Tidöpartierna lyckas inte locka väljare i Järva. Vad kan det bero på? Med alla diffusa anklagelser om misstänkt valfusk avslöjar högerrösterna sig själva.

Satellite imagery shows further destruction of homes, businesses and places of worship since fragile ceasefire

Klimatpolitik måste bygga på forskning

✓Familjen Zeka levde nästan ett decennium i Sverige. Efter dottern Vanesas död utvisades de till Kosovo – medan hennes grav blev kvar i Malmö.

Teachers warn it could be increasingly difficult for classrooms to function during the hottest months.

Dolly Parton was an avid reader and dedicated over 30 years to giving children free books. Here's how the literary world will remember her.

Artisten är en av över tiotusentals människor som väntas sluta upp på söndag för klimatet.

Almost 1,000 teachers wrote in to share strange reasons students have given for being late. Animals were mentioned **207** times overall, and that included seagulls, which appeared **13** times, pigeons were cited **11** times, dogs featured in**27** excuses and cats **13** times! Food was given as a reason **54** times, only slightly more the number of times toilet-activity featured (**52 times!**). Police and the law appeared in **14** separate excuses recalled by teachers. Other regular themes included tractors (**8 times)** and spiders (**5 times**)…and somewhat confusingly, aliens (**5 times**)! The excuses had everyone at the Teacher Tapp office giggling, but here are our favourites: 1. **The “Cow-in-Waiting” Milking Crisis:** “A child had filled a rubber glove with water and tied it around their middle and was pretending to be a cow – they said sorry they were late but they were waiting to be milked!!!” 2. **The Microwave Knicker Fire:** “One boy told me his mum had set fire to her knickers in the microwave and they were late leaving the house!” 3. **The Uncooperative Fat Cat:** “My fat cat went under my bed, but because he’s so fat he got stuck, so I had to try and get him out but then I got stuck too.” 4. **The Philosophical Delay:** “I left on time but made a series of bad decisions.” 5. **The Post-Drama Fake Tan Wash:** “He was washing fake tan off following a drama lesson.” 6. **The “Hedgehog Fajita”:** “A child had the aforementioned animal wrapped gently in their jumper, like a hedgehog fajita.” 7. T**he Very Honest “Trump-Poo”:** “Sorry I’m late, I did a trump-poo in the car and we had to go back home for more trousers!” (A very honest 5-year-old). 8. **The £30 Shirt Sale:** “He had to wait for M&S to open to buy himself a new shirt, as a guy at the bus station paid him £30 for the one he was wearing.” 9. **The Sticky Trousers Incident:** “A boy shuffled into my classroom about twenty minutes late and told me he was late because another boy had poured an entire bag of sugar down his trousers… and he had tried to wash it all off but it was just making everything stickier!” 10. **The Apocalyptic Boat Builder:** “I was building a boat for when the world floods, but don’t worry, I have saved you a place.” 11. **The Pigeon Brawl:** “I was having a fight with a pigeon.” 12. **The Inexplicable Stilts Problem:** “I couldn’t get my stilts on and my brother wouldn’t help me!” 13. **The Dog Saliva Alibi:** “Best one was that the dog had stolen his pencil case and he had to chase him around the garden to get it back. He then produced the soggy, dog-saliva-covered pencil case as proof!” 14. **The Pocket-Fish:** “He had trouble getting his goldfish from the locker, and, true to form, he had a hold of a fish in a bag in his pocket.” 15. **The School-Yard “Crucifixion”:** “Sorry, Miss, I was just crucifying Luke,” he said — in a Catholic school where there was a big cross outside the chapel. 16. **The “F’ing Big Duck”:** “Watching the ‘f***ing big duck’ in the car park, which turned out to be a goose!” 17. **The Dead Bird Funeral:** “We were playing football and a bird got hit by the ball. We didn’t know what to do so we took it to the Head of Science. She couldn’t save it and it died. We had to have a funeral and it would have been rude not to sing.” 18. **The Forgot-the-Kid Drive-Off:** “Her parents drove to school but forgot she hadn’t got in the car before driving off.” 19. **The Spider Wardrobe Siege:** “An A-level student was 30 minutes late because of a spider in his room. It hid under his wardrobe and he couldn’t leave until it came back out for fear it would breed in his absence. He happily shared this with the whole class.” 20. **The Heathrow Airport Detour:** “I fell asleep on the bus and ended up at Heathrow Airport.”

I’m usually not someone who gravitates towards pessimism or endless talk about the decline of civilisation. And I’m not about to do that here either. This isn’t going to be another post about AI suddenly becoming sentient and wiping out humanity. But… Over the past few months, I’ve started noticing that AI is already damaging some very human things. A few examples. I have a very mixed relationship with LinkedIn. On the one hand, it sends a lot of traffic to this blog, which is great. On the other hand, more and more of the content I see is clearly written with or by AI. I’ve had a Pangram account for a while already, but these days I often don’t even need it anymore to recognise AI. One particularly popular format currently: one starts with a tiny anecdote (“I bought a dress today”) followed by a sweeping reflection on some major global issue. Speaking of Pangram, the thing has made me surprisingly insecure about my own writing. I wrote a lot during July and regularly ran my own texts through AI detectors. Mind you, I knew perfectly well that I had written them myself. Some of those texts even dated from before 2022, so AI literally couldn’t have written them. Apparently, though, some sentence structures I happened to use back then have since become popular among AI models. I’ve even caught myself avoiding em dashes for quite some time now – even though I used them all the time in the past. An even stranger example: I had a paragraph that three different people edited independently, after which a professional editor revised it once more. That final version was suddenly labelled as AI-generated, whereas my original version wasn’t. To be clear, I do use AI. But not in the sense that AI writes my texts. Grammarly suggests changes while I’m writing. I ask Claude or ChatGPT for feedback. I use ChatGPT or Google Translate to help with English versions. But how often have I received feedback telling me to remove my quirky humour or rewrite sentence structures that I actually liked? Which brings me to a third trend. Our language will become poorer. I’m not just talking about what happens if people stop writing for themselves. The technology itself seems to push us towards the same bland style. The irony is that the AI companies know this too. I wrote about it earlier on this blog, based on a Nature paper. The supply of high-quality training material is drying up. As a result, the major AI companies are now almost literally buying up parts of our cultural past, scanning them and destroying the originals. And while writing that previous paragraph, another frustration came to mind. AI has ruined search engines and search functions. No, really. Google’s search results have become depressing. Searching within WordPress has become unnecessarily time-consuming. Even finding an email in my own mailbox can be an ordeal. AI was supposed to make all of this better, but I can’t even begin to estimate how much time I’ve lost because of it. Okay, now I’m definitely ranting, so it’s probably time to stop. I won’t even get started on the environmental impact, the concentration of power, or the possible economic consequences. This blog is already full of posts about AI and education. Oh, and I won’t start talking about AI and music either, even though there has just been an important court ruling on that front. ### Share this: * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Share on Threads (Opens in new window) Threads * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram * Share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Nextdoor (Opens in new window) Nextdoor * ### Like this: Like Loading… ### _Related_

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