after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

“On today’s X, #AcademicTwitter is dead. And most scholars in the world do not want to be active on what the platform has become.”

I spoke to @timeshighered.bsky.social about Bluesky becoming a new hub for research

@academic-chatter.bsky.social

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/xs-domi...

Statement on the Academic Freedom and Independence of U.S. Institutions of Higher Education The American Political Science Association (APSA) is deeply concerned by recent attacks on the independence of colleges and universities in the United States. Over the past few weeks, there have been instances of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal grants and contracts for colleges and universities being cancelled or suspended, paired with promises of reinstating funding in return for compliance with a list of demands for institutional overhaul.

Statement on the Academic Freedom and Independence of U.S. Institutions of Higher Education

The American Political Science Association (APSA) is deeply concerned by recent attacks on the independence of colleges and universities in the United States. Over the past few weeks, there have been…

In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half-renovated kitchen for a Google ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family’s business grow. But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston Crafted, which features guides on do-it-yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past; this time, it didn’t recover. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence answers at the top of Google search. The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them. That’s disrupting a delicate symbiotic relationship that’s existed for years: if businesses create good content, Google sends them traffic.

NEW: Spoke to 25 small publishers about the kind of impact Google's AI changes to search has had on their businesses.

Things don't look good—not for the publishers, and not for the quality of information out on the open web, which ironically Google itself relies on.

Gift link: bloom.bg/43Jmzk3

Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer's Research Could Be Lost Forever Days before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 HHS staffers would lose their jobs, a message appeared on NIH research repository sites saying they were "under review."

Petabytes of critical government research that is marked for possible deletion cannot be archived because of technical and legal restrictions, meaning it is very likely to be lost forever:

www.404media.co/nih-archives...

2) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic.

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a NEW peptide antibiotic that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria INCLUDING those RESISTANT to existing antibiotics. This discovery marks the first potential new class of antibiotics in NEARLY 30 YEARS. 🧪🧵⬇️

April Fools’ post on friend's social media somehow less fun in era of constant misinformation Nelson, BC - A lighthearted fib posted on a friend’s Facebook page failed to generate the intended joyful confusion in even one reader this April Fool’s Day in light of the fact that the internet is a...

April Fools’ post on friend’s social media somehow less fun in era of constant misinformation

Technology, Democracy, and Power: Journalism’s Role in a Time of Crisis | TechPolicy.Press On Tuesday, March 25, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar to talk shop with journalists covering the political crisis in the US and its implications abroad.

On Tuesday, March 25, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar to talk shop with journalists covering the political crisis in the US and its implications abroad. The discussion featured journalists and editors from TechDirt, Wired, 404 Media, Rest of World, Coda Story, Euractiv, and more. Listen/read:

Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown | CNN Business Apple has been getting hammered in tech and financial media for its uncharacteristically messy foray into artificial intelligence. After a June event heralding a new AI-powered Siri, the company has d...

"AI can never fail, it can only be failed" seems to be the fallacy taking root in some tech circles. It's not that AI sucks, it's that all of us smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t *get* it www.cnn.com/2025/03/27/t...