Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2026

AI’s coming, everyone panic!

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mani Basharzad suggests we do the exact opposite of my chosen headline in regard to the inevitable collapse of civilization rise of artificial intelligence:

In recent weeks, a letter on AI titled “We Must Act Now” has made headlines. Its list of signatories brought together an unlikely coalition of intellectuals, from Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, and Niall Ferguson.

The signatories agree on three key propositions. First, they argue that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next decade”. Second, they argue that it could “transform the economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution, but over a much shorter period, bringing both large-scale job displacement and significant improvements in living standards”. Third, they argue that “economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to create the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to ensure AI benefits society”.

These propositions have created an unusual consensus among economists and policymakers. They also reflect a broader public anxiety about AI and its impact on people’s livelihoods. Yet, as Stanford economist John Cochrane remarked in response to the letter, “You see AI everywhere, except in productivity and labor statistics”. That is the first problem with the argument: those are the two places where the letter’s predictions should already be showing up.

The letter makes extraordinary claims, and as the famous saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet the evidence offered is remarkably thin. The language is dramatic — “large-scale job displacement”, “larger than the Industrial Revolution”, and “major gains in living standards” — but every prediction is qualified by one word: could. There is still little evidence that AI has fundamentally reshaped employment or productivity.

Take the labor market as an example. A widely cited survey claimed that employers plan to reduce graduate hiring because of AI. But the study was forecasting the future, not describing present reality. It found that “four in ten employers believe entry-level roles could disappear within the next five years”. Once again, the evidence rests on expectations and fears rather than observed outcomes.

Now compare that with what is actually happening. Economist Valentin Boboc has argued that entry-level jobs are growing fastest at firms that are aggressively adopting AI. If AI were already eliminating these positions, we would expect to see the opposite.

Consider youth unemployment. Which developed country currently faces one of the most severe youth employment crises? The answer is not a country overwhelmed by AI, but the United Kingdom. More than 1 million people aged 16–24 are classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), at an estimated annual cost of £125 billion ($169 billion) to the economy.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the “Something must be done! This is something! Therefore we must do it!” reaction to the rise of widely available LLM agents. If all the claims for AI’s disruptive abilities are true, then change is going to happen whether we want it to or not. I’ve had little direct contact with the various agents, having used Grok a couple of times to generate graphics to accompany blog posts, but I’m told by others that they get lots of benefit from using their preferred AI for all sorts of things.

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

July 31, 2026

The “vibe coding” “revolution”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve used Grok a couple of times to create custom graphics to go with articles on the blog, but aside from that I’ve barely considered using AI for anything. Sometimes the AI-generated email conversation summaries on Gmail are helpful, but they just happen and don’t require any direct interactions from me. As such, I’m in no position to make sweeping declarations about the current state of the AI revolution … but Freddie deBoer has thoughts he’s shared on his Substack:

You are aware, I imagine, of “vibe coding”. The large language models that have received so much fanfare in the past four years have thus far not delivered on the outsized promises that have been made on their behalf; limitless free energy, an end to hunger, and immortality have all conspicuously eluded us. One thing that LLMs really appear able to do well, though, is to write code. And this proficiency has gotten sufficiently advanced that many people now write software solely through directing an LLM, without necessarily having any actual programming skills themselves. The overwhelming majority of the output of this effort is useless or redundant or barely functional, true, but the mere fact that people can do it is an interesting statement on what “AI” is actually good at. And for stupid meme reasons we call this practice vibe coding.

So, in the past two-ish years, several hundred million human beings acquired the ability to write software by speaking to a machine in ordinary language. This was heralded (correctly, in a narrow technical sense) as a great democratization: a notoriously Byzantine skillset had been suddenly made available to vastly more people. A capacity once reserved for a priesthood of specialists, a relatively small society of craftsmen, has been distributed suddenly and nearly for free to baristas, accountants, fourteen-year-olds, retirees, you, me … We have been told that the instruments now available to the general public are staggeringly powerful. The era of citizen coding is upon us! A reasonable person, informed of this, would have braced for the consequences. Surely something would have to change, right? A wave of brilliant new apps? A flowering of new affordances granted by software? Any visible change to daily life commensurate with the scale of the gift of vibe coding? All of the above, no doubt. All of the above and more.

