Tama Leaver

T-minus one week to #AoIR2025, my first time in Brazil! 🌐🇧🇷

and here we go: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/...

And the icing on the cake is new research showing the longer the AI video, the worse the proportional impact on the environment: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19222 🤦‍♂️

Awesome, congrats!

Sora 2 is here Our latest video generation model is more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems. It also features synchronized dialogue and sound effects. Create with it in the new ...

So, OpenAI's Sora app is 10-second ChatGPT/AI-generated videos (now with audio) in an endless feed.

Doesn't that just make it all the shitty bits of TikTok in basically the same format?

Am I missing something?

openai.com/index/sora-2...

This is not how copyright works. Literally, the opposite. Also, this is legally stupid because it shows they can remove the work. Ergo, they have no defense for including it in the first place.

The highlight of Anthony Albanese's trip to the UN was spruiking Australia's teen social media ban.

You'd be forgiven for thinking it was already a smash hit. But not only has it not come into effect, there are some basic parts of the ban that remain a complete mystery

www.crikey.com.au/20...

Loot boxes are still rife in kids’ mobile games, despite ban on ‘gambling-like’ features Games with ‘loot boxes’ should be classified for over-15s – but a new study shows many of the most popular mobile games completely ignore the rules.

Great work from @marcuscarter.com & team, investigating the inconsistencies around gaming, gambling, loot boxes and the impact of new(ish) Australian regulation.

Loot boxes are still rife in kids’ mobile games, despite ban on ‘gambling-like’ features theconversation.com/loot-boxes-a...

There are some very sensible, highly respected folks on this list, including a solid number who actively campaigned against the ban in the first place. I still don't think the ban is the right approach, it's heartening to see a group that should provide proper scrutiny of how it actually works.

Instagram hits 3 billion monthly users Meta is now looking to drive growth further by testing changes for DMs and Reels.

Instagram hits 3 billion monthly users www.theverge.com/news/784784/...

Or to put it a different way: there are as many people using Instagram each month as the were people on the planet Earth in 1960.

Just three weeks until #AoIR2025 Ruptures kicks off in Niteroi, Brazil!

Just three weeks until #AoIR2025 Ruptures kicks off in Niterói, Brazil, and we can't wait to see you all!

Wait 'til you hear all about Web2.0. It sounds marvellous! ;)

And you'd think being an AoIR President might help with these things, but all it means is there's even more jokes when the IT fails during a presentation. *sigh*

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

Working With Parents to Enroll Teens Into Teen Accounts | Meta Find out how we're empowering parents to take control of their teens' online safety, with the help of Teen Accounts and new technology.

Meta have started algorithmically finding under18s in Australia who claimed to be over 18, & shifting them to Teen Insta accounts. about.fb.com/news/2025/04... On 10 Dec, presumably those identified thus as under16 will be the first wave of Meta/FB/Insta deactivations as the ban starts.

As I wrote last week: there are age verification providers who have already built the racial profiling and discrimination modules to plug into their offerings the minute they legally can. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

Social media ban trial data reveals racial bias in age checking software: just how inaccurate is it? Young people from Indigenous and Asian backgrounds are more likely to be miscategorised as over the age limit and older people as underaged, analysis finds

I was pleased to chat with @australia.theguardian.com team who actually looked at the Age Assurance trial data, finding racial & other biases of concern before the trial are still very evident in the trial's actual data (downplayed in the official summaries): www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

"Here's that banana giving a human-like ChatGPT bot a kick in the bottom"

A Palestinian guy escaped to Europe on jet ski and used ChatGPT to plan, including how much fuel was needed.

A funny thing that's buried is that they ran out of fuel 20km from their destination -- presumably because ChatGPT's estimate was wrong? lmao

www.reuters.com/worl...

How will the social media ban work? It's still an educated guess The social media saga has produced its fair share of intrigue. But the latest big reveal on how the the ban will work has left us with just another cliff hanger, writes Ange Lavoipierre.

The social media saga has produced its fair share of intrigue. But the latest big reveal on how the the ban will work has left us with just another cliff hanger, writes Ange Lavoipierre.

SPIR papers are published proceedings, but that's only the long abstract format, so you should have no issues publishing the full paper elsewhere.

This year’s Nancy Baym Book Award committee would also like to give an Honourable Mention to @tbonini.bsky.social and @emilianotrere.com for Algorithms of Resistance: The
Everyday Fight Against Platform Power (@mitpress.bsky.social).

Congratulations also!

AoIR is pleased to congratulate the winner of this year’s Nancy Baym Book Award ... Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert for The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (MIT Press) Congratulations!

AoIR is pleased to congratulate the winners of this year’s Nancy Baym Book Award ‪@aramsinn.bsky.social‬ & @jesgilbert.bsky.social for The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (@mitpress.bsky.social). Congratulations!

aoir.org/2025nb_booka...

Screenshot from Apple Airpods Ad talking about the Hearing Aid feature.

Infographic summarising the new features of Apple's new AirPods.

Watching the promotional material for Apple's new AirPods, it's notable just how much #accessibility is being positioned as the terrain big tech wants to colonise, and in the long-run, personalise, locking users into their ecosystem.

Just over a month until #AoIR2025 in Brazil! How exciting!

Orson Welles Estate Slams AI Company’s Plan to Recreate Lost Scenes of ‘Magnificent Ambersons’: ‘Disappointing’ and an ‘Attempt to Generate Publicity’ The estate of Orson Welles calls it disappointing that Fable Studios' will reimagine lost footage of 'The Magnificent Ambersons' with AI technology.

Why we need the arts and humanities: Reason # 4 million. People think of film as a product, not a collaborative creative endeavor of human minds and bodies capturing a piece of lived experience.

variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Oh, this is so deeply unsettling. Watching big tech pay fealty to Trump in word and action to avoid regulation and basically deploy their own versions of the future without any guardrails is just chilling.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Here is my latest for The Conversation, on the results of Australia’s #ageassurance trial ahead of the #socialmediaban that will come into effect in December

Ep 30 - Hollow headlines - Media Watch A tragic youth suicide, gets the full Courier-Mail treatment. 

News Corp's Courier Mail linked a teen girl's suicide bullying on social media as part of its campaign for the <16 ban.

But the child's parents said she wasn't bullied on social media. Which News would have known if they contacted them before publishing.