Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · 5h

“A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.”

Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 17h

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

michael veale @michae.lv · 20h

OpenAI’s Sora opt-out for IP is clearly OpenAI trying to do a Google ContentID pivot to turn rightsholders of key trademarked characters into price-takers not price-setters.

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

Ramsha Jahangir @ramshajahangir.bsky.social · 19h

Last week, a Dutch court ordered Meta to give Facebook & Instagram users the right to set a chronological feed by default - one of the first EU cases applying the DSA in civil proceedings.

To unpack what this means, I spoke with @bitsoffreedom.bsky.social:

www.techpolicy.press/what-a-dutch...

What a Dutch Court Ruling Against Meta Signals for Private DSA Enforcement | TechPolicy.Press

Tech Policy Press spoke with Rejo Zenger, Policy and Advocacy Lead at Bits of Freedom, to better understand the significance of the ruling.

www.techpolicy.press

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

Aída Ponce Del Castillo @aida.follows.technology · 21d

As part of @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social 600th anniversary, I’m proud to contribute to 𝐀𝐈 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐬 with my essay 𝐆𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤.

I argue for anticipatory foresight and real-time reporting mechanisms so all actors can adopt a preventive oversight approach to AI.

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

Rupprecht Podszun @podszun.bsky.social · 14d

Yay! @sahinck.bsky.social from our SCiDA-team at @hhu.de won the EuCML Best Paper Award 🏆. Sarah works on rule-setting power of Big Tech through technology (building on @lessig.bsky.social’s groundbreaking work). Pic w/ @frankpasquale.bsky.social (speaker of jury) & Alberto de Franceschi (EuCML).

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · Sep 7

“.. Notably, the poll shows U.S. adults expressing strong, bipartisan support for vaccines ..

@nbcnews.com
www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · Sep 7

This undersells what insurance exchange policyholders will feel if Congress doesn't act. The 18 percent increase is on the raw cost of insurance. But many will also lose enhanced subsidies that expire at the end of December. Those people will feel an average increase of *more than 75%.*

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

ADM+S Centre @admscentre.org.au · Nov 28

'The Australian Ad Observatory: A web of invisible influence'

🎥 admscentre.org/ad-observato...

Produced by ADM+S in collaboration with project researchers and industry partners, this short-film explores key questions, challenges, outcomes & future directions in one of our major research projects.

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 7

“States experiencing recessions are spread across the country. This includes the midwest and parts of the rustbelt. California, Texas and New York, which together account for close to a third of US GDP, are holding their own, and their stability is crucial.”
www.ft.com/content/e9be...

Is the US already in a recession?

For vast segments of the American economy it certainly feels that way

www.ft.com

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · Sep 6

The AI authorship issue is real. We've caught papers that looked OK but had references to works by the *journal editors* that *do not exist*. Like, don't send us papers citing papers we know we didn't write, right?

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 7

“This week’s syndication of UK 10-year debt was enormously oversubscribed. The government wanted to issue £14bn. It received £140bn in orders. The IMF can stand down.”
www.ft.com/content/4edb...

The bond doom-mongers have got at least one thing right

Pressure on government borrowing costs is building

www.ft.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 6

"We identify structural failures in scientific data curation & [thus call for] a forward-looking data development agenda that supports advanced scientific intelligence, advocating for a closed-loop feedback between autonomous...discovery & scientific data infrastructure."
arxiv.org/html/2508.21...

A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Frank Pasquale

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Sep 6

“So, the rise of these industrial-scale computing facilities that are needed for A.I. and other Internet applications is certainly one of the factors driving up prices.”

“And I think there’s a chance that A.I. is going to drive our bills even higher in the future.”

How AI infrastructure is driving a sharp rise in electricity bills

Electricity bills are climbing nationwide, rising faster than inflation in many places. The explosive growth of AI and the massive data centers behind it are driving demand and straining the grid. To ...

www.pbs.org

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 5

“We need to grasp our current moment as a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English, there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one way traffic into the unknown.”
adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 5

“Camouflage extends beyond visual disruption into multispectral and algorithmic dimensions: adaptive textiles that shift chromatically with light or temperature, nanocoatings that suppress infrared signatures, and nets to dissolve radar profiles.”
diffractionscollective.com/2025/08/30/i...

:: Xenowar :: In the Gaze of Machines: Camouflage as Dreamwork and Warcraft

:: But the sign is made to remain secret; even the bare face is a mask Paolo Fabbri (translated) :: To me, among the various available etymologies, the most poetically effective is the one that der…

diffractionscollective.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 5

“Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority…while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content”
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
@jburnmurdoch.ft.com perhaps these are the new gatekeepers?

Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms

The current paper explains how modern technology interacts with human psychology to create a funhouse mirror version of social norms. We argue that no…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 5

“Social platforms’ inbuilt tendency to reward indignant and hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward the production of simplistic messages and extreme positions, while rendering moderate views less visible.”
www.ft.com/content/9251...

The end of the gatekeepers

In the age of social media, the establishment no longer controls the narrative

www.ft.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 4

“One of the things that distinguishes totalitarianism from other kinds of state tyranny is the way in which it invades every nook and cranny of human existence…[it] makes apolitical life impossible, thereby rendering impossible any apolitical treatment of art.”
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Unsentimental Education: Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance

There’s a quote I’m fond of, falsely attributed to Lenin, that “ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” It was in fact coined by Gorky, and as with so many misattributed phrases, it is also misquote...

libertiesjournal.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 4

Platforms “reward attention metrics like comments, shares, and retention of viewers who watch the whole video. Influencers like myself carefully script our videos for retention, include “ragebait” to generate comments, and deliberately play into trends.”
www.ft.com/content/8501...

From skibidi to rizz, why the internet loves slang

The online engagement treadmill deliberately pushes niche language into the mainstream

www.ft.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 4

One “chatbot, when asked to name an inspiring AI character from science fiction, chose AM, from the short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. AM is a malevolent AI who sets out to torture a handful of humans left on a destroyed Earth.”
www.ft.com/content/7f14...

How AI models can optimise for malice

Researchers have discovered an alarming new phenomenon they are calling ‘emergent misalignment’

www.ft.com

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 2

“Any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/life...

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

Julien Crockett speaks with Ted Chiang about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology.

lareviewofbooks.org

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 2

I cannot fathom the level of obtuseness it takes to publish this argument in September of 2025.

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Sep 1

“If we each had a dedicated writer—our own court scribe—then perhaps we could follow the trajectory of the selfie further into the territory of self-based narrative” 😬
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A.I. Is Coming for Culture

We’re used to algorithms guiding our choices. When machines can effortlessly generate the content we consume, though, what’s left for the human imagination?

www.newyorker.com

Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Aug 31

Thank you!!

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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · Aug 31

“To see the world ‘at scale’ is to regard humans as specks of data, a vantage that becomes even more dangerous when it belongs to machines, which construe individuals as mere numbers and are insensible to human pain.”
harpers.org/archive/2025...

None the Wiser, by Meghan O’Gieblyn

harpers.org

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