The Who's Who of AI
What the AI community is actually reading and debating — the articles its researchers, builders, ethicists and critics are sharing, and the discussions they're having, ranked by standing inside the field.
Reading
What the directory is reading
An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry | OpenAI
2 members discussed this
Suresh Venkatasubramanian: OpenAI just announced that ChatGPT has disproved a conjecture about one of Erdos's most famous problems: the unit distance problem. openai.com/index/model-... This problem is pe…
Suresh Venkatasubramanian: A complete post is here: blog.geomblog.org/2026/05/the-... The unit distance problem: Let P be a set of n points in the plane (amen). What is the maximum number of unit distance…
Suresh Venkatasubramanian: Note that this is really about duplicate distances (because if you get a bunch of pairs of points at distance d, you can scale the point set so that d = 1). It's also trivial to…
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Future of truth ai quotes
2 members discussed this
Will Oremus: Incredible www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...
Will Oremus: There are so many hilarious and awful things about this story but the coup de grace is the author responding by pledging to launch an investigation into his own book to figure o…
Will Oremus: oh ok, good job then ig
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Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch
2 members discussed this
Emily M. Bender: Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something): techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/g…
Emily M. Bender: 5 years ago (2021) Google researchers Metzler et al put out a preprint talking about how LLMs would change information access ("Rethinking Search"). It was full of TERRIBLE idea…
Emily M. Bender: We followed a couple of years later with further arguments about, inter alia, protecting the information ecosystem: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... While @noralindemann.bsky.social w…
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Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI
2 members discussed this
Joseph Cox: New from 404 Media: researchers planned to stick cameras on preschool teachers to then train AI models. Cameras would capture everything the teacher saw, including, obviously, t…
404 Media: New from 404 Media: researchers planned to stick cameras on preschool teachers to then train AI models. Cameras would capture everything the teacher saw, including, obviously, t…
Neil Turkewitz: 🙏🏼 Joseph & @404media.co
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US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows | WIRED
shared by Ingrid Burrington, Abeba Birhane, Mar Hicks, Ronen Tamari, Eileen Clancy 🧿, Katie Drummond +7 more
“Fusion centers are honing in on anti-data center activists. This has important implications for environmental organizers, as a number eco- and Indigenous activists and organizations have focused in on AI. www.wired.co…”
A civic grammar for AI rights | Science
2 members discussed this
Jack Stilgoe: "The AI Bill of Rights has become one kind of infrastructure, diffuse and informal, but generative." Bad administrations can repeal good policies, but they can't stop others bui…
Alondra Nelson: Thanks for reading 🙏🙏
Joanna Bryson: "The AI Bill of Rights has become one kind of infrastructure, diffuse and informal, but generative." Bad administrations can repeal good policies, but they can't stop others bui…
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Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale | WIRED
shared by dell cameron, Marietje Schaake, Marc Lanctot, Mary Branscombe, Katie Drummond, Andrew Couts +1 more
“"When employees protested the rollout in internal messages, CTO Andrew Bosworth 'belittled and berated' the dissenters, one veteran employee says. 'These billionaires can’t even feign empathy...The social contract is …”
[2605.07723] LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations
shared by Prof. Dr Beth Singler, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Sung Kim, Charlotte Högberg, Shannon Vallor
“"hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition" arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723”
ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop
shared by 404 Media, Dare Obasanjo, Sam Cole, Mél Hogan / The Data Fix, Shannon Vallor, Joseph Cox
“ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. www.404media.co/new-arxiv-ru...”
The Elon Musk v Sam Altman battle is a distraction | Karen Hao | The Guardian
shared by Pavel, Jeni Tennison, Data & Society, Alondra Nelson, Hypervisible , Charles Logan +1 more
“Great piece here from @karenhao.bsky.social We keep lazily saying "AI could cure cancer" when in fact *this* AI is more suited to mistakenly bombing schools and making people psychotic. We can only redirect it through…”
Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search | WIRED
3 members discussed this
Brian Merchant: Counterpoint: No I will not
Brian Merchant: WIRED contains multitudes and is doing some great work! I'm still pleased to subscribe but it's true this kind of consumerist tech optimism is in its DNA and can come into tensi…
Hypervisible : Not nostalgic at all, but they used to at least pretend to be giving you what you want and now it’s just “this is inevitable,” which among other things, is the language of abusers.
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Buspatrol put ai cameras in tens of thousands of school buses now they want to give cops access
shared by Miriam Posner, Joseph Cox, 404 Media, Olivia Guest, Hypervisible , Charles Logan +2 more
“www.404media.co/buspatrol-pu...”
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains
shared by Jeffrey Vagle, 404 Media, Luke Stark, Sarah T Roberts, PhD, Emily M. Bender, Paris Marx
“Cognitive surrender to AI* takes many forms, all of them with negative consequences. www.404media.co/software-dev...”
