Social media is just TV now, and we can’t stop changing the channel – article by John Naughton in his Observer column. "Last August, ... Meta filed a document that made a startling claim: that it cannot be regarded as a social media monopoly, because it is not really a social media company. How come? Meta argues that if 'social' means time spent checking in with friends and family, then very little of that now occurs on its platforms. Today, the company reports, only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time involves consuming content from friends. The majority of time on both apps is spent watching short-form videos that are 'unconnected' – not from friends or followed accounts – but recommended by AI-powered algorithms developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise. Meta is clearly deploying these statistics as legal strategy, but they nonetheless capture a profound shift in our media ecology. The Financial Times’s data analyst John Burn-Murdoch has tracked users’ stated reasons for using social media over two decades. His data reveal that 'social media has become less about social networking and more about replacing or supplementing big-screen TV time with a smaller-screen medium that serves the same functions'. The two dominant reasons people cite now are 'to follow celebrities' and 'to fill spare time'.... So it looks like a seismic shift is under way, triggered by TikTok and the panicked responses from Meta, YouTube, and Spotify. Text-to-video AI now threatens to accelerate this transformation into a media landscape governed by a single mantra: 'short video is the answer – now what was the question?' In a perceptive recent blog post entitled Everything is Television, the writer and podcaster Derek Thompson argues that all forms of digital media are converging towards the same end state: continuous streams of short-form video content. He believes that we’re seeing a fundamental shift in how we consume information and interact with media and that this will have significant social and political consequences in the long run."
In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy. That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false. It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model. When the multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was 'better than Wikipedia', or 'Wokepedia' as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points.... Evans, however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a ... problem. 'Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,' Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. 'AI just hoovers up everything.'”
Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once 'she takes all our money'.... Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now. I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming 'socially acceptable to be racist' again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing – not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally – goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms.... Something seems to have happened to us as we hit the midlife crisis years. Gen Xers are now old enough to start worrying that the world is changing and leaving us behind: that if we get made redundant we might not get hired again, that our marriages may not survive the shock of the kids leaving home, that our views are out of date and someone is out to get us for them, that people are laughing at us behind our backs.... It’s gen Xers, not grumpy pensioners or teenage boys beguiled by rightwing influencers, who are powering the populist insurgency now. Only 19% of British fiftysomethings voted Reform UK at the last general election but a third of those aged between 50 and 64 would do so now, according to YouGov, which is a staggeringly fast turnaround for the 'Cool Britannia' generation that put Tony Blair in Downing Street – and key to the party’s move from fringe to mainstream."
‘They’re not wolves, they’re sheep’: the psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone-actor mass killers – interview by Walter Marsh in The Guardian, on the publication of Mullen's book Running Amok. "The Bristol-born [Paul E.] Mullen had always dabbled in forensic work, but [a mass shooting] at Aramoana [New Zealand, where he was living,] piqued his curiosity. He would soon pivot to become a full-time forensic psychiatrist, specialising in some of the gravest acts known to society, from stalking and child sexual abuse to mass killings.... In April 1996 news broke of an even deadlier attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By then Mullen was in Australia, working as professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash University. He received a call summoning him to Royal Hobart hospital where this latest perpetrator – whose name Mullen refuses to use – had been taken alive hours earlier after shooting 55 people, killing 35.,,, While the Port Arthur killer angrily rejected Mullen’s suggestion his actions might have been inspired by another high-profile attack a month earlier in Dunblane, Scotland, Mullen says he soon started to talk about other massacres. 'So he did know quite a lot about these previous killers,' Mullen reflects. 'And this is typical.'... The following decades would see Mullen interview many men in a similar position to the perpetrators of Aramoana and Port Arthur, as he became a leading authority in what are often referred to as 'lone-actor mass killers'. But despite the implication of solitude, the man in that Hobart hospital ward revealed what would become a common thread in all of Mullen’s dealings with lone mass killers: they are rarely acting in isolation.... 'It was the Texas university tower massacre [in 1966] that created the script, which has now grown and grown and grown,' Mullen reflects. 'And the first imitator of the Texas killer was only five weeks [later].' Like the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fuelled by a mix of resentment and a sense of weakness, drawn to the promise of infamy, publicity, and a noteworthy death enjoyed by previous mass killers. Some even dress like their predecessors... 'They gather grievances, grievances, grievances,' Mullen says, echoing the common complaints he has heard across his career. '"People mistreated me"; "I was cheated"; "they’re not fair"; "no one likes me". All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back. The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance. But it’s much worse, because you never did anything. And this, in a sense, is your final reply.'"
