Margaret Mitchell

Smoke bush, orange dahlia, red mums, magenta dahlia, close up of yellow nasturtium with vermillion maple-leaf-shaped inner markings, red mums against the blue sky.

#SixOnSaturday 🌱

Congratulations!!

Tech for good. 😊

just started having recency bias and i love it. easily the best bias

The dilemmas of delegation An analysis of policy challenges posed by Advanced AI Assistants and natural-language AI agents.

Highly personalised and personable, Advanced AI Assistants may soon become the primary way that most people access the internet.

Our research explores the challenges that could arise if their adoption is not carefully managed in the public interest.

www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/dilem...

Nice piece, and consistent with our findings that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Also love "behavior hijacking".

That's a good one! Maybe the external-facing version of this is Gen-Juicing.

Oh that's great. I actually find that hard to scroll past, especially on my phone, since it tends to take up a lot of space, and THEN it's similar questions that upon dropdown click ALSO have AI-generated responses, and THEN it's finally links.
Have you proactively disabled some AI things?

Yes 100%!

If you have been framing your work as involving/in relation to "AI", what do you mean by "AI"? How would you describe your work without using that phrase?

>>

People mirror AI systems’ hiring biases, study finds In a new UW study, 528 participants worked with simulated AI systems to select job candidates. The researchers simulated different levels of racial biases for resumes from white, Black, Hispanic and.....

Thanks to @uwnews.uw.edu for covering my + @aylincaliskan.bsky.social's recent work published at AIES 2025! www.washington.edu/news/2025/11...

Haha. As a vegetarian, I particularly like that one.

There's this form of behavioral engineering/coercion going on to use AI when you're not even trying to. Ex: Enterprise Google Slides replaced "Upload an Image", with "Generate an Image" (right?), requiring extra work +adaptation to sidestep the AI-as-default push. It drives me bonkers.

Love the phrases "Cognitive Cost" and "Executive Function Theft" to pinpoint how exhausting it is to be constantly bombarded with apps telling you to use AI. I've been calling it "Corporate pressure" and "Force feeding". It's quite a lot right now. Seems a bit desperate tbh.

We're investigating how publishers handle name changes and the barriers scholars face. If you've changed your name (or are considering it) and dealt with updating your academic publications, we want to hear from you. Researchers who have changed their name for any reason, such as gender transition, marriage, divorce, immigration, cultural reasons, or citation formatting issues. Whether you've successfully updated your work, are currently trying, or decided not to because of barriers, your opinion matters. Your input will help us advocate for better, more inclusive policies in academic publishing. It takes around 5-10 minutes to complete. Survey Link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP Please share with anyone who might benefit.

We're surveying researchers about name changes in academic publishing.

If you've changed your name and dealt with updating publications, we want to hear your experience. Any reason counts: transition, marriage, cultural reasons, etc.

forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP

AI Search Has A Citation Problem We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.

In this 2025 study, more than half of LLM responses cited fake sources or links.

www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

🪶 Golden-crowned Kinglets at the water spout.

Was it “Q”? I never trust that one.

Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn on What ‘Pluribus’ Is Really About, Why Hollywood ‘Needs More Heroes’ and How Silicon Valley Has ‘F—ed Up the World’ Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn unpack the first two episodes of 'Pluribus' and slam AI: 'Silicon Valley' has 'f---ed up the world.'

Vince Gilligan on AI:

“AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires.”

This spring, Google AI leader Noam Shazeer posted a comment in one of the company’s internal discussion forums, in response to a post about how Google employees could support their transgender and nonbinary colleagues on International Transgender Day of Visibility. “I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender,” Shazeer wrote, according to a copy of the post viewed by The Information. “I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them.”

Holy shit. Noam Shazeer, one of the original authors on the "Attention is All You Need" paper and Character.AI founder, came out as major transphobe. Like Trumpian levels of "this is child mutilation" of transphobia.

(via The Information)

New Yorker author describing gradient descent and oblivious to the existence of local minima:

"(The algorithm could be compared to a hiker navigating from a mountaintop to a valley; a simple strategy for eventually finding one’s way is to insure that every step moves downhill.)"

The cover of The AI Con against a background

"'Luddite' isn’t an insult—it’s a warning and a word of caution. One we must return to, repeatedly, if we’re to resist the constant drumbeat of consumerism dressed up as science and progress."

Erik J. Larson reviews "The AI Con": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

This.

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.

When deception’s more profitable than honesty, users lose.

Internal documents suggest that Meta earns $3.5B(!) every 6 mo. from scam ads, revealing a deeper systemic problem: the economic incentive to tolerate “higher legal risk” content still outweighs any penalty. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

I thought this headline was from some small newspaper and went to tag @nytpitchbot.bsky.social to share smthn even more ridiculous than the usual satirical NY Times pitches, but…Nope, this is actually from @nytimes.com

💔

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week.

@wired.com #ICE
www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

This for me is the fundamental reason why I came to Bsky — posting on X helps retain people on X.
I’ve learned for myself and other colleagues in AI tho that part of the tradeoff w Bsky is abuse: how much abuse is ok for staying on the platform? Are death threats ok? (There isn’t one right answer.)

Yah, sorry. My sense from the comments I saw last night/this morning is that there’s nuance not well-suited for social media convo, this included.
I’m being called a c*** and stuff for things I haven’t said or done, so gotta kinda mute this stuff now—thanks for your thoughtful comments!