iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Shannon Vallor

1/2 🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at Behavioral and Brain Science have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" #OpenAccess for a limited time: target article, all 50 commentaries, & my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': doi.org/10.1017/S014.... Do share!

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 5h

Had a glorious time speaking at the Université Côte d’Azur last night, thanks to the brilliant @clequesne.bsky.social and her truly wonderful colleagues and students. Spent today soaking in sunshine, spritzes and Chagall, feeling recharged.

The Chagall mosaic at the Université Côte d’Azur

A bright blue-green Mediterranean on a sunny day against a grey rocky beach

A table at a seaside restaurant, featuring a spritz in a glass the size and shape of a hot tub

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I've had MANY conversations with students who see this in themselves and friends: "persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own." Arguments re: how could be used ≠ how it is being used.

We posit that persistence is reduced because
AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience
of working through challenges on their own. These results add to the growing literature
on cognitive offloading and AI-induced deskilling, and suggest the need for AI model
development to prioritize scaffolding long-term competence alongside immediate task
completion.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Why does it feel like they are *itching* for this to happen? Are the maintenance costs on their unused luxury bunkers and boltholes starting to be a burden?

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 09/10/2026

ah the "this basket has to be good for I have put all of my eggs in it" argument

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

SO good: “…we are constantly strapping in for the future, making ready each time to throw out the communities, cultural practices, and values that we have come to appreciate in their imperfections, only to be told once again that the plane must return to the gate for another unspecified checkup.”

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I’m beginning to suspect that the WSJ are now strange bedfellows because while their golden calf is money, they need their god to be real money and not vapormoney

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A. Cosmographer @acosmographer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Beyond the ethics of performative cruelty (and there's space for that discussion, sure), there is something insidious on insisting that behaviour toward *a model* needs to be moderated, when your entire industry is a toxic miasma of unregulated (and disregulated) human-to-human behaviour.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Can people please quit shitposting things that are indistinguishable from the stuff people say to me daily with a straight face

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

My cocktail nerd self hit the jackpot happening to be in Milan the day after Moebius Milano won second best bar in the world. I don’t really believe in rankings, but if you’re passing through, the Palo Santo Rob Roy is glorious. I appreciate the simplicity: no garnish, no smoke, no theatre, just yum

A chestnut coloured Rob Roy in a coupette on a wood table

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Aloysius the Band @aloysiustheband.com · 08/10/2026

George Floyd was murdered for using a counterfeit $20 bill

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Just completed my annual anti-fraud training course and I did not have 'my university aggressively caping for MLMs' on the day's bingo card

Shot of a multiple choice question asking 'Which of these is not a form of fraud?' and the answer is MLMs: "Correct, multi-level-marketing (MLM). While MLMs are often confused with illegal pyramid schemes, they are legitimate business models when operated correctly."

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

For *not* the first time, a publisher has asked me to review what appears from reading the description to be a blatant ripoff of my own book (if not an AI-assisted regurgitation, then just straight-up lifted, by someone who doesn’t write in my field.) Is this happening to anyone else?

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Daniel José Older @djolder.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This bullshit left unchecked: "There's a risk of not engaging with AI and being left behind. But there's also a risk that this is going to be harmful," said...the director of MIT's Teaching Systems Lab. "There's no evidence which clearly says that one of these pathways is better than the other."

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Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

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Matt Binder @mattbinder.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

the tech industry is about to invent books

Andrew Yeung
@andruyeung
X.com
We created gyms because modern day work no
longer required physical activity. Without exercise,
our muscles atrophy.
I predict we'll need gyms for our brains too, once Al
starts doing our knowledge work.
10:53 PM • 10/4/26 • 1.3M Views

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onion person @junlper.beer · 06/10/2026

one of the deepest sicknesses in the world are the people who feel personally attacked over other people getting the same rights as them

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

make me a low-emission car with a fine stereo and a dash with backlit buttons and knobs that quietly click with tactile feedback when you move them and I give you all of my money. It’s that simple

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We’re proud at @braiduk.bsky.social to be a sponsor of the Creators Emergency Summit next Tuesday in London at Conway Hall. Come join us there! If you’re part of the BRAID community you can email us to request a free event pass…

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Reposted by Shannon Vallor

Elizabeth Anne, PhD @lacksauthority.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

never the wrong time for this classic

Screenshot of a tweet by @RobbtKraft reading “scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"”

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I get that people are scared of an uncertain future, and they want to be told that someone like Altman is powerful and special enough to see the future and shepherd them through it. Trusted media aren't supposed to encourage this.

