Chris Stokel-Walker

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Our judges have been through literally HUNDREDS of websites and selected their shortlist for the Tiny Awards 2025 - voting's open now, so take a few minutes to check out some of the best, most beautiful, oddest, silliest websites of the past year, pick your favourite, TELL THE WORLD!: tinyawards.net

Are you paying the AI competence penalty? Devs who use AI are rated 9% less competent on average than their peers, a new study suggests. And the competency penalty is harsher for women.

Despite being given identical code snippets to review, work purportedly written with the help of AI was rated 9% worse on average, and 13% less if submitted by a female colleague.

@stokel.bsky.social on that fascinating @hbr.org study: leaddev.com/career-devel...

Are you paying the AI competence penalty? Devs who use AI are rated 9% less competent on average than their peers, a new study suggests. And the competency penalty is harsher for women.

Give the exact same bit of Python code to a developer and ask it to assess the person who produced it, and they'll say the person is 9% worse at their job if they admit to using AI. For @leaddev.com, I dug into the AI competence penalty leaddev.com/career-devel...

Why the Online Safety Act poses 'substantial threat to privacy and freedom of speech' An honourable attempt to protect children online has backfired after the Online Safety Act put up barriers to adults wanting to access innocuous content – pushing them into the arms of VPN providers

Experts - including those profiting from the boon in VPNs - tell me they see the Online Safety Act as a risk to privacy and free information access. My latest for @standard.co.uk.web.brid.gy www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/on...

New Scientist article: key takeaway - 8am or 4pm orals have a pass rate of about 50%; at noon it’s about 75%

Really interesting report by @stokel.bsky.social in @newscientist.com

The time of day a student takes an oral exam correlates with different pass rates

This is not a good thing

One for #ltheChat

Pod Save the UK | Crooked Media

The Online Safety Act is rubbish, in a take that I'm sure will allow listeners to @podsavetheuk.crooked.com to respond in as rational a way as they did when I was last on talking about AI's environmental impact. Listen now! www.crooked.com/podcast-seri...

Boris Johnson, Danny Finkelstein and Edwina Currie (based on me listening to them on Times Radio Breakfast last week) all seem to think that AI can do WAYYYY more than it can

Morning! It's a fun one

The U.S. and China are engaged in a race over chip development — both countries are racing to build infrastructure Both superpowers are building up chip development capabilities while trying to reduce dependencies upon one another.

In my first piece for @tomshardware.com's newly-launched Premium section, I wrote about the battle between the US and China for chip supremacy www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Cloudflare vs. Perplexity: a web scraping war with big implications for AI Cloudflare claims the AI startup is bypassing robots.txt restrictions to scrape content, potentially exposing Perplexity to lawsuits from publishers like Dow Jones and the BBC.

One expert told me "Perplexity seems determined to fuck around and find out". For @fastcompany.com, I looked at Cloudflare's eye-popping allegations about the AI answer engine www.fastcompany.com/91380448/clo...

Trump is chickening out again - this time over TikTok The US President has signalled to the public that he is a boy willing to cry wolf

Your acronym of the day, as we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump "banning" TikTok (which still exists, and which he's now loathe to ban), is TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out, as I've written for the i paper inews.co.uk/opinion/trum...

The U.S. and China are engaged in a race over chip development — both countries are racing to build infrastructure Both superpowers are building up chip development capabilities while trying to reduce dependencies upon one another.

In my first piece for @tomshardware.com's newly-launched Premium section, I wrote about the battle between the US and China for chip supremacy www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

got a link?

Trump is chickening out again - this time over TikTok The US President has signalled to the public that he is a boy willing to cry wolf

Your acronym of the day, as we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump "banning" TikTok (which still exists, and which he's now loathe to ban), is TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out, as I've written for the i paper inews.co.uk/opinion/trum...

Cloudflare vs. Perplexity: a web scraping war with big implications for AI Cloudflare claims the AI startup is bypassing robots.txt restrictions to scrape content, potentially exposing Perplexity to lawsuits from publishers like Dow Jones and the BBC.

One expert told me "Perplexity seems determined to fuck around and find out". For @fastcompany.com, I looked at Cloudflare's eye-popping allegations about the AI answer engine www.fastcompany.com/91380448/clo...

Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google A researcher has scraped a much larger dataset of indexed ChatGPT conversations, exposing contracts and intimate conversations.

404 Media follows up on my report for @fastcompany.com last week about private ChatGPT conversations being indexed by Google (though - if you're the researcher in question, you can always contact me, too) www.404media.co/nearly-100-0...

日本とEU、米国抜きのデジタル連合　分断時代の新秩序 - 日経デジタルガバナンス 日本と欧州連合（EU）はこのほど、産業協力の加速を狙った「競争力アライアンス（連合）」の発足で合意した。レアアース（希土類）や防衛産業での連携に焦点があたりがちだが、AIやデータガバナンスといったデジタルの分野も含まれている。トランプ米政権が各国との緊張関係を強めるなかで、テクノロジーを巡る「米国抜き連合」が生まれつつある。NIKKEI Digital Governanceは海外在住のジャーナリス...

