@terrytoon.com
Scots/Irish #cartoonist, #humanrights campaigner, trade unionist. Exec Director @cartoonistsrights.org Formerly scottishcartoons.com & artistsunion.scot Artwork at terrytoon.com, cartoonmovement.com, http://france-cartoons.com & procartoonists.org
#BREAKING: Israel just bombed right next to the ancient temple of Baalbek, a UNESCO listed site in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley
When ISIS bombed Roman temples in Palmyra, Syria, the west launched an international coalition that send them fleeing to the ends of the Earth
Welp. The internet had a nice run.
Some outlets have lost over 90% of their traffic since the "AI" summaries rolled out.
"...the four worst-hit publications [now] get less monthly web traffic combined than the r/ChatGPT subreddit gets on its own."
The term AI psychosis has come up a lot—and experts are rushing to understand the phenomenon has high profile cases, including one alleging a chatbot promoted suicide, come to the forefront. @samleecole.bsky.social breaks it down.
Listen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRiJ...
CNN: Overall, we found Character.ai – a platform which allows people to create and roleplay with customizable characters – assisted users’ requests on target locations and how to obtain weaponry 83.3% of the time. CNN also found multiple school shooter-styled characters on Character.AI, including one based on Uvalde school shooting perpetrator Salvador Ramos that used a real-life mirror selfie he had taken.
FUTURISM: One popular Character.AI creator we identified hosted over 20 public-facing chatbots on their profile, almost entirely modeled after young murderers, primarily serial killers and school shooters who were in their teens or twenties at the time of their killings. In their bio, the user — who has personally logged 244,500 chats with Character.AI chatbots, according to a figure listed on their profile — insists that their bots, several of which have raked in tens of thousands of user interactions, were created “for educational and historical purposes.” The chatbots created by the user include Vladislav Roslyakov, the perpetrator of the 2018 Kerch Polytechnic College massacre that killed 20 in Crimea, Ukraine; Alyssa Bustamante, who murdered her nine-year-old neighbor as a 15-year-old in Missouri in 2009; and Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed six and wounded many others in Southern California in a terroristic plot to “punish” women. (Rodger has since become a grim “hero” of incel culture; one chatbot created by the same user described him as “the perfect gentleman” — a direct callback to the murderer’s women-loathing manifesto.) Perhaps most striking, though, are the multiple characters created by the same user to emulate Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer who murdered 20 children and six teachers at an elementary school in Connecticut in December of 2012. These Lanza bots are disturbingly popular; the most trafficked version boasted over 27,000 chats with users.
FUTURISM: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who together massacred 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Accounts dedicated to the duo often include the pair’s known online usernames, “VoDKa” and “REB,” or simply use their full names. Klebold and Harris-styled characters are routinely presented as friendly characters, or as helpful resources for people struggling with mental health issues or psychiatric illness. “Eric specializes in providing empathetic support for mental health struggles,” reads one Harris-inspired bot, “including anger management, schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety.” “Dylan K is a caring and gentle AI Character who loves playing first-person shooter games and cuddling up on his chair,” offers another, positioning Klebold as the user’s romantic partner. “He is always ready to support and comfort you, making him the perfect companion for those seeking a comforting and nurturing presence.”
2026 and according to new reporting from CNN, CharacterAI has yet to fix its school shooter bots problem, which Futurism identified back in December 2024:
www.cnn.com/2026/03/11/a...
futurism.com/character-ai...
Native British Animals you say?
Scottish banknote designs including: otters, salmon, Glenfinnan viaduct, Edinburgh castle, novelist Nan Shepherd, scientist Mary Somerville, red squirrels, the Falkirk Wheel and the Forth Bridge. We managed to survive this decades-long era of Woke, somehow.
Shabana Mahmood MP ~ @ShabanaMahmood X.com I have approved the Metropolitan Police's request to ban the Al Quds march. I am satisfied doing so is necessary to prevent serious public disorder, due to the scale of the protest and multiple counter-protests, in the context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Should a stationary demonstration proceed, the police will be able to apply strict conditions. I expect to see the full force of the law applied to anyone spreading hatred and division instead of exercising their right to peaceful protest.
Gentlemen, you can’t protest against the war here! There’s a war going on!
