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A. L. Bishop

@mandahnk.bsky.social
162 followers 439 following 37 posts

Writer, etc. She/her.

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Reposted by A. L. Bishop
McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 10/09/2026
"To establish that AI did not write your book, we will upload it to an AI detector. The detector will retain your words, learn from your distinct syntax and semicolon placement, and use them to improve the technology that will eventually produce more books resembling yours." buff.ly/FYVr6Zx
mcsweeneys.net
A Note from Your Editor Regarding the Entirely Routine Authentication of Your Humanity
“To establish that AI did not write your book, we will upload it to an AI detector. The detector will retain your words, learn from your distinct syntax and ...
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Back with another blanket book recommendation, even if it’s probably a little too niche for such a bold move. But it is so great!! (The link is to the amazing Northern Ontario book shop I picked it up from.) chatnoirbooks.com/item/CH-pMnw...
chatnoirbooks.com
Thirty-Two Words for Field by Manchán Magan | Chat Noir Books
NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER"What a joyful, profound, passionate revelry of a book this is—an illumination of how words make worlds; a reminder of what is lost when a language is lost; an act of salvage ...
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Julie Carpenter, PhD @jgcarpenter.com · 16/07/2026
As a robotics researcher, learning scientist, and author who has followed Realbotix for years, I'm compelled to do a Bluesky thread on this whole pivot that Realbotix is now trying, turning from humanoid sex robots to classroom "education" robots. Buckle up. nysfocus.com/2026/07/14/n... 🧵
nysfocus.com
Rural NY School To Launch Humanoid Robot Teacher
Plans to deploy a "lifelike" robot and avatar teaching assistant at Salamanca High School have sparked debate over the role of technology in schools.
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Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Huge new class action lawsuit filed by big publishers and authors against Google this week over AI training. It accuses Google of taking millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly using them to train LLMs. 🧵 1/4
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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...
404media.co
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy.
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Anjali Dayal @anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
I just want to add, since this is breaking containment, that this can't be made right. these people, each one a whole universe, are gone. there can only be justice for the perpetrators; public remorse & restitution; & reform to ensure future aid systems are more just and less prone to imperial whims
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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
This community just voted to deny water to a new AI data center for nuclear weapons, p interesting tactic: www.404media.co/community-vo...
404media.co
Community Votes to Deny Water to Nuclear Weapons Data Center
America’s nuclear scientists plan to break ground on an AI data center next week, but the Township where it’s being constructed just put a 365 day hold on providing it with water.
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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 19/04/2026
"The new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?"
buff.ly
Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as invested in keeping my job as the next weaver. When the boss brought in that big new power loom, I was pretty skeptical....
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Fatima Syed @fatimabsyed.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
We @thenarwhal.ca spent a month investigating what Doug Ford's conservation authority consolidation means for drinking water protections. 12 sources & a leaked doc reveal the system built to prvent another Walkerton crisis is in flux—and experts are worried. thenarwhal.ca/ontario-sour... #onpoli
thenarwhal.ca
How conservation authority changes could affect Ontario's drinking water | The Narwhal
Ontario drinking water committees, formed following the Walkerton tragedy, face an uncertain future as conservation authorities amalgamate
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Hege A. J. Lepri @hegelincanada.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
melt-water puddles a toddler searching for frogs or a dragon #DailyHaikuPrompt (frog) #senryu #3lines #micropoetry
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PEN International @peninternational.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
Established at our 48th Congress in 1986, World Writers’ Day honours the courage to write and the solidarity that protects it. As writers face imprisonment, exile, censorship, and violence for speaking the truth, we stand with them and defend freedom of expression.
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
This looks so super fun - high drama and high camp you say?? Can’t wait to read this one!
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 19/02/2026
Some coverage of our new report in @wired.com by @mollytaft.com!!! Really want to highlight this new work from @sashamtl.bsky.social et al though: on the 'none of this has to be this bad' point -->> www.wired.com/story/big-te...
