Conor Linehan

It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️

An obviously AI-generated figure with AI slop and fake text all over it, recently published in Scientific Reports.

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing.

Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this?

Background readings:
Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r
Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

The way in which these people are so transparently evil, and so transparent in their desire to enact violence and reinforce existing oppressions, will never cease to be astonishing. The only thing more astonishing than that is the average person’s willingness to tolerate it.

Get Your Kid a Watch A smartwatch isn’t capable of doing that much harm. It can also do a lot of good.

Loved this story by @ibogost.com, which is nominally about the Apple Watch, sure, but more remarkably about granting young people the right amounts of agency and dignity in the digital world that we really have no choice but to live in.

this is all generative tech! almost all the time, it is better to just do the thing yourself than to try to build a monkey with poor cognition that can occasionally, in perfect conditions, do it for you

emergence is only useful in contexts where a random vector is desirable and intentional!

Perhaps we are at the point where universities should be making themselves much less dependent on microsoft.

I’m not so naïve to think that AI will go away when the AI bubble bursts (after all the Internet didn’t go away when the dot com bubble burst). But it is really sad that such an unreliable, unethical, and massively polluting technology is embraced by so many.

Glengariff is destroyed with Rhododendrons. Shocking to see up close.

what i love is that in 1990 judas priest got brought to trial over the claim that subliminal messages in the recording "better by you better than me" caused two suicides and now in 2025 openai seems to be generating a suicide a week with its superliminal messages and the US government is funding it

And I'll repeat this because why not.

This is really what companies want. They want us to be totally isolated from other people. And all our interactions to be mediated by their LLMs, in a way that literally edits and devalues what we know and say.

7/n

bsky.app/profile/oliv...

6/n

Josh Crowley (sp?) (@jdcrowley) on twitter: "If I built a big robot that consumed 33% of my state's electricity so it could go around stealing people's art I would be arrested, and that's how you know law is a social construct."

The powerstrip-plugged-into-itself-as-a-brain meme is featured but is three interlocking instances. One is labeled Oracle w/ a plug from Nvidia reading $40bn of NVIDIA chip purchases for OpenAI datacenters One is labeled Open AI reading $300bn deal for datacenters with Oracle and $200 bn deal to buy NVIDIA chips One is labeled Nvidia with $200 investment into Open AI and goes into the first one in the sequence, Oracle

You know the bubble is cooked when it can be explained like this.

I’ve already said so and phones aren’t the problem here.

The problem is companies offering sycophantic human simulator software that is objectively harmful and is not controllable—something that’s somewhere between religion and drug, for profit.

Chat interfaces that mimic human beings should be illegal.

Organizations who use works they have no license to should be shut down.

It’s pretty simple.

Remember: if AI did even half of what it promises, tech firms wouldn't need to shove it down our throats, unasked for, at every opportunity.

It's snake oil. Resist.

Please sign this excellent letter to Ursula vdL, so she can see that nonsense AI hype is neither true nor appropriate for anybody to believe or spread.

Sign here bsky.app/profile/kris...

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

Pope Leo:

I have my students co-develop class policies, and they pretty much unanimously chose to ban AI in the class. There were a few questions about using Grammarly, but those were the only real exceptions any students expressed (and even then, we talked about alternatives to that and they were open to it)

We had fucking congressional hearings over Mortal Kombat.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

“We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically.”

Today, someone who has been surfing the AI hype wave to boost his career, got upset by our position paper.

He gave no substantive couinterargument. Just called it “activism”. As if that is an insult.

In a world where techno-fascism hollows out our institutions, I’m a proud scientific activist.

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

Most of Ireland's uplands are commonage, ie co-owned by local farmers.

The ONLY real income from commonage is via subsidies, almost always for ecosystem-killing sheep. This is why Irish mountains are all empty wastelands, kept that way by your taxes.

Why are we STILL not paying farmers to rewild??

yes, really messed up stuff, see thus by me and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social (2025). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

and: bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Feeling existential weariness today at so much academic effort promising to create AI systems and design frameworks that "augment rather than replace", support wellbeing sustainable just etc etc etc –– and yet, and yet, all it will achieve is Gutmenschen shelfware.

In Ireland
• Nature is haemorrhaging
• Water bodies are sick and dying
• Greenhouse gas emissions from land are soaring
• Flooding is ever more catastrophic
• Etc...

Because we've turned nearly all wild, natural habitat into barren monocultures of grass or shitka.

Mass REWILDING is the solution.