Mallory Archer ants meme, but for cults ('Do you want a cult? Because that's how you get a cult')

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Words cannot express my loathing of Vanity Fair right now. This man can’t see the future, or people. He can only see marks, and wow are you easy pickings

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In looking for the best metaphor for understanding and teaching people about today’s AI, I went to mirror made of math when cognitive hot dog was right there

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

What kills me is that it's no longer Internet randos using AI to cosplay as philosophers, historians or scientists. It's established philosophers, historians and scientists surrendering their hard-won intellectual agency and integrity in a rapid cascade, faster than even my darkest prediction. 1/1

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Get in losers, we're reinventing Narrow AI

Excerpt reads: "Smaller models fine-tuned for industries such as law and finance - or even individual companies - could make AI cheaper to run. Trained on specialist or proprietary data, they may require less computing power while outperforming general-purpose frontier models on narrow tasks."

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I wish Anthropic had been nowhere near it but now I know exactly why the Encyclical was not corrupted by their efforts.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In one sense an easy question (Twin Peaks: The Return ep 8). But to say that’s my ‘favorite’ feels off. That episode exists in its own singular aesthetic universe, one without the concept of ‘favorites’. In the universe with favorites, it’s Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose hands down

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We have reached the stage of interspecies friendship where Puffin and Carol team up to Do Crimes. God help us

A dog that definitely did not empty the treat container knocked down by the cat

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If you need to explain to someone why the ‘Rogue AI’ framing is both wrong and harmful, actually blocking our view of what safety and responsibility requires in AI, this will help:

noemamag.com

The AIs Are Not Going Rogue | NOEMA

But they still pose risks.

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Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Meta is using a radical interpretation of a tax credit for “research and experimentation” to get billions of dollars off GPUs for its A.I. data centers. My latest with Jesse Drucker, @elitan.bsky.social and @mikeisaac.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/t...

nytimes.com

How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes (Gift Article)

Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Because the discourse is making us all crazy, look upon the face of a dog more blessed than any human, for she has never heard the word superintelligence

A white fluffy fox-faced dog with a black nose, goofy smile and pink tongue, staring intently at you and now you forgot what SI means

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

So glad that this quote can be added to my forthcoming article on AI and Epistemic Dispossession because I had to say that they will absolutely be using AI to erase science and history but I didn’t yet have the ‘he admit it’ smoking gun

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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I give up. I’m moving into a cave.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Not a single perspective here from someone who didn’t write the report. This isn’t journalism, it’s an author’s abstract. Every para is just “this is what the paper says.” It’s exactly what you would get if you asked an undergrad to read it and write a summary. Or get one from a chatbot.

theguardian.com

AI godfathers warn of runaway ‘intelligence explosion’

OpenAI chief scientist also among authors of report on prospect of ‘most consequential technological development in history’

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This thread is so important because it gets at the AI industry’s central failure of imagination. While I’ve met exceptions to the rule in Silicon Valley, most human beings do not reduce their sense of being alive to a stream of successive task completions, and find it a truly alienating vision.

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The idea that people want AI oversight to happen "all of a sudden" ignores years of research, warnings, and policy efforts. The delay hasn’t been a lack of awareness; it’s been because of years of industry lobbying against regulation, political resistance, and inaction.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

who’s gonna explain to him that making sure others have food, water, medicine, shelter and safety is the core of every ‘moral story of how we live together’

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