Laurence D
AI strategy at the FCA. Views mine and only mine.
Recovering academic (Legal {tech, philosophy}, hci, regulation, responsible innovation, and whatnot). Diver rhymes with river.
tbh I'd rather be in Assynt
- Reposted by Laurence DHis students deserve and should demand a refund
- Reposted by Laurence D“According to AI companies, creativity isn’t an innate human endeavor, but a problem, an inefficiency waiting for a technological intervention…Such rhetoric conveniently abstracts creativity from a complex, embodied human experience & represents it as a computational problem to be solved.”
- outright lies
- Reposted by Laurence D"The very first thing he did is launch Trump Coin and it just felt like the extractiveness has now been institutionalized" Area crypto guy is *so close* to getting it. The whole damn thing is extractive, you numbnuts www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/...
- Reposted by Laurence DWhy isn’t this video on the front page of every newspaper? The country we thought we had is lost.
- This is great, and its central observations about factory-fication apply far beyond the academic context
- Reposted by Laurence D'With it, the danger is that, under a narrative of financial constraints, universities take actions that emphasise governance practices that reshape behaviour so deeply that, over time, what remains may still be called a ‘university’, but no longer acts like one.' Astute, informed, important. 4/4
- Extremely petty peeve: podcasters (usually North Americans) saying 'with that being said' to mean 'moving on from what I just said' rather than the correct meaning which is 'despite/in contrast to what I just said'
- Reposted by Laurence Damazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders
- Reposted by Laurence DThe ethical and legal damage will be with us forever but it’s the raging incompetence that will strike first, within the next few days.
- Reposted by Laurence D2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".
- Reposted by Laurence DThe real breakthrough of the year -- something that matters far, far more than generative AI ever will.
- Science has named the seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy worldwide as the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year. Learn more about this year's #BOTY and other big advances in science: scim.ag/493Tpgx
- Just AISI there, using 'post volume' and 'negative sentiment' on the r/CharacterAI subreddit as a source of evidence for the impact of emotional dependence on AI www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-...
- of all places, why the hell would i want a 'year in review' from linkedin
- Reposted by Laurence D🔴 REVEALED 🔴 The Institute of Economic Affairs – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group that "incubated" Liz Truss – was bankrolled by oil giants and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. 📝 Exclusive findings from @desmog.com 👇
- Reposted by Laurence D1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that
- "The current lack of oversight departs from established norms: regulatory mechanisms that are standard in other high-impact domains remain largely absent in AI governance" New study on public attitudes to AI regulation, from the Ada Lovelace Institute: www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/policy-brief...
- This is an actual captioned figure in a published article, and not a bit of marketing imagery. Absolutely unbelievable
- "Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se
- Reposted by Laurence DI wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
- Can we take a moment to acknowledge just how bad text-based 'asking' is as UI
- Reposted by Laurence D❗ Researchers say they’ve found a universal “jailbreak” for top AI models, through poetry. A new study shows that rephrasing harmful prompts as short poems can bypass safety filters across all major models, raising questions over AI Act compliance. www.mlex.com/mlex/article...
- Reposted by Laurence Dwhen I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor
- Cloudflare outage in the UK -- the consequences of concentrating infrastructure in ~10 companies becoming clearer by the day
- From cloudflarestatus.com: "We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers." Oh the corporate tedium of that phrasing, when half the world relies on your service whether they like it or not
- Interesting how often we seem to equate cleverness with constant, manic activity. I wonder how many smart folk fly under the radar simply because they know how to chill out
- Reposted by Laurence D"Sure, our plagiarism machine ingests enormous amounts of copyrighted material without anyone's permission, but it's the users of the machine who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 criminals, your honor." 🙄🙄 Just unbelievable levels of chutzpah. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
- Reposted by Laurence DWe didn't plagiarize, you made us plagiarize by asking questions to which we stole the answers. "Because its output is generated by users of the chatbot via their prompts, OpenAI said, they were the ones who should be held legally liable for it – an argument rejected by the court."
- Reposted by Laurence DNew NY State law on "AI Companions" 👀 www.governor.ny.gov/news/governo...
