Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · 29d

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop

AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

www.e-flux.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Sep 7

Plus de la moitié du trafic web mondial provient désormais de bots fr.statista.com/infographie/...

Infographie: Plus de la moitié du trafic web mondial provient désormais de bots

Cette infographie montre l'évolution de la répartition du trafic web mondial généré par des humains et des bots de 2019 à 2024, en %.

fr.statista.com

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Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe

Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) @hannahshelley.bsky.social · Aug 13

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Google Scholar Is Doomed

Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

hannahshelley.neocities.org

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Jul 11

Le mondes des revues scientifiques au bord de l’asphyxie www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...

Le monde des revues scientifiques au bord de l’asphyxie

Plus de trois millions d’articles sont publiés chaque année dans les revues scientifiques, les chercheurs étant incités à les multiplier pour se distinguer. Une logique économique perverse s’est insta...

www.lemonde.fr

Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Jun 29

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

Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers

From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.

www.nature.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Jun 25

Nouveau bouquin de Marcello Vitali-Rosati que j’ai très hâte de lire : « C’est la matière qui pense -
Pour une philosophie de l’édition »

ceen.univ-rouen.fr/matiere-marc...

C'est la matière qui pense

ceen.univ-rouen.fr

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Jun 17

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...

arxiv.org

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Jun 17

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

www.404media.co

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · May 29

McGill professor Juan Serpa created SUSAN, the online forum helping U.S. researchers protect their data from Trump macleans.ca/society/amer...

American Climate Scientists Have a New Canadian Hero - Macleans.ca

How McGill professor Juan Serpa created SUSAN, the online forum helping U.S. researchers protect their data from Trump

macleans.ca

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · May 19

Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors

The rapid development of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies has led to widespread endorsement of GenAI systems serving as a ‘personal tutor’ and learning ‘collaborator’ in higher education. However...

www.tandfonline.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · May 13

The physicality of learning -
Generative AI threatens the valuable process of searching for answers

jamescosullivan.substack.com/p/the-physic...

The physicality of learning

Generative AI threatens the valuable process of searching for answers

jamescosullivan.substack.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · May 6

Qui sont les « petites mains » de Wikipedia, l’encyclopédie libre qui agace réacs et géants de la Tech basta.media/Qui-sont-les...

Qui sont les « petites mains » de Wikipedia, l'encyclopédie libre qui agace réacs et géants de la Tech

Chaque jour, des millions d'internautes y trouvent des infos et du savoir gratuitement et en accès libre. Mais ce site n'existerait pas sans ses bénévoles. Des « wikimédien·nes » racontent ce que sign...

basta.media

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Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · May 1

I wrote about this in this week's newsletter. I seriously believe one of the main reasons ChatGPT grew is that Google Search both failed to meaningfully innovate, especially in how it answered a user's query, and eventually deteriorated into something worse.
www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

This Bubble Was Also Inflated By The Failure of Google Search

Everybody I talk to that uses ChatGPT regularly uses it as either a way to generate shitty limericks or as a replacement for Google search, a product that Google has deliberately made worse as a means of increasing profits.

ChatGPT is, if I'm honest, better at processing search strings than Google Search, which is not so much a sign that ChatGPT is good at something as it is that Google has stopped innovating in any meaningful way. Over time, Google Search should've become something that was able to interpret your searches into the perfect result, which would require the company to improve how it processes your requests. Instead, Google Search has become dramatically worse, mostly because the company's incentives changed from "help people find something on the web" to "funnel as much traffic and show as many ad impressions as possible on Google.com."

By this point, Google Search should have been more magical, more capable of taking a dimwitted question and turning it into a great answer, with said answer being a result on the internet. Note that nothing I'm writing here is actually about generating a result — it's about processing a user's query and presenting an answer, the very foundation of computing and the thing that Google, at one point, was the best in the world at doing. Thanks to Prabhakar Raghavan, the former head of ads that led a coup to become head of search, Google was pulled away from being a meaningful source of information.

And I'd argue that ChatGPT filled that void by doing the thing that people wanted Google Search to do: answer a question, even if the user isn't really sure how to ask it. Google Search has become clunky, obfuscatory, putting the burden of using the service on the user rather than helping fill the gap between query and answer in any meaningful way. Google's AI summaries don't even try to do what ChatGPT does — they generate summaries based on search results and say "okay man, uhh, is this what you want?"

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Apr 27

Will the Humanities Survive AI? www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

www.newyorker.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Apr 26

U.S. attorney for D.C. accuses Wikipedia of ‘propaganda,’ threatens nonprofit status www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

U.S. attorney for D.C. accuses Wikipedia of ‘propaganda,’ threatens nonprofit status

Ed Martin sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation accusing it of spreading propaganda

www.washingtonpost.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Apr 18

AI companies demand huge amounts of data to train their programs. Peer inside LibGen, a pirated library of millions of books and research papers used by Meta and others: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

www.theatlantic.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Apr 8

«Un enfant va aller mieux s'il ne regarde pas du tout d'écran avant l'âge de six ans. Je répète: le développement d'un enfant ira mieux s’il ne voit pas d'écran avant six ans.»
Dr Jean-François Chicoine
www.985fm.ca/audio/690394...

Selon un pédiatre | «Le développement d'un enfant ira mieux s’il ne voit pas d'écran avant six ans»

Écoutez le Dr Jean François Chicoine, pédiatre au CHU Sainte Justine, professeur agrégé de clinique à l Université de Montréal, en discuter.

www.985fm.ca

Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe

WIRED @wired.com · Mar 27

Nearly 35 years ago, Paul Ginsparg created arXiv, a digital repository where researchers could share their latest findings before they had been systematically reviewed or verified. If arXiv stopped functioning, scientists would suffer an immediate and profound disruption.

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science

Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

www.wired.com

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Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe

Jules @juleswp.bsky.social · Mar 16

Léo Joubert : « La force de Wikipédia, c’est la pluralité des engagements qu’elle suscite » sur @la-croix.com

Léo Joubert : « La force de Wikipédia, c’est la pluralité des engagements qu’elle suscite »

La célèbre encyclopédie en ligne fait face à des accusations de partialité idéologique, de la part d’Elon Musk comme de l’hebdomadaire « Le Point ». Le sociologue Léo Joubert, auteur d’une thèse sur l...

www.la-croix.com

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Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe

danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · Mar 16

When politicians ban books, I read them. So when I heard that Meta - who, of course, believes in free speech - is using egregious legal tactics to silence a former employee's book, my eyebrows went up. Who else is reading "Careless People" just cuz Meta is suing? www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/t...

Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.

www.nytimes.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Mar 14

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

www.newyorker.com

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Jean-Michel Lapointe @lapointejm.bsky.social · Mar 5

Wikipedia is a bastion of transparency, punctiliousness, and accessible knowledge.

So maybe it should come as no surprise that Elon Musk has lately taken time from his busy schedule of dismantling the federal government to attack Wikipedia.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...