15 great reads on the state of AI

Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson deep dive into the strange beliefs and hidden worlds of their new book Conspiracy Nation

A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of teachers report using AI weekly, according to a recent survey.

: Predicted a 24% boost, but clocked a 19% drag

Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to have IRL workers to fix the technology’s screwups.

An investigation by SEO expert James Brockbank shows that ChatGPT may cite hacked websites and expired domains in business recommendations.

Basic security flaws left the personal info of tens of millions of McDonald’s job-seekers vulnerable on the “McHire” site built by AI software firm Paradox.ai.

The allegations are the latest to accuse Perplexity of improper web crawling.

In many countries, there is an academic cheating crisis with students misusing artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to write essays, dissertations and other assignments. According to new research, certain personality traits make some students more likely to pass off AI-generated work as their own.

What if instead of trying to detect and avoid AI glitches, we deliberately encouraged them instead?

AI chatbots strip language of its historical and cultural context. Sometimes what looks like a satanic bloodletting ritual may actually be lifted from Warhammer 40,000.

Researchers took inspiration from r/AmITheAsshole to find out if chatbots are likely to demonstrate an exaggerated version of human beings’ “bias for inaction.”

PhD Researcher Kathy Reid (she/her) is an AI Voice researcher investigating speech technologies with a focus on the data that goes into these models. Kathy asks critical questions about these technologies, the people, and the voices they serve. Kathy’s motivation both personally and professionally is the value that knowledge is power and knowledge shared is empowerment. These underlying understandings are core to Kathy’s PhD work and also her keynote talk Token Wars. With these values and a highly open-source background it may come as a surprise to you that Kathy questions if everything should be open not just to anyone but to anything. The continuous scraping and pollution of the internet by AI companies looking to train their latest models is deeply challenging to the ‘everything open’ approach. Kathy and her research ask a lot of great questions about technology and power - who benefits from technologies and what are the costs? These cybernetics questions about unintended consequences underpin Kathy’s Token Wars, a talk that dives into the current technical, legal, and political, resource conflict surrounding AI training ‘tokens’ or data. Kathy’s talk, as many great talks do, comes in three parts: Part 1: Kathy gives us an accessible overview of tokens and transformers, the technologies that together build large language models like ChatGPT and Claude Part 2: Kathy unpacks the value of tokens, why they mean so much to AI companies, and what it means for these tokens to become a scarce resource. Here, Kathy also dives into the actions and intentions of the key actors in these token wars, as well as the damage they are causing. Part 3: Kathy considers tokens and data as a form of treasure or capital – and asks how we might protect and safeguard this treasure. Kathy also speculates on the future of tokens and future protection strategies. The Token Wars: why not all our content should be open Token Wars was first delivered by Kathy Reid at Everything Open and the Melbourne Machine Learning and AI meetup. This version of Token Wars was delivered on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country here at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics. Current LLMs are trained on nearly all the publicly available data in the world – and globally we’re running out of new human-generated ‘tokens’ to train newer and better models on. Kathy holds that we’ve passed a point in history she terms “Peak Token” - where we have the highest availability of human-generated tokens. As LLMs and synthetics data proliferate, the open web is becoming increasingly filled with low-quality “AI slop”, ushering in the “slopocene” - where rich, diverse, human-generated data is rarer and more valuable. LLM Models: Number of training tokens and parameter size by date. 2025-04-13 https://github.com/KathyReid/token-wars-dataviz. Visit Kathy’s blog for her recent thoughts on the speculative OpenAI hardware device that may come about as a result of these Token Wars and find out more about Kathy’s research on our PhD Spotlight from earlier this year.

Cloudflare wants AI companies to get permission to crawl websites.

Updated: Using proof of work to block the web-crawlers of ‘AI’ companies

YouTube’s creator liaison said the change is a “minor” update to YouTube’s longstanding policies.

It was trained on licensed data.