#gettingmedieval

The dog robots are supposed to be autonomous, threehalves is explicitly only for being piloted by a human. The giant horns make it difficult for this machine to enter through doorways, and that is the point. Coupled with the built-in weak points, it is very easy to disable this thing, so it can't be used by the police or the military effectively.

None of the signup methods require a password. It only takes email and birthday. Minimizing time on the signin or signup screen makes it harder for people quitting to avoid relapse.

"Characters" on the website will send messages "on their own" (prompted by the site) to try to invite inactive users back after as soon as 1 day of inactivity. This is likely to force FOMO, or make users feel more like they owe the bots a response. Unhealthy attachment stuff.

Account deletion is an essential part of every service that should go smoothly, right? Right? Wrong. It takes 1-2 weeks for a Character AI account deletion to be finalized, and account deletion requests have a high chance to not go through if you're not using the app.

Rephrasing: People leaving Character.AI are pushed to download the app in order to delete their accounts, if they haven't already. This makes it harder for people to quit and stay gone. Failing to quit an addiction makes it harder to quit successfully in the future, so this feels like a feature, not a bug. On top of that, the delete account menu reads like this:

Oooh, so I have lots and lots of thoughts (and I’ll try to keep this under the length of the Substack I’m potentially writing).

Fundamentally, I think several intersecting issues are being collapsed into one another so that people can play culture wars with the whole thing.

First, the plagiarism,

Having actually gone and looked at the side-by-side passages from his PhD, I personally think they constitute plagiarism (much as I am loath to give Cofnas any credit, if those receipts are legitimate, I agree with his assessment that Arday’s thesis is extremely similar in places to Dr Zwozdiak-Myers’s — and if I were her, I would be fuming).

Some of the examples are not just “similar wording” or two academics summarising the same literature in a predictable way (there are, after all, only a finite number of ways you can say certain really niche things). The sentence structure, sequence of ideas, citations, and even the way the argument is built are extremely close to the source material, sometimes across substantial passages. In some examples, even the same copying or typographical mistakes appear to have been carried over, which makes the overlap harder to explain as coincidence or merely weak paraphrasing. 

I do understand patchwriting as a developmental thing. Early in a PhD, people sometimes write far too closely from a source because they are still learning how to synthesise literature and develop an academic voice. I’m sure plenty of doctoral researchers have an ancient first-year draft somewhere they buried out of fear of Turnitin.  But the whole point of doctoral training is that you learn and by the time you submit the finished thesis, independent synthesis of the literature is part of what the doctorate is certifying. If you are still essentially taking someone else’s synthesis and running it through a synonym blender at submission, then yes, I think there is a legitimate question about whether the doctoral standard has been met.

However, Liverpool John Moores University did investigate the plagiarism allegations and did not uphold academic misconduct. Looking at the evidence publicly available, I think they seem to have been extraordinarily lenient and I  would love to know what the panel heard and how they reached that decision, because from the passages I’ve seen I personally would have called it plagiarism.

But I also think institutional processes have to mean something. I wasn’t on that panel. I don’t know all the mitigation, the exact regulations being applied, what evidence was presented or the reasoning behind the decision. Unless genuinely new evidence emerges (and based on the idea this was the evidence used), I don’t think universities should be able to keep re-litigating the same allegation indefinitely until a panel eventually produces the answer people want. There has to be some principle of finality. You can think a decision was wrong or far too generous and still think the process should stand.

And Cambridge is not Liverpool John Moores. Cambridge can investigate Arday’s conduct as a Cambridge employee, research published under its name,etc. It cannot simply decide that a doctorate awarded by another university is invalid because it dislikes that university’s misconduct finding.

The part of this story that actually concerns me more is the allegations around his later published empirical research

If quotations presented as participant testimony were not genuinely said by those participants, that is a completely different level of problem to poor doctoral writing. In qualitative research, participant quotations are not decorative little flourishes you sprinkle through the results section to make your argument look convincing-they are part of the empirical evidence on which your interpretation rests.

