Something Else To Look Forward To: AI Worms

the arrival of AI agents that can carry out actions autonomously brings with it a new threat: AI worms potentially able to seek out, hack into, and infect any device that is online. Researchers at Anthropic have been studying this possibility

On Techdirt.

See also Moody Sonnets - AI Helminthology

How AI could bring about the mass adoption of open access in mathematics – and beyond

These changes are already taking place in the world of mathematics, which is the first to be impacted by the new capabilities of powerful AI models. It is not yet clear how quickly other fields will be affected. Academic fields closest to mathematics – physics, chemistry, engineering etc. – are likely to be the first to see similar dramatic breakthrough results from AI models. Moreover, if mathematics successfully shifts away from today’s emphasis on publications towards a broader appreciation of skills, it may be that other fields will recognise the benefits of doing so and start following suit – with or without pressure from AI.

On Walled Culture.

AI Agents Are Not Going “Rogue,” But Recent Developments Lead Increasingly-Concerned Researchers To Call For AI Slow Down

For the last few months, there has been much talk of AI agents going “rogue”. This is another of those unhelpful anthropomorphisms that are great for clickbait headlines, but which obscure a multitude of important issues.

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German Court Says Google Is Liable For False Claims In Its AI Overviews Because They Are Its Own Words

In a post on his blog, the security guru Bruce Schneier points out that if the ruling stands and is adopted elsewhere, it could have important implications not just for things like Google’s AI Overviews and chatbots, but also for the increasingly popular AI agents.

On Techdirt.

Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster

With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to most people, who will be happy to let Google become their universal user interface to everything. And yet Google still depends on the Internet to supply all the information it is analysing and repackaging. It risks killing the very thing that sustains it.

From Walled Culture.

Blooks Like the Future

Blooks are generally blogs turned into books, but I suppose we can stretch the term to include books that are available from blogs. Here's a heartening story about the latter type.

A novelist became fed up waiting for an agent or publisher to deign to acknowledge his existence (don't we all know it?). So he did the obvious thing: bunged it up on his Web site for anyone to download. His reasoning?

I'm putting this full-length novel online and encouraging you to read it, send it to your friends, blog about it, distribute it on your blogs, etc. and we'll all see what happens. Maybe nothing. But maybe ... something. In fact after weighing the pros and cons of doing this, I can't find any actual downside.

I wrote The Agency Delta because I had a story. Now I want people to read it. I think it's a great story. Now tell me what you think.

This is the future, you writer people. (Via Self Publish Blooks.)