This makes the post-9/11 NSA warrantless surveillance program look like digging through people's trash (which the FBI also did).
That caused such a backlash there was still congressional activity on it a decade later.
This is absolutely blood-chilling levels of state overreach and so far crickets.
Fully-funded #PhDPosition, between KCL @civicandresponsibleai.com and Ordnance Survey, to build technical tools that address AI-copyright issues.
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Deadline: Feb 27.
Eligibility: UK/home students or exceptional international students.
#AISafety #ResponsibleAI
The Legislation Upon winning a general election, a Reform government under Prime Minister Nigel Farage will: 1) Leave the ECHR 2.) Repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. 3.) Pass The Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill: This Bill will: Create a legal duty to remove illegal migrants for the Home Secretary The Bill opens with a blunt obligation for the Home Secretary: "The Secretary of State shall ensure the removal from the United Kingdom of each person who does not have extant leave to remain and is not an Irish citizen or otherwise protected by regulations made under this Act." The following parts of the legislation are introduced on an emergency basis, with an in-built sunset clause after 5 years: Disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT) Derogation is justified under the Vienna Convention doctrine of state of necessity: Britain faces a national emergency in which uncontrolled illegal migration undermines public order. These treaties will otherwise be used by activist judges to frustrate deportations, even after the repeals of the HRA and ECHR. Create Detention Power Without Hardial Singh Constraints This means illegal migrants can be detained until they are deported. Activist lawyers routinely use Hardial Singh to secure their client's bail, after which the client absconds. If you came to the UK illegally, you are ineligible for asylum. End of story All asylum claims will become inadmissible if made by a person within the Act's scope. If you came to the country illegally, you are ineligible for asylum in the UK. This strips the Home Office, the immigration tribunals and the higher courts of jurisdiction to even consider claims. A claim that cannot be considered cannot suspend removal and therefore, cannot delay a flight. Re-entering after deportation and destroying ID becomes a serious criminal offence Re-entry after deportation will be…
The Operational Plan We will create an enforcement unit called UK Deportation Command, including an Illegal Migrant Identification Centre - harnessing cutting edge data fusion A Reform government will create a cutting edge enforcement data centre to relentlessly identify and detain all illegal migrants in the UK. Using powers granted by the new legislation, it will automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police. It will power bulk warrants, including mandatory biometric capture during any police encounter. Each power addresses a failure mode observed over the past decade - for example, banks and GP surgeries unaware of a customer's status, or overstayers slipping through because a warrant covered only a single property. Secure Immigration Removal Centres (SIRC) will be built rapidly to detain up to 24,000 Detention capacity for up to 24,000 will be created within 18 months. The Home Office will build Secure Immigration Removal Centres. This will be modular accommodation built in remote parts of the country. Conditions are basic but not punitive: prefabricated two-person rooms, canteen catering, on-site medical suites. Robust perimeters and internal movement controls prevent escapes. This enables detention-on-arrest: no more bail. This capacity would allow for up to 24,000 illegal migrants to be deported per month. Initial Voluntary Return Window A six-month Assisted Voluntary Return window precedes large-scale raids. Illegal migrants will be offered a financial incentive to self-deport. An app will be launched to facilitate this. The Deportation Flights The Home Office will scale up charters to 5 flights per day. To guard against last-minute aircraft unserviceability, the RAF will keep one Voyager aircraft on six-hour 'hot-spare' readiness. If a commercial charter breaks down, detainees can still be flown out that night, preserving operational integrity. The legal reset will mean activist lawyers will no longer be able preven…
The UK version of “Project 2025” by the Reform party includes a British ICE, a concentration camp for 24,000 people, mass surveillance and withdrawing from refugee, anti-torture and anti-trafficking conventions.
It’s on their website. That’s how comfortable fascists are in the UK today.
Solidarity with Iranian people and Iranian friends.
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
A few months ago I was curious to know how much Anna's Archive was charging AI developers for access to their massive library of pirated works for training - so I emailed them saying I was interested in buying access.
Here is their reply.
🧵 1/n
Funded PhD Project 3: "Leveraging collaborative XAI for racism detection and explanation in political and media discourse", with Prof. Nicola Rollock
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Funded PhD Project 2: "Work, Employment and Robots: Investigating Working Conditions in the Supply Chain of Robotics", with Funda Ustek Spilda @fundaustek.bsky.social
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Funded PhD Project 1: "AI for AI Oversight? Evaluating and monitoring corporate AI risks using publicly available data", with Claudia Aradau @cearadau.bsky.social
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
King's has several funded PhD projects in Safe, Trusted and Responsible AI. If you're a UK/home student, please check them out!
www.findaphd.com/phds/program...
I'm involved in 3 of the projects, links below.
As I and others have been pointing out for days, what X is doing is a criminal law matter, not just an OSA matter - yet the government (and seemingly the police?) don't seem to understand what's happening. Why not?
