The term “Artificial General Intelligence” or AGI is the often-used yet rarely understood “goal” that contemporary AI researchers and companies claim to be working towards. Sadly, no one can agree on what it actually means. Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist formerly employed by Google who is often referred to as “the godfather of AI”, saysContinue reading “What Exactly Is ‘Artificial General Intelligence’?”
Category Archives: That Slops
Audio Deepfake Vocal Tracts Have No Correlation to Human Vocal Tracts (2022)
A 2022 study of audio deepfakes at the University of Florida reverse-engineered the shapes of the vocal tracts of the AI-generated “speakers” using fluid dynamics. The scientists discovered the vocal tracts of the deepfake voices had no correlation to human vocal tracts, even when a human listener was unable to distinguish the deepfake from theContinue reading “Audio Deepfake Vocal Tracts Have No Correlation to Human Vocal Tracts (2022)”
AI Ethicist Reveals What the Plan is for Paying Off AI Companies’ Debts
In a new short documentary for FastCompany, AI ethicist Tristan Harris talks about AI’s impact on the US economy, and how companies like OpenAI are hoping to pay off the millions of dollars in debt they kept accruing (hint: it’s not advertising, and it’s not chatbot subscriptions). Watch the full documentary.
AI Companies–yes, even “the good one”–Are Buying Rare Books, Scanning Them, and Pulping Them to Avoid Copyright Law
Do you like books? As someone who runs our museum’s Research Library and also has a day job at a university library, I definitely like books. Which is why this report by Futurism from over the past weekend is so infuriating. It seems AI companies – yes, even Anthropic, “the good one” – are runningContinue reading “AI Companies–yes, even “the good one”–Are Buying Rare Books, Scanning Them, and Pulping Them to Avoid Copyright Law”
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Wants You To Just Chill About the Whole OpenAI/Hugging Face Thing
“We need to back away from this anthropomorphic language that paints these models as somehow conscious.” The always reliable Meredith Whittaker, President of the Signal Foundation, does her best to communicate that OpenAI’s “cyberattack” on Hugging Face was not evidence of an AI agent “waking up and going rogue” – it was a human-initiated failure,Continue reading “Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Wants You To Just Chill About the Whole OpenAI/Hugging Face Thing”
The Week In Slop, Week of 20 July 2026
THIS WEEK: OpenAI admits one of its agents “accidentally” attacked Hugging Face; AI ruins Belgium’s F1 race; Anthropic needs to pay up for all those books they pirated training Claude; Google ends a quarter with negative free cash flow–a first!–and you’ll never guess why; China’s Moonshot AI makes US companies freak out over open sourceContinue reading “The Week In Slop, Week of 20 July 2026”
AI Characters: Moguls
Part One of a three-part “who’s who” series providing brief profiles of many major players in the AI industry. This first part focuses on AI’s powerful technology moguls. They are listed alphabetically by their company name: Amazon, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, and xAI. Amazon Primary AI Product: AWS (Amazon Web Services)Continue reading “AI Characters: Moguls”
What Happens When You Ask ChatGPT a Question?
While I can’t vouch for The Asian Boss‘s overall trustworthiness, this short Instagram explainer video on the technical process involved when you ask ChatGPT a question versus what happens when you ask a search engine is pretty spot-on, and very easy to understand.
The UN Appointed Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be its first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance. Here’s Why You Should be Sceptical.
Earlier this year, the United Nations appointed Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt as its first Global Advocate for Human-Centric Digital Governance. Sounds great, right? I mean, he’s always been fairly likeable onscreen and can sound just like a regular Joe. He’s even pretty good at lip synching. But when it comes to AI, he’s hardly anContinue reading “The UN Appointed Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be its first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance. Here’s Why You Should be Sceptical.”
UK National AI in Research Survey
Quoting from the email I received today inviting me to participate in this survey (which you should too if you work in research of any kind in the UK): The UK National AI in Research Survey is being administered by RAND Europe on behalf of UKRI and the UK Metascience Unit. This survey is a key component of the UK Government’s AIContinue reading “UK National AI in Research Survey “
The Week In Slop, Week of 12 July 2026
This week: Meta uses AI to make pregnant employees redundant; Elon’s data center gasses Black communities in Tennessee; OpenAI and Jony Ive think their upcoming portable smart speaker will kill the iPhone; and the creator of Jar Jar Binks declares that AI is the future of film making, so deal with it. To me, myContinue reading “The Week In Slop, Week of 12 July 2026”
Anne-Marie Imafidon: We’re Being Gaslit About How Smart AI Actually Is
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon is a trustee at the Institute for the Future of Work, the CEO of Stemettes, and one of the UK’s most highly regarded figures in technology. The Oxford computer scientist and entrepreneur appears here on Dr Myriam Francois’s The Tea podcast to discuss why AI needs to be more critiqued than feared.
The Week In Slop, Week of 5 July 2026
This week: Meta lets you deepfake anybody, then pulls the plug; Microsoft thinks Claude and ChatGPT are a bit pricey; OpenAI’s GPT-Live is here to listen; Anthropic signs 20 year crypto data center lease; and Meta’s deepfake detector can’t detect MetaAI’s own watermarked deepfakes. Slop me! Tilly Norwood, AI ‘actor’ denounced by actors union, toContinue reading “The Week In Slop, Week of 5 July 2026”
Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker: “You Have Plenty to Hide”
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the nonprofit organisation responsible for developing the Signal messaging app. In this episode of the Futurology podcast, she discusses the ways AI is being used as a tool of surveillance capitalism.
Book Review: Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao
Impeccably researched page-turner essential reading for those most unlikely to read it Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination by Karen HaoAllen Lane, London, 2025; 482 pages.Reviewed by Dr John Kannenberg Almost a decade ago, the online museum world made collective pledges to decolonise their collections and curatorial practices, to dedicate themselvesContinue reading “Book Review: Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao”
Carissa Véliz on the Myth of AI’s Inevitability
Dr Carissa Véliz is a leading AI ethicist and a professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. In this episode of The Tea with Myriam Francois, Dr Véliz argues against the prevailing attitude that AI is inevitable.
The A.I. Dilemma, March 9 2023, by the Center for Humane Technology
This shocking presentation by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology was a wake-up call. Its demonstrations of audio deepfakes and using WiFi networks to eavesdrop on conversations felt like a skyscraper-sized can of worms had been opened, and it was a relief to see that there was at least oneContinue reading “The A.I. Dilemma, March 9 2023, by the Center for Humane Technology”
Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 27 February 2023
A good time capsule of where things were at the beginning of Big Tech’s push to make “AI” into The Next Big Thing: ChatGPT was starting to put writers out of work, and self-driving cars were going to redesign cities just like the Segway did.
Episode 1: The Beginning
Creepy Microsoft Bing Chatbot Urges Tech Columnist To Leave His Wife(HuffPost UK 17 February 2023)“The AI chatbot ‘Sydney’ declared it loved New York Times journalist Kevin Roose and that it wanted to be human.” It was after reading this article that I first thought “Ok, this AI thing is probably something I should start keepingContinue reading “Episode 1: The Beginning”