Digital Theology Research @cliffcollege; Methodist Minister; digitheology, digihumanities, theology, New Testament, @pmphillips.Bluesky.social

Joined December 2008
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Our new handbook - for which I wrote a foreword. Here is a lot of words cut down to 4 mins! Join us as GoneDigital.media for the conference next week.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
This is a really sharp critique of Magnifica Humanitas (which could also apply to much Anglican commentary). On what's wrong with framing AI as a "tool". And "heresies of form". Thanks @nathanmladin for posting hedgehogreview.com/web-featu…
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Though you might argue HMT/No10 has dragged its feet and isn’t willing to spend enough it’s also worth remembering that deficiencies in Britain’s defence spending/capabilities did not start with this Labour govt- not that you’d know it listening to a lot of the commentary today.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Musk as a trillionaire- anyone as a trillionaire- is a grotesque economic, moral and political problem. We cannot have individuals with that level of power, whatever they might have achieved.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Dario Amodei, anthropic's CEO, just answered the question everyone is asking. should you still learn to code: 1. coding is going away first. the AI models are doing it already. the broader task of software engineering takes longer but that's going too. if you're learning to code purely for job security, you're learning the wrong thing. 2. even at 5% of the task you're still valuable. if AI does 95% and you do 5%, you become 20 times more productive. comparative advantage is surprisingly powerful even when the gap is massive. 3. the professions with the most runway are human-centered ones. things that mix people, the physical world, and analytical skills together. he uses the radiologist example. the doctor who understands patients and context, not just reads scans. 4. critical thinking might be the most important skill of the next decade. when AI can generate anything, the ability to tell what's real from what's fake becomes rare and valuable. you don't want false beliefs. you don't want to get scammed. that's his actual advice to a 25 year old. 5. AI can make you stupider if you use it carelessly. anthropic ran studies on this. depending on how you use the model, de-skilling in coding is measurable and real. the tool doesn't cause it. carelessness does. 6. the semiconductor space is his pick for a capitalistic win in the next decade. physical world, traditional engineering, direct AI tailwind. not software but chips.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley very strong on scenes in Belfast: "I was watching a bit of the news last night, and I can't remember what channel it was, but a journalist was talking about 'these protesters.' "I thought, that isn't a protest. People are setting fire to cars. That's not a protest. That's violent disorder, that's criminality. I really feel for Northern Ireland colleagues who are wrestling with that. It's really, really difficult. "We live in these volatile times and, some of what goes on online whips up, sentiment on the street. "We know that Russian state actors, Iranian state actors, they want to sow discord on the streets of the UK. So this is a really complex issue we're wrestling with. So you've got very polarised debates in the UK, and you've got other people overseas who want to drive wedge issues to create disorder, and you've got the great men and women of Police Service Northern Ireland on the streets in the middle of that, trying to sort of protect people and stop people burning down houses and things. It's awful."
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WinstonAI says 64% AI generated text @heynavtoor?
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
5/ The lead researcher's warning. Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, co-author of the paper, said this: "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is AI content on the internet. Invisible. Unlabeled. Indistinguishable from human writing. And every AI model training on the internet right now is swallowing it. Model Collapse is not coming. It is already here. And the thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
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This isn’t what happened in Belfast nor in Southampton
Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not “social media”!
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Hey @coursera since when did “Enrol for free” mean sign up for free and then we’ll charge you £45???
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It’s out! Whoop!!!
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Good to see Ant Middlton campaigning for Rob Kenyon in Makerfield. Who better to help push the message that Reform is on the side of local businesses than someone who lives in Dubai and is banned as a company director for dodging £1m in tax?
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Struggling to recollect any legitimate concerns rioting after these abhorrent episodes. Maybe there's another agenda at play.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Crime is now being viewed through an entirely racialised lens – but only when the perpetrators aren't white. When Chas Corrigan stabbed a Saudi student to death, or Paul Doyle mowed down Liverpool fans, white people didn't have to fear being a target of collective retaliation.
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This is crazy
🚨 The legal blueprint proposed by the Argentinian President @JMilei is the world's most RADICAL deregulatory approach to AI. And it doesn't stop there: The "agentic corporation" he is proposing, a new non-human corporation fully operated by AI agents or robots, will be the world's first experiment of its kind. The United States is not even close, and I bet that the White House is taking notes. It caught my attention that Milei wrote in the same article that "AI will free us from the constraints of the human brain, pushing productivity beyond our wildest dreams." I'm not sure I want to live in a world free from the constraints of the human brain (the "constrained" world is already complex; I can't imagine the "unconstrained" one). I'll write more about that (and keep you posted).
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Pete Phillips retweeted
JD Vance took time this week to explain to the British that the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak was actually about immigration. Justice Secretary David Lammy apparently rang Vance to set the record straight. “You’re wrong about this,” Lammy told him. Which must have been an uncomfortable conversation for a vice-president who has built an entire political career on being confidently incorrect about things happening in other people’s countries. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, England’s football squad was busy preparing for the World Cup in Kansas City, Missouri. Nine people were shot near England’s planned training facility and hotel on Troost Avenue at four in the morning. Police arrived to find a large crowd scattering. A second shooting the same evening, just miles away on Troost Avenue, left two people dead.  The Kansas City Police were quick to reassure everyone that the incident “did not occur near a World Cup venue or anything else World Cup-related.”  Which is technically true, in the same way that a house fire next door isn’t technically in your living room. The Americans are hosting a World Cup. They have strong opinions about immigration and British crime statistics. They would just like everyone to ignore the bit where nine people get shot near the visiting team’s hotel before breakfast. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
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Pete Phillips retweeted
After criticising Reform UK for ignoring the wishes of Henry Nowak's family and politicising the death of Henry Nowak #BBCLauraK gives Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf a solid 8 minutes to argue against Henry Nowak's family's wishes Then a further 2.5 minutes to criticise the police and the Sikh tradition of carrying ceremonial knives, stoking even further division in society
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Later this week it will have been 50 days since @Nigel_Farage last held a press conference. Given he's had so long to get his story straight, @annaturley is calling on Farage to answer 50 key questions about his secret £5 million "gift". It's time he finally came clean.
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Pete Phillips retweeted
Lawyer Peter Stefanovic - whose political films have been watched over a billion times - breaks down Reform's Great Repeal Act line by line: strip day one sick pay, legalise fire and rehire, lift zero-hours protections, repeal the Renters' Rights Act, abolish the Equality Act, and leave the ECHR. He also notes that almost half of Britons believe net migration has increased when it's fallen 48% to 171,000. His conclusion: if the media explained Reform's policies, nobody would support them. Full story at the link below 👇
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