Mayo Clinic is Using AI to Listen to Emergency Room Visits
shared by Olivia Guest, 404 Media, Veni Kunche, Kate Knibbs, Joseph Cox
“Mayo Clinic has been using Ambient Listening for a couple years at this point, but not all patients may be aware the recording is ongoing. www.404media.co/mayo-clinic-...”
I’m a Professional Fact-Checker. AI Is Wrong More Often Than You Think | WIRED
shared by Joanna Bryson, Katie Drummond, Shannon Vallor, Olivia Guest, Ethan Mollick, Teresa Heffernan +1 more
“Can AI do fact-checking? We asked an intrepid @wired.com fact checker to fact-check the LLMs: "According to my research, AI is even more wrong than people might think."”
[2605.06806v1] Big AI's Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity
shared by Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র, Abeba Birhane, Luke Stark
“Read more here arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... With gratitude to my amazing coauthors @storitu.org, @willie-agnew.bsky.social, @harshp.com, @bmitra.bsky.social, Roel Dobbe, and @zeerak.bsky.social”
Chatgpt ai college school graduation
2 members discussed this
James Grimmelmann: The chef’s kiss in this essay about how ambition is destroying education at Stanford is the note at the end, where we learn that the author, a Stanford senior, has a forthcoming…
James Grimmelmann: I say this with both affection and discomfort. I can see some aspects of my college-age self in the author, and some in his classmates. But it is enlightening to focus on what i…
Mor Naaman: I want to know how much AI was used in writing the column (and book)! But: this is the student reporter who exposed the Stanford president's scientific integrity issues in the s…
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You can no longer Google the word 'disregard' | TechCrunch
shared by Emily M. Bender, Mar Hicks, Olivia Guest, Mary Branscombe, Matteo Wong, Hypervisible
““I have been a tech journalist for nearly 15 years, and before today, I cannot think of a single time when a Bing search result was more valuable than the Google equivalent. There really is a first time for everything…”
Discussions
What they're debating
Casey Fiesler on why LLMs don't really cite their sources
Casey Fiesler · Luke Stark · Eileen Clancy 🧿 · Prof. Catherine Flick · Thomas Dietterich
Casey Fiesler: Particularly in the context of (appropriate) crackdowns on LLM-generated papers (e.g., on arXiv) and more and more tales of fabricated citations, two reminders: (1) LLMs do not …
Casey Fiesler: A common comment on my videos about LLM "hallucinations" is that this isn't as much of a problem because LLMs "cite their sources" now. This is a category error. Citing a source…
Casey Fiesler: So when you get LLM output with links or citations to scholarly work: those citations aren't there because the model consulted them and they actually represent the source of the…
Casey Fiesler: Therefore, the possible failure mode here isn't just fabricated citations - a model can include a real paper in a real journal by a real author, but be *completely* wrong about …
Open the thread → SE Gyges · tweety fish · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · Pwnallthethings · Dustin Moskovitz · rev. howard arson · Doll · David Marx
SE Gyges: sorry third time's the charm. since timnit has premium twitter and is just over the character limit text kept getting folded under "show more" in the screenshot
SE Gyges: yes it is explicitly about this
tweety fish: [ sepulchral, directionless, booming sigh echoes through the ancient and musty halls ]
Singularity's Bounty e/cc: Pope TESCREAL
Open the thread → Researchers weigh arXiv's new policy penalizing LLM-generated paper slop
Mark Riedl · Michael Saxon · critical slop studies · Dominik Moritz · The Data Therapist in the Blue Sky · jake · Anna Rogers
Mark Riedl: ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)
Michael Saxon: there will be much gnashing of teeth when the slop penalty for an undergrad-prompted related work section which was delegated by a phd student delegated by an absentee advisor h…
Michael Saxon: still, it's absolutely for the best! We need to pull as many emergency brakes on the paper production rate as possible
critical slop studies: Oh good there was a paper I was planning to report and this makes it more clear cut
Open the thread → Anil Dash · Alex Hanna · Michael Ekstrand · Hypervisible · Amy Hoy
Anil Dash: The AI of drugs. The same tech financiers have been saying for years that they want GLP-1s in the water supply.
Anil Dash: Tressie you can’t take my one idea per year. (It’s fine, much better than when the tech financiers take my one idea per year. 😭)
Anil Dash: I see tons of folks finding utility in LLMs for helping them code. That’s a separate thing from the agenda and negative externalities of the biggest proponents and manufacturers.
