AI Slop

ArXiv will no longer accept review or position papers in computer science
unless they have already been peer reviewed.Credit: Sharaf Maksumov/Alamy

AI slop, digital content made with generative artificial intelligence, specifically when perceived to show a lack of effort, quality or deeper meaning, and an overwhelming volume of production.[1][4][5][6] Coined in the 2020s, the term has a pejorative connotation similar to spam.[4]

In 2024, AI-generated "Shrimp Jesus" images
proliferated on Facebook.[1][2][3]

AI slop is everywhere. Anywhere you look, some image, video or story just appears, forcing one to analyze is this real? It's like the slime balls who try to steal your ID or money via scams where vigilance must be adhered to or your mind or wallet will go sideways in a nano second.

To whit ...

The oldest and best-known preprint repository, arXiv, has announced that it will no longer accept review or position papers in computer science. The website will make exceptions only for papers that have been previously accepted by a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference.

These types of article were never officially on arXiv’s list of ‘accepted content types’, but they had previously been allowed at moderator discretion, said a blog post announcing the move on 31 October. arXiv management says the move was made necessary by a surge in low-quality papers, including many that appear to be written using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“I think this is a wise move by arXiv,” says Richard Sever, chief science and strategy officer of the non-profit organisation openRxiv in New York City, which runs the biomedical-sciences preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. He adds both of those platforms have had a ‘no narrative reviews’ policy from the outset.

 End result ...

Rising rejection rates

Preprints submitted to arXiv are checked by automated tools. Before going live on the site, around 20% of submissions are flagged to one of 240 volunteer moderators, says arXiv executive director Ramin Zabih, a computer scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Until a year ago, only 2–3% of submissions were ultimately rejected by moderators, says Steinn Sigurðsson, an astrophysicist at Penn State University in University Park who is arXiv’s scientific director. But in the last year, that number has gone up to 10%.

An originally-generated example of the "Shrimp Jesus" AI imagery that appeared on Facebook in 2024.
Generation prompt was: A person who looks like Jesus but who is made completely out of live shrimp, swimming underwater in the turquoise ocean, with a shrimp halo, and his hands dissolving into a shoal of shrimp.

He has risen ... :)

When it gets personal ...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, provides aid to about one in eight Americans.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

When you deny food from folks based on politics and a lie, people remember and what the administration from hell is doing is making said denial personal. Combine this with Epstein, a tanking economy, Medicaid cuts and exploding Affordable Care costs and one sees a perfect storm brewing, costing the Orange Menace dearly regarding the midterms, something the repugs are starting to realize with great anxiety as we move closer to 2026.

The Trump administration moved on Friday to deny swift and full food stamp payments to millions of low-income Americans, as it asked a federal appeals court to halt a judge’s recent order that would preserve those benefits during the shutdown.

The legal salvo once again plunged the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, into confusion and chaos — and raised the possibility that the poorest families may receive no aid while the fiscal stalemate in Washington remains unresolved.

The Trump administration specifically sought to challenge a ruling handed down by a lower court on Thursday. In that scathing order, Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, directed the government to tap an ample store of leftover federal money to fund food stamps in their entirety for this month.

In doing so, the judge faulted President Trump and his top aides for using the nation’s largest anti-hunger program as a political bargaining chip. And he gave the government a Friday deadline to comply and release full payments for states, which administer food stamps for roughly 42 million people.

But the art of stupid prevails ...

But lawyers for the government asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to halt that requirement and render a ruling before 4 p.m. If the administration prevails, it could severely cut or delay aid that helps many families purchase groceries.

It's personal now.

Recession 2025?

A sign for a job fair in New York in September. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Well, the great, great economy that the orange menace endlessly promised, due to his innate genius of being the ultimate business man, is taking a rather large hit due to circumstances beyond his control, something most galling as he knows, without question, how to run a once great nation known as America better than anyone, right?

Layoffs accelerated in October, pushing 2025 job cuts to levels typically seen in recessions, according to newly released data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that tracks workplace reductions.

