Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 12h

The phrase "AI will create jobs" has started causing me to visibly convulse.

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 15h

I don't tend towards doom/alarmism generally but I can only see global politics playing out one way at the moment: the gradual, relentless erosion of people power under oligarchic fascism. Thinking because you don't live in the US you're safe from the decimation of democracy? Have you played Risk?

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Reposted by Oliver Bown

James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 1d

The whiplash from 'we are going to build responsible AI' and 'were worried about the addictive nature of these tools'

To:

'Were going to build a porn bot', 'were building a additctive, endless scroll social media app' and 'were bringing back the addictive model'

Is pretty big

The Verge @theverge.com · 2d

Sam Altman says ChatGPT will soon sext with verified adults

ChatGPT is about to get flirty.

buff.ly

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 3d

Sounds like it wasn't Books ETC Bayswater where I worked 😔 I once gift-wrapped a book so badly (no giftwrap training you see) it looked like someone had scrumped the book up in wrapping paper. The lady was very nice but clearly had to rewrap it later.

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Reposted by Oliver Bown

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 14d

Still time to sign up for a half-day seminar "Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries" on Oct 17th - a powerful resource with so much to keep up with everything going on in copyright, content licensing, new business models. www.eventbrite.com.au/e/adapting-t...

Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries

Learn what experts are saying about the anticipated trends for AI capability across creative industries in Australia.

www.eventbrite.com.au

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 4d

It's extraordinary times when Australia Post temporarily unlists the USA as a shipping destination.

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 6d

PSA in no world should "Trump didn't win the Nobel peace prize" be a newsworthy statement.

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Reposted by Oliver Bown

Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 6d

Of all the clerics they could have popped, those ICE idiots had to hit Hot Priest.

Presbyterian minister David Black on CNN, who was shot with pepper balls while praying outside an ICE facility.

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Reposted by Oliver Bown

Anthony Etherin @anthonyetherin.bsky.social · 10d

INFINITE PALINDROME

…cosmic,
I’m so cosmic,
I’m so cosmic,
I’m so cosmic,
I’m so cosmic,
I’m so cosmic,
I’m so cosmic,
I’m so c…

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 11d

Well worth a read.

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 11d

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com

As post-liberal tendencies take hold, “they take substantially different forms on the left versus the right — and those differences help explain why people on either side of the divide struggle so mightily to understand their opponents,” our columnist Ross Douthat writes.

Opinion | Why Left and Right Can’t Understand Each Other’s Fears

Getting past the urge to reduce all politics to existential conflict.

nyti.ms

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 13d

A circus musician goes into a bar.
The bar goes wah wah waaah.

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 14d

It's hard to miss the perfect portrayals of Trump and Vance.

Old White Nepo Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 14d

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

harpers.org

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 14d

Still time to sign up for a half-day seminar "Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries" on Oct 17th - a powerful resource with so much to keep up with everything going on in copyright, content licensing, new business models. www.eventbrite.com.au/e/adapting-t...

Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries

Learn what experts are saying about the anticipated trends for AI capability across creative industries in Australia.

www.eventbrite.com.au

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 14d

Humprhy Davy, is this epically cynical or epically enlightened?

"The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth."

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 14d

Music indies sound the alarm bells!! So called "attribution technology" will be nothing like the world of streaming or record sales where a successful artist can track their popularity. It will be a murky tech-metricocracy that will benefit those with the most compute.

www.ft.com/content/1a1a...

Music labels close to landmark AI licensing deals

Universal and Warner seek payment structure similar to streaming as more disruption looms

www.ft.com

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 17d

Excellent take. If you add up the value of the knowledge needed to train AI and cost it properly, this cannot possibly be something a private corporation can be allowed to own and seek rent on. But can anyone be trusted?

theconversation.com/generative-a...

Generative AI might end up being worthless — and that could be a good thing

GenAI does some neat, helpful things, but it’s not yet the engine of a new economy — and it might not ever be.

theconversation.com

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 20d

Thanks. Perfect. Old is fine.

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 21d

I maintain, this will end up with AI robots ambling down the street with microphone on, loitering near shopfronts, passing cars, and picnicking families, as a way of capturing music "inadvertently" for training.

www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/inspired-by-...

Inspired by Anthropic’s $1.5B book piracy payout, record labels accuse Suno of illegally ‘stream ripping’ music from YouTube

The labels are now seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed, as well as up to $2,500 for each act of YouTube stream ripping…

www.musicbusinessworldwide.com

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 21d

Generative image/audio folks, I'm looking for contemporary examples of training data used in different ways. e.g., one set of image data used for learning object structure and another used for learning painterly style. Any and all examples welcome, particularly academic papers.

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 21d

Sydney, I'm speaking at this awesome curated series of talks at the Uni of Western Sydney, as are my two fabulous PhD students Chloe McFadden and Tom Willma, along with a great line up of talks about art and AI.

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 21d

What's the best way to write some text for future flexibility. Needs to mange citations in a sensible way. MD, HTML, RTF, .docx, TeX? Or is that moot because we can convert so easily? I started writing my new book in HTML1 😀📜 but I don't have a referencing solution.

Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 21d

Yes. Watch and share. Viralise the hell out of this. Do you want to look back at this and say, "remember when we had freedom to criticise our leaders" or look back and say "this was the moment people stood up to authoritarianism in the US". Nothing is decided yet.

Wajahat Ali @wajali.bsky.social · 21d

Jimmy Kimmel's Monologue now has 14.3 MILLION VIEWS on YouTube.

It would be a shame for you to share it

www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1tj...

Jimmy Kimmel is Back!

YouTube video by Jimmy Kimmel Live

www.youtube.com

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 22d

100%. Any government that's not the current US administration has an interest in supporting civil society alternatives.

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 22d

Had a dream where if I held my breath my hair would grow slowly out into this giant afro until I breathed out and it went back to normal. I went around showing off my party trick. Got it to go a full metre in diameter. Good dream.

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Oliver Bown @olliebown.bsky.social · 23d

Not sure I've raved enough about the inaugural AI Music Studies Conference last year in Stockholm, which showcased an exceptional standard of scholarship. In March 2026 it comes to Nottingham. Delighted to be on the Steering Committee. I just hope I can make it!

www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/gro...

Aims 2026 conference - The University of Nottingham

www.nottingham.ac.uk

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