What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms – article by Eric Reinhart in The Guardian. "Policymakers and aligned business interests promise AI will solve physician burnout, lower healthcare costs and expand access. Entrepreneurs tout it as the great equalizer, bringing high-quality care to people excluded from existing systems. Hospital and physician leaders such as Dr Eric Topol have hailed AI as the means by which humanity will finally be restored to clinical practice; according to this widely embraced argument, it will liberate doctors from documentation drudgery and allow them to finally turn away from their computer screens and look patients in the eye. Meanwhile, patients are already making use of AI chatbots as supplements to – or substitutes for – doctors in what many see as a democratization of medical knowledge. The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.... What makes AI so compelling is not simply faith in technology but the way it suggests we can improve medicine by leapfrogging the difficult work of structural change to confront disease-causing inequality, corporate interests and oligarchic power.... This faith in AI also reflects a misunderstanding of care itself, a misunderstanding decades in the making in the service of an idea now treated as an unquestionable good: evidence-based medicine (EBM). Emerging in the 1990s with the unassailable goal of improving care, EBM challenged practices based on habit and tradition by insisting decisions be grounded in rigorous research, ideally randomized controlled trials.... The gains were real: effective therapies spread faster, outdated ones were abandoned, and an ethic of scientific accountability took hold. But as the model transformed medicine, it narrowed the scope of clinical encounters. The messy, relational and interpretive dimensions of care – the ways physicians listen, intuit and elicit what patients may not initially say – were increasingly seen as secondary to standardized protocols. Doctors came to treat not singular people but data points. Under pressure for efficiency, EBM ossified into an ideology: “best practices” became whatever could be measured, tabulated and reimbursed. The complexity of patients’ lives was crowded out by metrics, checkboxes and algorithms. What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers.... As philosophers from Socrates to Søren Kierkegaard and feminist theorists like Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto have long argued, care is not only a clinical task but an ethical and political practice. It is, in the deepest sense, a practice of disalienation – of recovering our sense of ourselves as singular beings in community with one another in which individual difference is valued rather than erased. That is why care has transformative power beyond health. To be truly listened to – to be recognized not as a case but as a person – can change not just how one experiences illness, but how one experiences oneself and the world. It can foster the capacity to care for others across differences, to resist hatred and violence, to build the fragile social ties upon which democracy depends."
‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children –article by Lucy Knight in The Guardian. “The Secret of Me, a new documentary by British film-maker Grace Hughes-Hallett, … follows the life of Jim Ambrose, who was born in Louisiana in 1976.… Ambrose had genitals that, as he puts it in the film, ‘fall outside of an arbitrary acceptable norm‘. Doctors decided to operate on him as an infant, removing his testes and constructing a vagina. His parents were then advised to raise him as a daughter, and keep quiet about what had happened. He was told that he would need to take hormones when he was a teenager, and had further surgery to make his sexual organs appear more ‘female‘ as a young adult. But explanations were few and far between, and it was only when Ambrose sought out intersex groups that he was able to fully understand what had happened to him…. The Secret of Me draws a direct link between the harmful way Ambrose was treated and the work of psychologist John Money, whose theories about gender informed medical guidance about children born with atypical genitalia. In the 1960s, Money studied a pair of Canadian twin boys, originally called Bruce and Brian Reimer. Bruce was left without a penis after a botched circumcision, and the academic encouraged the boys’ parents to raise him as a girl, Brenda. Money studied both children as they grew, with his research claiming the experiment was a total success. Brenda, according to him, was a stereotypical and happy little girl, showing that a child’s gender could be moulded by the adults raising them. In fact, there were clear signs that Brenda was never happy as a girl, which Money simply left out of his papers. As an adult, he began living as a man, changing his name again, this time to David. The brothers were left traumatised by Money’s research (which involved having them inspect each other’s genitals as children and ‘rehearse‘ sexual acts) and their story has an incredibly sad end – both Brian and David killed themselves in their 30s. Money’s work was eventually debunked – but its impact on medical treatment for children born with ambiguous genitalia was felt for years…. Holly Greenberry-Pullen, 47, a Lib Dem councillor and the only openly intersex candidate in the 2024 general election, points out that the information that someone is given to guide their decision about surgery is just as important as their age.… In 2011 Greenberry-Pullen helped to found the charity Intersex UK. ’If there is no life-saving, essential medical urgency and factual diagnosis that means you have to perform an irreversible surgery, then you don’t do it,’ she says. ’Wes Streeting [the health secretary] needs to invite me and colleagues into Westminster to sit around the table and to talk about human rights and the right to bodily autonomy and medical policy on how intersex bodies are treated.”
