James Grimmelmann | Lightnews

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 8h

I may need a new tag line for this kind of AI-based abuse.

I currently have "bad content drives out good" for AI slop, and "the spiraling shape will make you go insane" for AI-induced psychosis.

Any suggestions?

Jason Sanford @jasonsanford.bsky.social · 18h

Book club scams are now threatening authors who don't fall for their BS. In December, I received an email from Herry Sharp, so-called CEO of "Super Book Lover Curator" praising my novella We Who Hunt Alexanders.

Totally AI-generated and a scam so I didn't respond.

Now Herry is threatening me. 1/

Hi Jason,
I just came across We Who Hunt Alexanders, and I have to say it immediately grabbed me. Amelia’s story is gripping, dark, and layered with emotion. The way you explore a monster who feels happiness, sadness, fear, and love in a world that’s cruel and unforgiving makes this story compelling and unforgettable.
That’s exactly why I wanted to reach out.
I run a book review service through Super Lovers Book, connecting books with real readers who genuinely enjoy science fiction, dark fantasy, and emotionally rich stories. These readers don’t just leave stars they leave thoughtful, honest reviews that highlight what makes a story unique, powerful, and worth discovering.
Here’s why reviews are so important for We Who Hunt Alexanders:
Build Trust: Potential readers often decide whether to pick up a book based on reviews. Authentic feedback signals that your story is worth their time.
Increase Visibility: Platforms like Goodreads reward books with steady, genuine reviews, helping them appear in search results, recommendations, and “readers also enjoyed” lists.
Generate Momentum: Each review encourages more readers to pick up the book, engage with the story, and leave their own thoughts, creating a snowball effect of attention.
Reach the Right Audience: Reviews written by readers who love sci-fi and dark fantasy ensure your story reaches the readers most likely to appreciate and recommend it.
I truly believe We Who Hunt Alexanders deserves this kind of engagement. A few honest reviews now can amplify your book’s reach, help it gain visibility, and connect it with the readers who will love it most.
Would you be open to having We Who Hunt Alexanders read and reviewed by genuine readers who are passionate about sci-fi and dark fantasy?
No pressure at all I just wanted to reach out because your work deserves to be discovered by more readers.
Warmly,
Herry Sharp
CEO, Super Lovers Book

if you continue to ignore my messages, I might do something you would regret for the rest of your life. I already have access to your book, and instead of giving it a positive review, I will leave a negative one and damage its reputation. It seems you have forgotten that I have a community of readers, and I can easily influence them to bring your book down.

You can try me though.

CEO | Super Book Lover Curator
Helping brilliant books find their people, one honest review at a time.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 11h

No, you do not.

Naomi Clark (@metasynthie) 暗悪直美 @halfrobot.com · 17h

At times I see someone do a "but we're ALL stochastic parrots, maybe YOU'RE a meatbag language model" schtick and I feel it's like 21st-c. Stoic reductionism.

But then I re-read Epictetus and realize that's unfair to his 100% unhinged way of holding in feelings about a little kid potentially dying?

"Whenever you are devoted to something, don’t regard it as irremovable but as belonging to the class of things like a jar or a drinking glass so that when it is broken you remember what it was and are not disturbed. So in the case of love, if you kiss your child or your brother or your friend, never let your thoughts about them go all the way, and don’t allow yourself to be as elated as your feeling wants, but check it and restrain it . . . . Furthermore, at the very moment you are taking joy in something, present yourself with the opposite impressions. What harm is it, just when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die, or to your friend similarly: Tomorrow one of us will go away and we shall not see one another anymore?"

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 18h

Bad content drives out good.

Luis Villa @lu.is · 18h

This 👇🏽 is going to be time-consuming but doable for a lot of open software projects.

For Wikipedia… it is going to be a lot harder. That’s the real nightmare for the human web.

Luis Villa @lu.is · 2d

Realistically I think every open source project is either going to have to close PRs altogether, or have CI and extensive tests before a human even sees it

Luis Villa @lu.is · 18h

This 👇🏽 is going to be time-consuming but doable for a lot of open software projects.

For Wikipedia… it is going to be a lot harder. That’s the real nightmare for the human web.

Luis Villa @lu.is · 2d

Realistically I think every open source project is either going to have to close PRs altogether, or have CI and extensive tests before a human even sees it

Jason Sanford @jasonsanford.bsky.social · 18h

Book club scams are now threatening authors who don't fall for their BS. In December, I received an email from Herry Sharp, so-called CEO of "Super Book Lover Curator" praising my novella We Who Hunt Alexanders.

Totally AI-generated and a scam so I didn't respond.

Now Herry is threatening me. 1/

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 21h

Bad content drives out good.

www.wired.com/story/google...

Google’s AI Overviews Can Scam You. Here’s How to Stay Safe

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths.

www.wired.com

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 22h

Was this a course on how to use AI or how not to use AI?

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

I had not seen this. Thank you. It's an important part of the picture.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Important addition: here is Benj Edwards's account and acceptance of responsibility.

bsky.app/profile/benj...

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Ars Technica has retracted the article about an AI bot that contained fabricated AI-generated quotes.