“The narrative that we need big AI models—and quasi-infinite amounts of energy—tries to sell us the idea that this is the only kind of AI we need, and the only future that's possible,” says AI and sustainability researcher Sasha Luccioni. “But there are so many different, smaller and more efficient models that can be deployed for a fraction of the cost, both to people and the planet.”
In a separate piece of research also published Monday, Luccioni and Yacine Jernite, head of sustainability at AI company Hugging Face, looked at the costs of training a wide variety of AI models, finding that massive proprietary models trained on access to vast amounts of data and energy aren’t the only option for powerful AI solutions. Often, smaller models perform just as well as the more expensive ones in AI application.In the sections above, we showed that training and deployment costs across all of the categories we have surveyed — task and domain models, small and medium language models, and large open-weight and proprietary systems — vary by orders of magnitude. This report provides quantitative estimates of those cost to show that the majority of commercially and scientifically significant AI development does not require 9-figure training runs or exclusive access to data-center-scale infrastructure. Open science and open-source developers have demonstrated that models that are competitive on a wide range of benchmarks can be trained for costs that range from the low thousands to the low tens of millions of dollars, and that deployment can be as simple as running on a single GPU instance or on-device, or as scaled as paid API access. The gap between that reality and the narrative centered on frontier-scale systems is not merely technical; it has implications for who can build, audit, and govern AI.
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Lit Hub @literaryhub.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
“AI giant Anthropic ran a massive program called Project Panama where they spent tens of millions of dollars to hoover up used books, which they then sliced, scanned, and pulped.”
buff.ly
Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software.
Companies making machine learning and generative software aren’t just metaphorically ripping off books. In at least one case, they’re rather literally shredding millions of physical books to …
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just Dave @justdave.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
NEW: X/Twitters continue to freely use xAI's Grok to generate and disseminate nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of real women and underage girls. Neither X nor xAI have taken meaningful action to fix the issue. So we're following that inaction live: futurism.com/artificial-i...
We Can't Believe We Have to Do This

Live Coverage: Is Grok Still Being Used to Create Nonconsensual Sexual Images of Women and Girls?

We're following whether Elon Musk and his companies, X and xAI, make any meaningful change to stem the tide of likely-illegal AI deepfakes on X — content that's being generated via Musk's own chatbot, Grok.

Image: Elon Musk in front of the silhouette of an anonymous woman.
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 24/12/2025
You are painting a vision of a future in which teachers create lessons with "A.i.," students complete them with "A.i.," and teachers grade them with "A.i." No learning takes place under this system. The only benefactors of this system are the corporations being paid for the "A.i." products.
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 17/12/2025
while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article
Moser tells Rolling Stone that to even claim LLMs "hallucinate" fictional publications misunderstands the threat they pose to our comprehension of the world, because the term "implies that it's different from the normal, correct perception of reality" But the chatbots are "always hallucinating," he says. "It's not a malfunction.
A predictive model predicts some text, and maybe it's accurate, maybe it isn't, but the process is the same either way. To put it another way: LLMs are structurally indifferent to truth."
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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
“Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.”
reuters.com
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.
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Lex McMenamin (they/them) @lexmcmenamin.com · 04/11/2025
thank you for the outpouring of support! those of us laid off from Teen Vogue yesterday are now sharing our GoFundMe to help us cover our emergency expenses now that we've lost our incomes, as we get back on our feet.
gofundme.com
Donate to Help Laid-Off Teen Vogue Staffers Recover, organized by Lexi McMenamin
More than half the team at Teen Vogue was laid off this week by our parent co… Lexi McMenamin needs your support for Help Laid-Off Teen Vogue Staffers Recover
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 01/11/2025
Very good @abigailboydmlc.bsky.social summary of the really, really significant data centre growth in New South Wales, Australia - something we can see directly contributing to sustaining the burning of coal in the state www.instagram.com/reel/DQbKiv9...
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 16/10/2025
Nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries that a recent study has identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — signaling enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability. (Published July)
propublica.org
“Staggering” Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat
A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.
