[Tsundoku]

Amazing what motion-capture can do these days.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

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recent research by scientist Tuhin Chakrabarty[...] has attempted to fine-tune large language models to produce better writing by feeding them authors' entire oeuvres. [...] when Chakrabarty ran the results by some creative writing graduate students, they preferred AI imitations of writers like Junot Diaz, Sigrid Nunez, and Tony Tulathimutte to the writers themselves, or could not tell the difference. [Critically acclaimed authors Vauhini Vara] and [Karan] Mahajan talk about their decades-long connection and familiarity with each other's writing. They muse on what it means that, when Vara talked Chakrabarty into letting her compete with a large language model, even Mahajan could not separate her original work from what it produced.

Literary Hub » Vauhini Vara and Karan Mahajan on When AI Tries to Sound Like Us

Here's a pre-print of the paper:

Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

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With help from AI, MIT researchers have discovered novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections

[...] drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

[...] The top candidates they discovered are structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics, and they appear to work by novel mechanisms that disrupt bacterial cell membranes.

https://news.mit.edu...t-bacteria-0814

Generative AI may save your life. It's the most promising path forward (at least until we scale up quantum computing) for dealing with the surge in antimicrobial resistant infections:

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One in six laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections causing common infections in people worldwide in 2023 were resistant to antibiotic treatments, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report launched today. Between 2018 and 2023, antibiotic resistance rose in over 40% of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored, with an average annual increase of 5–15%.

[...] "Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide," [...] E. coli and K. pneumoniae are the leading drug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria found in bloodstream infections. These are among the most severe bacterial infections that often result in sepsis, organ failure, and death.

https://www.who.int/...otics-worldwide

And generative AI's ability to come up with new mathematical insights is now on the level of the world's best mathematicians. According to professor Ravi Vakil, Stanford University, president of the American Mathematical Society:

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We integrated Gemini into various stages of the project to empirically test its effectiveness. In many instances, it proved useful in familiar ways: identifying connections to cross-disciplinary papers, writing data-generation code, and verifying minor lemmas. However, the most striking experience was how it propelled the project forward intellectually.

[...] As someone familiar with the literature, I found that Gemini's argument was no mere repackaging of existing proofs; it was the kind of insight I would have been proud to produce myself. While I might have eventually reached this conclusion on my own, I cannot say so with certainty.

https://x.com/A_G_I_...213692617285729

[Macros]

And hey, Grok in the Military can only go well

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Macros, on 16 January 2026 - 11:15 PM, said:

And hey, Grok in the Military can only go well

Here's hoping the new Army of Shadows features incompetent bumbling hallucinating easily fooled Neo-Nazi robots and surveillance/PA systems praising Elon Musk as the Great Creator and Donald Trump as Jesus... they will be watching in your homes to make sure you're getting on your knees to pray to Donald Trump (as your Lord and Saviour), and not having any abortions in there.

But they'll probably add substantial guardrails to try to keep Grok from wreaking too much havoc:

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Should the Pentagon proceed with the integration, the military will likely have to rely on additional guardrails and testing to prevent the same failures that have plagued the model's public deployments, sources told Information Security Media Group. Hegseth announced Monday that Grok will soon be integrated into military systems alongside other commercial AI tools as part of a broader push to accelerate AI adoption. Hegseth said the move is part of a wider "AI acceleration strategy" aiming to "unleash experimentation" [...]

Analysts said deploying Grok safely will likely require significant hardening, including sandboxed testing environments that mirror operational data, extensive red-team exercises designed to probe for failure modes and strict limits on what systems and datasets the model can access. Absent those controls, they warned Grok could introduce new attack surfaces into military networks, including exposure to prompt injection attacks, adversarial manipulation of outputs or unintended disclosure of sensitive context through model responses.

Pentagon's Use of Grok Raises AI Security Concerns

So those added vulnerabilities might be good news (for most of the rest of the world, if they can exploit them)...

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 16 January 2026 - 11:33 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Remember that "very soulful" hit song I posted two days ago?

Well, guess what...

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A hit song has been excluded from Sweden's official chart after it emerged the "artist" behind it was an AI creation.

I Know, You're Not Mine – or Jag Vet, Du Är Inte Min in Swedish – by a singer called Jacub has been a streaming success in Sweden, topping the Spotify rankings. [...]

"The artist Jacub's voice and parts of the music are generated with the help of AI as a tool in our creative process."

Stellar said it was "first and foremost" a music company run by creative professionals, not a tech or AI outfit. The company added that creating a hit had required "something different" to simply prompting an AI tool to create a tune.

Partly AI-generated folk-pop hit barred from Sweden's official charts | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

Obviously calling it "I Know, You're Not Mine" could be interpreted as poking fun at the primary objection most people make to the most common forms of generative AI. Though since the two major generative AI music services, Suno and Udio, are both switching to "ethically trained" models (with consent of the rights holders) this year, and there are several other "ethically trained" music models for generating stems (individual instrumental or vocal tracks to incorporate as part of a song, intelligently responding to what's already been added to the song), that's soon no longer going to be much of an issue, so people who hate AI because it's AI, or because they're afraid of losing their jobs, will transition to other rationalizations to passionately glom onto.

From their statement (applying Google Translate to the Swedish):

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"The work has been created through a focused, conscious and human-driven creative process, guided by a clear artistic vision. ...

We are strongly critical of the mass uploading of music, often referred to as "AI music slop," where anonymous actors or technology-driven entities upload thousands of songs without artistic intent. ...

[This song] is based on craftsmanship and contributions from experienced music professionals. The lyrics are inspired by events in our own lives and written from genuinely human experiences."

Jacub svarar om AI-låten som toppar svenska Spotifys topplistor: Vi är ett kollektiv bakom

Here's the song again for reference (yes, if you listen closely you can hear some artifacts in the voice):