Universities pay copyright fees. Libraries pay copyright fees. Theaters pay to perform copyrighted work. Artists and authors pay licence fees to quote others in their own work, usually out of pocket.
really good piece and I want to highlight this theme here, something Iβve become obsessed with: LLMs simply cannot evaluate the objective truth of any claim or the relative value of any information
Yup, LLMs are so woefully bad at history, so I'm never trusting them with anything else... but I keep meeting smart people who "ask ChatGPT" for so many things, and it's driving me to despair
We have just launched our IHR 2026 internship with the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH), focusing on environmental histories. For more information and to apply visit: buff.ly/Vzpz6G3 (application deadline 15 April 2026, 11:59 pm BST).
All of the information in the image is available via the web link.
New free online research training course 5 May 2026. Engaging Histories: Working with/in the Media as an Historian.
www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
I would love to think along side any historians working on preserving historical memory, records, and archives in the age of AI.
When mass manipulation of info is possible, how do we make sure the records we have can be authenticated, traceable, and withstand multiple chain of custodies? ποΈ
Lovely colours!
"Disciplines reject what isnβt intellectually valid... If the discipline of Geology determines that the flat-Earth theory doesnβt meet its standards, geologists do not need to hire flat-Earthers and provide lessons in flat-Earth theory to their students."
stanforddaily.com/2026/02/17/v...
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access β’ Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitterβs algorithmic feed significantly shifts peopleβs political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers Iβve read in awhile.
Amazing treasures of medieval legal history - the Catslechta Λ (or Cat-sections) - an old Irish legal text on cats and part of an Old Irish legal compilation (the Senchas MΓ‘r) #medievalsky
Lovely to see this review of our 'London in the Second World War' exhibition published on its last day. Huge thanks and congratulations to our staff who worked hard to curate it π₯³π
Our next exhibition, 'Londoners on Trial' opens on the 9th March.... π
www.thelondonarchives.org/visit-us/exh...
My Biographical Memoir of Jinty Nelson for the British Academy is now available on their website, open access on this link www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/m...
The AI discourse has been particularly unhinged lately. Here are five things I think are behind it:
www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/five-takea...
This wonβt give my management a secondβs pause.
π
Countries that don't eat crisps will die, says crisp salesman.
This is why archeologists don't like us ... Get it together historians.
Sobering quote from the article linked to in this thread:
"The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters."
/1
This is a good read
Yet again the fees regime - so eagerly embraced by university management - returns to bite us on the arse. Fees for HE are retrograde shite, universities should have fought this, not welcomed it, and the pain will end up - yet again - being borne by staff put, as usual, in an impossible position.
America's Richest People Are Not its Most Generous
Fascinating chart with one outlier: Warren Buffett.
At the low end, giving 0.06% of one's wealth is equivalent to:
Net worth -> Lifetime Giving
50K->$30
100K->$60
500K->$300
$1M->$600
Most folks give far more by % in a *single year*.
www.forbes.com/sites/forbes...
Can historians benefit from creative works for historical research? In this @hsnatsci.bsky.social short piece, I share how I worked w/ different types of making to research and write my recent book on 17th-c. florilegia. Thank you @dominikhhh.bsky.social & @mbaldwin.bsky.social for the invitation!
I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.
Meanwhile, the rest of us scrape together our fivers and tenners to try to stop this happening...
www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-save-...
Hey UK archaeology. Let's all just cash in our years of knowledge, understanding, professionalism, trust, integrity, stakeholder partnerships, land owner networks, Professorial privilege, university accreditation.
Buy a metal detector and make some (more) money. πΊ
If the finder were an archaeologist this would be an unthinkable story, our training teaches us that artefacts represent a shared past. His training is in documents, he sees objects as something to be auctioned, a source of 'reward'
Is this an anomaly? Historian friends, how do you feel about this?
We are just screaming into the void about how wrong this is when the BBC and all other media outlets consistently glorify and platform these stories along with how much money the people are making from this activity.
βConfusionβ doesnβt begin to describe our emerging predicament. Seventy-two percent of American teens have turned to A.I. for companionship. A.I. therapists, coaches and lovers are also on the rise. Yet few people realize that some of the frontline technologists building this new world seem deeply ambivalent about what theyβre doing. They are so torn, in fact, that some privately admit they donβt plan to use A.I. intimacy tools. βZero percent of my emotional needs are met by A.I.,β an executive who ran a team mitigating safety risks at a top lab told me. βIβm in it up to my eyeballs at work, and Iβm careful.β Many others said the same thing: Even as they build A.I. tools, they hope they never feel the need to turn to machines for emotional support. As a researcher who develops cutting-edge capabilities for artificial emotion put it, βthat would be a dark day.β
Developers I spoke to said the same incentives that make bots irresistible can stand in the way of reasonable safeguards, making outright abstention the only sure way to stay safe. Some described feeling stuck between protecting users and raising profits: They support guardrails in theory, but donβt want to compromise the product experience in practice. Itβs little wonder the protections that do get built can seem largely symbolic β you have to squint to see the fine-print notice that βChatGPT can make mistakesβ or that Character.AI is βnot a real person.β βIβve seen the way people operate in this space,β said one engineer who worked at a number of tech companies. βTheyβre here to make money. Itβs a business at the end of the day.β
But even if companies can curb serious dependence on A.I. companions β an open question β many of the developers I spoke with were troubled by even moderate use of these apps. Thatβs because people who manage to resist full-blown digital companions can still find themselves hooked on A.I.-mediated love. When machines draft texts, craft vows and tell people how to process their own emotions, every relationship turns into βa throuple,β a founder of a conversational A.I. business said. βWeβre all polyamorous now. Itβs you, me and the A.I.β
A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.
assholes like Suleyman and the rest of the techbros salivating over how AI is going to automate all white collar jobs from lawyers to educators and make them personally trillionaires have no conception of what the jobs they claim will be automated actually involve.
I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.
