What happens when a ghost video is exposed as fake?

You might assume that once we know a recording is unreliable, its influence disappears. But brand new research into deepfakes suggests it isn’t quite that simple.

In my latest Ghost Geek essay, I look at the psychology of misinformation, the continued influence effect, and why debunking paranormal evidence may require more than simply saying: “this is fake.” 👻

theghostgeek.com/p/you-know-th…

#Skepticism #Psychology #Paranormal #Deepfakes #AI

You Know the Ghost Video Is Fake. So Why Can’t You Unsee It?

Recent research suggests that warning people about a deepfake can help reduce its influence, though it may not make its impact disappear entirely.

^{Hayley Stevens (The Ghost Geek)}

"Dark Hours" is probably one of the first public smoking gun cases of a complete app (including the name) being copy/pasted by Claude Code and getting the "AI-enhanced" developer into trouble.

Godier did a good job in the aftermath by taking the app down and apologizing, but people really need to understand that "AI code" comes from somewhere and that somewhere is usually someone else's hard, copyrighted work.

blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/0…

#DarkHours #AI #SmokingGun #Copyright

#AI is the New #Colonialism | Karen #Hao
#IA est le nouveau #colonialisme
les données sont la dernière frontière de la colonisation;
Ils ont pris nos terres et ont tenté de nous les revendre, ils nous prennent nos données et veulent nous les revendre comme un service

entretien en entier
youtube.com/watch?v=6SXQLO5bwf…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic)

"Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society.

Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage."

thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-…

#AI #llm #aibubble

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist

^{The Nerve}

“After just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”.

An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.”

theguardian.com/books/ng-inter…

#ai #cognitivedebt

‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom

Education is at a crossroads, argues the author and academic. Should we embrace new technology in the name of efficiency, or is it time to fight back?

^{Katherine Rundell (The Guardian)}

@Bredroll

"dont pretend the #ai threat is all trash"

I was saying it was stolen, that's a slightly different complaint.

(But it IS trash in the way it uses what it steals, as it doesn't understand it and often mashes it together with other stolen art incorrectly/inappropriately.)

#meme #ai #brain #knowledge #education #idiocracy #technology #software #wisdom #future #problem @Memes

Great summer read. Cory Doctorow completely dissects the hype behind #artificialintelligence .

#ai #tech #technology @pluralistic

ByteDance is training an AI model with up to 10 trillion parameters, approaching the scale of Anthropic's cutting-edge Mythos system.

That is more than 3x the size of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 (2.8T params). Industry estimates put Mythos 5 at ~8T parameters and Fable 5 at ~5T. US labs don't disclose exact counts so comparisons are approximate.

Pre-training expected to take 3 to 6 months. Chinese AI labs continue narrowing the gap with top US companies.

Source: ft.com/content/9b8383b1-a28d-4…

#AI #ByteDance #Anthropic

> [Amazon] has bought land and acquired permits in Pecos County, Texas, for an AI data center powered by a 7.65 gigawatt gas power plant. The plant will be completely separate from Texas’s power grid

> The site, known as GW Ranch, got a state permit allowing the proposed power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide, which would make it the biggest pollution site in the U.S., emitting more than the country’s biggest coal power plant

newrepublic.com/post/214111/am…

#AI

Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Entire Country

Amazon has bought a site in Texas where it plans to build a data center campus.

^{The New Republic}

Data Center CEO chased out of Salem, OR city council hearing by protesters with guillotine.

Love that portable guillotine on wheels towed behind an Xtracycle extended bike.

Let's just say in a world of electrical/energy and water shortages, some cuts are necessary...

#AI #DataCenters #Guillotine

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerized by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist

thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-…

#news #tech #technology #AI #aislop #nvidia #AIPsychosis

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist

^{The Nerve}

AI Slop companies now advertise their crimes to hype up their slop bots, basically acknowledging their "product" is total worthless and does not do what it's instructed

All the while stealing our content to train on, flattening whole forests to make space for their crap centers, consume water and electricity meant for people

And they don't have a clue about the endgoal

What a terrible joke..

#LLM #AI #slop

Only 2 weeks left to submit your proposal for #OSCL26 #CallforPapers

Delegates would like to hear how you, your organisation/project could help them leading in Digital Sovereignty in areas that include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- #OSPO and Open Source #Governance
- #OpenSource in local/central governments and EU institutions
- #CyberSecurity
- #Sovereign #AI
- #EdTech
- Decentralised technologies for #DigitalSovereignty

conference.opensource.lu/

#CfP #Luxembourg #FOSS

Just when you think Zucky @zuck is finally out of ideas - to steal.

It starts to feel like even a weak #LLM like #MetaAI is more creative than him.

Maybe we already have created truly artificial intelligence because he is more of an #SLM: a Small Language Model?

futurism.com/future-society/je…

#toxic #humor #Meta #News #Facebook #Zuckerberg #MarkZuckerberg #ai #artificialintelligence #creativity #robot #sarcasm

Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

Meta claimed that a recent test of its AI model allowed it to access the internet, an already intimately familiar narrative by this point.

^{Victor Tangermann (Futurism)}

I say, this is a fantastic article. So many truths.

Also, a recurring topic these last couple of days, it saddens me that these days when people do NOT agree with something they lazily say "AI slop". To anything/everything. They proclaim they have seen the obvious, which means everyone else thinks "oh...really...ok, yeah! I see it too now!" instead of actually reading the content.