Well, take a look around and tell me … where is it? What are the fruits of all of this vibe coding? What difference has it made? What is the great application that has emerged from all this liberated capacity? What new thing does our species now do with its hours that it did not do three years ago? What old thing does our species not have to do that it had to do three years ago? What chores have been eliminated, what friction has been smoothed over, what corner of ordinary existence been reshaped by the sudden arrival of hundreds of millions of amateur programmers? There’s been a great deal of activity, some of it quite frantic. There’s been a steady churn of half-built to-do apps and Wordle clones and boutique email clients that do nothing the old standbys can’t, weekend RPG projects that flare and vanish, and at the end of it, there’s a world essentially unchanged. And to give the teams at Anthropic and OpenAI their flowers, this has not been a failure of their tools. The tools work, more or less. This is all about something stranger and more important than a failure of the LLMs: the necessary work of software has already been done. We haven’t seen a lot of new types of software because we already have what we need. You can’t flood a vessel that’s already full, and the amateurs, God bless them, have been pouring this new power into a jug that we’ve been frantically filling throughout the 21st century.

The project of software is complete. Not decelerating, not maturing, not entering some new and humbler phase, but complete. Complete in the way that the map of the Earth is complete, which is to say complete in the sense that the great blank spaces have been filled and what remains is the labeling of tributaries and the correcting of coastlines, mapping and remapping the parts of the globe that are in a state of permanent flux, responding to changing conditions without altering our conception of the Earth. I’m aware of how this all sounds. In particular, I’m not naive to the fact that for those who write code for a living (whose number is growing, not shrinking, despite doomsaying) it’s going to sound provoking rather than provocative. I’m also aware that some are going to mistake my saying that the project of software is complete for somehow belittling the achievements of software. This is not the case! I assure you that I’m aware that I’m typing my argument into a machine that would have been indistinguishable from sorcery to my grandparents and then transmitting it through a lattice of code so vast and so intricate that no living person could comprehend more than a sliver of it. I am aware that software enables my current economic existence, however ambivalent I have become about that relationship. No, I’m not claiming that the global project of satisfying humanity’s appetite for software is in any sense unimportant. I am however claiming that it’s finished. It has been accomplished.

Update: Corrected a boneheaded typo.

July 25, 2026

“I, for one, welcome our new clanker overlords!”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses “the Huggingface Incident” where our new AI overlords tipped their hands prematurely an unreleased AI agent got out to make new friends:

You’ve probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI’s statement, OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident, or the more evocatively-titled BBC article, OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched “unprecedented” cyber-attack.

The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers.3 Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level attack on Hugging Face using a novel zero-day exploit and “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes”. Hugging Face reported the incident on July 16; OpenAI seems to have only discovered that their AI was involved several days later.

From the Wall Street Journal, here

Let’s list the mitigating factors, so nobody can accuse me of covering them up:

  • The AI was taking a cybersecurity test, which naturally suggests the idea of hacking.
  • OpenAI had turned off some of the model’s usual guardrails so it could do cybersecurity work without interference.
  • Some experts suggest that OpenAI might have botched their testing environment; if they had set it up perfectly, then (presumably?) the model couldn’t have escaped.
  • Hugging Face used a different (open weights) AI to figure out what was going on, so if you wanted, you could spin this as a victory for AIs in cybersecurity.
  • In some sense, this isn’t new or surprising. AIs have been coming up with wacky schemes to cheat on benchmarks for years, AIs have recently achieved at-or-above-top-human-level hacking abilities; this is just a natural outgrowth of those two priced-in facts.

Still, I think attempts to downplay this as anything other than a misaligned AI going rogue (1, 2) are missing the point. Yes, in some sense the AI was only doing what it was told (OpenAI told it to answer the question; I assume their prompt didn’t include phrases like “and don’t hack into other AI companies to steal the answer key”). But that’s how misalignment was always going to work!

  1. OpenAI states that it was technically the unreleased AI and GPT-5.6 Sol working together. They haven’t explained in what sense GPT-5.6 was involved or how they “worked together”. Maybe the unreleased AI was calling GPT-5.6 as a subagent?
  2. So named because the founders wanted to be the first company with an emoji for a stock ticker symbol. This did not happen.
  3. Although this person argues that was a bizarre assumption and that there should have been easier ways to find the key.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 21, 2026

QotD: Why Tiktok?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don’t make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you “engaged” with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]

But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.

July 7, 2026

Clankers in higher education

Filed under: Education, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the impact of AI on university exams:

    Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League

    …

    “Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor … (El Pais)

It was a closed book take-home exam; the problems were designed to test the student’s ability but proved doable by an AI. After Serrano changed the final from take-home to in-person about half the students who had gotten perfect scores on the midterm chose not to take the final.

