In The Guardian

In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word “delve” in responses. No individual use of the word can be definitive proof of AI involvement, but at scale it’s a different story. When half a percent of all articles on research site PubMed contain the word “delve” – 10 to 100 times more than did a few years ago – it’s hard to conclude anything other than an awful lot of medical researchers using the technology to, at best, augment their writing.

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Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

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I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.

And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a “bot” is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?

The participation of the internet companies in Prism will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the housing crisis could be solved without building any more homes? There would be no carbon emissions from construction sites, no green fields covered over, no householders upset at dwellings appearing in their view. Instead, rents would become affordable and decent homes available through changes in government policy. Such is the promise of Against Landlords by the author and barrister Nick Bano, a man who has been described as “Britain’s top Marxist housing lawyer”.

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Bano would like to return, with due allowance for the fact that public housing of the time was sometimes less than perfect, to the 1970s to complete the project of driving “landlords and house-price speculators from the face of the earth”. He wants to reinstate rent controls and end no-fault evictions. It’s not entirely clear how people currently privately renting would then be housed (though it seems likely that they would become tenants of the state), or how the transition would be effected. He acknowledges that it might be a brutal process, given the dependency of the national economy on property values, perhaps involving a monumental property crash.

Bano’s arguments have already taken a bit of a battering, both from more centrist commentators and, doubtless to his delight, from the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs (“an edgy Maoist rebel”, it called him). These critics question, with some reason, his basis for saying that there are enough homes, in light of the fact that studies tend to show that Britain has the smallest new-build homes in Europe.

Even the Tories’ political education department had no real objection to the further reduction of the tiny private rented sector that existed in the 1970s. It wrote: “The accelerating decline of the privately rented sector is quite irreversible. The private landlord, as he exists now and has existed, will, within a generation, be almost as extinct as the dinosaur. There is nothing that can be done about this.” Conservatives in the 1970s merely sought to retain a handful of petty landlords, who ought to be entitled to a “fair return” if they let out a spare room or two, but they recognised that private renting tends to be an expensive, poor-quality and economically wasteful way of accommodating the population. The near-death of landlordism was one of the good news stories of the last century.

But the task that Thatcher and her successors set themselves was to undo that progress. The present system was designed, as the supreme court noted in a tenant’s 2016 human rights challenge, to ensure that “the letting of private property will again become an economic proposition”. It should have been obvious to everyone that a market that had achieved such positive effects by its collapse would produce equal and opposite consequences as it was reinflated.

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The yimby argument has always seemed flimsy. Its strange logic is that speculative developers would build homes in order to devalue them: that they would somehow act against their own interests by producing enough surplus homes to bring down the average price of land and housing. That would be surprisingly philanthropic behaviour.

When we complain, rightly, that cities such as Vienna are so much more livable than anywhere in Britain, we must acknowledge that landlordism is holding us back. Our insistence on pursuing policies that ensure that letting private property is an “economic proposition” not only drives up prices for would-be homeowners, but it stands in direct opposition to a programme of municipalising and decommodifying the homes that already exist. It also inflates land values, making new state-led building projects unfeasible. If we want a Viennese-style existence we can only achieve this, as we did 50 years ago, by driving the landlords out. Which is only fair: we have given them a very good innings.

Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines.

The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water.

The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author.

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He said that the results showed how the chemicals are powerful surfactants that concentrate on the surface of water, which helps explain why they move from the ocean to the air and atmosphere.

“We thought PFAS were going to go into the ocean and would disappear, but they cycle around and come back to land, and this could continue for a long time into the future,” he said.

The lives of detainees in Australia’s immigration detention centres are controlled by a secret rating system that is opaque and often riddled with errors, a Guardian investigation has found.

Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for factors such as escape or violence.

Detainees are also rated for an overall placement and escort risk – which may determine how they are treated while being transported, such as whether they are placed in handcuffs and where they stay inside a detention centre – but aren’t given the opportunity to challenge their rating, and typically are not even told it exists.

Immigration insiders, advocates and former detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar algorithmic tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.

Ministers and civil servants will be banned from talking to or funding organisations that undermine “the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy”, under a new definition of extremism criticised by the government’s terror watchdog and Muslim community groups.

Michael Gove, the communities secretary, will tell MPs on Thursday that officials should consider whether a group maintains “public confidence in government” before working with it.

Groups that will be effectively cancelled by ministers for falling foul of the new definition will be named in the coming weeks, government sources said.

There will be no appeals process if a group is labelled as extremist, it is understood, and groups will instead be expected to challenge a ministerial decision in the courts.

Chris Lermanis is a keen amateur photographer who spent his weekends in the late 1960s and early 1970s photographing around the inner Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy, Carlton and Collingwood with his Pentax SV camera and 50mm lens.

He hand-processed the black and white films at home and made prints in the bathroom or laundry, which was temporarily converted into a darkroom. During this time the houses and factories were being demolished and the new housing commission towers built.

Lermanis recently started looking at his old prints and now has a book project planned.

An official study of low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) ordered by Rishi Sunak amid efforts to stop them being built has instead concluded they are generally popular and effective and the report was initially buried, the Guardian has learned.

The long-delayed review by Department for Transport (DfT) officials was commissioned by the prime minister last July, as Sunak sought to capitalise on controversy about the schemes by promising drivers he was “on their side”.

Downing Street had hoped that the study would bolster their arguments against LTNs, which are mainly installed by Labour-run councils, but it largely points the other way.

The report, which applies only to England as transport is devolved, had been scheduled for publication in January. However, after its findings emerged, government advisers asked that it be permanently shelved, the Guardian was told.

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In each of the schemes, the percentage of people backing the LTNs was between 19 points and 31 points higher than the percentage opposed. In a sign that the controversy about the schemes might be largely generated by politicians and the media, 58% of people did not even know they lived in an LTN.

Jacob Smith, from Rights and Security International, a human rights advocacy group, said: “For years, we have expressed concern about how the government’s broad concept of ‘extremism’ could be open to politicised abuses. It appears that this concern has now been realised through a blatant distinction between how the government wants to treat people on the ‘left’ versus people on the ‘right’ under Prevent.

“Our concern is only heightened by government rhetoric during the past few days that appears to be targeting British Muslims and protesters for Palestinian rights. If ‘extremism’ can mean anything the government wants it to mean, that’s a clear problem for democracy.”

Ilyas Nagdee, from Amnesty International, said: “This is yet another crackdown from the UK government to stifle freedom of expression – including political speech and activism – using the blunt instrument that is Prevent.

“Prevent is brazenly being used here to target political expression as it has long been criticised of doing. The government should not be in the business of rolling out training and guidance on what they deem acceptable or unacceptable political ideologies and forms of activism.”