U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far this year — the largest reading since the pandemic recession and on par with 2008 and 2009 job cuts during the Great Recession, the firm’s figures show. The data includes a recent spate of layoffs at major companies such as UPS, Amazon and Target, and adds to growing concern about a labor market slowdown.

Employers cited cost-cutting and artificial intelligence as the top two reasons for job reductions in October.

“We’re entering new territory with these layoffs in October,” said John Challenger, CEO of the consulting firm that tracks job losses. “We haven’t seen mega-layoffs of the size that are being discussed now — 48,000 from UPS, potentially 30,000 from Amazon — since 2020 and before that, since the recession of 2009. When you see companies making cuts of this size, it does signal a real shift in direction.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Recent layoffs, the data shows, have been concentrated in technology, retail, service and warehousing jobs. Employers announced more than 153,000 job cuts last month, a 183 percent increase from the month before, marking the worst October for layoffs since 2003, the Challenger report said.

Any questions?

Its only the beginning ...

Graphical abstract. Credit: Acta Biomaterialia (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.actbio.2025.08.057

This is the first practical application of stem cell regeneration that will transform medicine forever as it will go far beyond repairing just hearts once the research proves to work in the real world.

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a pioneering method to mend damaged hearts without open-heart surgery, an advance that could one day transform the treatment of heart failure.

The new approach uses lab-grown heart tissue made from reprogrammed adult stem cells, delivered through a tiny incision rather than a surgically opened chest cavity. In preclinical testing, the stem cell patch restored heart function and improved healing.

"For patients with severe heart failure, there are very few options beyond mechanical pumps or transplants. We hope this approach will offer a new way to repair their own hearts," says Wuqiang Zhu, Ph.D., senior author of the study published in Acta Biomaterialia and a cardiovascular researcher at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

But safely and effectively delivering engineered heart tissues made from these cells has remained a major challenge.

In collaboration with engineers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Mayo researchers developed a flexible, paper-thin patch made of nano- and microfibers coated with gelatin. This hybrid scaffold supports a blend of human heart muscle cells, blood vessel cells and fibroblasts—cells that form the tissue's structural framework—to create a living, beating piece of heart tissue.

Before transplantation, the tissue is infused with bioactive factors such as fibroblast growth factor 1 and CHIR99021 that encourage the growth of new blood vessels and help the cells survive once they are in place.

"The beauty of this design," says Dr. Zhu, "is that it can be folded like a piece of paper, loaded into a slender tube, and delivered precisely where it's needed through a small incision in the chest. Once in place, it unfolds and adheres naturally to the heart's surface."

Instead of using stitches, the team used a biocompatible surgical adhesive that holds the patch in place while minimizing additional trauma to the surrounding tissue.

Its just the beginning ...

Next Brain

Learning in detail on how our brains actually work is becoming reality via Next Brain,

a 3d AI driven app showing how the brain functions at deep level. 

A new AI-assisted brain atlas that can help visualize the human brain in unprecedented detail has been developed by UCL researchers, in a major step forward for neuroscience and neuroimaging.

Published in Nature, the new study introduces NextBrain, an atlas of the entire adult human brain that can be used to analyze MRI scans of living patients in a matter of minutes and at a level of detail not possible until now.

The creators of the atlas, which is freely available, hope it will ultimately help to accelerate discovery in brain science and its translation into better diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as Alzheimer's.

Fig. 1 | NextBrain workflow. a,

The caterpillar ...

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Back in 2012 and 2024, yours truly talked about wormholes in blurbs titled Entanglement, the journey to forever and A temporary arrangement discussing, in part, the brilliant ER=EPR conjecture written by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013 explaining how entanglement happens via wormholes in the context that ... ER = EPR, a conjecture in physics stating that two entangled particles (a so-called Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen or EPR pair) are connected by a wormhole (or Einstein–Rosen bridge)[1][2] and is thought by some to be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.[1]

Now it seems this notion of ER=EPR has legs based on the latest findings that
this radical take on reality just might be true.