You can lightly tidy quotations for readability (remove filler words,  anonymise details, use square brackets for clarity etc) but what you cannot do is manufacture speech and present it as something a participant said.

And if you are researching marginalised communities, that is particularly serious. Your scholarly authority often rests partly on saying: I listened to these people and this is what they told me. If you are instead creating or importing the words that best support your argument, then you are not amplifying marginalised voices — you are ventriloquising them.

A doctoral student can at least plausibly say they were still learning academic conventions. A professional academic publishing peer-reviewed empirical work does not get to rely indefinitely on “I didn’t really know academia yet” (especially when occupying a Cambridge Professorship which does mean you are the creme de la creme). So if those allegations are substantiated, I would regard that as potentially much more serious than the PhD plagiarism.

Then there is Nathan Cofnas.

I think people need to be intellectually grown-up enough to understand that somebody can hold racist views and still be correct about a particular piece of evidence. Morality and academic competence are not the same thing. David Starkey does not suddenly stop knowing Tudor history because he has said racist things. Likewise, Nathan Cofnas being a racist does not make two matching paragraphs stop matching.

I looked at the receipts. Unfortunately for everyone who would like this to be simpler, the receipts are receipt-ing.

But (and this is the absolutely enormous BUT) Cofnas appearing to be right about Jason Arday’s plagiarism does not remotely mean that his wider racial worldview has been vindicated (which is what parts of the right wing are currently acting like — as though Christmas has come early).

In summary, Cofnas believes that racial groups differ innately in intelligence, that present racial inequalities are substantially explained by inherited differences rather than structural discrimination, and that DEI artificially elevates Black academics who would not survive a genuinely meritocratic system.

So of course this case is catnip to him.

Cambridge very publicly presents a Black professor as evidence of inclusion and social mobility. Cofnas goes looking and apparently finds serious plagiarism and questionable biographical claims. Within his worldview, this is not simply “I found an academic fraud”. It becomes “I found proof that DEI elevates unqualified Black people” but one dodgy professor should not carry the inferential burden of an entire race.

Also, obviously, I wholly disagree with Cofnas’s conclusions, but even putting that to one side, I find his broader argument about “intelligence” much shakier than he presents it (I did fall down a rabbit hole on him), and I’m genuinely surprised this part of his argument hasn’t been challenged more vigorously.

He uses IQ and psychometric general intelligence as though they map fairly neatly onto who should reach elite academic positions, and I simply don’t think that follows. IQ and academic ability are not the same construct. IQ correlates with educational performance, yes, but being a good academic requires considerably more than scoring highly on a psychometric test: critical reading, domain knowledge, methodological judgement, intellectual creativity, the ability to synthesise evidence, and a sort of dogged determination to complete the fucking thing once you’ve lost the will to live.

You can have a very high IQ and be a terrible researcher. You can be fantastic at abstract reasoning and incapable of producing a coherent qualitative analysis. You can have enormous cognitive ability and still lack the persistence, organisation or judgement required to finish a PhD. “High IQ” and “excellent scholar” overlap; they are not synonyms. And all this is before we get into the material support required to rind through a PhD (as I never have and never will shut up about- I worked full time while completing mine and it was so much harder than doing a traditional funded PhD).

Also IQ itself is also measured differently across the studies he cites and across literature itself. There is no single universal object called The IQ Test: studies use different tests and subtests, and sometimes achievement measures or other proxies for cognitive ability. Some are verbal, some non-verbal, some are more influenced by education, while others focus more heavily on working memory, processing speed or abstract reasoning. Treating all of that as though it produces one clean, universally comparable measure of innate “intelligence” seems methodologically shaky to me.

And even high heritability within a population does not automatically tell you why two populations have different average scores (that is the basic distinction between within-group heritability and between-group causation). So Cofnas seems to move far too easily from disputed and heterogeneous psychometric evidence to enormous claims about what the racial composition of elite institutions “should” look like under genuine meritocracy.That is an absolutely massive inferential leap (and, given how central it is to his entire worldview, I’m surprised it doesn’t get interrogated much more aggressively).