I don't post often on LinkedIn (for a good reason) but my very last post was about exactly that: if a writer these days care about making a point, and uses bullet points, bold, cursive etc to emphasize words, they will be called "ai slop" nowadays.

On LinkedIn that is extra troublesome as it is literally riddled with AI slop, and I mean the obvious kind. But it kills it for those of us that actually type stuff with our own little fingers.

notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-a…
#ai #writing #observations #truth

When #AI tools hallucinate citations, their made-up author names are not random. "We show that #LLMs do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios [of co-authors] whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations."
arxiv.org/abs/2606.02184

They fool people and tools:

"We identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming nonexistent journals with fabricated publication dates…Server-side #DataCite timestamps prove deliberate backdating…These carry real #DOIs…making them harvestable by any scholarly aggregator that ingests DOI metadata."

#Citations #Hallucinations #ScholComm

The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing

These names do not exist. Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived.

^arXiv.org

A lot of people seem to believe that if you ask an LLM to look through a database and calculate something, or extract data according to some criteria, then it will do exactly what you ask for.

It won't. It will calculate an output that looks normal. And you won't discover this unless you do the same operation manually and compare.

#llm #ai #aibubble

welp…

❝ MIT researchers last year hooked a group of students up to EEGs to study their brain activity while writing essays. Some of them were allowed to use the internet to conduct research, while others were told to use AI. Not only did the AI cohort have far less ability to recall what they wrote when asked about it later, but they also showed far less brain activity, suggesting that relying on #AI simply doesn’t lead to better learning. theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

#OpenAI #aislop #edu

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

New plugins for K-12 teachers, university instructors, and college kids? Read the room, guys

^{Brandon Vigliarolo (theregister)}

🏗️ The AI buildout is now a trillion-dollar construction boom, and the US, Europe, and China are funding it three completely different ways: private credit SPVs, public gigafactories, state banks.

hermez.prose.sh/the-trillion-d…

#datacenters #AI #infrastructure

The Trillion-Dollar AI Buildout: How the US, Europe, and China Build Data Centers Differently

^prose.sh

🤖 DeepSeek's new V4 Flash really is 99% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8: $0.28 vs $25 per million output tokens.

It also beat Claude on Arena's front-end coding leaderboard and scores 82.7 on Terminal-Bench, ahead of some Claude tiers. That part is true.

The nuance: on overall intelligence rankings Claude still leads. V4 Flash is a 284B open-weight model with a 1M context window, MIT-licensed, and it's the same playbook as Moonshot's Kimi K3, which took the same coding crown first. Cheap open models keep getting very good at specific jobs, and that's changing who pays what.

US hyperscalers still outspend China on AI infrastructure by 7-8x (Goldman), so reports of the US losing the race are early.

Read more:
axios.com/2026/08/01/deepseek-…
api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_st…
github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3

#AI #DeepSeek #OpenSource

Models & Pricing | DeepSeek API Docs

The prices listed below are in units of per 1M tokens. A token, the smallest unit of text that the model recognizes, can be a word, a number, or even a punctuation mark. We will bill based on the total number of input and output tokens by the model.

^{api-docs.deepseek.com}

"After years of hype, and trillions of dollars, the AI boom will leave us with a captured economy, a corrupted democracy, and a devastated environment. We’ll be told that this is just how markets work – sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down. But this narrative obscures how decisions are really made in capitalist economies"

Chilling read on the AI boom from Grace Blakeley.

#AI #AIBubble #Capitalism #Data #Technology

graceblakeley.substack.com/p/d…

We didn't choose AI. Capital did.

The AI boom was planned by capital. When it collapses, capital must be made to pay.

^{Grace Blakeley}

The #AI hyperscaler datacentres craziness comes to #Leeds

you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions…

This needs stopping, water and electricity is already pretty expensive and this will make things far worse

Found via @openrightsgroup

Stop the Microsoft AI megasite in Leeds!

Microsoft want to build three huge AI data centres at Skelton Grange. It would drain the River Aire and become the city's biggest carbon emitter. We can still stop it - add your name to the petition.

^{38 Degrees}

“All of the speculation and hype around #AI is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a #superstructure that merges #regressivepolitics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological #innovation. Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people. That’s #datapolitics.”

nytimes.com/2026/08/03/opinion…

AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring

The models were even more likely to stereotype people by demographic group than the human participants in the original study.

Because LLMs “really are eager to create generalizations from limited data”

#bias #discrimination #hiring #jobs #hr #artificialintelligence #ai #technology #tech

technologyreview.com/2026/07/2…

AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring

AI doesn’t just learn stereotypes from its training. It can cook up new ones, too.

^{Michelle Kim (MIT Technology Review)}

A startup called #Satyress #Robotics (🤔) has built a disaster response/ search and rescue #robot that's a 2 meter tall #centaur

satyress.com/

So I've been lost in the woods for two weeks. I'm feverish from the untreated water I drank and delirious because I've eaten very little

Then I see fucking #Terminator #Baphomet walk up on me

😵‍💫

I don't think I'm being rescued

I think I've passed to the other side and I'm going to technohell- I'm being punished for being grumpy about #AI

Do you think AI has the potential to solve South Africa's healthcare challenges?

gadget.co.za/aihealthcoverage6…

#SouthAfrica #healthcare #AI

AI brings universal health coverage closer – Gadget

But AI tools must be grounded in the realities of the country’s healthcare system, writes DR KATLEGO MOTHUDI, MD of the Board of Healthcare Funders.

^{Gadget Staff (Gadget)}