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
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
5 members discussed this
SE Gyges: us government has rendered it illegal to give access to fable or mythos to foreign nationals ^_^ www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...
SE Gyges: this means nobody can have either of them btw. because they haven't KYC'd their customers hard enough.
SE Gyges: dario got what he wanted
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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good
2 members discussed this
Edouard Machery: The literature on cognitive offloading and deskilling should be taken with a serious grain of salt. See literature on video games in the 1980s, see Haidt style literature on soc…
Alondra Nelson: I find the research increasingly compelling — this week's example being a case in point: www.nature.com/articles/d41... I look forward to reading your book and having these conc…
Edouard Machery: The issue, in my opinion, is publication bias and p-hacking. The literature is clearly titled toward finding negative effects - this is what gets in the news etc. As a result I …
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US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows | WIRED
shared by Hypervisible , Pavel, Ingrid Burrington, Abeba Birhane, Mar Hicks, Ronen Tamari +8 more
“Not liking AI is now a terrorist act”
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests
2 members discussed this
Mar Hicks: Preprint research from Cornell: "We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to …
Mar Hicks: This suggests that motivated actors can potentially alter AI search results with very little effort… will be interesting to see if this pans out in practice and what kinds of ha…
Ryan Calo: I think this should constitute inadequate security papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones
2 members discussed this
dell cameron: NEW: WIRED analyzed Meta's AI app and found NameTag — a hidden facial recognition system designed to identify people via the wearer's smart glasses — has already shipped to over…
Justin Hendrix: NEW: WIRED analyzed Meta's AI app and found NameTag — a hidden facial recognition system designed to identify people via the wearer's smart glasses — has already shipped to over…
dell cameron: While dormant, three AI models — for face detection, cropping, and encoding — have been pushed from Meta's servers. The system is designed to pull faceprints from those servers …
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The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI
2 members discussed this
404 Media: Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides. They're not the only company now telling staff to slow…
Teresa Heffernan: Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides. They're not the only company now telling staff to slow…
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Introducing Claude Sonnet 5 \ Anthropic
shared by Nicole Hennig, Lior (AlphaSignal), Rohan Paul, Rafael Pinto, Scott McGrath, Tim Kellogg +2 more
“Introducing Claude Sonnet 5 www.anthropic.com/news/claude-so… #AI #Anthropic #Claude”
The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes
2 members discussed this
Mary Anne Franks: “These major tech giants will burn everything to the ground as long as they’re making a profit. They’re not interested in anything that’s going to slow them down.” A haunting an…
Neil Turkewitz: I love how direct he always is. “Content moderation has not kept up with the threats because it’s not in the financial interest of the tech companies. This is all about greed. L…
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If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’
2 members discussed this
Sarah T Roberts, PhD: “If you’re looking for human-like traits, you will tend to find them.” www.404media.co/if-ai-is-sen...
Sam Cole: “If you’re looking for human-like traits, you will tend to find them.” www.404media.co/if-ai-is-sen...
Neil Turkewitz: Ted Chiang is a treasure! One of my favorite quotes about AI & creativity/originality: “Obviously, no one can speak for all writers, but let me make the argument that starting w…
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Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs | WIRED
2 members discussed this
Katie Drummond: NEW: Meta paid hundreds of contractors to pretend they were kids—and then prompt rival chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT to talk about subjects like suicide, sex, eating disorder…
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真): NEW: Meta paid hundreds of contractors to pretend they were kids—and then prompt rival chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT to talk about subjects like suicide, sex, eating disorder…
René Walter: Not sure what the fuzz is here. This looks like standard safety research project, no?
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Beijing is looking curbing overseas access chinas top ai models sources say
2 members discussed this
Ted Underwood: If everything reported here happens, and the US continues on current trajectory, we're looking at a bad timeline. But there's reason to be wary about both of those "if"s. Nation…
Ted Underwood: All that being said, I would love to see EU and/or international initiatives in support of open models.
Ted Underwood: In case opaque: corporations (directly) and nations (indirectly) have an incentive not to restrict distribution of their products. You can make money on open-weights models, and…
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Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5
shared by Thariq, Claude, Scott McGrath, Fran Litterio, Nicole Hennig, Isaiah Bishop +2 more
“See the post here: https://t.co/ayMkRPyJhl https://t.co/dfk3oMWVM6”
Opinion | Why A.I. Won’t Steal All Our Jobs - The New York Times
4 members discussed this
zeynep tufekci: I know it’s not a popular position but I really don’t see mass unemployment from generative AI soon because of structural and technical features of the tech. Gift link where I e…
Baldur Bjarnason: I know it’s not a popular position but I really don’t see mass unemployment from generative AI soon because of structural and technical features of the tech. Gift link where I e…
Neil Turkewitz: Yes, there are/will be present/near term significant employment issues—esp. in the arts & coding, but I do worry that existential angst over AGI risks will obscure focus on imme…
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How the Peter Thiel-Linked Dialog Club Secretly Ranks Its Members
shared by By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C), Social Media Lab, Alejandra Caraballo, Katie Drummond, Eileen Clancy 🧿, dell cameron +2 more
“Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week: www.wired.com/story/how-pe... 1/”
We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’
5 members discussed this
Jason Koebler: ChatGPT posters and flyers are polluting real life and driving me insane. Please respond to this with the worst ones you've seen irl. I'll post some in the thread www.404media.c…
Jason Koebler: good on you! i see soooo many of them now
Jason Koebler: sadly and perveresly i wanna see these but i see so many fewer presentations these days
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Previewing gpt sol
3 members discussed this
Tim Kellogg: fyi GPT-5.6 Sol is served on Cerebras at 750 tok/s this was in the official launch announcement a few weeks ago openai.com/index/previe...
