Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 2h

I’ve just learned that John Searle, whose Chinese Room thought experiment is often used to challenge ideas of “understanding” in LLMs, died at age 93 on Sunday. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

John Searle obituary

American philosopher whose Chinese Room thought experiment rebuts the idea that computers can think as humans do

www.theguardian.com

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 23h

What could possibly go wrong with putting giant microphones in cities, funded by law enforcement?

via @mguariglia.bsky.social for @eff.org

www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for Human Voices

Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product ...

www.eff.org

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Jathan Sadowski @jathansadowski.com · 1d

Call for abstracts: "Insurance, Climate Change, and Spatial Governance" paper session for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California, March 17-21, 2026

I'm co-organizing this session with some amazing scholars. Here's our extended abstract:

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 1d

RAG as a service?

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 3d

I really enjoy this new paper in Signata that picks up my work on QR codes.

The paper maps how pandemic infrastructures became architectures of legibility—how a logistics tool turned into a grammar for social life.

Reading it feels like finding my own handwriting inside someone else’s map.

Screenshot of the Signata journal webpage. The banner reads “OpenEdition Journals.” Below it, the journal title Signata – Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics, issue 16 | 2025, “Sémiotique de l’espace à l’ère de la logique computationnelle et des pratiques numériques.” The article title appears in bold: QRcoding the Smart City: Dystopian governmentality and the digital infrapolitics of the post-pandemic present by Aurora Donzelli, with a DOI link. The design is clean, white, with text centered on the page.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 3d

Huge congratulations! Can't wait to see what you do next.

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 3d

So this weekend I arrived & officially started my doctoral studies as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, in Digital Humanities under supervision of Leo Impett. It’s exciting!

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

mozilla.ai @mozilla.ai · 5d

🚀 We’ve just launched our new Mozilla.ai website!
We’ve given our website a full makeover, making it easier than ever to explore our work and connect with what we’re building.

👀 Check it out and explore what’s coming next: www.mozilla.ai

Mozilla.ai - We’re building a future where AI works for you

Mozilla.ai is building AI that is trustworthy, transparent, and controllable. Explore the Agent Platform to automate workflows, open-source libraries like any-agent, any-llm, any-guardrail, and mcpd, ...

Mozilla.ai

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 5d

🚨 #NLP SHARED TASK 🚨

Use @mozilla.org Common Voice Spontaneous #Speech datasets to train #ASR models that work for conversational speech on 21 under-represented languages.

📆 Dataset release 1 Dec
📆 Submissions 8 Dec
💰 $USD 11k prize pool !!!

community.mozilladatacollective.com/shared-task-...

Shared Task: Mozilla Common Voice Spontaneous Speech ASR

Overview Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has come a long way – but most systems are still trained on polished, read-aloud speech. So we set out to build a model that can handle the messy, beautifu...

community.mozilladatacollective.com

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 6d

It's another case of alateral damage in the #TokenWars.|

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 6d

Moreover, this poor quality content is then being used to train *new* AI models - propagating the poor quality downstream.

This "slopagation" - the propagation of AI-generated slop - is now endangering the transmission of endangered languages through its inauthenticity.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 6d

Machine translation - a machine learning technique which automatically translates text from one language to another - has been used to make poor-quality translations of Wikipedia articles.

This process is challenging the quality control and editorial processes of the Wikimedia Foundation.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 6d

Excellent article by @jacobjudah.bsky.social for @technologyreview.com about the unanticipated consequences of machine translation (MT) at scale.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral

Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

www.technologyreview.com

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Jathan Sadowski @jathansadowski.com · 6d

What an unsurprising decision by corporations that desperately need to make money with AI. If every other company with a chatbot isn't already doing this, then expect them to be following Meta's lead soon. The chatbot is not your friend; it's a corporate listening device. www.ft.com/content/22f7...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/22f7afc3-8ac0-4ca1-9877-fd3f8ddcc986?desktop=true&segmentId=7c8f09b9-9b61-4fbb-9430-9208a9e233c8#myft:notification:daily-email:content

Meta will use conversations people have with its chatbots to personalise advertising and content across its platforms, in a sign of how tech companies plan to make money from artificial intelligence.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday said it would use the content of chats with its Meta AI to create advertising recommendations across its suite of apps.

