David Barnard-Wills
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dbarnardwills.bsky.social
David Barnard-Wills
@dbarnardwills.bsky.social
520 followers 750 following 84 posts
Political scientist working in tech. Emerging technology. Previously Research-Innovation Lead at Trilateral Research. Privacy, ethical AI and responsible innovation. Manchester UK
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"whats that lad? Trouble at t'ech accelerator?"
Reposted by David Barnard-Wills
🎉Today, we released a series of five Responsible AI courses that you can take for free: alltechishuman.org/rai-courses

Principles of Responsible AI

The History of Responsible AI

Operationalizing AI Governance (2)

Governing Agentic AI Systems
Reposted by David Barnard-Wills
CNN takes a deep dive into the business of crypto ATM companies who mark up the price of cryptocurrency by adding 20% to 30% to each transaction. "Americans, often retirees, lost around $240 million to crypto ATM scams in the first six months of this year" www.cnn.com/interactive/...
Americans are losing millions to scammers at crypto ATMs. Here’s how companies profit
Companies often fail to refund money to victims and aggressively fight police to claw back scam money seized from machines.
www.cnn.com
Thank you. In my last job, at research company, we put a ban on "silicon samples" in our gen AI policy. I think it's particularly bad for "hard to reach" populations because they are less likely to be represented or represented well in the models training data.
Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵
The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...
arxiv.org
Reposted by David Barnard-Wills
Preparing my notes for an interview on history of identity cards, back in the news because of proposals such as Labour Together’s Britcard (left). There’s a long history (see WW2 poster, right)

Here’s a thread on recent (1980s-2010s) UK ID card history, showing how Tony Blair became keen on them
DIE:volume 1 had a take on something like this.
This just arrived, looking forward to giving it a play.
Reposted by David Barnard-Wills
What did I visit on my holidays?
Reposted by David Barnard-Wills
📢 Applications close this Friday to attend our Future Leaders workshop! 📢

Together with the RBOC Network+, we invite you to a co-hosted workshop aimed at developing future research leaders working in TIPS.

Apply here: www.spritehub.org/event-detail...

#SPRITE #events #opportunities #TIPS
Future leaders: Imagining Scenarios/Effective Decision Making/Encouraging Resilience. | SPRITE+ Hub
Join our Future Leaders workshop in collaboration with the RBOC Network+
www.spritehub.org
Reposted by David Barnard-Wills
I did some research and reporting to try to understand why Elon turning Grok "anti-woke" also made it into MechaHitler, some interesting stuff in the guts of LLMs. feat @theophite.bsky.social prospect.org/power/2025-0...
How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler?
The malfunctioning xAI chatbot provides some insights into how large language models work.
prospect.org
I'm more of a science consumer rather than a science producer these days. So I'm a bit car-crash fascinated by meta-science
My D&D warlock and his owl familiar would agree with this article 😉🦉