Liam Hogan

Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.

Absolutely damning from @aaronschaffer.com, @willoremus.com, & @nitasha.bsky.social.

To get more data, Anthropic:
* "destructively scanned" millions of books
* downloaded the shadow library LibGen
* hailed another shadow library's arrival as "just in time!!!"

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Hello? Cassandra here. Remember all those times we AI-resistant educators were warning about this exact thing?

When two years of academic work vanished with a single click After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.

Amazing sob story: "ChatGPT deleted all the work I hadn't done"

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

Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show

We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

The whole thing feels automated from top to bottom, with the sole purpose being to collect revenue. Our democracies have not even begun to adequately regulate these spaces.

Kilmainham Gaol visitors hit by Google ad ticket scams Visitors to one of the country's top tourist attractions, Kilmainham Gaol museum, are being hit with a scam which sees them pay for fake tickets through duplications of the museum's official website

The tech industry #enshittification continues at pace. I recently reported another outright scam that was appearing above legitimate results (as a sponsored ad) but Google replied to say that it did not breach their policies. www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

Renewables muscle fossil fuels out of EU electricity market, says research

Renewables muscle fossil fuels out of EU electricity market, says research https://aje.news/a6ihio

Und thus, modernity comes to a close just like it started, with a guy ranting at windmills

Dublin City Council suspends use of X as State agencies leave amid Grok controversy Country’s largest local authority undertakes review of social media platform use as others sign out for good

Dublin City Council has suspended use of X following the Green Party emergency motion last week. It'll come to our Protocol Committee next week and myself and other Greens will be recommending leaving it completely.
www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026...

The hardest possible AI sell to global economic and political elites, and even with this captured audience, this still won't land, and it won't work.

If you listen very carefully, you can hear Charles de Gaulle screaming I BLOODY TOLD YOU SO from some rural French cemetery.

this crystallizes why, despite truly heroic solidarity and activism, i can’t quite get in the “we’re going to win” mindset right now. the harm is so active and there’s so much violence we don’t even know about. people are being turned into ghosts.

It’s such a downgrade in every way.

I assume most of #speirghorm has read this already but I think it's important for my British and overseas followers to see too.

Pretty crazy that nearly all of the EU Commission is still on X even as Elon Musk is literally talking about destroying the EU.

You can leave X. It's really not that difficult.

The Gist: The Abuse Factory X, the child abuse imagery app, revealed our state has no red lines. This is the Gist.

In Dublin, on Fenian Street, there's a factory that makes child sex abuse material.

You can pay it money, as a subscription, and that's one of the services it offers. This doesn't happen by mistake or because you've tricked or hacked the system.

It’s a feature.

www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the...

If it's not regime change, and it's certainly not "law enforcement," let's just call it a nuclear-armed oil heist.

You couldn't publish this today. You'd have to cloak it under several layers of metaphor.

So many historians to recommend, but maybe start with Peter Gray? bsky.app/profile/pete...

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

Great work.

Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education - Public Books We are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.

"universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry that exploits students+faculty as data mines

frenzy w/o consulting their faculty, collecting empirical data on whether gen AI is pedagogically useful, or pausing to inquire about the long-term impact"
www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz Amnesty International, interviewing migrant detainees, identifies use of the confinement box. There can be no denying it is a torture prison

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

Gentle reminder that the European Union was established because the first four decades of our 20th century were mostly internecine war and genocide.

What this shows is how obviously weak their arguments are once they are confronted with any question. Doesn’t even need to be a well developed counterargument, just „but what exactly do you mean by that?“ or „what does that entail?“ This stuff can only survive in its own bubble.

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning.

Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

On Environmental Democracy and the Collisons’ “Abundance-Verse” Andrew Jackson 21 November 2025 I. Introduction A clamour of praise greeted John Collison’s “how to get Ireland moving” Op-Ed following its publication in the Irish Times on 25th October: the Irish…

Rebuttal to John Collison's highly contested Irish Times “sermon to the nation", by lawyer @andrewlrjackson.bsky.social. A fact-check pushing back on the tech-optimist, deregulation-first vision - defending environmental law, democratic oversight & evidence-based planning elajucd.com/2025/11/21/o...

The Government Has Cut Air Pollution Funds to Councils by 99% as Illegal Levels of Pollution Shorten Lives New data shows just £1.5 million was given to councils in England in the past year to tackle air pollution - down from a high of £225 million in 2021

New data shows just £1.5 million was given to councils in England in the past year to tackle air pollution – down from a high of £225 million in 2021 @bylinetimes.bsky.social
bylinetimes.com/2025/11/21/t...

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.