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Edward Elderman @elderman.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
This only happens to you once
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Conor Browne @brownecfm.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
1. The intense and all-encompassing institutional and societal pushback seen in some countries against any intervention to mitigate the impacts of Covid-19, whether that be vaccines, or air filtration / purification, or masks, is not simply as a result of mandates or lockdowns.
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The Fiddlehead @fiddlehd.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Disability: The Revolution! Special Issue Call for Submissions, Deadline November 30, 2025 If you identify as disabled and would like to answer this call, please submit! We would love to hear from you. See the full call and instructions on how to submit here: thefiddlehead.ca/revolution
A purple graphic for The Fiddle’s special Summer 2026 disability issue. At the top of the graphic is The Fiddlehead’s logo. Below is a purple image with two transparent light purple circles overlapping like a Venn diagram. On top of this, in white, is the work Revolution. Below is the text: call for submissions from disabled writers. Deadline November 30, 2025. Thefiddlehead.ca/revolution
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
Excited to be included on this (long) shortlist! mastersreview.com/best-emergin...
mastersreview.com
Best Emerging Writers 2025 Shortlist! - The Masters Review
Andrew Porter, we don't envy you. That's right—the shortlist for Best Emerging Writers 2025 is now in the hands of Andrew Porter, our guest judge, who has the extremely difficult task of selecting onl...
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Sarah Emily Duff @sarahemilyduff.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
‘The anti-vax movement isn’t simply a grassroots network of concerned parents. It’s an industry. … It operates on a simple premise: if you’re not vaccinating your kids, you need to protect them somehow, and here’s a bunch of things you can buy to do that.’ Excellent writing in @macleans.bsky.social
macleans.ca
Confessions of an Ex-Anti-Vaxxer - Macleans.ca
I spent years spouting conspiracy theories about vaccines. Now, as measles rages in my home of Alberta, I’m trying to convince vax-hesitant parents to inoculate their kids.
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Chris Franklin @errant-signal.com · 05/09/2025
For context that's a third the price the RIAA expected a single human to pay for just downloading 24 songs a decade ago (after cutting the ruling down from $1.5m, or $62,000 per song), and that's not adjusting for inflation:
theguardian.com
Minnesota woman to pay $220,000 fine for 24 illegally downloaded songs
Recording Industry Association of America has largely adjusted its anti-piracy strategy to stop suing individual downloaders
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Canadian Anti-Hate Network @antihate.ca · 04/09/2025
NEW: “Remigration” and “mass deportations” is the new rallying cry of white nationalists. Experts say it’s a call for ethnic cleansing. A new Canadian group is trying to "normalize" the concept and get the Conservative Party of Canada to talk more about immigration. www.antihate.ca/remigration_...
antihate.ca
“Remigration”: How White Nationalists Are Repackaging Ethnic Cleansing
White nationalists in multiple countries, including Canada, are pushing for mass deportations of non-Europeans to be part of the political platforms of their right-wing parties.
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Similar survey underway now in Canada, for anyone who wants to weigh in: openmedia.org/AI-survey-2025
openmedia.org
Help shape Canada’s AI future!
What does Responsible AI mean to you? 🗣️ @OpenMediaOrg is gathering public input to help shape Canada’s AI laws. Make sure your voice is part of the conversation. #AIRegulation #ResponsibleAI! Share y...
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Richard Waite @waiterich.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
“It would take you 723 years to delete enough emails to save the same amount of water in data centers as you could if you fixed your toilet” “If someone deleted all their photos, the water they would save could support 2 blades of grass on their lawn”
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Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Air Canada offered the pilots a 26% wage increase in the 1st year of their newest contract. The flight attendants got an offer of an 8% increase in the 1st year. In the entire 4-year deal Air Canada offered them, their wages won't go up by as much as the pilots' did in just 1 year.
cupe.ca
Air Canada is reinforcing the gender wage gap – and they want the government to help them do it
Air Canada wants to reinforce the gender wage gap by forcing Air Canada flight attendants – 70% of whom identify as women – to accept a wage offer less than one third of what Air Canada offered its pi...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 15/08/2025
can you imagine trying to convince the average skepti-dude in the year 2010 that this is what summer europe will look like in 2025
a map of europe showing temperatures in the low 40s and high 30s
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Nat Cassidy @natcassidy.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Among the greatest promotional photos of all time are these for the 1990 television movie of IT, where it looks like a prestige legal drama about a firm of hot young lawyers and one associate who likes to dress up like a clown.