Anil Dash: Yyyyep
Open the thread → rev. howard arson · SE Gyges · tweety fish · critical slop studies · Colin · Chris Paxton
rev. howard arson: it is kind of sad to see her reduced to this.
rev. howard arson: like the argument here can be reduced to "i am timnit gebru"
SE Gyges: she has me blocked for saying her primary credential is having been fired by google
SE Gyges: charitably? she simultaneously dealt with a genocide back home and getting fired from her job, which i am not sure i would handle better
Open the thread → Thomas Dietterich · Eugene Vinitsky · Martin Jaggi · The Data Therapist in the Blue Sky · Marco Z · David Picard · Andrew Gordon Wilson · Suresh Venkatasubramanian · Naomi Saphra
Thomas Dietterich: At @arxiv.bsky.social, we are receiving a new type of paper that I call an "I did this experiment" paper. These papers typically report some experiment with an LLM or LLM "agent…
Thomas Dietterich: For example, they might tweak the method for context compression or the routing network in an MoE model. They are typically written by a single author using an LLM system and te…
Thomas Dietterich: What do ML researchers here think? Should these be considered research contributions and released on arXiv? Or do these authors need to formulate higher level research questions…
Thomas Dietterich: The influx of first-time, single author, AI-assisted work suggests that these new entrants to the field would benefit from some mentoring about what constitutes a research contr…
Open the thread → Emily Bender on ChatGPT as a product that harvests what you type
Emily M. Bender · Baldur Bjarnason · The Data Therapist in the Blue Sky
Emily M. Bender: Always worth remembering: ChatGPT isn't a tool, it isn't a companion. It's a product -- and everything you type in that box is data you are sending to OpenAI.
Baldur Bjarnason: Always worth remembering: ChatGPT isn't a tool, it isn't a companion. It's a product -- and everything you type in that box is data you are sending to OpenAI.
The Data Therapist in the Blue Sky : Not quite! That was the good ol’ days! According to the law suit, now everything you type in that box is data you are sending to OpenAI, and much of it (or derivatives) is also …
Open the thread → Melanie Mitchell · Suresh Venkatasubramanian · Marc Lanctot · James MacGlashan · Jasmijn Bastings
Melanie Mitchell: “If a machine can defeat the best of our species at chess, ‘a domain that humans have viewed as sacrosanct, something that is quintessentially possessed by human intelligence,’ …
Melanie Mitchell: It turned out that beating the best humans at chess had nothing to do with more general intelligence. Any analogy with what we're seeing now with AI and math?
Suresh Venkatasubramanian: It's hard to say. But the unit distance conjecture has the feel of deep blue. In that the machine was able to go deeper and explore a space of possibilities more than a person c…
Marc Lanctot: I wouldn't say absolutely nothing but I mostly agree. Of course.. this is the Washington Post's take. Pretty sure most AI researchers didn't think a highly specialized minimax w…
Open the thread → Cat Hicks · Maria Antoniak · Adam L · Carlos Scheidegger · Eryk Salvaggio · Stephen Turner
Cat Hicks: Same religion is the reason neither of our dads would come to our wedding. So bizarre every time Bsky fawns over the pope. My dad sent me an encyclical letter to explain WHY he …
Maria Antoniak: exactly, it sends me into a spiral every time this happens
Cat Hicks: He does not want people to come to harm, so in a way, repaired a lot. But on this, no. He once said with great pain that he would've loved my wife if the church would let him an…
Adam L: Cynical theory: the pope puts out progressive-sounding statements strategically, trying to win back people who left over child abuse/anti-LGBT/anti-abortion stuff, while explici…
Open the thread → How arXiv will detect and penalize LLM-slop papers
David Picard · Thomas Dietterich · Mary Branscombe · Joshua Grochow · Iris van Rooij
David Picard: The classifier that says if there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, is it open source? I'd like to see how it's made and also I'd like to use it.
Thomas Dietterich: If you haven't read the thing you are citing, you are already in trouble
Mary Branscombe: yeah, like the mimimum issue with including someone else's citation you haven't bothered to go read is plagiarism?
Joshua Grochow: Is there a way to report slop papers? I've definitely seen a few on arXiv (cs.CC) already.
Open the thread → AI harms: Skynet hypotheticals vs. what powerful people do with AI
Julian Sanchez · Luis Villa
Julian Sanchez: In my more cynical moods I suspect the Skynet nonsense is to equate discussion of “AI harms” with fanciful hypotheticals rather than more mundane stuff that’s actually happening.
Julian Sanchez: I am not worried software is suddenly going to decide it wants power over humanity. I am worried about what people who already have power over humanity can do with that software.
Luis Villa: That’s sometimes the purpose, and something just that people who should know better are lazy or bored or pressed for time. In the meantime, we have literal (potential) killer ro…
Open the thread → Abeba Birhane · Olivia Guest · Andrew D Wilson · Rua M. Williams · Marielza
Abeba Birhane: misogyny, racism, & fascist ideologies ai systems encode and exacerbate that we've been telling you about for yrs never went away. it's just that governments & those in position…
Olivia Guest: misogyny, racism, & fascist ideologies ai systems encode and exacerbate that we've been telling you about for yrs never went away. it's just that governments & those in position…
Andrew D Wilson: I’ve seen this one arrive in discussions at work and it’s said with such confidence and it shuts the discussion down. People are buying the line that it’s assistive tech and tha…
Rua M. Williams: I love/hate that this term is useful.
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