Last week Japan and the EU announced a major agreement on AI and tech - designed to ensure their security as the US goes its own way. My latest for @nikkei.com Digital Governance www.nikkei.com/prime/digita...

Trust in AI coding tools is plummeting A new Stack Overflow survey highlights a steep decline in trust and reliance on AI coding tools, as experienced users get more selective.

Stack Overflow's latest survey of developers highlighted plummeting trust in the output of AI tools. So for @leaddev.com I looked into why that's happening leaddev.com/technical-di...

AI and Fraternity, Abeba Birhane, AI Accountability Lab I envision a future where human dignity, justice, peace, kindness, care, respect, accountability, and rights and freedoms serve as the north stars that guide AI development and use. Realising these ideals can’t happen without intentional tireless work, dialogues, and confrontations of ugly realities – even if they are uncomfortable to deal with. This starts with deciphering hype from reality. Pervasive narratives portray AI as a magical, fully autonomous entity approaching a God-like omnipotence and omniscience. In reality, audits of AI systems reveal a consistent failure to deliver on grandiose promises and suffer from all kinds of shortcomings, issues often swept under the rug. AI in general, and GenAI in particular, encodes and exacerbates historical stereotypes, entrenches harmful societal norms, and amplifies injustice. A robust body of evidence demonstrates that — from hiring, welfare allocation, medical care allocation to anything in between — deployment of AI is widening inequity, disproportionately impacting people at the margins of society and concentrating power and influence in the hands of few. Major actors—including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI—have willingly aligned with authoritarian regimes and proactively abandoned their pledges to fact-check, prevent misinformation, respect diversity and equity, refrain from using AI for weapons development, while retaliating against critique. The aforementioned vision can’t and won’t happen without confrontation of these uncomfortable facts. This is precisely why we need active resistance and refusal of unreliable and harmful AI systems; clearly laid out regulation and enforcement; and shepherding of the AI industry towards transparency and accountability of responsible bodies. "Machine agency" must be in service of human agency and empowerment, a coexistence that isn't a continuation of modern tech corporations’ inequality-widening,

so I am one of the 12 people (including the “god-fathers of AI”) that will be at the Vatican this September for a two full-day working group on the Future of AI

here is my Vatican approved short provocation on 'AI and Fraternity' for the working group

what's the non-Vatican approved draft look like?

Trust in AI coding tools is plummeting A new Stack Overflow survey highlights a steep decline in trust and reliance on AI coding tools, as experienced users get more selective.

Stack Overflow's latest survey of developers highlighted plummeting trust in the output of AI tools. So for @leaddev.com I looked into why that's happening leaddev.com/technical-di...

How Trump's trade war impacts the tech sector New tariffs on nearly 70 countries threaten to drive up prices on semiconductors, smartphones, laptops, and consoles.

How will Donald Trump's trade war affect the tech sector? For @fastcompany.com, I outlined the different ways Trump's new tariffs will affect tech products www.fastcompany.com/91378950/how...

How Trump's trade war impacts the tech sector New tariffs on nearly 70 countries threaten to drive up prices on semiconductors, smartphones, laptops, and consoles.

How will Donald Trump's trade war affect the tech sector? For @fastcompany.com, I outlined the different ways Trump's new tariffs will affect tech products www.fastcompany.com/91378950/how...

Hostage to hackers: Can the war against ransomware be won? Cybersecurity is now a top priority for all major businesses, Chris Stokel-Walker investigates why

In @standard.co.uk.web.brid.gy today, just wrote about the challenge of ransomware and how to tackle it www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/ha...

OpenAI pulls ChatGPT feature that showed personal chats on Google Following a Fast Company report that found sensitive conversations appearing in search results, OpenAI removed a controversial sharing option and began working to de-index exposed content.

“Tech companies use the general population as guinea pigs. They do something, they try it out on the population, and see if somebody complains.” #AIEthics #OpenAI Thanks for the quote, @stokel.bsky.social www.fastcompany.com/91378696/ope...

Interesting, as all my journalistic career has been spent reporting on ethical issues and trying to highlight them (plus my partner is a leading tech ethics researcher). Notable this dude has turned off replies

OpenAI pulls ChatGPT feature that showed personal chats on Google Following a "Fast Company" report that found sensitive conversations appearing in search results, OpenAI removed a controversial sharing option and began working to de-index exposed content.

OpenAI has pulled a controversial feature that showed some personal conversations on Google search results after my reporting. Here's the story for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91378696/ope...

YouTube channels are being sold and repurposed to spread scams and disinformation, says new research A new study finds that 1 in every 400 YouTube channels has been sold and often repurposed to promote scams, disinformation, and spam.

One in 400 YouTube channels analysed by researchers has been sold on grey market sites - with new owners often pushing people towards scams and spam. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91376684/you...

I never thought I'd agree with Farage on anything – until now We need a grown-up conversation about the Online Safety Act and child protection. The Government's Jimmy Savile jibe suggests it can't

Very good piece from @stokel.bsky.social inews.co.uk/opinion/neve...

IMPORTANT UPDATE: OpenAI has now pulled the feature that lets users opt-in to indexing their chats
bsky.app/profile/stok...