David Barnard-Wills

AI companies are starting to build more and more personalization into their products, but there's a huge personalization-sized hole in conversations about AI safety/trust/impacts.

Delighted to feature @mbogen.bsky.social on Rising Tide today, on what's being built and why we should care:

Collections Management Librarian - Games Workshop Jobs About the Job Games Workshop has an exciting new role for a Collections Management Librarian to join our Archiving team, where you will be responsible for

You can genuinely be a space marine librarian: jobs.games-workshop.com/search-and-a...

On Dec 11, tune in for @rondeibert.bsky.social's conversation w/ @signal.org president @meredithmeredith.bsky.social about the critical lessons learned from the Signalgate scandal at @financialtimes.com #FTGlobalBoardroom conference.

Learn more: globalboardroom.ft.com/agenda/sessi...

Making the case for an AI metaphor observatory Between 2023 and 2025 I have written various posts on GenAI, Large Language Models and metaphors: one where I went out hunting for metaphors; one where I had a chat with ChatGTP about metaphors for…

In this week's post I make the case for an #AI #metaphor observatory tracking how we think and talk about and act on GenAI and LLMs makingsciencepublic.com/2025/11/14/m...

‘Fashion exposes people’s desires and anxieties’: how much do we really reveal when we get dressed? A new exhibition – with contributions from Chanel, McQueen and Galliano – places 100 looks under the psychoanalytic lens, and suggests that what we wear is the result of a battle in the psyche

www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025... CBT's great and all, but it doesn't come close to Freud and Lacan for the ability to generate waffle about fashion

The Craft of Science with AI: Evidence, Judgment, and Practice We invite researchers and practitioners to join us in examining how scientific reasoning and imagination are being reconfigured as AI systems become a part of the everyday practice of science. Learn m...

I am participating and reviewing submissions for this workshop. so let's get some interesting proposals here, yeah? If you are an STSer/anthropologist working on how AI is changing ideas and practices in the sciences, would love to have you in the conversation.

How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time The idea that machines will be as smart as—or smarter than—humans has hijacked an entire industry. But look closely and you’ll see it’s a myth that persists for many of the same reasons conspiracies d...

I had a long conversation with MIT Tech Review’s @willdouglasheaven.bsky.social about AGI; it fed into this very good read on the rise of AGI orthodoxy

The value of public R&D

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...

Sign saying "tech accelerator" at Campfield Market Manchester

"whats that lad? Trouble at t'ech accelerator?"

🎉Today, we released a series of five Responsible AI courses that you can take for free: alltechishuman.org/rai-courses

Principles of Responsible AI

The History of Responsible AI

Operationalizing AI Governance (2)

Governing Agentic AI Systems

Americans are losing millions to scammers at crypto ATMs. Here’s how companies profit Companies often fail to refund money to victims and aggressively fight police to claw back scam money seized from machines.

CNN takes a deep dive into the business of crypto ATM companies who mark up the price of cryptocurrency by adding 20% to 30% to each transaction. "Americans, often retirees, lost around $240 million to crypto ATM scams in the first six months of this year" www.cnn.com/interactive/...

Thank you. In my last job, at research company, we put a ban on "silicon samples" in our gen AI policy. I think it's particularly bad for "hard to reach" populations because they are less likely to be represented or represented well in the models training data.

Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies in 2030 Date and time Wednesday 15 October 2025, 9:00am to 2:00pm Location In-person, the Cabot, 25 Cabot Square, London. Registration for this event closes at 12pm on Thursday 9 October 2025. About this even...

connect.cma.gov.uk/drcf-cyberse... registration is now open for this digital regulators hosted event on the future of cybersecurity

Front cover of Labour Together’s Britcard proposal. It is red and promises a ‘progressive digital identity for Britain’. The abstract imagery suggests progress (arrows) and immigration borders (the arrows are partially interrupted)

WW2 poster- a policeman’s hand takes a National Registration ID card from a plain, citizen’s hand. Text says a citizen may be asked for the card at any time

Preparing my notes for an interview on history of identity cards, back in the news because of proposals such as Labour Together’s Britcard (left). There’s a long history (see WW2 poster, right)

Here’s a thread on recent (1980s-2010s) UK ID card history, showing how Tony Blair became keen on them

A comic panel from DIE: volume 1. a silhouette of a hobbit smoking a pipe in a world war one style trench, with a speech bubble "not a nice hole, but a nasty, dirty, wet hole, a charnel hole"

DIE:volume 1 had a take on something like this.