- Typography matters, don't let anyone tell you otherwise
- Seen on Reddit
- Reposted by Laurence D
- Yoshua Bengio trotting out the nonsense idea that LLMs have volition and goals #FTAISummit
- banger
- We talk about enshittification as a tech phenomenon, but applied to everything it basically describes neoliberalism -- constant squeezing of more juice when there's nothing left to give, coupled with a rictus grin telling us it's all fine, everything is just *great*
- The salient question is why anyone would ever think a system producing output based on existing statistic distributions of fragments of text would be a reliable source of truth. That's the real enigma.
- Watching Magnolia for the first time since ~2001. Some barometer of growing up.
- Ezra Klein interviewing one of the extremists of the AI nonsense sphere www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/o...
- Would hope to see a follow-up with someone on the other side but not optimistic given his own 'abundance' schtick
- No punches pulled by one of the finest screenwriters/producers still going
- Undergraduate moral philosophy question: to what extent is someone's apparent goodness contingent on the alignment of their experience and choices with their expectations of what life can and should be
- Folk outraged about digital ID as though the infrastructure isn't all already there and operating (national insurance, passport, tax). It's just another interface on top of all that. If there's an issue, then it already very much exists
- Reposted by Laurence DToday's the day! My new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER is finally out! If you want to understand why tech billionaires are so obsessed with impossible ideas about space and AI — and why that's dangerous — this book is for you. #MoreEverythingForever www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-...
- Reposted by Laurence Dsometimes the world doesn’t need to hear your take
- psa: it's 'envideya', not 'nivideya'
- Reposted by Laurence D“I don’t remember anyone ever saying to us ‘Oh I just don't think we're properly reflecting the Green Party view, or the liberal-left view on this story’,” one former BBC journalist told me. “It was always just slanted in one direction – which was basically the nativist, authoritarian direction.”
- Reposted by Laurence DData, striving to represent, can never keep up
- Nice touch from DuckDuckGo
- Can we send the phrase "writ large" to Room 101 please
- Reposted by Laurence DI'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.
- Reposted by Laurence DGood day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...
- Reposted by Laurence DA full design for the George Street and First New Town project, has been approved by the Transport and Environment Committee. The report follows the completion of the technical designs phase and sets out the next stages of the project.
- Reposted by Laurence DAll these things happened to me in London today. I paid 3 shillings to the coachman to convey me to London - a distance of a mere 30 miles or so, e’en though twas a Saturday. /1
- Reposted by Laurence D[This post could not be retrieved]
- Brilliant interview with @mmitchell.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/7089...
- @mmitchell.bsky.social: "One of the fundamental things that I’ve noticed as someone in the tech industry is that we develop technology because we love to do it. We make post hoc explanations about how this is great for society or whatever it is, but fundamentally, it’s just really fun." 💯💯💯
- and so what's possible technically becomes the whole of the truth -- whatever the computer can do is the whole of reality, and whatever it can't do doesn't actually matter. Because fun
-
View full threadIt's tragic that the 'have fun' tinkering mentality (which I share) is a central contributor to so much harm
- Reposted by Laurence DSam Altman has made a habit of penning new manifestos every time he wants to raise cash. This time, he's promising that "gentle singularity" has already begun—as part of a play to raise billions from the Saudis and the Emiratis. Here's what the "gentle singularity" looks like in reality:
- Reposted by Laurence DNew paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278 Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/
- Reposted by Laurence DIt's because they have flattened the idea of "intelligence" to mean mastering language* *which isn't even the case with current llms
- Reposted by Laurence DFwiw, I do not think this is what Tim Berners Lee had in mind
- Journalists falling over themselves to express surprise at the Trump-Musk bust up says a lot about the state of our media
- Reposted by Laurence DAmazing account of ChatGPT's sycophancy and confabulation on steroids. amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
- Reposted by Laurence DOpenAI is featuring a "Looksmaxxing GPT" that provides "PSL ratings" for photos. It will rate people as "subhuman", and advise men to get invasive procedures like jaw surgery to "increase their sexual market value" among women, who it describes as "hypergamous by nature".
- Reposted by Laurence DLuddites weren't anti-tech. They were against technology being used by the capitalist class to capture wealth at the expense of the worker. I am a Luddite, and a tech enthusiast. They're not in opposition. I want technology that makes MY life better, not that sells my life piecemeal to corps.
- Brilliant essay -- in particular the lamentations about the unseriousness of the academic machine hit home thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...
