Bhargavi Ganesh

Jamie Webb, Shannon Vallor and Gina Helfrich sit together in the Edinburgh Futures Institute having a conversation. They are all smiling.

The CTMF brings together philosophers, technologists, policymakers & researchers to tackle one of the defining questions of our time:

How can we build technologies that truly serve human flourishing?

This video captures the heart of that mission & the voices of those shaping it ▶️ edin.ac/4ai5OiC

Important ethnography by Diana Enriquez, putting some flesh on the survey findings reported by Lindsay Ellis in the WSJ. Fascinating that these organizational pathologies are currently so widespread.

Congrats to @bhargaviganesh.bsky.social for passing her viva today with flying colours! It’s been a joy to work with you and Stuart - we at the @technomoralfutures.bsky.social will miss you dearly. Looking forward to your work with the AI Accountability Lab and all that you will do in the future!

Thank you :)

Thank you Shannon for all your support over the past four years!! I’ll miss the Centre and the lovely community you’ve created at Edinburgh. I will definitely come visit when I can :)

How did AI policymaking go from bipartisan collaboration to partisan gridlock in just a few years? 🧵

Our new study in Policy & Internet tracks this shift across US states (2019-2022) and reveals the triggers that fractured early cooperation.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10....

a recent New York State audit of NYC's Local Law 144 — designed to ostensibly regulate potential bias and discrimination in automated employment tools — is fairly scathing in its assessment of how implementation and enforcement of the law is going.

simply put, LL 144 does not work.

Registration is open for the first Accountable AI Research Conference, at The Wharton School in Philadelphia on Feb. 6, 2026.

ai-analytics.wharton.upenn.edu/wharton-acco...

If you're an AI governance practitioner or researcher, looking for insights on the future of responsible AI, please join us!

Page 10-11 of the linked PDF

On AI’s ‘mediocrity trap’ — experiments indicates that while AI helps the less skilled make something passable, the highly skilled don’t use it to produce something better than they could have; they produce something ok, but lose motivation to make it great. www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/...

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope.

Yes, THAT Pope.

Final thank you to the participants without whom this study would not have been possible. Their expertise was invaluable in understanding the challenges emerging in context.

6 more days to submit to this call for papers for the inaugural Accountable AI conference at Wharton. Should be an interesting interdisciplinary conversation!

I hope you'll check it out and let me know if you have any questions/comments. Many thanks to my PhD supervisors Stuart Anderson and @dschiff.bsky.social for helping me think through and develop this project. Hopefully this can be a starting point for more research on 'bottom-up' AI governance!

We found that there is great variance in how AI is governed across hospitals, and that setting up governance committees is challenging because the diffusion of AI within hospitals is not always complementary with existing norms in medicine. More details and findings are in the body of the paper.

The paper was motivated by a desire to understand how governance is emerging in practice settings. We spoke to healthcare practitioners with experience developing 'bottom-up' AI governance committees and task groups in radiology departments and professional societies in the US and UK.

Really excited to present one of the papers coming out of my PhD at the AI, Ethics and Society (AIES) conference tomorrow called "The ‘Wild West’ of Medicine: Exploring the Emergence of ‘Grassroots’ AI Governance in Radiology". Link here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI.... Thread on the paper below 👇

JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.” Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner Kiddo: that’s AI Sep 24, 2025, 07:36 AM

They've lost the 9yos

An ELSI for AI: Learning from genetics to govern algorithms In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months h...

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Research: low productivity gains from AI may stem from employees using AI to produce "workslop", or low-effort, passable work that creates more work for others (Harvard Business Review)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Tesla fights two court battles over claims it misled consumers about automated driving Tesla is fighting cases in Miami and California alleging it dangerously misled consumers about its Autopilot technology, including the driver in a fatal crash.

California’s DMV says Tesla should lose its license to sell cars in the state, as the company fights allegations of misleading drivers into thinking its vehicles can operate autonomously without human oversight.

These things seem to bear repeating over and over again

Beautiful, and thoughtful. For just one example, see this excerpt. I'm increasingly captivated by the idea that "attention is all you need" is both the rallying cry for transformers and an exhortation for us to preserve ours.

We are wildly unprepared to think about and manage water as the precious and limited resource it truly is.

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays.

Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

AI's promise is still taking shape. The costs of its data centers are already here. Data center costs in electricity and water have been hard to pin down. We dug up documents to figure out the impact of AI infrastructure.

"Business Insider identified 1,240 data centers in America already built or approved for construction at the end of last year — the most comprehensive tally to date. That's nearly four times the number in 2010."

Call for Papers - The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives www.criticalinfralab.net/preview/?id=...
We invite proposals for our symposium that offer critical perspectives on AI & environment, AI & society, and the political economy of AI. Please share widely!

Steph Wright of the Scottish AI Alliance asking exactly the right question at our @braiduk.bsky.social gathering in Manchester: ‘How can we change the narrative from ‘Are you ready for AI? How can we make you AI-ready?’ to ‘Is AI ready for you? Is it good enough yet to be in your life, or business?’

....the Middle East, Latin America, or Russia and the Post-Soviet space, great power/imperial conflict, international law..technology/AI, or the international politics of the environment.

Deadline - Friday 27 June 2025

Apply here
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

THREE 5-year Lectureships in IR at Oxford.

One person will have expertise in Historical and Interpretive Methods; another in Qualitative Methods, and a third in Quantitative Methods

We're looking for people with substantive expertise in historical international relations, the IR of Africa...

Congrats Joe!! Amazing to see how this work has progressed