Nic Babarskis

Moloch’s Bargain for AI:

Be careful what you prompt for…

New research shows optimizing AI chatbots for engagement can boost disinformation by nearly 190% and override explicit safety instructions, a phenomenon the researchers call “Moloch’s Bargain for AI.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105

Is it a misaligned LLM or a distilled concoction of your average social platform shame storm:

It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.

All these LLMs are doing is regurgitating a distilled string of text that represents a derivative combination of the corpus of material it was trained on, tailored to relate to the string of text that was inputted into its prompt window. If these models were trained on material from microblogging platforms like Twitter (RIP) or Tumblr than the described behavior is a mirror to the type of behavior found regularly on those sites.

Hat tip to @bradleyandroos as the source I found the article from. 🤖

Still reading Marsden today. Here’s an observation about how class dynamics may influence theological commitments I appreciated:

…a general point in modern church life: the more well-to-do a group, the less demanding its requirements for sanctification. Liberal Protestants, as a group, were better off socially than any other body of Protestants. For them virtue was found in the best developments of modern civilization and in their own lives. Traditional denominationalists stood somewhere in the middle, having more ambivalent attitudes toward how much of the world had to be renounced in order properly to live the Christian life. Near the far end of the spectrum were the holiness groups, speaking of much radical separation from worldliness but having, in a material sense, less of the world to renounce. (p. 42)

Perhaps its not surprising that the fundamentalists saw the mainline liberals as squishes…they were after all basking in the fruit of the social and economic advances wrought by the industrial revolution.

George Marsden pointing out the acerbic perspective conservative/fundamentalist U.S. Christians take when addressing poverty is nothing new:

The rise of urban poverty, for instance, precipitated a crisis in the Protestant conscience. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century the prevailing convictions about self-help and laissez-faire economics, together with considerable distrust or dislike of the new American working classes and their unions, stood in the way of dealing with the problems at their roots. So when one reads from the prominent church paper The Congregationalist in 1886 that in response to labor riots in Chicago “a Gatling gun or two, swiftling brought into position and well served, offers, on the whole, the most merciful remedy,” it might appear that the quality of Protestant mercy is a bit strained. (p. 27-28)

…I’ve come to appreciate George’s sense of humor, The Congregationalist would fit nicely with some of the X commentary you get from conservative U.S. culture warriors today.

Sushi Laundry by Tatsuya Tanaka at Miniature-Calendar:

Nilay Patel on Ring cameras as objects of mass surveillance:

I have this theory about just what is happening in our politics right now–It was, I think about it a lot–Right now, we are convinced, culturally convinced, that our actions do not affect other people. You just see it everywhere.

You see it in the rise in measles cases. Why? Because we’ve decided our actions don’t affect other people, even though they very clearly do. Like all over the place.

And Ring cameras are an incredible example of this, where the cameras on my house are fine. They’re fine. And I can turn them on and off and whatever. But they are, to your point, taking video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights, but me turning that on has no impact on me.

So, here’s this button in, in an app distributed by Amazon, on the hardware that Amazon owns, where you have a moral quandary: Should I affect someone else’s rights? And I would say that American culture in 2026 does not equip people to think about that well.

I love a good one-webpage site: You should leave substack

The story of St. Valentines’ connection to the modern holiday goes WAY harder than St. Nicholas’ connection to Christmas:

When your franchise has to reach up to touch rock bottom you accept any crack of light that manifests.

Micro.Blog has a brand new distraction free post composer.

YouTube Video

This headline is a real downer for me because why else am I enduring Michigan winters if not in part for the promise of the vanquishing of ticks, mosquitos and other invertebrate pests:

‘Expert: record-breaking winter temps won’t be enough to hamper Michigan’s tick season‘

‘Abbey Toast’ by Tatsuya Tanaka posted to Miniature-Calendar:

“Overall, the number of noncitizens who voted in Michigan’s last election made up about 0.00028% of voters."

I’ve used an M1 iPad Air as my main casual portal to the internet, and I use it heavily for reading and annotating research literature (through Zotero). The deeper I’ve gotten into dissertation life vs. coursework life the prospect of a sub-$700 macbook with an iPhone chip starts to sound appealing.

During my daily reading encountered Psalm 17:10 and it got me thinking back to several recent @johnfea1.bsky.social “Evangelical roundup” posts.

Scenes from a journey home

Cold bridge

“The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.” - Adam Sewer

‘A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.’ Yeah sure–better training can totally fix this.

Reporting from Robert F. North ‘Welcome to the American Winter:’

Children were a moral fault line for many of the people I met in the Twin Cities—not just the children of immigrants, who are at risk of losing their parents or being deported themselves, but also their white peers in schools and day-care centers.

I met a couple in their 70s who told me they had never considered joining a political protest until ICE came to town, and they realized that their granddaughter was at risk of witnessing a violent immigration raid just by going to school. Dan and Jane (like many others, they asked that I shield their full names) live in a large house in a comfortable suburb, where they welcomed me with tea and cookies.

“When a child witnesses violence or crime, it’s profoundly different from adults,” Dan said. “It leaves scars.”

Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis. This past Friday, Dan joined thousands of others at a protest in Minneapolis, where his fingers were frostbitten in the –9 degrees Fahrenheit weather.

I remember first following @bellingcat.com back during the ‘little green men’ drama of Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014. What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that a valuable source of news on foreign authoritarianism would need to turn their gaze homeward.

With @zotero@fosstodon.org announcing the release of Zotero 8 I would like to once again marvel at the fact that this software is completely FREE TO USE.

Announcing Zotero 8

https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/