jamal mehmood

🚨💐It's publication day💐🚨 You can now buy my new book on the below link: hajarpress.com/books/the-leaf… Hope you find something worthwhile in it Online launch is tomorrow! Get tickets: eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-leaf-of-…

Starmer realising he's less than two months away from the World Cup final in an executive suite

If you're thinking about using gen-AI to "write" books, this 🧵 is for you. I’m a highly experienced editor who’s been in the biz a long time. Recently I’ve had manuscripts come to me where the author has used gen-AI – not for writing, I’ve been assured, but for

Should probably retire this account soon. However, here is some new writing about rome, losing hair, and having children jamalmehmood.substack.com/p/in-rome-i-wa…

"Gaza Strip is now experiencing one of the largest collective psychological disasters in modern history.... the effects of the war are no longer limited to the dead and wounded but have extended to the psychological structure of society as a whole, especially children."

I'm sorry but how on earth is this not front page news everywhere? A child. Cigarettes extinguished on his body. A metal rod inserted into his feet. In front of his father. This is documented, filmed, and handed over through the Red Cross. Where is the ICC? Where is the outrage from those who lecture the world about human rights?

Israeli soldiers torture a one-year-old child in Gaza, including burning his leg with a cigarette and inserting a nail into his leg, according to a report, to pressure his father to make confessions trtworld.com/article/346872…

When I was in my 20s I wished to deepen my understanding of the Israel-Palestine situation. So I purchased at least a dozen books - mostly semi-obscure, academic, many by dissenting Israeli historians. A day came when I closed a book halfway through, resolved to read no further, even to try to forget all I had learned, and then I donated all the books. It was clear, painfully and miserably clear, that I would be wasting my life trying to understand it more when it was nothing more than this.

The BBC must now hand over records of any calls between the Israeli embassy – including ambassador Tzipi Hotovely – and the BBC-issued mobile phone lines of: 1. director-general Tim Davie 2. board member Sir Robbie Gibb 3. BBC News CEO Deborah Turness 4. chair Dr Samir Shah.

BREAKING: The Israeli military says it is dropping charges against five soldiers who were accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee. apnews.com/article/israel…

Unimaginable grief. This level of state criminality is unprecedented. The stuff of sci-fi. Must Read: Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate - Al Jazeera investigation ‘The investigation detailed how specific chemical compositions in Israeli munitions turn human bodies into ash in seconds… “Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?” urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https…

This is being read as a philosophical farewell. It’s a resignation letter from the head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team, and the most important sentence is buried in paragraph three. “I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions. I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most.” That’s the person responsible for keeping Claude safe telling you the pressures to ship are winning. Mrinank Sharma built the Constitutional Classifiers system, developed defenses against AI-assisted bioterrorism, and authored one of the first AI safety cases ever written. Two years of work at the exact intersection of “make the model safe” and “ship the model fast.” And he just walked away. Now zoom out. Dylan Scandinaro, another Anthropic AI safety researcher, left last week to become OpenAI’s Head of Preparedness. Harsh Mehta and Behnam Neyshabur, both senior technical staff, also departed in the past two weeks. Four notable exits in a single month from the company that sells itself as the responsible AI lab. Meanwhile, Anthropic is in talks to raise at a $350B valuation and just launched Opus 4.6 last Thursday. The commercial engine is accelerating. The safety talent is dispersing. This is the core tension of every AI company right now: the people building the guardrails and the people building the revenue targets occupy the same org chart, but they optimize for different variables. When the pressure to scale wins enough internal battles, the safety people don’t fight forever. They leave and write beautifully worded letters about integrity. Sharma’s next move tells you everything. He’s pursuing a poetry degree. When your head of safeguards research decides the most authentic use of his time is writing poems instead of writing safety cases, that’s a signal about what he believes the safety cases were actually accomplishing.

hello - I wrote about bad Muslim art, and it seems to have struck a chord with quite a few people. it deserves more time than I gave it, but the game is the game. anyway, hope the artists among you find it useful. jamalmehmood.substack.com/p/bad-muslim-a…

my latest are you part of a community or a glorified group chat?

THE COGNITIVE COLLAPSE We are witnessing the first documented case of mutual intelligence degradation between humans and machines. This is not theory. This is peer-reviewed science. Texas A&M, UT Austin, and Purdue just proved that AI systems trained on viral content lose 23.6% of their reasoning ability. Long-context comprehension collapses by 38%. Even after retraining with 4.8 times more quality data, a 17.3% deficit remains permanent. The models are forgetting how to think. MIT tracked 54 humans using ChatGPT for four months. Result: weakest brain connectivity of any group tested. When asked to write without AI assistance, 78% could not recall a single passage from essays they had written minutes earlier. The humans are forgetting how to think. Nature published the mathematical proof: AI trained on AI-generated content undergoes “irreversible defects.” The tails of the distribution vanish. Nuance disappears. Everything converges toward the median of whatever the algorithm rewards. Now connect the system. Platforms optimize for engagement. Engagement-optimized content degrades AI training data. Degraded AI produces degraded content. Humans consuming and delegating to these systems experience cognitive decline. Those humans produce content that becomes training data. The feedback loop is closed. Both intelligences are degrading together. 560,000 weekly ChatGPT users now show signs of psychosis according to OpenAI’s own data. Websites blocking AI scraping tripled in one year. AI incidents increased 56.4% in 2024 alone. The information ecosystem that built modern civilization is consuming itself. This is not a technology problem. This is not a human problem. This is a coupled system approaching a phase transition where the quality of thought itself becomes the scarce resource. The organizations and individuals who secure access to genuine human intelligence and uncorrupted information will define the next era. Everyone else will wonder what happened to their ability to reason.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Read the full article here open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Tomorrow morning come and edit your poems w me: luma.com/3ymwbw4l

HELLO my reach and engagement on this site is almost non existent but for those of you who might be interested or known someone who is, I'm teaching a session on editing poetry at the end of the month pls share luma.com/3ymwbw4l

I'm beyond thrilled to receive these endorsements from historians I greatly admire on my first book, 'The Indian Caliphate' - set to be published next month. It's a history which investigates the exiled last Ottoman Caliph's forgotten scheme to revive the Caliphate in India

hello all I'll be part of this panel in Manchester on 2nd Nov at @SalaamFestival come say hi contactmcr.com/events/boiling…

AI poetry proponents HATE this new course offered by human writer Jamal Mehmood lu.ma/b2jkoigm