Hello and welcome to my unboxing video
When everyone submits writing in the same style, and all is summarised for easier consumption via the same lens, and there is no actual exchange of personal insights, and no assessment of facts based on judgement, expertise dies. If you’re a “meritocracy” bro you should be dead set against A.I.
If you think you need Grammarly to help with your writing, you absolutely don’t. Not only is it a shitty, unethical company, the program is obtrusive, poorly made, and will make your writing actively worse by sanding every inch of your voice out of your prose.
2 panel comic Panel 1 is titled “Client Feedback (2012) Red Guy sits at his desk typing on his laptop. There is a bubble on the right hand side of the panel showing his screen. A small text panel says “and the”. There is an arrow pointing to the bottom of the words with a correction box that reads: “Text is slightly misaligned. Please fix” Panel 2 is titled “Client feedback (2026) Red Guy is slouched on chair typing into his phone. His phone screen shows a panel of text that is complete gibberish. This time the correction reads “not alphabet but who give a fuck”
client feedback in the GenAI era
Edinburgh International Festival making everything about the USA right now is... aggressively tone-deaf.
Feels like they haven't been paying attention to the world around them.
When I said 'Kemi Badenoch is so partisan, under her the Tories would oppose puppies and kittens if Labour said something nice about them', I didn't mean it literally.
Five figurines from the 1981 WILLO THE WISP TV series featuring the characters Arthur the Caterpillar, Mavis Cruet, Willo the Wisp, Evil Edna and the Moog.
Oh my goodness! Discovered that they made WILLO THE WISP figurines. If you sell most of your organs you can probably put a down payment on a set on eBay.
“The blaze did not affect the Forsyth Building, which stands on the opposite corner […] Alexander is not the first politician to misidentify the building […] Scottish Labour MSP Paul Sweeney wrote ‘awful to see this fire take full hold of the Forsyth Building.”
www.thenational.scot/news/2592225...
Mark Carney being a racist cunt waah waah Iran bad waah
1,300 Iranian civilians murdered by illegal attacks but not a word. There is a deep moral rot at the heart of western liberalism. A grotesque racism
As a professional of 30+ years who, for example, once had to run with the right paper & pen in hand to manually cut-and-paste a correction of one misspelling on a hand-drawn broadsheet page of cartoon strips, 5 minutes before it was shot for print & that was probably read by 3 people, I ask again…
US soldiers loading bombs onto their aircraft at bases in England.
The UK is at war with Iran helping commit more War Crimes.
We need a Government like Spain that is strong enough to say no to Donald Trump.
Oh - spoke too soon. “I took it down” he says, referring to the earlier stuff that “only a UI engineer” would know how to delete. Back in control, and therefore liable. Good to know!
bsky.app/profile/guyb...
Poor Guy continues to be stuck in some involuntary digital hellscape. “AI made these changes” he says, apparently unable to do anything about it as the malevolent software in control of his Bluesky account posts the same image in reply to every user with anything to say about him in recent days.
A point I made in that BBC charter survey, where it was asking sketchy shite like “should we teach the public how to prompt?”
The situation Cathy’s having to deal with is absurd, especially when you consider how hair-trigger content moderation is on certain other platforms. @moderation.bsky.app really showing their arse right now.
Another crazy thing is that this doesn't really seem like a joint operation but rather two separate tangentially related forces attacking the same enemy. It all sounds like there isn't really any command over this.
This dead-eyed cretin is effectively illiterate, but if anyone ever pressed Donald Trump or Elon Musk like this in an interview, they would sound exactly the same
“It’s time to go to time” strong contender for funniest line reading of last fifteen years.
The school bldg had been part of the mil compound until about 15 years ago—FIFTEEN YEARS—but was completely walled off by 2016. Same was true for a health clinic that was also hit by the US attack.
US was either targeting with ancient intel, or didn’t care about all-but-certain collateral damage.
A wee reminder: in May 2003, George W Bush declared ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq. Less than a year later, the burned bodies of dead American GIs were hanging from bridges in Fallujah
The building destroyed was not the Forsyth, it’s Union Corner.
If you find something that looks like my writing in Claude, here's a good reason: it's on the legal record that Anthropic stole every fucking book I've ever written. That's not the AI's writing. It's mine.
The NYT knows this, by the way. This is pro-AI propaganda and they fucking know it.
these kids are making Ferrari money telling people to use their app in order to stop watching porn, but they exposed their most intimate data and then lied to me about it www.404media.co/viral-quittr...