“People will already expect that their Meta AI interactions are being used for these personalisation purposes,” said Christy Harris, privacy and data policy manager at Meta.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 7d

My good friend Kat is selling her place in #Lara, #Geelong - if you're looking for a great 4BR #home that's great for folks commuting to Melbourne and who might want a great family home with lots of yard and space, close to all facilities, this one's for you!

www.realestate.com.au/property-hou...

www.realestate.com.au

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Asher Wolf @asherwolf.bsky.social · 8d

Ehsan Dehghan wrote his phD thesis on how antagonistic communities reposted each other during the Twitter campaign against Robodebt: the left and right formed a star-shaped network, working together to fight Robodebt. See page 197 eprints.qut.edu.au/174604/1/Ehs...

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 9d

When we automate things there are always trade-offs. Decisions made about #data that seem straightforward and efficient and impartial and "clean".

Data is never straightforward or efficient or impartial or clean.

James C. Scott should be required reading for any Minister automating anything.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 9d

The government implemented a policy in a way that was illegal (the averaging of yearly income based on a subset of data - extrapolation of income during a quarterly period to the whole year). Even the ministers responsible seemed to believe what was being automated was the existing process.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 9d

This makes the current government's attempts to curtail Freedom of Information #FoI laws even more suspicious. The more that #AI and automated systems are used in government, the *more* transparency we require to ensure they are being used effectively. Journalists & activists made it untenable.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 9d

Big shout out to @asherwolf.bsky.social and Lyndsey Jackson, who are also featured, for the incredible work they did on #NotMyDebt. One of the key take-aways for me from the documentary was the role of the media and activists in shining light on the inappropriate #algorithm being used.

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 9d

Watched the #SBS #documentary "The People vs #Robodebt" - h/t to @jpwarren.pivotnine.com for the recommendation.

It's an incisive and damning view of the human harms perpetrated by a government hell-bent on efficiency & stigmatising welfare recipients.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

www.sbs.com.au/whats-on/art...

Robodebt scandal explored in SBS docu-drama 'The People vs Robodebt'

One government. Almost half a million victims. Zero accountability... until now. The devastating human story behind one of the Australia’s greatest political scandals premieres on 24 September on SBS ...

www.sbs.com.au

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 11d

Ruin a book with a car:
NeuroLancer

Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 12d

Ruin a book with a car:

Nova Country for Old Men

NightMar on Hicks Street, Part 4: The Rabbit’s Revenge @histoftech.bsky.social · 13d

Ruin a book with a car:

The Unbearable Lightness of Brabus

Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Jake Goldenfein @jakegoldenfein.bsky.social · 12d

New one from James Parker and me - wading into the fights between artists and AI companies. We suggest artists need a vocabulary beyond copyright to articulate their grievances: www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/...

Labor not property: Why artists are fighting the wrong battle on gener

This cover image depicts the display screen of the Suno-generated song 'created' using the text of this piece as the prompt. You can listen to the song by clicking the hyperlink where you see "Bad son...

www.versobooks.com

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Reposted by Kathy Reid (she/her)

Rosamunde Van Brakel @rosamundevb.bsky.social · 14d

Looking for a stimulating and accessible article on critical socio-technical imaginaries of #AI to add to the syllabus of my AI course on legal, ethical and social issues of AI. Anyone have any suggestions?

Rosamunde Van Brakel @rosamundevb.bsky.social · 19d

Next week the new academic year starts in Belgium and I’m excited that in addition to my Master course legal, ethical & social issues of #AI course I will also teach Sociology and Sociology of Law to 1st year bachelor law and criminology students at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel!

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Kathy Reid (she/her) @kathyreid.au · 15d

yeah I have flagged it twice - try [email protected]

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