iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

(Wrote this up in response to a couple inquiries, and started to turn it into an essay, but the frame is too Inside Baseball for a public-facing essay. Yes, on-wiki is the logical place for this conversation, but Bsky seems like a place that's interested, too. It's too long; we'll see. :) )

None of this is very glamorous or exciting, and I'm not addressing at all the more difficult problems of how to deal with malicious uses of agents for influence, infiltration, or flooding. These are just the first, actionable steps for volunteers.

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As with paid editing (which has its own ToU section), it doesn't provide a guarantee, but it makes the violation unambiguous to all parties. Operating an undisclosed agent would then require an operator whose use is careless enough or malicious enough to allow it to commit such a violation.

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Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use - Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki

One of the ways in which foundation action depends on our policies is through the Terms of Use. Speaking of which, (3) we should also be having a conversation about modifying the terms to explicitly require agents to identify themselves. foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:...

foundation.wikimedia.org

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(To be clear, these conversations I've had with staff were not specifically about agents, and I'm not claiming to know any of their legal strategies in that regard.)

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Second, based on a series of conversations with various WMF staff, it's become clear to me that, in many policy and law contexts, their options depend on us being crystal clear in our rules and the language we use to justify our actions.

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Two reasons for a dedicated, explicit policy. First, these tools should encounter utterly unequivocal language in easy-to-find policies about proper usage and expectations that isn't buried in some other policy, labeled as a mere essay, or dependent on interpretation.

Wikipedia:AI agents - Wikipedia

We should instead be promoting to policy status a dedicated page. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped... and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped... are both useful starting points (h/t Chaotic Enby and Anomie), but need more work and more momentum.

en.wikipedia.org

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Wikipedia:Bot policy - Wikipedia

(2) We should also be shoring up our policies. I don't want to hear that "well technically the bot policy covers agents." The bot policy doesn't even include the word "agent" once outside of the see also section. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

en.wikipedia.org

A block gives an agent something concrete to circumvent; an edit filter tag is less obvious and acted upon manually, so probably harder for it to predict or navigate. My understanding is this is not technically possible right now. Some privacy considerations, but worth exploring.

Wikipedia:Edit filter - Wikipedia

My own opinion is that no, we should not block them preemptively, but we should absolutely be tracking these IPs to the extent possible and using edit filters to flag them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

en.wikipedia.org

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(1) There is a discussion to be had among Wikipedians about whether to treat data center IPs like we do open proxies, i.e. block them preemptively, sometimes in large quantities. (see also theconversation.com/what-20-mill... )

theconversation.com

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Server load and technical vulnerabilities are obviously very important, but they're primarily on the shoulders of WMF staff, not volunteers (which isn't to say volunteers do not or should not help).

The wisdom of clawds - AI & SOCIETY

(that would be the deployment by users of these agentic tools to influence content, infiltrate governance, or flood us purely for disruption, each of which needs its own conversation [see also link.springer.com/article/10.1... ]).

link.springer.com

AI & SOCIETY -

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All told, while scary and ominous, the harm done by these "rogue agents" looks to have been fairly minimal [this time], and I'd argue that from the perspective of the editing community, exercises internal to the AI companies themselves are probably not the greatest threat posed by agents

"Rogue" agents were detected on @wikimediafoundation.org @wikipedia.org projects (see links at the end of the thread for context). Here's my take on "what should we/volunteers do next" (separate from what the WMF, AI companies, and regulators should be doing): 🧵

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Her AI-Generated Video Swayed the Judge. The Court Said it Carried 'Undue Emotional Weight'

It's not rare that I cringe at the words/actions of judges, but "I love that AI" is peak judicial cringe-in-the-GenZ-sense.(@404media.co looks to report it as "I loved that video" btw, which could use an edit or a different link to where that's said). www.404media.co/her-ai-gener...

404media.co

"Chris’ sentiment does not change," said the sister who created an AI avatar of her slain brother Christopher Pelkey to speak in court.