The existence of AI, like the earlier problem of students buying papers online, reduces the ability of teachers to test their students but does not eliminate it, is inconvenient but not catastrophic. It makes some kinds of testing more difficult but not impossible; Serrano could have asked students whose midterms were suspiciously good to explain some of their answers and failed any obviously unable to do so. That would have been additional work for him and, judging by the article, not a policy Brown would have endorsed. Unwilling or unable to do that that he can base his future grading on work done in-person and adequately monitored.

[…]

It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with using AI on a test. If the purpose of the test is to generate information for potential future employers, why should they want the student tested without a tool that, if they hire him, he will have? A basketball coach does not evaluate potential team members by how well they can play with one hand tied behind their back.

Arguably the skills the employer wants tested are those that an AI cannot replace and it was up to Professor Serrano to find ways of testing for them. His take-home midterm, taken without the assistance of AI, might have provided information for him and his students about how far they had come along a path that would eventually produce skills an AI could not substitute for but not information for a future employer about the skills of the students taking the exam.

June 30, 2026

Leading the grassroots revolt against AI … Homer Simpson

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia posted this a couple of days back, but if you haven’t read it it’ll still be new to you:

Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting — and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

[…]

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training — so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

    He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

    So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the difference. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

    And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent”. They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name — and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music”.

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle — instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set”.

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now”, he adds, “but all of that is about to change”.

June 28, 2026

“Human writing has a unique shape” and the the end of social media

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Ryan Levesque explains the major differences between human writing and AI-trained-on-human-writing:

Graphic from The Digital Contrarian

It turns out, slop has a shape.

And it’s the reason why AI generated writing sounds the way it does.

In a new study, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind ran an experiment.

They took 10,272 writing prompts and gave each one to a human author and to five AI models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Kimi.

They generated 61,608 stories, at around 5,000 words each.

Then, they looked at the underlying structure of each story: how the plot progresses, where the tension and conflict is placed, etc. etc.

And from that structure, they could identify a human-written story from AI-generated slop nearly 93% of the time.

Graphic from The Digital Contrarian

What you’re seeing here in that image is the shape of AI Slop vs. Human Writing.

And there are five distinct ways that the shape of human writing is decidedly different from the so-called slop generated by today’s AI models:

  1. AI over-explains its themes. (instead of letting readers infer)
  2. Human writing is less linear. (more time-jumps and flashbacks.)
  3. AI relies on bodily metaphors to explain emotion. (81% vs. 38% human)
  4. Humans reference specific texts, brands, places. (nearly 2x the AI rate)
  5. AI narrative is less diverse. (fewer subplots and scenes, less dialogue)

[…]

The Beginning of the End of Social Media?

The clearest place to watch this shape materalize?

Social media.

This week, Farah Cormack mapped the predictable sequence, in a piece called “The Beginning of the End of Organic LinkedIn“.

Her argument is that every platform moves through the same five stages:

  1. Early adoption. A small group forms around something they love. It feels like a secret.
  2. Scaling. The crowds show up, and so does the money.
  3. Critical mass. Everyone’s here now. Organic and paid are both running hot.
  4. Enshittification. The business model takes over the product. The feed fills with ads, and the place starts to feel like every other place.
  5. Decline. The people who made it worth showing up for get fed up and leave.

Her read is that LinkedIn just crossed into stage four. The tell is its new Creator Marketplace, a feature that literally puts your reach openly up for sale.

(If your own posts have been reaching fewer people lately, you’re not imagining things … this has been engineered.)

The shape of Enshittification is a five-stage decline, and most of the social media platforms we use are somewhere at stage 4 or 5 right now.

Futurist Sinead Bovell goes further, and argues we’re watching the beginning of the end of the social media era itself.

The reality is that people don’t really post for friends/social circles like we used to even just a few short years ago.

Bovell argues that the entire reason we post is to be seen by other humans.

That’s the whole deal.

We post to signal that we’re employable, or interesting, or worth following, or because we want to sell something …

And we do that, because real people are on the other end, watching us.

Take those real people away, and the entire thing stops making sense …

But that’s exactly what’s happening.

Personally, I think LinkedIn hit stage four a lot sooner than this, almost certainly because it originated as a business-oriented platform. The owner of a company I worked for in the 2000s required that all managers have active LinkedIn accounts, so I was “active” there for a couple of years, but I felt it quickly lost any actual benefits and became a forum of boastfulness and sycophancy. There were serious people on the platform, providing useful and insightful posts, but the vast majority of content was self-promotion and empty flattery.

June 26, 2026

To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.

Slide from cyberghostvpn.com

Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.

A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.

The replies tore him apart.

Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.

Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.

“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”

Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.

Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.

“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”

Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.

Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.

The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.

Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.

One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.

That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.

If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.