In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy. That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false. It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model. When the multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was 'better than Wikipedia', or 'Wokepedia' as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points.... Evans, however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a ... problem. 'Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,' Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. 'AI just hoovers up everything.'”
Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once 'she takes all our money'.... Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now. I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming 'socially acceptable to be racist' again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing – not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally – goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms.... Something seems to have happened to us as we hit the midlife crisis years. Gen Xers are now old enough to start worrying that the world is changing and leaving us behind: that if we get made redundant we might not get hired again, that our marriages may not survive the shock of the kids leaving home, that our views are out of date and someone is out to get us for them, that people are laughing at us behind our backs.... It’s gen Xers, not grumpy pensioners or teenage boys beguiled by rightwing influencers, who are powering the populist insurgency now. Only 19% of British fiftysomethings voted Reform UK at the last general election but a third of those aged between 50 and 64 would do so now, according to YouGov, which is a staggeringly fast turnaround for the 'Cool Britannia' generation that put Tony Blair in Downing Street – and key to the party’s move from fringe to mainstream."
‘They’re not wolves, they’re sheep’: the psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone-actor mass killers – interview by Walter Marsh in The Guardian, on the publication of Mullen's book Running Amok. "The Bristol-born [Paul E.] Mullen had always dabbled in forensic work, but [a mass shooting] at Aramoana [New Zealand, where he was living,] piqued his curiosity. He would soon pivot to become a full-time forensic psychiatrist, specialising in some of the gravest acts known to society, from stalking and child sexual abuse to mass killings.... In April 1996 news broke of an even deadlier attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By then Mullen was in Australia, working as professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash University. He received a call summoning him to Royal Hobart hospital where this latest perpetrator – whose name Mullen refuses to use – had been taken alive hours earlier after shooting 55 people, killing 35.,,, While the Port Arthur killer angrily rejected Mullen’s suggestion his actions might have been inspired by another high-profile attack a month earlier in Dunblane, Scotland, Mullen says he soon started to talk about other massacres. 'So he did know quite a lot about these previous killers,' Mullen reflects. 'And this is typical.'... The following decades would see Mullen interview many men in a similar position to the perpetrators of Aramoana and Port Arthur, as he became a leading authority in what are often referred to as 'lone-actor mass killers'. But despite the implication of solitude, the man in that Hobart hospital ward revealed what would become a common thread in all of Mullen’s dealings with lone mass killers: they are rarely acting in isolation.... 'It was the Texas university tower massacre [in 1966] that created the script, which has now grown and grown and grown,' Mullen reflects. 'And the first imitator of the Texas killer was only five weeks [later].' Like the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fuelled by a mix of resentment and a sense of weakness, drawn to the promise of infamy, publicity, and a noteworthy death enjoyed by previous mass killers. Some even dress like their predecessors... 'They gather grievances, grievances, grievances,' Mullen says, echoing the common complaints he has heard across his career. '"People mistreated me"; "I was cheated"; "they’re not fair"; "no one likes me". All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back. The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance. But it’s much worse, because you never did anything. And this, in a sense, is your final reply.'"
