Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Liam Hogan

Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 10d

Guardian investigation into Facebook groups with 600k members in which the kind of extreme dehumanising language that socialises racist violence is rife. Facebook has become more permissive towards extreme content in the last year.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Far-right Facebook groups are engine of radicalisation in UK, data investigation suggests

Rioters were influenced by network that exposes hundreds of thousands of Britons to racist disinformation, Guardian research indicates

www.theguardian.com

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 10d

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10d

It is, far and away, the most challenging thing I’ve encountered since entering the academy. And that is saying a lot. I might be working on this but I keep putting it aside because I’m not medicated enough to describe how demoralizing it all is.

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 11d

We have allowed the lazy, grifting Silicon Valley charlatans into the front door, & in doing so, we have learned just how many of our own colleagues & administrators simply are not interested in the actual business of education. It's incredibly demoralizing.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 11d

Thanks so much for your reporting on this, Ben. I just got an email from my campus's IT office triumphantly advertising free student access to four different AI models -- at the same time as we have a hiring freeze, caps on grad enrollment, and a 7% budget cut -- and wanted to scream.

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tamara nopper @tamaranopper.bsky.social · 13d

Alice Walker said, “When we find our place, we know. Everything else can seem a distraction. We settle in to enjoy the beauty of Life itself.”

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David Gilbert @davidgilbert.bsky.social · 13d

NEW

WIRED led the way in reporting on Elon Musk's efforts to dismantle the US government. My colleagues and I spoke to 100s of employees at dozens of agencies to understand what happened.

This is the definitive story of DOGE as told by those who experienced it

www.wired.com/story/oral-h...

The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers

WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers in dozens of agencies to learn what happened as the Department of Government Efficiency tore through their offices.

www.wired.com

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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 14d

More on the failures/erasures that ai chatbots introduce into library search tools aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...

The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search

From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched

aarontay.substack.com

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Julia Métraux @juliametraux.bsky.social · 14d

I really hope there's a correction on it saying why they edited the story. It was the right thing to do, obviously, but accountability for harmful writings is the right thing too.

jael holzman @jael.bsky.social · 14d

politico has now edited their story to eliminate references to “the autism problem” and deleted their bsky post about it

someone got caught

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Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 16d

I cannot tell you how grim the AI in higher ed situation is. Many of the students have completely surrendered to letting AI do their homework, badly, I might add. How do you fix this? Truly, what the hell do we do, beyond what grading can address, which isn't a solution?

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Claire L Jones @claireljones.bsky.social · 17d

This is it. Overwhelming anti-intellectualism. Everywhere, all the time

Liam Hogan @liamhogan.bsky.social · May 29

Can’t help but feel that we are living in an era of overwhelming anti-intellectualism on every front, with AI being the corporate vanguard of this cultural emptiness.

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 18d

Power is the rock on which truth founders. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital.
Here's what I've learnt about the industry in 40 years in journalism.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I have now been a journalist for 40 years. The forces ranged against my profession have never been so powerful | George Monbiot

Once, I believed that humanity’s problem was an information deficit. Now, I know you can’t speak truth to power if power controls your words, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

www.theguardian.com

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 19d

A college English class where they’re told to use AI to complete assignments. Why bother teaching at all? Especially the languages/literature. I’m sorry but I will judge any professor who does this, especially in fields like English and history

Tastes Like Purple @linz13.bsky.social · 19d

My daughter has a college English class right now where they’re told to use AI to complete assignments. SHE’S HORRIFIED AND DISGUSTED. The tech bros want you to voluntarily relinquish your ability to think and give up all creativity to computers. So people are dumb and dependent on their products

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Ernesto Priego @ernestopriego.com · 21d

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

Screenshot. King's College London page. Examples of effective practice

The following scenarios follow the above guidelines and offer insights into ways that academic staff can use AI transparently and in an assistive capacity, always ensuring human oversight and judgment remain central.
Scenario A – Scaling feedback while maintaining quality

Lecturer A is responsible for marking over 100 essays within a two-week window.

Conscious of the limitations this workload places on the depth of individual feedback, they adopt a hybrid approach using their university’s approved or supported LLM tool, Copilot.

Without ever uploading student work directly, Lecturer A composes an anonymised summary for each student, noting which marking criteria were met and the approximate percentage achieved for each. They input this summary alongside the official rubric into Copilot, prompting it to generate supportive, criterion-referenced feedback. This feedback is then carefully reviewed, adapted, and personalised before being uploaded to the marking platform.