For obvious reasons, we do not know what the inside of a black hole looks like. But thanks to theoretical physics, we can ask what the inside should look like if Einstein's theory of gravity and the rules of quantum mechanics are both true. A new study published in the journal Physical Review Letters has done exactly this by concentrating on two black holes that are deeply entangled (linked together by quantum rules).

The research by scientists from the U.S. and Argentina theoretically mapped the shared inner space between the two objects—the wormhole connecting them. They found that for a typical, messy entangled pair, the interior isn't the smooth tunnel of science fiction.

The ER caterpillar is a long, bumpy wormhole supported by an inhomogeneous matter distribution, with correlation scale set by ℓΔ and average length set by ℓ(t).

Instead, it's a long, lumpy structure they called the "Einstein-Rosen caterpillar." It's named after the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, the mathematical structure that connects two regions of spacetime, and "caterpillar" because of its bumpy, segmented shape. This discovery is a significant step toward proving that the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics can control the shape of spacetime inside a black hole.

This result supports the idea that two of the strangest concepts in physics (quantum entanglement and wormholes) are equivalent, or two sides of the same coin—the ER=EPR conjecture. The authors say, "The construction and main result of this Letter support a vastly more general form of ER = EPR and seem to be in some tension with arguments against semiclassicality of typical interiors."

Arizona Moonrise

The question to ask ...

How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion?
Animations by Zach Lieberman

Wish this awesome New Yorker animation was a gif and not a video as it's truly stellar to a fault but this blurb is not about that, it's about the illusion of thinking as expressed by AI as a frenzy of talk regarding AGI and ASI is becoming ever more animated as we speak.

Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic, has been predicting that an A.I. “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner” in such fields as biology, math, engineering, and writing might come online by 2027. He envisions millions of copies of a model whirring away, each conducting its own research: a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” In June, Sam Altman, of OpenAI, wrote that the industry was on the cusp of building “digital superintelligence.” “The 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before,” he asserted. Meanwhile, the A.I. tools that most people currently interact with on a day-to-day basis are reminiscent of Clippy, the onetime Microsoft Office “assistant” that was actually more of a gadfly. A Zoom A.I. tool suggests that you ask it “What are some meeting icebreakers?” or instruct it to “Write a short message to share gratitude.” Siri is good at setting reminders but not much else. A friend of mine saw a button in Gmail that said “Thank and tell anecdote.” When he clicked it, Google’s A.I. invented a funny story about a trip to Turkey that he never took.

The question to ask ...

I once had a boss who said that a job interview should probe for strengths, not for the absence of weaknesses. Large language models have many weaknesses: they famously hallucinate reasonable-sounding falsehoods; they can be servile even when you’re wrong; they are fooled by simple puzzles. But I remember a time when the obvious strengths of today’s A.I. models—fluency, fluidity, an ability to “get” what someone is talking about—were considered holy grails. When you experience these strengths firsthand, you wonder: How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion?

A leading neuroscientist argues that ChatGPT “radically demystifies thinking.”

The question to ask/rev II

Artificial neural networks compress experience just like real neural networks do. One of the best open-source A.I. models, DeepSeek, is capable of writing novels, suggesting medical diagnoses, and sounding like a native speaker in dozens of languages. It was trained using next-token prediction on many terabytes of data. But when you download the model it is one six-hundredth of that. A distillation of the internet, compressed to fit on your laptop. Ted Chiang was right to call an early version of ChatGPT a blurry JPEG of the web—but, in my view, this is the very reason these models have become increasingly intelligent. Chiang noted in his piece that, to compress a text file filled with millions of examples of arithmetic, you wouldn’t create a zip file. You’d write a calculator program. “The greatest degree of compression can be achieved by understanding the text,” he wrote. Perhaps L.L.M.s are starting to do that.