Max Woolf: I read "also" as a SKU where you pay extra, not as the default.
Tim Kellogg: also, if you use it on Azure, it’s likely you’ll never get it as Cerebras doesn’t have a deal with Microsoft
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Call For Creative AI 2026
shared by Mark Riedl, NeurIPS Conference, Ted Underwood, Sander Dieleman, Piotr Mirowski
“Submissions for the NeurIPS 2026 Creative AI Track are now open! Don’t forget to submit your research papers/artworks by August 3, 2026 (AoE). We invite submissions exploring emerging applications, methods, and critic…”
AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds
5 members discussed this
Ali Alkhatib: this is interesting but i'm reluctant to get very attached to these analytical methods. a lot of computing researchers live for puzzles; if you tell them LLM outputs are identif…
Ali Alkhatib: this is sort of a fundamental problem with pangram IMHO. if you restrict yourself from thinking critically about the author(s) as such and only look at syntax, you paint yoursel…
Hypervisible : Even if it’s “good” by some metric, I don’t want to read it because it has no perspective or viewpoint.
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Discussions
What they're debating
M.J. Crockett · Eryk Salvaggio · Emily M. Bender · SE Gyges · Alondra Nelson · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · Maxim Raginsky · Larry Hunter · Jack Stilgoe
M.J. Crockett: Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, has long been out of print - used copies sell for hundreds of dollars. It's wild that this is not more widely ava…
M.J. Crockett: Weizenbaum was an MIT computer scientist who built one of the first chatbots, ELIZA. He wrote the book out of a growing sense of horror as he saw how “extremely short exposures …
M.J. Crockett: Another version of the program, called DOCTOR, simulated psychotherapy: “A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a ne…
M.J. Crockett: He cites a psychiatrist who writes: “The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man …
Open the thread → Ted Underwood · Ciara Rowles · Grace · tweety fish · mackuba.eu · Brett Bobley · Emile van Krieken · Luis Villa
Ted Underwood: This divide is also why half of my friends are "What will we put in the abandoned shells of these data centers when people realize they're useless?" and the other half are "Can …
Ted Underwood: Meanwhile memory chips are increasing in price so fast that by the time Neuromancer comes out this fall you will *actually* be able to get killed in Chiba City for 3 MB of hot RAM.
Ted Underwood: The tacit premise there is that coding is a narrow, purely technical application with an obvious ceiling on demand. (Which is what half of my friends do assume.) But I'm startin…
Ted Underwood: I don't belong to an evangelical religion, so that sounds good to me. Live a code-free life; enjoy summer; plant tomatoes, they're delicious!
Open the thread → Naomi Saphra · Isaiah Bishop · Ted Underwood · Joanna Bryson · Claas Voelcker · Mark J. Nelson · David Marx
Naomi Saphra: Are students embarrassed by AI cheating? Like, there has always been rare but unstigmatized dishonesty (memorizing a frat’s archive of finals questions) and common but stigmatiz…
Naomi Saphra: I don’t know exactly what dictates cheating stigma. Ease of observation? Is there something about effort, or the margin of work required to do it honestly? Regardless, AI cheati…
Isaiah Bishop: Absolutely not
Naomi Saphra: :(
Open the thread → Christian Wolf · David Picard · Alexander Hoyle · Jacob Eisenstein · Thomas Dietterich · Eric Brachmann · Kabir Kumar, aiplans.org
Christian Wolf: The impact of Claude: it - has become very cheap to produce submissions (quality?) - remains very expensive to evaluate them by humans. Possible solutions are limited (I don't a…
David Picard: Limit the number of sub. You start the year with 2 tokens, if you want more tokens, then you review 2x per token.