What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms – article by Eric Reinhart in The Guardian. "Policymakers and aligned business interests promise AI will solve physician burnout, lower healthcare costs and expand access. Entrepreneurs tout it as the great equalizer, bringing high-quality care to people excluded from existing systems. Hospital and physician leaders such as Dr Eric Topol have hailed AI as the means by which humanity will finally be restored to clinical practice; according to this widely embraced argument, it will liberate doctors from documentation drudgery and allow them to finally turn away from their computer screens and look patients in the eye. Meanwhile, patients are already making use of AI chatbots as supplements to – or substitutes for – doctors in what many see as a democratization of medical knowledge. The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.... What makes AI so compelling is not simply faith in technology but the way it suggests we can improve medicine by leapfrogging the difficult work of structural change to confront disease-causing inequality, corporate interests and oligarchic power.... This faith in AI also reflects a misunderstanding of care itself, a misunderstanding decades in the making in the service of an idea now treated as an unquestionable good: evidence-based medicine (EBM). Emerging in the 1990s with the unassailable goal of improving care, EBM challenged practices based on habit and tradition by insisting decisions be grounded in rigorous research, ideally randomized controlled trials.... The gains were real: effective therapies spread faster, outdated ones were abandoned, and an ethic of scientific accountability took hold. But as the model transformed medicine, it narrowed the scope of clinical encounters. The messy, relational and interpretive dimensions of care – the ways physicians listen, intuit and elicit what patients may not initially say – were increasingly seen as secondary to standardized protocols. Doctors came to treat not singular people but data points. Under pressure for efficiency, EBM ossified into an ideology: “best practices” became whatever could be measured, tabulated and reimbursed. The complexity of patients’ lives was crowded out by metrics, checkboxes and algorithms. What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers.... As philosophers from Socrates to Søren Kierkegaard and feminist theorists like Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto have long argued, care is not only a clinical task but an ethical and political practice. It is, in the deepest sense, a practice of disalienation – of recovering our sense of ourselves as singular beings in community with one another in which individual difference is valued rather than erased. That is why care has transformative power beyond health. To be truly listened to – to be recognized not as a case but as a person – can change not just how one experiences illness, but how one experiences oneself and the world. It can foster the capacity to care for others across differences, to resist hatred and violence, to build the fragile social ties upon which democracy depends."
‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children –article by Lucy Knight in The Guardian. “The Secret of Me, a new documentary by British film-maker Grace Hughes-Hallett, … follows the life of Jim Ambrose, who was born in Louisiana in 1976.… Ambrose had genitals that, as he puts it in the film, ‘fall outside of an arbitrary acceptable norm‘. Doctors decided to operate on him as an infant, removing his testes and constructing a vagina. His parents were then advised to raise him as a daughter, and keep quiet about what had happened. He was told that he would need to take hormones when he was a teenager, and had further surgery to make his sexual organs appear more ‘female‘ as a young adult. But explanations were few and far between, and it was only when Ambrose sought out intersex groups that he was able to fully understand what had happened to him…. The Secret of Me draws a direct link between the harmful way Ambrose was treated and the work of psychologist John Money, whose theories about gender informed medical guidance about children born with atypical genitalia. In the 1960s, Money studied a pair of Canadian twin boys, originally called Bruce and Brian Reimer. Bruce was left without a penis after a botched circumcision, and the academic encouraged the boys’ parents to raise him as a girl, Brenda. Money studied both children as they grew, with his research claiming the experiment was a total success. Brenda, according to him, was a stereotypical and happy little girl, showing that a child’s gender could be moulded by the adults raising them. In fact, there were clear signs that Brenda was never happy as a girl, which Money simply left out of his papers. As an adult, he began living as a man, changing his name again, this time to David. The brothers were left traumatised by Money’s research (which involved having them inspect each other’s genitals as children and ‘rehearse‘ sexual acts) and their story has an incredibly sad end – both Brian and David killed themselves in their 30s. Money’s work was eventually debunked – but its impact on medical treatment for children born with ambiguous genitalia was felt for years…. Holly Greenberry-Pullen, 47, a Lib Dem councillor and the only openly intersex candidate in the 2024 general election, points out that the information that someone is given to guide their decision about surgery is just as important as their age.… In 2011 Greenberry-Pullen helped to found the charity Intersex UK. ’If there is no life-saving, essential medical urgency and factual diagnosis that means you have to perform an irreversible surgery, then you don’t do it,’ she says. ’Wes Streeting [the health secretary] needs to invite me and colleagues into Westminster to sit around the table and to talk about human rights and the right to bodily autonomy and medical policy on how intersex bodies are treated.”