Short answer, yes.

The CyberSec Game Challenge Build trust, shape a culture and kick start conversations. Physical games for in person threat modelling, training and fun.

Enter the cybersecurity game challenge and get your cybersecurity game printed!

cybersecgames.com/pages/the-cy...

Lessons Learned from the Consortium: Tool Use in Agent Systems CAISI and NIST hosted an AISIC workshop with approximately 140 experts in January

www.nist.gov/news-events/...

Box of the card game corvids - the card game of trash and treasure, designed by jasper Beatrix and illustrated by Meg Lemieur. The art is black and white pictures of a coin, bottle top, feather, paperclip and a crow foot.

This just arrived, looking forward to giving it a play.

Public sector public engagement on data and AI Whenever we speak to public servants who are keen to involve the public more on decisions about data and AI, an early subject to be raised is always: who’s already done it, and how did they do it? People are understandably keen to learn from what has already been tried. This blog/case study is part of a series exploring how public sector organisations involve the public, workers and civil society in decisions about data and AI, and some of the consequences when they do not. Read more about our work on public involvement in public sector data and AI.

Whenever we speak to public servants who are keen to involve the public more on decisions about data and AI, an early subject to be raised is always: who’s already done it, and how did they do it?

@gavinfreeguard.bsky.social‬ shares some examples here.

🔗 connectedbydata.org/resources/b...

Europe's Innovation Agencies Need Radical Reform To Meet Today's Grand Challenges Innovation agencies in the EU are no longer fit for purpose. A major overhaul of both the concept of innovation and of institutional structures is urgent.

Interesting read: Europe's Innovation Agencies Need Radical Reform To Meet Today's Grand Challenges: www.socialeurope.eu/europes-inno...

For effective science communication, 'just the facts' isn't good enough, say scholars In a new communications landscape that feasts on polarization, the science community needs to rethink how it engages society in scientific discovery, controversy and policy.

Facts alone won’t bridge science and society. Researchers call for a “collaboration model” built on dialogue, trust, and shared values, to make science more relevant and connected to people’s lives.

On Critical Technologies Policy@Manchester’s publication On Critical Technologies offers sharp insights, robust evidence, and forward-thinking policy recommendations from leading experts at The University of Manchester.

Paying off technical debt with a sociotechnical cyber levy...my piece in policyatmanchester.shorthandstories.com/on-critical-...

@manchester.ac.uk @ciaranm.bsky.social @spcoulson.bsky.social @cybergeekgirl.bsky.social #CentreForDigitalTrustAndSociety @cyberbaines.bsky.social @digitaluom.bsky.social

What did I visit on my holidays?

Revealed: oligarchs spied on UK lawyers who ran Serious Fraud Office cases The Guardian has obtained surveillance images taken by hired spies whose goal is said to have been identifying sources and gaining ‘leverage’

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Judge tells colleagues to be ‘on their guard’ over expert witness evidence Patrick Hodge, supreme court’s deputy president, wants judges to improve their scientific and technical literacy

I'm no expert, but this seems an important issue www.theguardian.com/law/2025/aug...

Future leaders: Imagining Scenarios/Effective Decision Making/Encouraging Resilience. | SPRITE+ Hub Join our Future Leaders workshop in collaboration with the RBOC Network+

📢 Applications close this Friday to attend our Future Leaders workshop! 📢

Together with the RBOC Network+, we invite you to a co-hosted workshop aimed at developing future research leaders working in TIPS.

Apply here: www.spritehub.org/event-detail...

#SPRITE #events #opportunities #TIPS

How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? The malfunctioning xAI chatbot provides some insights into how large language models work.

I did some research and reporting to try to understand why Elon turning Grok "anti-woke" also made it into MechaHitler, some interesting stuff in the guts of LLMs. feat @theophite.bsky.social prospect.org/power/2025-0...

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

Scoop from @eileenguo.bsky.social - huge amounts of personal information are embedded in a major data set used to train AI models www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

Comission guidelines on providers of general purpose AI models digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/g...