• OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users. This past week, however, it did roll back an update to GPT‑4o, its current AI model, which it said had been criticized as “overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic.” The company said in its statement that when implementing the upgrade, they had “focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed toward responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.”
• “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.
• The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.

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• Summary: A global analysis of dietary trends across 101 countries over 60 years reveals that populations consuming more plant-based proteins tend to live longer. While animal-based proteins are linked to lower infant mortality, plant-based sources such as legumes, tofu, and grains are associated with increased adult life expectancy.

  After adjusting for wealth and population size, researchers found that countries with high plant protein availability, like India, outperformed nations with meat-heavy diets, like the U.S., in adult longevity. The findings support broader health and environmental goals, highlighting the benefits of shifting toward more sustainable, plant-forward diets.

• They found that, for this colony of macaques at least, none of those explanations held up. Instead, same-sex behavior in males was strongly correlated with “coalitionary bonds.” That is, the more often two males bonded sexually, the more likely they were to support each other during conflicts within the group, providing them both with an advantage.
• The team used that pedigree data and found that bisexuality in male macaques was 6.4% heritable — marking the first genetic link in primate same-sex behavior discovered outside of humans. As a side note, a preference for mounting or being mounted (what humans would call topping or bottoming) was also found to be inherited, paralleling previous findings in humans.
• But bisexuality in nature is vastly more common than homosexuality. The only animal species in which a significant percentage of the population is known to engage in exclusive same-sex behavior is the domesticated sheep. Approximately 8% of rams show a clear homosexual orientation, alone among the 1,500 species found to exhibit same-sex behavior. The balance of scientific research on non-human animals strongly suggests that bisexuality is, by definition, quite natural.
• But bisexuality in nature is vastly more common than homosexuality. The only animal species in which a significant percentage of the population is known to engage in exclusive same-sex behavior is the domesticated sheep. Approximately 8% of rams show a clear homosexual orientation, alone among the 1,500 species found to exhibit same-sex behavior.
• The reality is simple: Whether human or animal, most individuals who engage in same-sex behavior are not “homosexual”; they are bi. In our animal relatives, bisexuality has now been shown to be a heritable, evolved trait that increases reproductive success. From a reproductive and evolutionary standpoint, bisexuality may be beneficial for humans as well, in the absence of social stigmas.

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• We conclude with a queer bestial ethics of avowal, one that dispenses with anthopatriarchal innocence towards a more capacious embrace of the panspecies desire for touch and thriving

• The judge also found that it violated free speech rights by requiring teachers to use pronouns aligning with a student’s gender identity.

   

  “The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves wrote.

• Decoding whalespeak and other animal languages 

    

    Researchers know the enigmatic clicks made by sperm whales vary in tempo, rhythm and length, but what the animals are saying with these sounds — produced through spermaceti organs in their bulbous heads — remains a mystery to human ears.

• Machine learning, however, has helped scientists analyze nearly 9,000 recorded click sequences, called codas, that represent the voices of approximately 60 sperm whales in the Caribbean Sea. The work may one day make it possible for humans to communicate with the marine animals. 

    

    The scientists examined the timing and frequency of codas in solitary whale utterances, in choruses, and in call-and-response exchanges between the marine giants. When visualized with artificial intelligence, previously unseen coda patterns emerged in what the researchers described as akin to phonetics in human communication.

• In all, the program detected 18 types of rhythm (the sequence of intervals between clicks), five types of tempo (the duration of the entire coda), three types of rubato (variations in duration), and two types of ornamentation — an “extra click” added at the end of a coda in a group of shorter codas. 

    

    These features could all be mixed and matched to form an “enormous repertoire” of phrases, the scientists reported in May. However, the approach has its limitations. While machine learning is adept at identifying patterns, it doesn’t shed light on the meaning. 

    

    A next step, according to the study, is interactive experimentation with whales, along with observations of whale behavior, which could be an important part of unraveling the syntax of sperm whale click sequences.

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• We cannot do anything with reasoning that works like this. It begins with its conclusion that men and male sexuality are defined by something dark, dangerous and ugly and that gay men’s sexuality, unconstrained by the influence of an imagined pure and virtuous female sexuality, represents a particularly concentrated variation of this vile and contaminating depravity. It then works backwards from there. No amount of reasoned argument or evidence to the contrary will reach true believers in this narrative. They are prisoners of their own minds and the rest of us can only be thankful we do not have to live in such minds.
• However, I would suggest that there is genuine cause to be concerned for young gay men and especially for boys who are or will soon be recognising themselves to be gay and who are particularly likely to operate more in the social media world of narratives than in the real one. For them, we must fear the homophobic narratives of the ‘queer theory’ brand of Critical Social Justice activism which will try to convince some of them struggling with their sexuality that they are actually girls and the rest that it is transphobic to be solely same-sex attracted.

• Further, vegans are perceived as less masculine than omnivores
  (Thomas, 2016), and omnivorous men exhibit more negative attitudes toward vegans than omniv-
  orous women do (Judge & Wilson, 2019). In addition, vegan men face more negative prejudice
  than vegan women do. In a simulated job application context, for example, vegan men were con-
  sidered less competent than their omnivore counterparts, while vegan and omnivore women were
  assessed as equally competent (Adamczyk & Maison, 2023). Men therefore have fewer personal
  incentives to become vegan, and face more obstacles if they choose this path

• What I want to do here is think through why the concept of ‘discrimination-as-phobia’ worked for the gay rights movement, and why, despite superficial similarities, it doesn’t accurately capture what is at stake in the trans rights debate, and actually serves as a tool of political propaganda and obfuscation to push that agenda through.