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
I don’t often make blanket book recs, but I’ve run out of friends to randomly text with fascinating insights from this one, so here we are.
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Isaac Callan @isaaccallan.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
The Ontario Science Centre 1 year later: The cost of a new site has escalated, its opening date has been pushed back, there is no sign of a temporary location, and the old building’s roof appears intact. #OnPoli By the superb Canadian Press team globalnews.ca/news/1125207...
globalnews.ca
‘The biggest betrayal’: A year on, staff grieve Ontario Science Centre’s snap closure | Globalnews.ca
One year after closing the Ontario Science Centre, plans for a new site face delay, the roof remains intact, and staff call the shutdown a “manufactured crisis.”
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
if you haven’t tried Shyra’s teas and coffees yet, this is the perfect time to treat yourself!
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APTN News @aptnnews.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
'Ontario’s Bill 5 wilfully ignores this obligation and now threatens our lands, waters, and our ability to protect them for future generations.'
aptnnews.ca
Bearskin First Nation joins chorus calling for Rickford's resignation
Bearskin First Nation in northern Ontario is joining a chorus of nations calling on Ontario's Greg Rickford to resign over Bill 5.
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Granta @grantamag.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Granta mourns Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In memory of his life and work, we have lifted the paywall on his writing for the magazine.
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Yolande House @healthruwriting.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
For any disabled artists interested in applying to grants, I'm presenting a very introductory workshop for the New Brunswick Disability Arts Collective next Wednesday at 7pm AT/6pm ET. There will be a recording on YouTube afterward if you can't make it live. FREE! www.facebook.com/events/61575...
facebook.com
Getting Started with Disability Arts Grants
Networking event by Jane LeBlanc Legacy Fund on Wednesday, June 4 2025
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 28/05/2025
"The chatbot’s instructions tell it to “de-emphasize the climate catastrophe narrative,” to focus on “real pollution, not CO2.” The bot is told to frame these arguments in the most reasonable possible way" "chatbots are useless" is wrong. They're very, very useful, for a certain kind of person:
nationalobserver.com
A weaponized AI chatbot is flooding city councils with climate misinformation
Internal instructions accessed by Canada’s National Observer show that the chatbot produces tailored scripts, petitions, reports and even speeches for council chambers. The messaging is all framed to ...
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Martha Bátiz @mbatiz.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
Spotted at #IndigoHillcrestMall in #RichmondHill 😊🙏🎉 @houseofanansi.bsky.social
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The Baffler @thebaffler.com · 21/05/2025
We’re saddened to hear of the passing of Alice Notley, who died on Monday at the age of 79. We published a poem from her 2024 collection, “Being Reflected Upon,” in our June 2024 issue.
thebaffler.com
Jim Carroll’s Ass | Alice Notley
Nothing seems real yet I’m willing / to play ‘the real’ game for ones I love
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Michelle Ma @michellema.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
bloomberg.com
The AI Boom Is Draining Water From the Areas That Need It Most
A Bloomberg News analysis finds that roughly two thirds of new data centers built or in development in the US since 2022 are in places with high levels of water stress.
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A. L. Bishop @mandahnk.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
Um…
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🇬🇾🗽Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon🗽🇬🇾 @blackamazon.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
AI ‘s primary purpose is to eliminate consent one update at a time
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Emily Johnston @enjohnston.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
“The thing that I take from it…now that I’m older, is that [the struggle for civil rights is a] constant practice that needs to occur. A constant vigilance. You can’t expect that things will hold.”—Tracy Chapman The forces arrayed against justice & thriving don’t die, they hide in our complacency.
nytimes.com
Tracy Chapman Wants to Speak for Herself (Gift Article)
For years, the singer and songwriter has avoided the spotlight. But she is breaking her silence to look back on her self-titled debut and its powerful hit “Fast Car.”
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