Students are made aware of this process in advance and shown a demonstration, reinforcing transparency and trust.

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 24d

Vacuous, generic and scattershot advice for incoming 1st years on the use of AI at university. Especially liking 'Chin recommends giving it class notes and asking it to generate practice exam questions.' Surely we can't be the only programme that supplies students with past & practice exams?

How to use ChatGPT at university without cheating: ‘Now it’s more like a study partner’

The ubiquitous AI tool has a divisive effect on educators with some seeing it a boon and others a menace. So what should you know about where to draw the line between check and cheat?

www.theguardian.com

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 25d

"On the last episode of his show before he was killed," Kirk told "his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 25d

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend

Opinion | Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either.

www.nytimes.com

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Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 26d

I wrote my own Charlie Kirk obituary, and about valuing truth over manners: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning

The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division

www.thenation.com

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · Sep 2

Good news about the cutting-edge AI tools from the $3-trillion-dollar company.

Google AI search result for “was 2010 fifteen years ago?” returning: “No, 2010 was 14 years ago, not 15 years ago. The current year is 2025, and to find the number of years ago 2010 was, you subtract 2010 from 2025, which equals 14.
Current Year: 2025
Past Year: 2010
Years Ago: 2025 - 2010 = 14 years”

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Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · Aug 31

AI's best use case will always be scams. It's scamtech, top to bottom. Everything about it is crooked. Its bedrock is theft and its legacy is the destruction of the environment, both physical and virtual.

Even most of its 'legitimate' uses are a form of lying.
"I wrote this."
"I created this."

Unofficial BBCNews (World) Bot @bbcnews-world-rss.bsky.social · Aug 29

BBC reveals web of spammers profiting from AI Holocaust images

The BBC has found an international network of content creators profiting from AI generated posts on Facebook.

www.bbc.com

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The Irish Times @irishtimes.com · Aug 30

Blackwater fish kill: EPA finds creamery co-op wastewater exceeded permitted discharge limits

Separate investigation launched after white discharge spotted in water on north bank of Blackwater

www.irishtimes.com

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Mark Sumner 🇺🇦 @devilstower.bsky.social · Aug 21

Microsoft copilot for Excel has a warning not to use it for “business critical” calculations because the answer may not be accurate.

Would someone explain why I might *ever* want to use a spreadsheet where results are unreliable?

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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · Aug 21

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

Karen Graubart @kbgraubart.bsky.social · Aug 20

Universities doubling down as public sentiment shifts away from dependence upon AI. This is the problem with the buy-in.

Theo Nash @theonash.bsky.social · Aug 20

The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.

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👻 Eastern European hard candy 👻 @bvrlytweetmaker.bsky.social · Aug 14

I've been thinking a lot about how I really hate the implication that AI skeptics are luddites because most of the AI skeptics I know are relatively tech savvy while the biggest AI champions I know can barely use email

Ksandra @ksandrarpg.bsky.social · Aug 12

Funny how when it comes to AI people are all "adapt or be left behind" but when it comes to remote work the same people insist that things must go back to how they were at all cost.

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Liam Hogan @liamhogan.bsky.social · Aug 6

Excerpt of Daniel O'Connell's reply to the King's Speech and refusal to acknowledge the Food Riots in Limerick (November 1830)

My article about this is here > limerick1914.medium.com/objects-of-a...

"[If there be no distress], why are the people in a state of disturbance and insubordination within a short distance of the very seat of Government? Is there no cause for this, and is the calumny to be pronounced upon the people of England, that they break out into acts of violence without the pretence of suffering? Nothing is said about the alleviation of distress, and, above all, nothing is said about the alleviation of the distress of Ireland."