Do you feel lucky? Why acknowledging our own good fortune would make the world a better place – article by Julian Richer in The Guardian. “I believe that many of us – especially those who consider ourselves successful – underestimate the role that luck has played in our lives…. I have had the incredible luck of being born in the UK, in a peaceful period of history. I was blessed with an able body and mind, and had a good upbringing, and an incredibly exclusive education. I had the freedom to take advantage of opportunities, to start my own business and pursue my ambitions. In that sense my early years were a heck of a lot easier than many people’s. And I was also extremely fortunate that my particular talents were highly valued and rewarded in the marketplace, which enabled me to become wealthy. How about you? Maybe you were born in a period when house prices were low, or when university education was free? You may not have had all of these things, but imagine for a second that you had none of them. Imagine that you came into this world facing barriers to your progress at every stage. Your parents unemployed, or needing care from you, or working ridiculous hours in insecure jobs. Your neighbourhood wracked by deprivation, despair, pollution and crime, with precious few opportunities to move up or out. Your plans to buy a house or start a business impossible because of lack of capital, or access to it…. Dismantling the myth that we live in a meritocracy is one of the most urgent changes needed in public life today.… Acknowledging the role that luck has played in our lives would be a great starting point, helping to smooth the path for our political leaders to take bolder action to tackle socioeconomic inequality. If more business leaders recognised how luck has helped them, it might also encourage them to act (for example by improving pay and conditions for low-paid or insecure workers).“
What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ – article by Deepak Varuvel Dennison in The Guardian. "For many people, GenAI is emerging as the primary way to learn about the world. A large-scale study published in September 2025, analysing how people have been using ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022, revealed that around half the queries were for practical guidance, or to seek information. These systems may appear neutral, but they are far from it. The most popular models privilege dominant ways of knowing (typically western and institutional) while marginalising alternatives, especially those encoded in oral traditions, embodied practice and languages considered 'low-resource' in the computing world, such as Hindi or Swahili. By amplifying these hierarchies, GenAI risks contributing to the erasure of systems of understanding that have evolved over centuries, disconnecting future generations from vast bodies of insight and wisdom that were never encoded yet remain essential, human ways of knowing. What’s at stake, then, isn’t just representation: it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself.... To illustrate the kinds of knowledge missing, let’s consider one example: our understanding of local ecologies. An environmentalist friend once told me something that has stayed with me – a community’s connection with its ecology can be seen through the detailed and specific names it has for local plants. Because plant species are often regionally specific or ecologically unique, knowledge of these plants becomes equally localised. When a language becomes marginalised, the plant knowledge embedded within it often disappears as well. While writing this essay, I spoke to various people about the language gaps in GenAI – among them Dharan Ashok, chief architect at Thannal, an organisation dedicated to reviving natural building techniques in India.... Amid concerns over unsustainable and carbon-intensive construction, Dharan is actively working to recover the lost art of producing biopolymers from local plants. He noted that the greatest challenge lies in the fact that this knowledge is largely undocumented and has been passed down orally through native languages. It is often held by just a few elders, and when they pass away, it is lost. Dharan recounted an experience of missing the chance to learn how to make a specific type of limestone-based brick when the last artisan with that knowledge died."
The BBC is under threat like never before. This is how to save it – article by Pat Younge in The Guardian. "The BBC is our most effective defence against the dangers of global media power concentrated in the hands of a few private individuals, but we have very few obstacles to prevent a populist or authoritarian government from undermining it. This is a moment of peril that demands a new approach to governance and funding that secures the BBC’s future. We at the British Broadcasting Challenge have set out a number of proposals for achieving this. First, the government must grant the BBC a permanent charter that establishes it in perpetuity and enshrines its core principles of independence, public service and universality.... Second, it should create a new BBC governance board whose members – crucially – should be appointed by an independent body, and be responsible for regulating the BBC’s editorial performance and setting its strategic direction.... Third, the government must recommit to the fundamental principle of BBC universality. That means geographical universality, ensuring BBC services are free at the point of use throughout the UK, and universality of content, providing quality programmes across the board that reflect the lives of nations and regions throughout the country.... Fourth, the BBC must have a proper funding settlement that recognises the 30% cut in funding imposed over the past 15 years.... We need a more open, confident and responsive BBC, liberated from the nervousness engendered by years of bullying, that genuinely listens to its viewers and listeners and finds new ways of engaging with audiences. We can achieve this through a new governance system that recognises the BBC’s worldwide reputation for independence, and insulates it from the kind of partisan political meddling that has created the current furore; and through a reformed universal funding system that takes account of people’s ability to pay."