One never knows, do one? Fats Waller

Phase transtions ... are never linear

The Hektoria Glacier terminus is seen in February 2024. Naomi Ochwat

Phase transitions ... are never linear. The day before a pond freezes over, half the surface is ice free.
As long as the temp remains below freezing, the next day, the pond's surface is totally frozen.
This is what's happening in Antarctica save the temp is above freezing, not below.

Phase transition of water

A simplified phase diagram for water, showing whether solid ice, liquid water,
or gaseous water vapor is the most stable at different combinations of temperature and pressure.

An Antarctic glacier has experienced a rapid retreat 10 times faster than previously measured, according to new research.

Glaciologists recorded a five-mile retreat in just two months on the Hektoria Glacier on the eastern Antarctic Peninsula -- a rate nearly 10 times faster than previously measured for a grounded glacier, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience on Monday.

"Glaciers have a tendency to react if you remove the floating part of them," she said.

Later that year, even more ice -- this time from Hektoria -- would fall into the sea.

Grounded glaciers, which are not floated and fixed to the land, typically retreat less than about 1,000 feet per year, the researchers said. But images taken by satellite and plane between November and December 2022 indicate that the glacier retreated nearly half a mile per day at some points, according to the paper.

The Hektoria (right) and Green (left) glaciers are seen in February 2024 surrounded by remnants of ice
that were once attached. Naomi Ochwat

Something eternal ...

November looms ...

Something eternal ...

Back in 1977, yours truly took a serious road trip to Colorado to check out a design conference in Aspen, Colorado. After attending said conference, the Four Corners Area beckoned as the vehicle I had was the VW Camper Bus, the best way, IMHO, to see America as this voyage took well over a month and encompassed thousands of miles before returning to CT. In doing the explore, encountering Aspen groves, a single organism consisting of hundreds to thousands of clone trees residing in finite spaces, remain forever etched in my mind because of the fluttering of their leaves, presenting to the viewer a silvery shimmer bordering on the magical. On an earlier trip, my wife and I experienced the grandeur of the redwoods on the coast of Northern California. Vast, remote, an open air cathedral for the ages, an environment encouraging one to walk in silence among entities thousands of years old residing in forests millions of years old, something most wondrous to behold. Being a designer and videographer who likes to walk, one amazing aspect of all tress is how they react to wind as the sound wind makes when moving through the canopy of leaves indirectly relates, to this writer, the work of Gustav Mahler as they too emote a sense of eternal timelessness like that of nature when wind makes it's presence known in the most amazing way possible.

Snow ...

Woods

One is not entitled ... ever.

Credit: Getty Images

Let's think about the above image. Did Getty create that or some artist? I hope some artist, who should be named, as the graphic's really good and relates to the blurb concerning AI and the art of the easy way out.

With a child in college and a spouse who’s a professor, I have front-row access to the unfolding debacle that is “higher education in the age of AI.”

These days, students routinely submit even “personal reflection” papers that are AI generated. (And routinely appear surprised when caught.)

Read a paper longer than 10 pages? Not likely—even at elite schools. Toss that sucker into an AI tool and read a quick summary instead. It’s more efficient!

Another TA claimed that “it’s insane how pervasive AI slop is in 75% of the turned-in work,” while another student complained about being a course assistant where “students would have a 75-word paragraph due every week and it was all AI generated.”

One doesn’t have to read far in these kinds of threads to find plenty of students who feel aggrieved because they were accused of AI use—but hadn’t done it. Given how poor most AI detection tools are, this is plenty plausible; and if AI detectors aren’t used, accusations often come down to a hunch.

In closing ...

AI can be an amazing tool that can assist with coding, web searches, data mining, and textual summation—but I’m old enough to wonder just what the heck you’re doing at college if you don’t want to process arguments on your own (i.e., think and read critically) or even to write your own “personal reflections” (i.e., organize and express your deepest thoughts, memories, and feelings). Outsource these tasks often enough and you will fail to develop them.

Time for a life lesson! Credit: Instagram

Getting good at something is hard. Get over it and just do it as one is not entitled ... ever.