Some interesting stuff here on measuring writing quality and improving on qualitative tasks:
www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/31/h...

I've never regretted reading poems while in the air. You get to look out the window while the words linger.

Today the words were from Pink Dust, by Ron Padgett.

Computationally, whitespace gets little attention—it’s usually standardized or stripped.

But in poetry, whitespace matters!

Yet actually *preserving* that poetic whitespace is v tough. Its slipperiness points to bigger issues w/ text processing & LLMs.

New paper ⬜️ aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...

The project that started my whitespace obsession... #EMNLP2025

While we've all been worrying about tokenizers, lurking in the background has been the preprocessing *before* tokenization. Poems break standard HTML-to-text linearization systems, and we find that multimodal models aren't a solution.

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines?

We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713
🧵👇

“We may be left with an unintended consequence… that the very companies that have been most inconsiderate about using materials crafted by writers will be strengthened by a regime in which a billion-dollar check is the entry fee for developing the best AI.”

NEW: Anthropic has reached a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history.

My co-authors, Jana Diesner, @tedunderwood.me, @zoeleblanc.bsky.social, @gworthey.bsky.social and
@profdownie.bsky.social, and I are excited to share our paper in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social "Who decides what is read on Goodreads?" on book review sponsorship, open access at doi.org/10.1177/2053....

Anthropic appeals ruling that would allow the copyright case against them to become a class action suit (with up to 7 million claimants)

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Their argument is apparently that that the legality of their business model should not be questioned because AI is too important.

The complete lack of regard for the Y-axis hurts me physically #GPT5

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.

Judge Chhabria's “market dilution” theory suggests “using copyrighted books to train an LLM might harm the market...because it enables the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the originals, even if those works aren’t themselves infringing.”

www.authorsalliance.org/2025/06/26/m...

Judge Alsup's decision found that Anthropic's training AI on lawfully acquired copyrighted works was a fair use.

Below we highlight some of the most important parts of the decision on the question of whether using books for AI training is fair use:

www.authorsalliance.org/2025/06/24/a...

Additional analysis of the Bartz v. Anthropic decision, including some speculation as to where things might go from here, from our AI Legal Fellow, Justin Bonfiglio:

www.authorsalliance.org/2025/07/26/b...

Word of this morning is ‘procaffeinate’: to put everything on hold until you’ve had sufficient amounts of coffee.

Your daily reminder: ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not "know" anything: it smashes words together in plausible sounding way, but it does not have (and never will have) any ability to check whether something is true or false

Using it for anything beyond "re-word this headline" = failure

Number Shortage xkcd.com/3009

Poetry Northwest submissions, open for November. Send some poems!

poetrynorthwest.submittable.com/submit

First post here, thought I'd start with an article by @emilymbender.bsky.social.

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

My tldr: Creative works are an expression of the creators' humanity - we need to understand, respect, and protect what that means in this age of LLMs.