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Christopher English @ampersandc.bsky.social · 6d

AI sucks

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 7d

People who coax chatbots into sensible answers are basically opening and closing the fridge until it contains something you wanna eat, yes, eventually you get hungrier & eat the stuff in there. But what changed was your cognition. The fridge stayed the same. You changed your mind about the contents.

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Christopher English @ampersandc.bsky.social · 20d

AI sucks

Owen Blacker @owenblacker.bsky.social · 20d

ChatGPT Goes Completely Haywire If You Ask It to Show You a Seahorse Emoji
Wait, there's no seahorse emoji, right? Right?
futurism.com/chatgpt-hayw...

"Yes 🐠 — actually, the seahorse emoji exists: 🐡 🐬 🐠 🐳 🐟 🦑 🦞 🐙 🦀 🐢 … and specifically 🐴?" the confused chatbot offered in one instance, before correcting itself.

"✅ The official seahorse emoji is: 🦄—oops, no wait, that’s unicorn 😅. The real one is 🐉?" it continued. "Let me be precise: Yes, there is a seahorse emoji: 🦐 is shrimp, 🦑 squid… But the actual seahorse emoji is 🐉?"

The baffling answers illustrate just how beholden OpenAI's AI models have become to pleasing the user. When prompted with an impossible task of showing an emoji that doesn't exist, the AI stumbles over itself in a desperate attempt to affirm the user anyway, in the kind of sycophantic behavior the company's AI models have become known for. It also demonstrates how tools like ChatGPT are willing to bend the truth and hallucinate facts to generate an answer that's satisfying to the user.

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Reposted by Christopher English

Lenore Taylor @lenoret.bsky.social · 28d

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Fierce and factual from Anna Funder and @juliapowles.bsky.social

Tech companies are stealing our books, music and films for AI. It’s brazen theft and must be stopped | Anna Funder and Julia Powles

If we don’t refuse and resist, not just our culture but our democracy will be irrevocably diminished

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Christopher English

Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · Sep 8

I respect Anil so I want to talk seriously about harm reduction and public health messaging.

First let me acknowledge that yes, many regular, not-super-online people are trying out AI tools. Of course they are! It's been aggressively pushed into everything and given heavy institutional support.

Anil Dash @anildash.com · Sep 7

this is the really ineffective head-in-the-sand reaction a lot of folks on Bluesky tend to have if you talk about any harm reduction-based approach to the reality that millions of people are using AI tools today. The current approach to critiquing AI is obviously not working, but they don't care.

alert saying "@auska.esq has added you to the "Al Apologists" moderation list"

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Jonathan Green @greenj.bsky.social · Sep 5

The Death of Meanjin. a couple of thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/greenwor...

The Death of Meanjin

Price of everything, value of nothing dept.

open.substack.com

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Christopher English @ampersandc.bsky.social · Aug 19

AI sucks

Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · Aug 19

As an anthropologist, I'm inclined to try to understand stuff that looks like magical thinking rather than mock it, but proposing to build a God and then expecting him to tell you how to get rich is really testing all of my professional training...

Warren Terra @warrenterra.bsky.social · Jul 15

From the replies (bsky.app/profile/dasb...) here's Sam Altman doing what the quoted post described. He seems serious about it.

Christopher English @ampersandc.bsky.social · Aug 19

AI sucks

Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · Aug 18

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event

Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

www.theatlantic.com

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Josh Taylor @joshtaylor.bsky.social · Aug 14

I know it was a trainwreck interview, but I couldn't get past the point that we need to be like the US when it's not a settled issue in the US at all...

Guardian Australia @australia.theguardian.com · Aug 14

Scott Farquhar thinks Australia should let AI train for free on creative content. He overlooks one key point

CEO of Tech Council of Australia and Atlassian founder’s argument hinges on whether AI goes on to create something ‘new and novel’ * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Australia should adopt US-style copyright law to allow artificial intelligence to suck up all creative content or risk harming investment in the industry in Australia, according to Atlassian founder, Scott Farquhar. Farquhar, the Tech Council of Australia CEO, told ABC’s 7.30 program on Tuesday: “all AI usage of mining or searching or going across data is probably illegal under Australian law and I think that hurts a lot of investment of these companies in Australia”. Whether the use is commercial or not The nature of the copyrighted work The amount used of the copyrighted work The effect of the use on the market for or value of the copyrighted work. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Christopher English

Possum @pollytics.bsky.social · Aug 12

From a story about a new species of pseudoscorpion, this sort of highlighted the management of Australia in a nutshell

au.news.yahoo.com/incredible-p...

Incredible facts about Barrow Island
There is no public access to Barrow Island as it is listed as a Class A Nature Reserve.

