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benwaugh.bsky.social

@benwaugh.bsky.social

111 followers 173 following 9 posts

Reposted by @benwaugh.bsky.social

John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking.

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review. Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage. To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.

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Reposted by @benwaugh.bsky.social

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 11/03/2026

"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well." 21/

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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Think I’ve found those famous AI guard rails.

VILLA
→ KERYLOS
Merci de ne pas s'appuyer sur cette rambarde.
***
Please do not lean on this guardrail.

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Reposted by @benwaugh.bsky.social

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Software developers think "if AI automates coding, I will be able to spend less time on producing widgets, and more time on strategy and architecture." Bosses think "if AI automates coding, I can get my devs to produce 100x more widgets."

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benwaugh.bsky.social @benwaugh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Some good (and well expressed) points here from Sarah Demers about the loss of attribution and of human conversations and learning that can come from using LLMs, while acknowledging the ways scientists are finding them useful.

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Reposted by @benwaugh.bsky.social

e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 21/08/2026

Threatening people with inevitability doesn't work anymore. Overemphasizing the benefits and minimizing the risks doesn't work anymore. Dismissing peoples concerns because they aren't deeply rooted in the technical details doesn't work anymore. The days of steamrolling hesitancy are gone.

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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 24/06/2026

Oh now Thiel is talking about the "reproducibility crisis" in science, amazing Wait these guys are all myna birds, aren't they. They hear a few words said by someone else and they just grab them and repeat them without understanding. Now I see why they love LLMs so much.

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benwaugh.bsky.social @benwaugh.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

"Teams of AI agents boost speed of research." in that they can "arrive at plausible hypotheses". Wow. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Teams of AI agents boost speed of research

Systems can generate hypotheses, interpret data and suggest ways to develop medicines.

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