16 Aug 2026
LLMs: damned if you don’t, worse if you do
The Carlson Lab at the Yale School of Public Health has done some research and held some discussions, and posted The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI.
Our lab has agreed on a blanket ban on the use of generative AI for writing….Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.
Even though there’s a lot of pressure on academics to adopt AI or be left behind!!1! this is a lot bigger deal. Especially for this particular research team.
They’re a public health lab, which puts them into an unavoidable adversarial relationship with the anti-public-health oligarchs who run the “AI” companies. The “E” in TESCREAL doesn’t stand for “eugenics,” but the political movement behind “AI” is more likely to believe in improving society by weeding out the “unfit” recipients of health misinformation than in public health as we know it.
More from the blog post:
Plagiarism accusations are now a core part of the right-wing harassment toolkit, and knowing that those accusations were made in bad faith or for political reasons does not make them disappear.
It’s safest to assume that a future well-connected accuser will be able to get access to large quantities of text, for practical purposes all of it, and the computing resources to look for a pattern match between anything that the targeted person has ever written and anything that anyone else has ever written. They’ll be able to do the search much better than the targeted person could, even using the best commercial “plagiarism detection” software and services.
Related: On the non-use of AI in my writing process by Charles Stross.
If I was crazy enough to feed the outline of a story I was working on as a prompt to ChatGPT or Claude in hope of getting the stochastic parrot to do my homework for me, then it would be only my own fault and nobody else’s if the next model from the company in question was trained on my book outline and could reproduce part or all of it for someone else.
Authors of scientific papers don’t have the choice to keep their work out of training sets in most cases. As soon as it’s published or on a preprint server it will get crawled, either with the publisher’s cooperation or not.
Bonus links
US firms that kept DEI policies despite ‘go woke, go broke’ threats thrived by Gaya Gupta. (There’s probably a pretty simple explanation of why this happens. (1) In order to avoid the frequent criticism that DEI programs are resulting in hiring unqualified people, the company has to document and improve the hiring process. (2) As a side effect of step 1, they make fewer nepo, vibe, and “lgtm” non-DEI hires, so even if the average DEI hire is no more than acceptably qualified, the average new employee skill level goes up.)
Ukrainian drones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game by Jeremy Hsu. (This is good news. An army that either made the exercises easy enough to win every time, or didn’t release the results of challenging exercises, would be a lot worse off.)
Hackers
Created a Device That Can Take Over a Boeing 737 Jet’s Autopilot Without
Anyone Noticing by Frank Landymore. The attack relies on plugging
the device, which costs less than $100, into a port hidden by a hatch on
the exterior of the plane, which the researchers say is easily within
reach of maintenance workers and airline staff. Once the device is
plugged in, it could connect to the plane’s in-flight Wi-Fi system and
allow a hacker to remotely control the aircraft’s systems from terra
firma.
VC-backed
startups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why by
Dominic-Madori Davis. But investors aren’t always hapless victims,
the researchers found. Beyond the outsized growth expectations that push
founders toward fraud in the first place, some investors unwittingly
“co-create fraud,” Weiss said, by continuing to back founders—sometimes
the very same ones— who’ve previously been accused of fraud, thereby
normalizing it to a certain extent. In fact, the UT report found little
evidence that alleged fraud prevents founders from raising funding for
new startups, even when those fraud cases received major media
attention.
(more for the scam culture is
everywhere file)
Saudi
defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan is a verdict on the reliability of
US security guarantees by Muhammad Waqas Haider. On paper, the
combination is formidable. Turkey fields Nato’s second-largest army and
a drone industry that has reshaped modern battlefields. Saudi Arabia
brings the Gulf’s deepest reserves of capital. Pakistan adds a large,
combat-experienced military and the Muslim world’s only nuclear arsenal.
Analysts point to genuinely complementary assets here: Turkish
technology which is short of markets, Pakistani manpower short of
financing, Saudi wealth short of manpower.
The End of Google Search by Katie Baker. (Yes, “new Google” is doing their best to ruin what “old Google” built, but you can still (mostly) get the pre-enshittification version back.)