It is home to 24 species and subspecies found nowhere else on Earth.

Barrow Island is home to Boodie Cave, which is one of Australia's oldest archaeological sites and contains evidence of humans from 46,200 to 51,100 years ago.

US energy giant Chevron was permitted to build its $54 billion Greater Gorgon gas extraction project on the island.

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Josh Taylor @joshtaylor.bsky.social · Aug 5

Idk why the productivity commission believes productivity can be derived by giving away other people's labour for free to companies with way too much money. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Should big tech be allowed to mine Australians’ text and data to train AI? The Productivity Commission is considering it

Interim report on digital economy also mulls changes to privacy rules and copyright collections to help harness AI’s benefits

www.theguardian.com

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Christopher English @ampersandc.bsky.social · Jul 11

AI sucks

METR @metr.org · Jul 10

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · Jun 23

"The announcement was 782 words, followed by a nervous clarification of 731 words. The page featured 48,320 words of comments in just 24 hours"

Here's a new one for @crikey.com.au trying to figure out why the presence of backlash to "AI" is so weirdly uneven ->

www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/23/i...

a graphic featuring asort of zombie long armed creature, with an ant's head, and the words 'intaturalist zombie ant' on a plaster in front of a cricuit board thing

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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · Jun 10

A startling number of ChatGPT uses are developing intense, reality-bending AI delusions. The impacts on their real lives are often disastrous

People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions

A startling number of ChatGPT uses are developing intense, reality-bending AI delusions. The impacts on their real lives are often disastrous.

futurism.com

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Reposted by Christopher English

Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · Jun 5

I’ve added two more, inspired by some responses.

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Climate Science Breakthrough @climatescibreak.bsky.social · Jun 2

US climate scientists need all the help they can get. Including from foul-mouthed comedians! 🤡😱😱

Watch Emmy Award-Winning David Cross team up with Prof Michael Oppenheimer in the US launch of the hit series "Climate Science Translated".

#climate #arresteddevelopment #climatescience

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Anathema Device (Brisbane) @iamanathemadevice.bsky.social · May 24

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI | MIT Technology Review

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.

www.technologyreview.com

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · Apr 25

I've just come back from the Cambridge Disinformation Summit where I gave the opening keynote, titled "Demanufacturing Consent - How Disordered Discourse is Destroying Democracy", featuring everything from Fake Hooves to Jackson Hinkle being the worst.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-FV...

Belllingcat CEO Eliot Higgins, on how disordered discourse is destroying democracy

YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit

www.youtube.com

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · May 15

🧵 There’s a thread going around misrepresenting my work and Bellingcat’s education strategy. I want to use this as an opportunity to explain what we’re actually doing—and why it matters.

This is about truth, democracy, and how we build a more resilient society.
x.com/buynevich/st...

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · May 13

"We are surrounded by cheerful, grinning volunteers, all willingly punting own-goals against the fossil-fuelled bullshit factories. It seems like nothing is going to stop them, so it’s time regulation did the job instead"

Me, in @crikey.com.au, feeling like a total loser:

My protests against AI make me feel like a total loser, but not in the way you think

Big tech companies are seeing their power consumption skyrocket far faster than any greenwashing actions they can take to pretend that power is ‘clean’.

www.crikey.com.au

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The Monthly @themonthly.com.au · May 9

“These are words with nothing behind them. They have no purchase on reality, no logical coherence, no meaningful information to convey. They are greasy bubbles that pop the moment they touch anything.” James Ley on UNSW’s announcement of a deal with OpenAI

Page against the machine

With the inexorable rise of AI – in everyday tech, in public and private communications, in our universities – the value and distinctness of the written word is under siege

buff.ly

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The Conversation AUNZ @aunz.theconversation.com · May 4

We’re facing a crisis in public trust – in institutions and the information they feed us.

Truth and lies, trust and doubt: how should we be navigating the misinformation crisis?

theconversation.com

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The Australia Institute @australiainstitute.org.au · Mar 20

It's enough to give you the sh*ts. @rodcampbell.bsky.social reveals that Tasmanian salmon farms produce 6 times more pollution than all of Tasmania's sewage #OffTheCharts
australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-big...

Chart showing how much dissolved inorganic nitrogen is produced each year:

Tas salmon farms - 4,193tonnes, Tas sewage - 755 tonnes

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Alice Evans @draliceevans.bsky.social · Mar 14

Have we passed peak intelligence?

In international tests, student scores for reading and maths sunk to a new low.

US teens are struggling to concentrate & evaluate information.

The excellent @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Warning: this thread is dark 🧵

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · Feb 28

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

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