This man is a racist, why is he being wheeled out in mainstream media……

Which brings me to Cambridge, because I think Cambridge has a significant amount to answer for here (and is, in many ways, the true villain of the piece as they manufactured the conditions for this racialised spectacle)

Universities have increasingly become marketing machines because the sector is financially precarious, and Cambridge is not exempt from that reality (it is itself running substantial deficits and needs to recruit lucrative postgraduate and international students). Arday was an extraordinary institutional story: Black, neurodivergent, from a disadvantaged background, with a remarkable educational trajectory. Cambridge didn’t simply appoint a professor; it packaged him as proof that Cambridge was inclusive, that barriers could be overcome and that EDI worked. And IMO that is not only self-congratulatory, but deeply patronising (and rather undermined by the fact that Cambridge remains disproportionately populated by students from privileged and privately educated backgrounds).

And if you are going to turn somebody into an institutional billboard, do your fucking due diligence.

I have worked for public-facing organisations that verified my education and employment history going back years because, if I was going to represent them in the press, my credibility became part of their reputational risk (that is basic governance). So I find it astonishing that Cambridge could appoint someone to an actual professorship, build a huge PR narrative around him, and apparently fail to verify professional claims that seem to have been relatively straightforward to check (and have been proven to be false- Glasgow have refuted his visiting professorship and Birkbeck have confirmed he never did a masters there). I’m not suggesting they should have fed a ten-year-old PhD into plagiarism software. I am suggesting that qualifications, appointments, publications, references and the scholarly record should probably be checked before one of the world’s most famous universities effectively announces: we vouch for this man.

And Cambridge should have understood the racial environment into which it was launching him. Minority people in Britain are often subjected to extraordinary scrutiny whether anybody consciously intends that or not. You frequently have to be fucking excellent merely to receive the presumption of competence — and even then you are expected not to appear too conscious of your own excellence. Success can itself trigger the urge to “correct” you back into whatever social position somebody unconsciously thinks you ought to occupy.

Minorities (from across the intersections) are rarely afforded the right to mediocrity. A mediocre cis white male professor is simply a mediocre professor; nobody asks what his existence tells us about whether white people/men/cis people belong in academia. But when minorities are made highly visible, both success and failure become proof about the group.  Institutions say, “Look, diversity works”; racists/bigots wait for the same person to fail so they can say, “Look, diversity doesn’t work.” Either way, the individual stops being allowed to just be a person and becomes a representative (which is deeply dehumanising).

And that is exactly what Cambridge did to Arday. They made him a test case for EDI; Cofnas is now trying to make him a test case against it. Those positions are morally very different, but structurally they commit the same error: making one Black academic carry the meaning of an entire demographic group.

Which is also why the gleeful tone of some of the reporting can be racist even if the underlying allegations are true. Racism is not limited to fabricating accusations against innocent people. It can operate through who is scrutinised, how relentlessly, how much public humiliation is considered appropriate, how far beyond the relevant misconduct people are willing to dig, and whether one individual’s wrongdoing is recruited as evidence against everyone who shares his race.

Thank you sir!

i wasn’t going to respond to this bc of how much it fucking pissed me off but i feel like this needs to be said.

don’t ever come into a writers’ inbox and openly admit you used ai to, let’s face it, plagiarise their work. i don’t CARE if you want it to be on my blog, you still fed it into an ai bot for your own gain. it’s fucking ridiculous that you blatantly ignored the rules on my page that state NOT to do this to my work.

also saying it’s “better than the first chapter” sorry but fuck you?? first you steal my work and put it into ai and then basically say my works shit and ur ai slop is better???

i work full time, i dont tend to write all that often, hence why longer one-shots/fics are barely posted. sometimes all i can get out is a little drabble/blurb. and then sometimes i lose motivation for fics/series’ that i’ve previously posted about. this doesn’t give you an excuse to take my work and use ai to create your own. sometimes fics just don’t get finished and you have to fucking deal with it. if i ever find the motivation again, i might post about it again, but if i don’t, then don’t use ai on my work. and especially don’t use it to create fucking fanart on my other pieces.