Jiyoun Suk @jiyoun-suk.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reposted by Ryan McGrady

🌟 New Pub 🌟 If your computational social science study focuses on “most engaged” or top-liked content, you may be measuring what people publicly signal, not what they actually pay attention to. For political content, that gap is especially wide. First 50 copies: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7M7FR...

tandfonline.com

Rethinking digital trace inference in political communication: evidence from a simulated platform experiment

Digital trace data such as likes, shares, and comments are widely used to infer what captures attention in digital political communication. Yet these visible signals may not map closely onto underl...

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Reposted by Ryan McGrady

Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Editing Wikipedia is not a crime - freedom for Osama Khalid" Osama Khalid has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for editing Wikipedia since 2020. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_K... ##WikiConferenceNA

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Saw some of this work presented at a social media research workshop last year. Lots of impressive people talking about impressive projects, but this was the moment when I had the rare feeling of "oh, wait, we're talking about *actually* important things now." This is a good reminder to get the book.

Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

CNN's article said that the report was "put together by a special operations command analyst," which does kind of point to Meta/SOFChat as the more likely, but that would be a useful tidbit for folks to dig up.

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

As of February, per Reuters, "Only one AI company - Anthropic – is available in classified settings through third parties." But there's also Meta, who says that Llama is behind "USSOCOM’s first enterprise-wide generative AI platform." about.fb.com/news/2025/09...

about.fb.com

How Meta Is Supporting US National Security With AI

Since making Llama AI models available to US government agencies and their contractors, a wide variety of organizations have adopted this technology to

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Government users are the real problem here, but naming and shaming the model/company is probably the only way we'll see anything like an open letter (the medium for all important comms in 2026) saying "maybe don't try to use our products for these kinds of decisions."

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Reposted by Ryan McGrady

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has a (complimentary) op-ed concerning my recent piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. thebulletin.org/2026/09/rogu...

thebulletin.org

Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did

At the core of the Hugging Face hacking incident were a series of human choices that traded security for speed.

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... how that hyperreality was ripe for exploitation by people in an elite class Rogan wants to be part of. The videos are not academic or philosophical. The editing is increasingly self-indulgent. Several of the claims are a bit of a stretch. But it's more compelling than I would've thought.

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They're collectively a commentary on the state of stand-up comedy in the podcast-influencer age, psychological exploration of the unlikely kingmaker of comedy, analysis of the [very Curtisy] "hyperreality" the Rogansphere power dynamics create, and ...

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He made lots of shorter pieces, some of which worked better than others, but his five-part series on Rogan (Rise of the Under Toad, Burn the Boats, Comedy Czar, Comedy Jonestown, and Comedy Cataclysm) have gone viral in a way I wouldn't have expected a 90 minute video essay to find traction.

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The elephant graveyard: It's where you come to die, and nobody knows where it is but yourself. "Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a...

Elephant Graveyard. Increasingly involved video essays about the Greater Rogansphere. They feel like Adam Curtis docs (great archival excavation, with narration drawing together psychological themes, but more sarcastic than didactic/theoretical). www.youtube.com/@TheElephant...

youtube.com

The Elephant Graveyard

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The word of the day is "mojibake," dedicated to the CSV I'm trying to use. —â€š�舐 æØ¢ÃÂ£»Þ¥¿舐▀ ???? æØ¢ÃŘ§Ů»»舐Ř§Ů©â€š� —舐•— —â€š�Â£— Ř§Ů© —â€š�舐 舐©ðsžšåÞяÞ¥¿— ???? —舐•— »舐Ř§Ů½ æØ¢Ã ▀舐¶????▀舐▀ ðsžšåÞя©Ř§Ů½ æØ¢Ã Â£½ ðsžšåÞя½ Ř§Ů½ —舐½ ▀舐▀ ¶â€š�Â£Â£¶—舐 舐½ ¶????▀Ř§Ů½ æØ¢

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Reposted by Ryan McGrady

Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The 2027 Tech Policy Press Fellowship application is live! We’re seeking journalists, policy professionals, and researchers to pursue independent reporting and analysis on issues at the intersection of technology and democracy.

techpolicy.press

Call for Applications: 2027 Tech Policy Press Fellowship Program

2027 Tech Policy Press fellowship applications are due on September 24, 2026.

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Not a frequent long-form/non-academic writer, but I submitted a long-form pitch to a magazine recently that required it to be mailed with a SASE. Not a principled stance against AI, but the "we're not about that slop" signal it sent was oddly comforting on my way to the post office.

Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

FWIW, I do actually think this is a fun idea. From what I could see through my skeptical squint, it's a neat demo for a type of vibe coded game, even if I do have principled resentment and even if it did *totally* ruin my childhood.

Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Brb having Claude make a novel out of my favorite Infocom game, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Every time I go to build a new YouTube sample, I find at least one (and often multiple) new annoying thing YouTube has put in place to degrade, obscure, relocate, throttle, deprecate... or just partially and inconsistently. "Following McGrady, et al., we began by banging our head against a wall."

There's something about "The language does not emerge from that reasoning, it is the reasoning" that gets me thinking about JL Austin -- like if you remove performative intent from a performative utterance.

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Surprised to be thinking again about Twitter. I wrestled with the decision to leave longer than most here, I think. But for me Twitter had become an unmade place. There are a ton of options to challenge your views or stay with the trouble.

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Hi! We're the “Guess-Where-You-Are-Game" 👋 Join us and Let's Explore The World 🌏

Oh, and the current world championship playoffs is streaming today. www.youtube.com/@geoguessr/s... (Also, PS, I've barely played this game -- there's just something compelling about seeing people do it well, and how they approach each place as a puzzle.

youtube.com

GeoGuessr

Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Reposted by Ryan McGrady

Big news for the backend of Wikipedia. Glad to see that the labour situation for Wikimedia employees has resulted in a union. www.wired.com/story/wikipe...

wired.com

Wikipedia Workers Unionize for the First Time

More than 200 people in roles such as engineering, finance, and communications will now be represented by the Communications Workers of America.

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The Greatest GeoGuessr Game Of All time - Grand Finals 24

Geoguessr is the esport the world really needs right now - a competition that plonks you down in a random place in the world and forces you to appreciate the visual details of that place -- plants, roads, bollards, signs, soil color... Here's the match that got my attention youtu.be/4TQeElIot-4?...

youtu.be

YouTube video by GeoGuessr

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Reposted by Ryan McGrady

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Not surprising, but this study suggests LLMs & LDMs actually produce *less* than the variety present in their training data: “across different model scales, sequence lengths, and decoding strategies.” arxiv.org/abs/2609.02275

arxiv.org

Do Large Language Models Capture the Diversity in their Training Data?

Large language models are trained to model conditional distributions over text, yet it remains inadequately understood whether they capture the full diversity of plausible outputs present in their tra...

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Reposted by Ryan McGrady

Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The EU AI Act's new transparency rules took effect on Aug. 2, requiring disclosure of AI interactions and marking of AI-generated content. Taras Kovalchuk @taraskovalchuk.bsky.social on whether they are enough to strengthen democratic resilience in Europe. buff.ly/pi5TmvO

techpolicy.press

Can the EU AI Act’s Transparency Rules Strengthen Democratic Resilience?

Taras Kovalchuk explores whether the EU AI Act’s new AI labeling and transparency rules can strengthen Europe’s democratic resilience amid growing AI threats.

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

"Forgetful by design" about the "major limitations" of YouTube's Data API for academic research, by Bernhard Rieder, Adrian Padilla, and Oscar Coromina. Super useful - not sure how this one slipped by me. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11727 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

arxiv.org

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Ryan McGrady @antisomniac.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Ridding the city of the clout-chasing platitudinal pox that is 7soulsdeep is the big quality of life improvement @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social should be tackling. Glad to see @hellgatenyc.com taking notice today. hellgatenyc.com/7soulsdeep-s... I'd take a hundred Kest Gaks.

hellgatenyc.com

@7SoulsDeep Must Be Stopped

Someone...anyone...help. Plus, more news for your Wednesday morning.