Is Your Website AI-Friendly? The 8-Point Checklist for Keeping AI Visitors Happy – website post by Andy Crestodina, referenced in Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle 'The Editing Podcast'. "Your website isn’t just for human visitors anymore. AI is already visiting your website.... Checklist for AI-friendly websites: 1. Add detailed descriptions of everything you offer. (AI visitors can't tell what you do.) 2. Confirm that all messages in images are also text. (AI visitors can't see inside your images.) 3. Confirm that all messages in videos are also text. (AI visitors don't watch your videos.) 4. Create an 'AI disclosure' training page. (AI cant get it all in one place.) 5. Create comparison pages. (AI can't tell how you compare.) 6. Confirm all copy is visible without Javascript. (AI can't see all of your content.) 7. Create custom report to track AI traffic. (Google Analytics isn't tracking traffic from AI sources separately.) 8. Update your contact form to track AI referrals. (Your contact form isn't updated for AI.)"
What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ – article by Deepak Varuvel Dennison in The Guardian. "For many people, GenAI is emerging as the primary way to learn about the world. A large-scale study published in September 2025, analysing how people have been using ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022, revealed that around half the queries were for practical guidance, or to seek information. These systems may appear neutral, but they are far from it. The most popular models privilege dominant ways of knowing (typically western and institutional) while marginalising alternatives, especially those encoded in oral traditions, embodied practice and languages considered 'low-resource' in the computing world, such as Hindi or Swahili. By amplifying these hierarchies, GenAI risks contributing to the erasure of systems of understanding that have evolved over centuries, disconnecting future generations from vast bodies of insight and wisdom that were never encoded yet remain essential, human ways of knowing. What’s at stake, then, isn’t just representation: it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself.... To illustrate the kinds of knowledge missing, let’s consider one example: our understanding of local ecologies. An environmentalist friend once told me something that has stayed with me – a community’s connection with its ecology can be seen through the detailed and specific names it has for local plants. Because plant species are often regionally specific or ecologically unique, knowledge of these plants becomes equally localised. When a language becomes marginalised, the plant knowledge embedded within it often disappears as well. While writing this essay, I spoke to various people about the language gaps in GenAI – among them Dharan Ashok, chief architect at Thannal, an organisation dedicated to reviving natural building techniques in India.... Amid concerns over unsustainable and carbon-intensive construction, Dharan is actively working to recover the lost art of producing biopolymers from local plants. He noted that the greatest challenge lies in the fact that this knowledge is largely undocumented and has been passed down orally through native languages. It is often held by just a few elders, and when they pass away, it is lost. Dharan recounted an experience of missing the chance to learn how to make a specific type of limestone-based brick when the last artisan with that knowledge died."
The BBC is under threat like never before. This is how to save it – article by Pat Younge in The Guardian. "The BBC is our most effective defence against the dangers of global media power concentrated in the hands of a few private individuals, but we have very few obstacles to prevent a populist or authoritarian government from undermining it. This is a moment of peril that demands a new approach to governance and funding that secures the BBC’s future. We at the British Broadcasting Challenge have set out a number of proposals for achieving this. First, the government must grant the BBC a permanent charter that establishes it in perpetuity and enshrines its core principles of independence, public service and universality.... Second, it should create a new BBC governance board whose members – crucially – should be appointed by an independent body, and be responsible for regulating the BBC’s editorial performance and setting its strategic direction.... Third, the government must recommit to the fundamental principle of BBC universality. That means geographical universality, ensuring BBC services are free at the point of use throughout the UK, and universality of content, providing quality programmes across the board that reflect the lives of nations and regions throughout the country.... Fourth, the BBC must have a proper funding settlement that recognises the 30% cut in funding imposed over the past 15 years.... We need a more open, confident and responsive BBC, liberated from the nervousness engendered by years of bullying, that genuinely listens to its viewers and listeners and finds new ways of engaging with audiences. We can achieve this through a new governance system that recognises the BBC’s worldwide reputation for independence, and insulates it from the kind of partisan political meddling that has created the current furore; and through a reformed universal funding system that takes account of people’s ability to pay."