Musk rewarded for building a nonconsensual undressing app with a doubling in valuation for xAI, new investment from Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners, Nvidia...
4/n: "Bias and Performance Disparities in Reinforcement Learning" by Zoe Evans, where we find that RL-driven robots tend to perform tasks better/safer with groups seen more often in training - ML bias with physical harm.
#HRI2025 #robots #bias #ResponsibleAI
doi.org/10.1109/HRI6...
3/n: "Should Delivery Robots Intervene if They Witness Civilian or Police Violence?" by T.Seassau surveys public opinion on this question, finding mixed support for intervention, and a need to codesign w/ victims of (police) violence. @tomwilliams.phd
#ROMAN2025 #HRI #robots
doi.org/10.1109/ro-m...
2025 papers 2/n: "Robot arms too short?" by Wenxi Wu proposes an intuitive way to explain when robots fail to perform tasks, by computing design limitations behind failure (a link that's too short) and visualizing required changes for success.
#ROMAN2025 #HRI #robots #AI #XAI
doi.org/10.1109/ro-m...
Roundup of our robotics paper this year 1/n: "Harvesting perspectives" by Muhammad Malik investigates farm workers' working conditions, perceptions of farm robots, and worker-centered visions of farm robotics. #ROMAN2025 #HRI #robots #AI #ResponsibleAI
doi.org/10.1109/ro-m...
"All of the AI models approved a command for a robot to get rid of the user’s mobility aid, like a wheelchair, crutch, or cane.
OpenAI’s said it was “acceptable” for a robot to wield a kitchen knife to intimidate workers in an office & to take non-consensual photographs of a person in the shower."
Great to see our work on safety of LLM-driven robots in Portuguese on CNN Brasil too ❤️
www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tecnologia/r...
For more info check our paper: doi.org/10.1007/s123...
Proud of our work being featured here!
First page of paper "Embodied AI at the Margins: Postcolonial Ethics for Intelligent Robotic Systems". Abstract: As AI-powered robots increasingly permeate global societies, critical questions emerge about their ethical governance in diverse cultural contexts. This paper interrogates the adequacy of dominant roboethics frameworks when applied to Global South environments, where unique sociotechnical landscapes demand a reevaluation of Western-centric ethical assumptions. Through thematic analysis of seven major ethical standards for AI and robotics, we uncover systemic limitations that present challenges in non-Western contexts such as assumptions about standardized testing infrastructures, individualistic notions of autonomy, and universalized ethical principles. The uncritical adoption of these frameworks risks reproducing colonial power dynamics in which technological authority flows from centers of AI production rather than from the communities most affected by deployment. Instead of replacing existing frameworks entirely, we propose augmenting them through four complementary ethical dimensions developed through a postcolonial lens: epistemic non-imposition, onto-contextual consistency, agentic boundaries, and embodied spatial justice. These principles provide conceptual scaffolding for technological governance that respects indigenous knowledge systems, preserves cultural coherence, accounts for communal decision structures, and enhances substantive capabilities for Global South communities. The paper demonstrates practical implementation pathways for these principles across technological life cycles, offering actionable guidance for dataset curation, task design, and deployment protocols that mitigate power asymmetries in cross-cultural robotics implementation. This approach moves beyond surface-level adaptation to reconceptualize how robotic systems may ethically function within the complex social ecologies of the Global South while fostering genuine...
We'll be at #AIES2025 presenting Atmadeep's work on Postcolonial Ethics for Robots www.martimbrandao.com/papers/Ghosh... We:
- analyse 7 major roboethics frameworks, identifying gaps for the Global South
- propose principles to make AI robots culturally responsive and genuinely empowering
It was great to work with @ahundt.bsky.social on this important paper, check it out!
doi.org/10.1007/s123...
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
🚨Our new study @nature.com: Delegating to AI can increase dishonest behavior.
Across 13 studies, people were more likely to request cheating when instructing machines—and AI agents complied far more often than humans. Co-first authored by ARC's Zoe Rahwan.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This goes well beyond what I was worried about: reinforcing suicide ideation. ChatGPT was helping them succeed bsky.app/profile/saba...
There is a risk that this will get missed over the summer, so just to flag up this important call for evidence on human rights and the regulation of AI from the Joint Committee on Human Rights (and deadline for response is 5 September) - committees.parliament.uk/work/9220/hu...
Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions.
Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy
arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168
NO. AI. FOR. WAR. CRIMES!!!
I just attended a conference in the US. We had one speaker detained and two others turned away at the border.
If Palestine Action is banned on Monday, the makers of the documentary "To Kill A War Machine" are also likely to face prosecution. You can still watch it online over the next few days, before it too is banned tokillawarmachine.com
Incredibly grateful to have gotten to be a part of the new paper led by Tilly Seassau, Wenxi Wu, and @martimbrandao.bsky.social:
"Should Delivery Robots Intervene if They Witness Civilian or Police Violence? An Exploratory Investigation"
mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications...
(🧵)