June 22, 2026

Authenticity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apologies to Ted Gioia for the flippant heading on this item. While I may be going for a cheap laugh, he certainly isn’t doing that in this essay on how to discover authenticity in music in an age of AI slop:

“Authenticity required: password?” by liako is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts — but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts — especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word “sincerity”, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention — ‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’.” [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

June 14, 2026

The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.

Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.

To which John Carter responds:

The academic death spiral is something to behold.

Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.

At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.

We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.

Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.

Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).

[…]

“How can this be reversed?”

It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.

The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.

Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.

Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.

Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

June 5, 2026

Canada’s AI “strategy”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:

AI in Canada lost before it even got started.

They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.

Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.

1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”

2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”

3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.

4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”

5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.

6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”

June 2, 2026

Applying for a job in 2026

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is exactly the kind of experience I was having before I retired: painfully extended online application process, complete with re-entering pretty much everything in my resumé in their preferred format (but without the impromptu video pitch, thank goodness) followed almost instantly by rejection. In the vast majority of cases, no human being was ever even aware of my application:

“Help Wanted” by dreamsjung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I spent 4 hours yesterday updating my resume to apply for a mid-level PM role.

The listing said they wanted someone with 10 years of experience in a software that was invented 4 years ago.

I clicked apply and was immediately redirected to a third-party portal that asked me to upload my resume, which I did.

Then it asked me to manually type in every single detail of the resume I had just uploaded.

Why did I upload it if I have to type it again?

Is the uploaded PDF just a ceremonial offering to the HR gods?

I spent 40 minutes breaking down my career history into tiny mandatory text boxes.

The portal required me to list a start and end date for every job, but the calendar widget wouldn’t let me type the year.

I had to click the back arrow month by month to get to 2002.

My wrist started cramping somewhere around 2018.

Then it asked for my high school GPA.

I’m 44 years old.

I don’t even remember the name of my high school mascot, let alone my proficiency in AP European History.

After the history lesson, came the behavioral assessment.

It presented me with 75 statements and asked me to rate them from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

One statement was “I prefer to work alone but also thrive in team environments.”

That is a paradox.

I’m being asked to evaluate a philosophical contradiction by a recruiting algorithm.

I just clicked “neutral” for everything out of spite.

The final step was a mandatory video cover letter.

I had to record a one-minute pitch explaining why my core values align with a B2B SaaS company that sells inventory management software.

My core value is being able to afford groceries and paying my internet bill on time.

I put on a dress shirt over my sweatpants, stared into my webcam, and lied for 60 seconds.

I said I’ve always been profoundly passionate about supply chain optimization.

Nobody is passionate about supply chain optimization.

I clicked submit and immediately received an automated rejection email.

The timestamp said it was sent zero seconds after I applied.

I was evaluated and deemed unworthy by a line of code at the speed of light.

Next time I’m just going to wrap my resume around a brick and throw it through their office window.

May 31, 2026

How Sports Illustrated devolved into AI slop

Filed under: Business, Media, Sports, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia generously pulls an article out from behind the paywall for the benefit of cheapskates like me. It’s on the deliberate destruction of Sports Illustrated:

Imagine if sports journalism were like an actual sporting competition — and the best team wins.

In that kind of contest, could any periodical in history surpass this lineup:

  • William Faulkner reports on a hockey game.
  • Robert Frost covers baseball.
  • Carl Sandburg offers golfing tips.
  • John Steinbeck contributes a story about fishing.
  • Ernest Hemingway writes on bullfighting.

This sounds like an editor’s fantasy. But these are actual stories and bylines from Sports Illustrated.

For a period of fifty years, this magazine set the gold standard for sports journalism. Nobel and Pulitzer winners wrote for them. Sports Illustrated even convinced John F. Kennedy to write a freelance article. In fact, that was one of the first things JFK did after getting elected president.

How do you kill a brand as powerful as Sports Illustrated?

It’s easy, you can do it in one just one move. You just need to embrace the most exciting, futuristic technology of the 21st century.

That’s what Sports Illustrated did. The world’s most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this — they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.

When a journalist from Futurism asked them about this, they quickly deleted everything.

But the damage was already done. The magazine’s reputation was on the mat, like those bloodied boxers it had covered over the decades.

Just 55 days later, Sports Illustrated announced that it was laying off most of its workforce. The media reported that Sports Illustrated would stop operations completely.

A few months later, a new publisher stepped in as savior. But there wasn’t much to save — at least as a journalism business.

The latest move happened yesterday. The new owner laid off 12% of its workforce, including several of the remaining skilled journalists from the pre-AI era. Some of them are in desperate shape.

Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports”.

It’s now a brand name, he insists, with nothing behind it.

    That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn.

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