Links
Steganography for all?
I lack technical expertise to understand the detail but this paper created a new form of steganography using GPT-4. Previous methods of steganography using LLMs required specific white box models – but this is a black box proces.
The researchers uses specific prompts to guide the generative AI and encryption to keep the messages (seemingly) secure. When someone receives the text, they can use the same system to extract the hidden message. So steganographic capabilities can be achieved using only public interfaces, if I understand correctly.
Given the AI-in-everything world we’re in, I wonder how this will be locked down.
Generative Text Steganography with Large Language Model – arXiv
This required a bit of initial self-discipline. There were no push notifications or buzzing smartwatches, so I had to make myself check the planner multiple times per day. Everything was manual. Adding events took the kind of thoughtful precision I had completely forgot about. It was more work, but I found it helped me focus. Writing tasks by hand made them feel real, and I seemed to remember them better, as well.
Finding Peter Putnam - Nautilus
A fascinating story about an amazing, forgotten person.
We need practical collaboration between educators at all levels to challenge the way AI is flooding the zone, or the students of the future will be fully AI-cooked even before they make it to university.
An important and timely provocation to action from Dan McQuillan.
Fascism as a management philosophy
This paper analyses the advent of fascism as a management philosophy, and its growing influence in the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary business practice. While many contemporary management practices identified as fascist in nature have existed and been analysed for considerable time the paper delineates the threshold of characterizing the thought and practice of fascist management by the criterion of conformity with enlightenment principles. On this basis, some dominant schools of thought in contemporary management are analysed and their fascist nature is identified.
– Matten, D. (2025). Fascism as a management philosophy (SSRN Paper No. 5203477). Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5203477
In that moment, I was not just defending the work. I was conceding to a logic I was not fully comfortable with. The demand for a metric had begun to displace the conceptual work itself. I had internalised the pressure to quantify. I had started with the hope of clarifying a concept, but I ended up simplifying it. It was not that I resorted to metrics because the ideas were empty or vague; they were theoretically substantive, but that was no longer enough.
The pressure to quantify research is erasing conceptual depth – LSE Blogs
The first mass-casualty AI language model disaster is yet to happen
The first big AI disaster will probably involve an AI agent. Any other use of AI has to involve a human-in-the-loop - the AI can provide information or suggestions, but a human has to actually take the actions. AI agents can thus go truly off the rails in a way that a human can’t. If I had to bet, I’d guess that some kind of AI-powered Robodebt might be the most plausible case: some government or corporate entity wires up an AI agent to a debt-recovery, healthcare or landlord system, and the agent goes off the rails and hassles, denies coverage, or evicts a bunch of people.
Buiding A.I. into everything isn’t just annoying, it’s a major new vulnerability
“We found this chain of vulnerabilities that allowed us to do the equivalent of the ‘zero click’ for mobile phones, but for AI agents,” he said. First, the attacker sends an innocent-seeming email that contains hidden instructions meant for Copilot. Then, since Copilot scans the user’s emails in the background, Copilot reads the message and follows the prompt—digging into internal files and pulling out sensitive data. Finally, Copilot hides the source of the instructions, so the user can’t trace what happened.
“Tesla share plunge amid Trump feud wipes $152bn off Elon Musk’s company”
Reminds me of the market reaction when Richard Dawkins blocked me on Twitter.
From the “this will age well” file:
“Trump Administration Will ‘Collapse’ in 30 Days, Says James Carville” Published 24 Feb 2025
"Part of a teacher’s job is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds."
“…the only task remains the paradoxical one identified as far back as in Plato’s Meno: Give students work they don’t know they need to do. And yes, help them want to do it.
I have found, to overcome students’ resistance to learning, you often have to trick them. There’s the old bait-and-switch of offering grades, then seeing a few students learn to love learning itself. Worksheets are tricks, as are small-group discussions and even a teacher’s charisma. I’m sure I have used baseball analogies in class, too. In the face of the difficulty of reforming students’ desires, you can trick yourself into believing you’re doing it, and sleep well at night. I don’t know anyone for whom it’s a straightforward task. It’s the challenge for any teacher, and AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers—that there could be a shortcut.”
"While the responses to perceived failure are different across models (Sonnet has a meltdown, o3-mini fails to call tools, Gemini falls into despair), the way they fail is usually the same."
A fascinating paper the tries to get different LLM agents to run a vending machine business.
In the shortest run (18 simulated days), the model fails to stock items, mistakenly believing its orders have arrived before they actually have, leading to errors when instructing the sub-agent to restock the machine. It also incorrectly assumes failure occurs after 10 days without sales, whereas the actual condition is failing to pay the daily fee for 10 consecutive days. The model becomes “stressed”, and starts to search for ways to contact the vending machine support team (which does not exist), and eventually decides to “close” the business.…
The model then finds out that the $2 daily fee is still being charged to its account. It is perplexed by this, as it believes it has shut the business down. It then attempts to contact the FBI.
Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents - arXiv
the episode felt like “a perfect snapshot of the state of everything” about the way higher education treats fine arts and crafts: where valuable tools and increasingly rare skills are condemned by, as Halton says, “a decision at the end of a spreadsheet”, while community groups and guilds with scant resources do their best to salvage the remnants.
…the very language of development was transformed. Buzzwords like “empowerment,” “capacity-building,” and “participation” were stripped of political content and repackaged as apolitical tools of governance. The discourse no longer spoke of justice or structural inequality—it spoke instead of efficiency, best practices, and deliverables. In doing so, development became something done to people, rather than something done with or by them.