Alexander Hoyle: Per some back-of-the-envelope math, I think this doesn't pan out. Even if we capped submissions at max one per author (which no one is suggesting), we'd still have at least ~10k…
Jacob Eisenstein: i agree about the dynamic, but the trend in submissions was in place well before claude
Open the thread → Maria Antoniak · Marzena Karpinska · Arseny Khakhalin · Christian Wolf · Thomas Dietterich · Marco Z
Maria Antoniak: hot take: don’t even use it for polishing your reviews. as an AC and SAC, the last thing i care about is your grammar, spelling, or formatting. i get the presentation issues wit…
Marzena Karpinska: funniest part is that the one i saw looked like bullet points copy-pasted from whichever-ai-tool. there was no space precisely where the bullet points changed but the person sai…
Marzena Karpinska: hot take: don’t even use it for polishing your reviews. as an AC and SAC, the last thing i care about is your grammar, spelling, or formatting. i get the presentation issues wit…
Arseny Khakhalin: Language is fixed so easily though ("please fix only typos, prepositions, grammar, and near-misses for idiomatic expressions. Don't make any substantial changes"). Or smth like …
Open the thread → Ethan Mollick · Eli Sennesh · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · Fran Litterio · Ted Underwood
Ethan Mollick: It is weird that there is still a substantial set of people who believe "AI is mostly hype" at this stage: Five Eyes is warning about AI, exponential revenue & token use at the …
Ethan Mollick: I know I write a post like this every month, but the degree to which the refusal to believe that maybe this is not just a fake bubble thing is getting weirder all the time. And …
Ethan Mollick: And if AI is real, than even if there is a financial bubble, it just does not matter. In a world when OpenAI and Anthropic collapse under pressure, their IP will just be picked …
Ethan Mollick: You can believe there is a financial bubble if you would like. I can't guarantee there isn't one, as I discuss in the thread. It doesn't really matter much. And if you don't tru…
Open the thread → Ted Underwood · Maria Antoniak · David Picard · Mark Riedl · Alice Schwarze · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · Andrea Lathrop
Ted Underwood: Can anyone who was there report the answer?
Maria Antoniak: Can anyone who was there report the answer?
David Picard: Hopefully nothing so that we could all get some nice vacations
Mark Riedl: I'm learning to play guitar. I hear there is a lot of money in the arts
Open the thread → Gautam Kamath · Naomi Saphra · Martin Trapp · Marco · Eugene Vinitsky
Gautam Kamath: That account's bio says "parody." It got me too for a second. It would be more believable if he weren't 91 years old. I hope dude is enjoying his retirement.
Naomi Saphra: Anthropic just hired Gilbert Strang???
Martin Trapp: What a strange world we live in nowadays.
Marco: it fooled me also haha
Open the thread → Marzena Karpinska · David Mimno · David Jurgens · Alexander Hoyle · Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Marzena Karpinska: Only 17% of May #ARR authors are qualified for reviewing, and almost 40% of papers have no qualified people?!?!
David Mimno: is anyone there suggesting not allowing submissions with no qualified reviewers? Elitist and gate-keepy yes, but is there a better option?
Marzena Karpinska: Yes, that's precisely what was suggested.
David Jurgens: I crunched some numbers for the Jan26 cycle and many of these papers do have senior author (e.g., 62% have a prof co-author), but these folks are often from related non-ACL fiel…
Open the thread → Ted Underwood · jake · Tim Kellogg · Max Woolf · apenwarr.ca
Ted Underwood: Lately I hear academic friends celebrate open-weight or local models for a mix of three reasons: a) transparency is good for research b) they protect higher ed's autonomy from S…
Ted Underwood: The same tasks may actually use less ⚡️ in a center, b/c better hardware & caching. “I use smaller models locally”—maybe? but they cost less, so Jevons paradox can kick in. Micr…
Ted Underwood: Jevons paradox is a problem even for "smaller." I run tens of thousands of queries on small models, because it's effectively free; I think twice before doing that on frontier mo…
Ted Underwood: The cost of paying frontier labs is absolutely an incentive to go local. But I'm skeptical that there's much incentive to be efficient—because, in reality, these things just don…
Open the thread → Eugene Vinitsky · jake · Ted Underwood · Tim Kellogg
Eugene Vinitsky: Kinda funny that bluesky is the anti-AI regulation platform
Eugene Vinitsky: Naively not what you might expect
Eugene Vinitsky: Ability to read in general
Eugene Vinitsky: Yeah, just that the anti regulation contingent is realllllly vocal
Open the thread → VE, cybersocial occult investigator · Dan Hon · Danya Glabau · Damien Williams · Alex Hanna
VE, cybersocial occult investigator: I wonder if it would be crazy of me to consider doing a sociology PhD
VE, cybersocial occult investigator: The problem is, I should also simultaneously be doing an information science PhD and a religious studies PhD, because the thing I’m interested in is the sociology of collective …
VE, cybersocial occult investigator: Science and technology studies for studying the occult
Dan Hon: I have always wanted to do: * linguistics * socio-linguistics * anthropology * philosophy * some combination of all of those but fuck me I wouldn't touch eng lit with a barge pole
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