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Liam Hogan @liamhogan.bsky.social · Aug 6

A letter sent from Gerrit Smith to Daniel O'Connell (The Liberator newspaper, 25/8/1843)

The fears of the American abolitionists had become excited, had, indeed, began to run high, that American slaveholders would prove themselves able to gag even Daniel O'Connell. But your late speech, which has blistered these tyrants from head to foot, and filled this land with their howlings and execrations, has put an end to all those fears. You perhaps, wonder why so little money is sent to you by American abolitionists. Be assured that it is not from the want of a lively interest in your efforts to obtain, by peaceable means, for Ireland, the right of making, and being governed by, her own laws. Be assured, too, that it is not because they think that they have not the right to express this interest. The sympathy of unsophisticated man for his brother man naturally, necessarily, and therefore rightfully, travels across national as well as city or village boundaries, and wherever that sympathy proceeds, its appropriate expressions and proofs have, of course, the right to follow. If I have the right to feel pity for a hungry and naked family in France, then I have also the right to follow up the pity, by sending a barrel of flour or a roll of cloth to that destitute family. The doctrine, that the conventional lines, which men have drawn upon the earth's surface, decide the question for whom we may and for whom we may not feel, is utterly repugnant to an unselfish and unspoiled heart. To tell me that I may not love him who dwells on the north side of the St. Lawrence, as well as him who dwells on the south side of that river; and that because a man is a Canadian, I may feel less pity for his woes than if he were an American, is to tell me what my nature and the God of my nature flatly contradict. I sympathise with your countrymen under their oppressions, for I hold that a people are grievously oppressed, who, not to speak of other wrongs they may be suffering, are denied entire freedom of religious conscience. But, were the Irish suffering no oppression, I should sti…

Having said what are not the reasons, I will now say what are the reasons why the American abolitionists send you so little money. In the first place, we are generally poor. It is proverbial, as you know, that the rich feel not the need of revolutions. They are content with the present order of things. Especially are they unwilling to embark in a revolution so odious as that which American abolitionists, at the certain expense of having their names cast out as evil,' are laboring to achieve. In the second place, we cannot connect ourselves with the Repeal Associations of this country; for, being principled and impartial lovers of liberty, we cannot consent to associate, for the advancement of her cause, with those who we know hate her, and who will never even seem to be her friends, save when some selfish calculation suggests the expediency, or when passion or prejudice impels them in that direction. I need not say to you that our Repeal Associations are generally pro-slavery, and that whilst they talk against the oppression of the Irish-an oppression which, however sore, still leaves to its victims their manhood they do, nevertheless, both talk and act for the infinitely greater oppression which turns millions of their own countrymen from immortal, God-like beings, into cattle and merchandise. That this is the general character of these associations, must be evident to you from the fact that many of the communications which they made to you abound in pro-slavery sentiments, and that none of them give their sanction to anti-slavery truth. Your speech, to which I alluded at the beginning of my letter, having called from these associations expressions of great bitterness toward yourself and the abolitionists in general, has done much to develop the atrocious and horrible pro-slavery character of those associations.

It may be, that the abolitionists of this country will form Repeal Associations. But whether they shall contribute as Associations or as individuals, I have no doubt that the little sums which they shall send you out of their deep poverty,' will, accompanied by the power of their consistent example and the blessing of God, be worth far more to the great and good cause, which you are leading on to a bloodless and sublime victory, than the far greater sums which the oppressors of God's poor in this land have the audaciousness to send to the oppressed in yours. I should love to send you a donation of one thousand dollars; but, I am sharing so largely in American embarrassments and losses, that I must content myself with sending you one hundred; and even this is from the income of my wife's estate. She parts with it, however, willingly-gladly; for her heart is no less true than my own, to the cause of American liberty; and if she cannot say that her, as well as my maternal grandmother, was born in Cork, nevertheless such a link between her heart and Ireland is not necessary to make that heart faithful to the cause of Irish liberty also.
I leave this letter open, and request my esteemed friend Lewis Tappan, Esq. of the city of New-York, to forward it to you, after he shall have enclosed in it a bill of exchange worth one hundred dollars.
If you knew the immeasurable influence of your example on our endeavors to terminate American oppression, you would pardon me for closing my letter with the earnest prayer, that Daniel O'Connell may have grace given him from God to stand firm in the cause of liberty-of American as well as Irish liberty! I remain,
Dear Sir, with great regard, Your friend and admirer, GERRIT SMITH.

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Liam Hogan @liamhogan.bsky.social · Aug 6

"As human, as accountable beings, why should we suffer this any longer?"

- Daniel O'Connell re: the abolition of chattel slavery (Exeter Hall, 23/4/1831)

RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · Aug 6

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O'Connell, the man known as 'The Liberator’.

Daniel O'Connell's legacy remembered on 250th birthday

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O'Connell, the man known as 'The Liberator'.

www.rte.ie

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