Prof. Dr Beth Singler

CALL FOR PITCHES: I'm looking for ambitious features and and personal essays for Slate's Business & Tech section.

I’m interested in stories about the surprising ways tech and business are reshaping our lives, work, and culture. Strong characters, deep reporting, and big ideas always welcome. 🧵

AI companies are stealing writers’ work to train AI in order, among other things, to do our work and the UK government, rather than fighting this theft, is considering legalising it.

I am one of thousands of authors to contribute to Don’t Steal This Book to draw attention to daylight robbery. I wrote the following poem and post it online knowing that I am feeding the beast, but also hoping that it illuminates the problem

If you go back 900 years, then a very high percentage of the people who read this post will also be descended from this man's ancestor.

I'm almost certainly descended from him.

Why don't I get a seat in the House of Lords?

Everyone Is Lying to You for Money | Official Trailer UHD YouTube video by The Forge

Yessss! @benmckenzie.bsky.social this looks really great, and definitely something to add to the syllabus for my lecture on cryptocurrency and religion :)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEXx...

Once read a paper that considered an objection derived from Don Quixote: “For this journey surely you don’t need so much baggage.” Often in my head when reading or reviewing journal articles which by some cosmic coincidence always need to be between 6-10,000 words to make their argument.

One of the biggest and most obvious divisions that genAI evangelism reveals, is people who are intrinsically motivated versus people who are extrinsically motivated.

I hate how true this is, and how many times I think about this post every time I read the news.

lmaooooo sloppelganger

Yeah, there was a popular vote on national issues here in Switzerland recently, and I was chatting to someone at work about their mail in ballot just the other day...

a woman in a green dress walks down a red carpet with the words welcome to the regency era written below her ALT: a woman in a green dress walks down a red carpet with the words welcome to the regency era written below her

Oooh I wanted to play this a while back! Looks great, let us know how it goes :)

Trump multiple times just today has said the country is at war. War can only be declared by Congress, and Iran posed no imminent threat. What Trump is doing there is a textbook illegal war and impeachable offense — if we still had a Congress.

bsky.app/profile/smit...

[Hitting the board that reads "Death of the Author was meant to be a tool of literary criticism, NOT an excuse to give your bucks to a shitty person" with my finger until it breaks]

🔥🔥🔥

I think this is about the temperature but honestly it works for decades as well

The Discourse has become sort of numb to the fact that the richest guy on earth and owner of a major social media platform just routinely spits out the kind of nakedly white supremacist shit that until a decade ago you rarely saw outside of places like Stormfront.

Some version of this is absolutely happening in the WH tonight.

Things look grim in the markets right now, but at least the U.S. economy wasn’t already being propped up by a massive speculative AI bubble that is highly sensitive to rising energy costs.

Me looking for all the free horses roaming the streets, having fun.

The last thing that any AI associated person should want is it developing "consciousness",like you do understand that if it's conscious we are now discussing why you are denying something with consciousness free will and now your role is not that of a scientist but something else entirely, right

Pete Docter Says Pixar Cut ‘Elio’ LGBTQ Themes Because “We’re Making a Movie, Not Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Therapy” The animation company's chief creative officer said they did not want their film to force parents to have conversations they weren't ready to discuss with their children.

Pixar‘s chief creative officer Pete Docter said Pixar cut Elio’s LGBTQ themes because: “We’re Making a Movie, Not Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Therapy”.

I won’t be watching any more Pixar movies.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

An older white woman walks through an ER, surveying the space, and remarks, “And how’s all this digital shit working out for you now?”

These are the questions.

So… I've been writing for about 18 years on the idea that if you somehow manage to make meaningfully conscious machine minds & then you treat them as tools, then you're enslaving those minds, and that's pretty messed up. And this ties into something else I've re-upped recently: LLMs can't say "No."

Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.

A post on X from the betting platform Polymarket that says “BREAKING: Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”

Literally as I’m arguing with someone about whether AI companies are misleading people into believing their technology possesses God-like super-intelligence I see this monstrosity

anthropic: I have made AI

tech nerds: you fucked up a perfectly good computer is what you did. look at it. it's got anxiety