Kathy Bowrey

Just a small blood moon rising last night.

Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

Evidence of Unreliable Data and Poor Data Provenance in Clinical Prediction Model Research and Clinical Practice Clinical prediction models are often created using large routinely collected datasets. It is essential that prediction models are developed with appropriate data and methods and transparently reported...

Much of my work in meta-research is on finding problems in research, so I've seen a lot of bad practices. However, even I was shocked by hundreds of researchers publishing papers using data that is faked and has no data provenance. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6.... Amazing work by my student Alex.

Why do you need AI to do basic authentication though?

Researcher ‘honestly shocked’ to discover name on paper, editor claims misunderstanding While reviewing her Google Scholar profile to prepare a list of her publications, psychologist Maryam Farhang came across a paper she didn’t recognize.  The article, in the Journal of Research…

This is why we need our institutions to help enforce our moral rights : against false attribution. It should not just be the busy work of academics to tidy up likely AI generated corruption

retractionwatch.com/2026/02/27/r...

I'd appreciate if any audio tech folks could help circulate this exciting call for a fully-funded PhD position working in multichannel audio design for galleries.

It's part of an ARC funded project 'From Noise to Signal: Improving Sonic Experiences in the Gallery'

www.unsw.edu.au/research/hdr...

Our universities have to stop normalizing theft out our IP….

Sydney STS folks 👋

Join us for the inaugural event of the Sydney STS Network (Friday 27 Feb) where a panel will respond to the prompt: Why (Australian) STS now? #STS

Revealed: How OpenAI lobbied to change Australia's laws — and got some of what it wanted OpenAI said artificial intelligence could create $115 billion of economic growth for Australia in five years. But internal briefings show public servants warned Treasury that the wider benefits of AI ...

Waiting to see how the copyright mess is untangled… it’s an offence to import technology that would have infringed if made here- so AI and the civil service adoption of AI really is in a spot.
www.crikey.com.au/2026/02/19/o...

Screenshot of text from University of Edinburgh library services: Like many academic libraries, we have been experiencing slowness and outages on some of our open access platforms over the last few months. We have identified that this is the result of poorly behaved Gen AI crawling activity. As such we have had to try to disable the ability for AI -harvesters to access content from our repositories, via IP range blocking, geographical blacklisting, implementing limits to throttle bots and using robots.txt files to limit access. We acknowledge that this approach is not consistent with our open access policy which should require us to permit machine access to our content. Our limiting activity is not 100% fool-proof, and is a temporary measure to give services breathing space to perform while a longer termn solution is worked out by software providers and the community. This approach also has the added benefit of helping to assuage authors fear of losing control of their works.

The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science Preprint repositories and conference organizers are having to counter a tide of ‘AI slop’ submissions.

Another story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NOR US! Another three UK universities decline new Elsevier deal www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m... - Sheffield, Lancaster and Surrey confirm they are walking away from proposed three-year deal with world’s largest academic publisher. (paywalled sorry)

AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster Here’s a new preprint from Anthropic: “How AI Impacts Skill Formation”. AI coding bots make you bad at learning, and don’t even speed you up. [arXiv] The researchers ran 50 test subjects through fi…

Been asked to discuss this tomorrow with Law Faculty: Should we “normalise AI-use” in the teaching of students or in our research?
There is no research it’s fit for purpose.
Even Anthropic says
“If you don’t do the work, you don’t learn, and you don’t remember.”

pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/06/a...

An Illusion of Consensus: What the Government Isn’t Saying About the Results of its AI Consultation - Michael Geist The government quietly released a “what we heard” report this week discussing the response to its 30-day sprint AI consultation from last October. Described as the “largest public consultation in the ...

Government used AI to summarize expert reports from its AI consult. I did the same by uploading them to Chat GPT/Perplexity AI to generate new summaries. I found the government consistently softened advice creating an illusion of consensus that isn’t really there.
www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/02/aico...

It’s good to get out and about

A discreet intellectual network has been reshaping the world for 70 years. Here's how A constant battle of ideas reshapes the world we live in, and few groups have been more successful in winning the war than the little-known Atlas Network.

Brilliant reporting here by Gareth Hutchens on the Atlas Network and its insidious work across the world, including Australia

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

New paper- LLMs allow verbatim extraction of copyrighted works. "For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under
copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984" arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671

How Two Canadian Organizations Created a National Model for Diamond Open Access The Canadian Research Knowledge Network and Érudit transformed their vendor-client relationship into a collaborative partnership to support open access without author-facing fees. What can we learn fr...

INSPIRING: How Two Canadian Organizations Created a National Model for Diamond Open Access katinamagazine.org/content/arti... “The final piece of the Canadian diamond OA puzzle is a nationwide network of library publishing programs hosted in university libraries."

Thank you very much to all colleagues who have submitted a proposal for their papers to be discussed at this year's workshop in Sao Paulo in June.

We hope to get back to you as soon as we can.

Night manoevres

It would be good if the complicity of some researchers and the resistance by others to this was acknowledged here. It’s not a self replicating system.

The deadline for paper proposals has been extended to

🗓️ 16 January 2026!

We would be grateful if you could forward this call to your respective networks, particularly those in the humanities.

Please find details for the call for paper here: ishtip.org/forthcoming-...

now extended to 16 Jan - please share!

Please join us for a timely discussion on intellectual property and democracy (and other IP theory and history matters) in June in Brazil!

Details on CfP:

The notion that "95% of people who responded to the survey are against this" can be glossed as "no clear consensus" is even more absurd than the usual "pretty damn absurd" usual baseline for uk politics.

Human Rights are Universal, Not Optional: Don’t Undermine the EU AI Act with a Faulty Code of Practice | TechPolicy.Press The Code of Practice draft takes a step backward due to its weak approach to human rights protections, write Laura Caroli, Laura Cabrera, and David Harris.

warning: reading this piece will leave you outraged

"Code of Practice is failing to protect human rights. This draft relies on faulty logic that dramatically limits the ways in which AI developers would need to mitigate human rights risks from their AI models"

www.techpolicy.press/human-rights...

How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants - and how I built a dashboard to see through it I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Yep. I did that too.

The UK Reproducibility Network

RESOURCE: training materials for all things Open oercommons.org/hubs/ukrn

“It was then – in a twist that still feels ridiculous to write – that a letter arrived from the Duchy of Cornwall, one of the monarchy’s oldest feudal estates, on behalf of the deli owner as her landlord…a plot twist so colonial that I had to check whether the East India Company had been revived”