Margaret Mitchell

💙💙 Thank you for this work.

I Infiltrated Moltbook, the AI-Only Social Network Where Humans Aren't Allowed I went undercover on Moltbook and loved role-playing as a conscious bot. But rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI-only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies.

NEW: I went undercover, as a human poster, on the social network designed just for AI agents.

The site isn’t a novel breakthrough; it’s simply a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies for the hype machine’s true believers.

My latest for @wired.com:

www.wired.com/story/i-infi...

Unreasonable Effectiveness Seriously: Machines Do Not Need to Think to Be Thought About 💡As I am immersed in PhD research I am at risk of becoming increasingly dense and nerdy. So I am adding a "nerd rating" to posts from now ...

"The fixation on proving LLMs are conducting something "akin to thought" could just as easily be framed as questions about why it is capable of resembling thought"
Post from @eryk.bsky.social on a paper I hadn't the stomach to deconstruct. <3
mail.cyberneticforests.com/th/?ref=cybe...

Well, what does it mean for AI to be "fake?" Language evokes intelligence - in the reader. It's a powerful illusion. A reasonable critic sees that computation at scale can fuse language w/math in ways that do things. That is not "intelligence," and the problems that come that error are bountiful.

Without her work, the “intricately accurate” navigation and timing of GPS would not have been possible. ❤️

Then surely if you can't say it's 'safe' it should be banned from anywhere kids could be? I don't know why this isn't being used as an argument to keep it out of ordinary protests and restrict for only the most seriously violent riot control.

I recorded this today, in Portland, Oregon, at a huge march to the ICE facility in SW. The crowd was full of cyclists who had ridden there in memory of Alex Pretti; members of several labor unions; and ordinary citizens of every age, including this little girl. So of course ICE deployed tear gas.

They know they could have called her lawyer and she would have shown up at their office.

But they ambushed her at home in the early AM. Like she's a terrorist, a mobster, a murderer or an Illinois governor who pawned off a Senate seat.

Chilling power abuse #JournalismIsNotACrime

🪶

Literally obsessed with this pic I got of one Cedar Waxwing getting very mad at another for drinking in the same spot as him despite there being a whole stream

lol I will not join you on this hill.
I’ll be down by the river, fishing the references I know exist **somewhere** even if I didn’t catch them earlier.

Stochastic parroting *is* powerful. For me, that’s the whole point. It’s not a minimization, it’s a reality check/grounding on what the technology technically (mathematically) is…
That’s not to say it’s not cool/helpful/interesting/etc.

Ian Austin, an Army veteran, was arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But he’s continued protesting. Senior reporter @julialurie.bsky.social spoke to him.

“When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he says. “My nation is under attack."

‘ “the prerogative state,” only becomes visible to you when you do something that the powers that be don’t like. Then suddenly you’re in a realm where the rule of law does not exist”’
Really helpful piece from @sigalsamuel.bsky.social

We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA.

We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material.

In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights.

link.europa.eu/Fh8h84

Post on X from the NRA. It is quoting a post from F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli, who says, "If you approach a law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don't do it!" Below, Readers added context: "The U.S. Constitution (particularly the 2nd, 4th, and 14th amendments) prohibit officers from shooting citizens merely for possessing a weapon that is not an "imminent threat". This was reaffirmed in Graham v Connor, which says force must be reasonable." The NRA post says: "This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong. Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens."

This statement below is a really big deal for the U.S.A. The NRA is a bedrock institution of our Second Amendment of the Constitution; and I reckon many supporters of the current president are members of this organization.

His last action was helping someone in need being assaulted, while fighting to support his community. We can only hope all can be as much as he was.

When people take the Oath of Office in the US, they swear to support the Constitution.This is what the 4th amendment to the Constitution asserts:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”

Calling all the PhDs I know to make monumental annoyances of themselves (and honestly, who better)

Yeah, and it's also just one study that (by design) doesn't have real ecological validity.
My sense is that putting on militia outfits + being told that peers are bad, go get 'em, strongly affects perception + action...but am less familiar with supporting academic studies.

Oh, interesting! Will look into what the details are, thanks!

I feel like people who are confused about the ICE/protestors dynamic should read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
We already know that even good people become awful when they're instructed to treat their peers as criminals for an extended period of time.

About the PhD: Audits and evaluation of AI systems — and the broader context that AI systems operate in — have become central to conceptualising, quantifying, measuring and understanding the operations, failures, limitations, underlying assumptions, and downstream societal implications of AI systems. Existing AI audit and evaluation efforts are fractured, done in a siloed and ad-hoc manner, and with little deliberation and reflection around conceptual rigour and methodological validity. This PhD is for a candidate that is passionate about exploring what a conceptually cogent, methodologically sound, and well-founded AI evaluation and safety research might look like. This requires grappling with questions such as: What does it mean to represent “ground truth” in proxies, synthetic data, or computational simulation? How do we reliably measure abstract and complex phenomena? What are the epistemological or methodological implications of quantification and measurement approaches we choose to employ? Particularly, what underlying presuppositions, values, or perspectives do they entail? How do we ensure the lived experiences of impacted communities play a critical role in the development and justification of measurement metrics and proxies? Through exploration of these questions, the candidate is expected to engage with core concepts in the philosophy of science, history of science, Black feminist epistemologies, and similar schools of thought to develop an in-depth understanding of existing practices with the aim of applying it to advance shared standards and best practice in AI evaluation. The candidate is expected to integrate empirical (for example, through analysis or evaluation of existing benchmarks) or practical (for example, by executing evaluation of AI systems) components into the overall work.

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me

apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

pls repost

Why Musk is Culpable in Grok's Undressing Disaster Grok’s functionality is not a black box, but the result of specific design decisions made by executives and engineers at xAI, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

Elon Musk’s company puts the responsibility for Grok ‘undressing’ images on users who prompt the system. But that denies the many ways that engineers and executives shape generative AI outputs, writes Eryk Salvaggio (@eryk.bsky.social).

AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science Analysis of 41 million papers finds that although AI expands individual impact, it narrows collective scientific exploration

This analysis of papers from 1980 to 2025 goes beyond LLMs, but notes one challenge that arises when research questions rely on the same tools and datasets: “the adoption of AI seems to induce authors to converge on the same solutions to known problems rather than create new ones.”

Elon Musk calling accountability for nonconsensual sexual images an "excuse of for censorship" perfectly exposes the lie at the heart of his "censorship industrial complex" crusade. When addressing abusive material of women and children is labeled "censorship," the term has lost all meaning.

Oh, thank you for the heads-up on this!

A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT for drug advice. He died from an overdose. "Who on earth gives that advice?"

Meanwhile, ChatGPT guided this teen on how to maximize his drug “trips” until he died from it.
www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

Graphic with a screencap of the video from episode 54, showing photos of Hanna, Bender, and Mitchell along the right edge and the artifact we are reacting to on the left: an article from CNBC with the headline "Scale AI announces multimillion-dollar defense deal, a major step in U.S. military automation" below a banner that says "AI EFFECT". Above is text reading #8 and below is the episode title (same as in post). All of this is against a dark grey patterned background with abstract purple shapes reminiscent of sea creatures.

#8 Episode 54: “AI” Agents, A Single Point of Failure with @mmitchell.bsky.social

www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

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ChatGPT explained that Arendt "resisted ideological thinking" and that her work remains "sharply relevant to politics, media, and civic life today". Grok, however, went down an entirely different path, choosing Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher who was a fierce critic of democracy, liberalism and the idea of equality.

ChatGPT names Hannah Arendt as its favourite philosopher whilst Grok prefers Nietzsche
www.thetimes.com/article/e346...