AI Opportunities and Concerns Discussed in Nottingham
Excitement around AI continues with meetup this evening, but the tech is not without its problems.
A solid good chunk of sunshine today. We will start at 7 degrees now, but reaching 15 degrees by lunch. No threat of rain and very little wind.
Tonight is the monthly evening for the Nottingham Data Science and AI Meetup. Alexander Koukovistas, who has been writing about AI since last year, is giving this month's talk titled "The 80% opportunity - transforming into an AI company". Whilst working at Kentico, a content management system, they've seen AI get used in areas other than just writing software. The free event is hosted at NTU's City Campus, where there will also be pizza. Registration is over on their meetup.com page.
The generative AI revolution has made many tasks easier for people who struggled with them previously, where now you no longer need to be a software engineer to develop iPhone applications, for instance. A weekend wrangling an LLM can lead to a functioning application, an act known popularly as "vibe coding".
Concerns have been raised from some sectors that AI usage isn't always beneficial. The University of Nottingham has updated its academic misconduct rules to cover AI-generated work, classifying unacknowledged use as “false authorship”. Back in January 2025, Nottinghamshire County Council’s Overview Committee said that although they were happy trialling generative AI tools, there were concerns about "how to ensure that we use it and retain empathy and fairness".
There's no denying that tools like ChatGPT have brought about a new way of using the Internet. Whilst the Morning Briefing adamantly avoids using any authorless text, ChatGPT was able to find references to the above Overview Committee where Google failed.
This new toolset is having a detrimental affect on the health of the Internet as a network though. Last night at the Members' Meeting of Nottingham Hackspace, it was heard that their wiki failed under the weight of at least five million requests within a month made by LLMs crawling the website to get its content, without permission from the Hackspace. Aaron Jackson, trustee of the Hackspace, said, "it is unfair to burden small organisations with this kind of thing when it's for their own profit, even if the content is licensed as creative commons."
Disclosure, I am also currently a trustee at the Hackspace.