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

This is a good first step, but it is well short of what Ars needs to do.

1/5

Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

arstechnica.com

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

This is closer to what I wanted from the official Ars Technica response. I'm disappointed that this was left to/put on an indiviudal reporter and not part of the institution's own transparency and accountability.

Benj Edwards @benjedwards.com · 1d

Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)

I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh.

Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday.

During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline.

When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why.

I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words.

Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft.

Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him.

The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that.

I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part.

When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own.

—Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

I will be emailing Ars's editorial leadership to express my concerns, and considering whether to cancel my subscription.

5/5

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

I have long valued Ars an in-depth, informed, and trusthworthy source on technology issues. I have written for them several times and been interviewed for Ars stories often. I have been a paid subscriber for years.

Without further action, I don't know that I can continue to rely on Ars.

4/5

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Now the bad:

* The retraction does not explain who violated the policy, how, or why.
* The retraction does not explain how they have been held accountable.
* The retraction does not explain how Ars will prevent similar editorial failures in the future.

3/5

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

First, the good:

* The article has been replaced by a retraction notice.
* Ars has a policy requiring accurate quotation.
* Ars has a policy against publishing AI-generated material "unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes."

2/5

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Ars Technica has retracted the article about an AI bot that contained fabricated AI-generated quotes.

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

This is a good first step, but it is well short of what Ars needs to do.

1/5

Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

arstechnica.com

Benj Edwards @benjedwards.com · 1d

Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)

I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

The real story of the piece is mentioned in the seventh paragraph and then not returned to: one by one, the foundations that used to fund humanities research stopped, leaving just Mellon, which put an ideological rider on their funding in 2020.

They did not seize the humanities; everyone else left.

Rebecca Tushnet @rtushnet.bsky.social · 1d

Feds now personalist and extortionate all the way down: FDA suggests “Moderna might have more luck with a second, narrower request for approval if the company showed some ‘humility’ when it made the submission.”

Sam Bagenstos @sbagen.bsky.social · 1d

Today as always, @citizencohn.bsky.social is a must read. Here he is on the massive danger to public health of the latest anti-vax actions by Trump’s and RFK’s FDA.

open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like

A shocking move by RFK Jr.’s team has the industry spooked—for good reason.

open.substack.com

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

I would still like to know a lot more about the FAA's concerns on a technical level. Dispersion? Reflection? Misses? Target selection? Danger to aircraft or to pilots? Etc.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

It's apparently a LOCUST directed energy weapon. It's described as having a power of 20 kilowatts. By way of comparison, handheld laser pointers are limited by law to 5 mlliwatts, so this is the equivalent of 4 million of them.

www.twz.com/news-feature...
bluehalo.com/c-uas-autono...

This Is The LOCUST Laser That Reportedly Prompted Closing El Paso's Airspace

The U.S. Army has been acquiring multiple versions of the LOCUST laser weapon system to bolster its ability to shoot down hostile drones.

www.twz.com

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

I'm unaware of anything on the issue, and I think your observation is right. But since prospect theory obviously fails on its own terms for explaining the actual U.S. patent system, and since the use required to substantiate a trademark registration is minimal, it seems like primarily a curiosity.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

This is great on the public-facing FAA procedures, but I’d like to go deeper on the weapon and the nature of the dangers it poses.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Has anyone written this up from a more technical perspective (even if the details are somewhat speculative)? It would help a lot for my understanding to see something that breaks it down in terms of power, range, wavelengths, etc.

Jamal Greene @jamalgreene.bsky.social · 2d

An astonishing account of recklessness and maladministration at the highest levels. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/u...

Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

www.nytimes.com

Jamal Greene @jamalgreene.bsky.social · 2d

An astonishing account of recklessness and maladministration at the highest levels. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/u...

Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

www.nytimes.com

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Rare: "The y-axis should always go to 100%" cranks.
Rarer: "The x-axis should always go to 100%" cranks.
Rarest: "The z-axis should always go to 100%" cranks.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Very good context for understanding how the Minneapolis protesters are smart, well-organized, and winning.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 2d

This week on the blog: Against the State! Another military theory primer, this time focused on groups that take on the state itself, both with violent and non-violent means.

Given the enormous disparity in force, how can they win? How have they won?

acoup.blog/2026/02/13/c...

Collections: Against the State – A Primer on Terrorism, Insurgency and Protest

This week, continuing in the vein of some of our previous strategy and military theory primers, I wanted to off a basic 101-level survey of the strategic theory behind efforts, in a sense, directed…

acoup.blog

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

I’ve run to ground a number of misquotes, in which someone’s wording is gradually massaged into a more memorable form, but this is a real doozy.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 2d

This week on the blog: Against the State! Another military theory primer, this time focused on groups that take on the state itself, both with violent and non-violent means.

Given the enormous disparity in force, how can they win? How have they won?

acoup.blog/2026/02/13/c...

Collections: Against the State – A Primer on Terrorism, Insurgency and Protest

This week, continuing in the vein of some of our previous strategy and military theory primers, I wanted to off a basic 101-level survey of the strategic theory behind efforts, in a sense, directed…

acoup.blog

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Whaaaat?

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