Is Your Website AI-Friendly? The 8-Point Checklist for Keeping AI Visitors Happy – website post by Andy Crestodina, referenced in Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle 'The Editing Podcast'. "Your website isn’t just for human visitors anymore. AI is already visiting your website.... Checklist for AI-friendly websites: 1. Add detailed descriptions of everything you offer. (AI visitors can't tell what you do.) 2. Confirm that all messages in images are also text. (AI visitors can't see inside your images.) 3. Confirm that all messages in videos are also text. (AI visitors don't watch your videos.) 4. Create an 'AI disclosure' training page. (AI cant get it all in one place.) 5. Create comparison pages. (AI can't tell how you compare.) 6. Confirm all copy is visible without Javascript. (AI can't see all of your content.) 7. Create custom report to track AI traffic. (Google Analytics isn't tracking traffic from AI sources separately.) 8. Update your contact form to track AI referrals. (Your contact form isn't updated for AI.)"
Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side. The degree of increased division – known as 'affective polarisation' – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.... 'The change in their feed was barely perceptible, yet they reported a significant difference in how they felt about other people,' [said] Tiziano Piccardi, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University computer science department and co-author of the research.... 'What’s exciting about these results is that there is something that the platforms can do to reduce polarisation... It’s a new approach they could take in designing their algorithms.'”
‘We used a beachball as an alien!’ John Carpenter on his gloriously shonky sci-fi comedy Dark Star – interviews by Chris Broughton. John Carpenter, writer and director. "In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback. We started off with some money from my parents, shooting on 16mm. It was a very long process of shooting a scene, then pausing to raise money to shoot the next.... By the summer of 1972 we had 45 minutes of footage, and we shopped it around and got the money to make it into a full-length feature film. We went looking for a distributor and Jack Harris, who’d produced The Blob, took it on. He was looking for a space movie, but there were certain things he wanted included – a bunch of cliches, such as a meteor storm.... The extra footage shot to make it feature-length included the scenes with the alien. By that point, we were full into comedy. We’d been using a beachball to represent a planet – it had a couple of bathroom plungers stuck to the bottom – and one day I saw it being carried by a crew member. I thought it looked so ridiculous that we should try something similar for the alien!" Brian Narelle, played Lieutenant Doolittle. "Filming was supposed to take a month but ended up happening at intervals over three years. The first scene we shot was in a closet in a student building – I don’t think the spaceship’s control room set had been finished.... Doolittle’s character – and the entire film – is summarised by one line: 'Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just find me something I can blow up.' Right now, that’s an attitude that feels even more disturbing. Doolittle’s lack of success when trying to persuade the bomb not to explode is also not a monument to our chances of victory over AI. The film has things to say about today that it couldn’t say in 1974."
‘We used a beachball as an alien!’ John Carpenter on his gloriously shonky sci-fi comedy Dark Star – interviews by Chris Broughton. John Carpenter, writer and director. "In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback. We started off with some money from my parents, shooting on 16mm. It was a very long process of shooting a scene, then pausing to raise money to shoot the next.... By the summer of 1972 we had 45 minutes of footage, and we shopped it around and got the money to make it into a full-length feature film. We went looking for a distributor and Jack Harris, who’d produced The Blob, took it on. He was looking for a space movie, but there were certain things he wanted included – a bunch of cliches, such as a meteor storm.... The extra footage shot to make it feature-length included the scenes with the alien. By that point, we were full into comedy. We’d been using a beachball to represent a planet – it had a couple of bathroom plungers stuck to the bottom – and one day I saw it being carried by a crew member. I thought it looked so ridiculous that we should try something similar for the alien!" Brian Narelle, played Lieutenant Doolittle. "Filming was supposed to take a month but ended up happening at intervals over three years. The first scene we shot was in a closet in a student building – I don’t think the spaceship’s control room set had been finished.... Doolittle’s character – and the entire film – is summarised by one line: 'Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just find me something I can blow up.' Right now, that’s an attitude that feels even more disturbing. Doolittle’s lack of success when trying to persuade the bomb not to explode is also not a monument to our chances of victory over AI. The film has things to say about today that it couldn’t say in 1974."
On Living in an Atomic Age – essay by C.S. Lewis, first published 1948, quoted by Eliezer Yudkowsky in 'If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies', referenced by Jasmine Sun in 'AI friends too cheap to meter'. “'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.'... If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs."
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