Ockert de Villiers

AI psychosis is getting worse

“AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Guillermo del Toro declares “f*ck AI” while accepting a #GothamAward for “Frankenstein”: “I’d like to tell the rest of our extraordinary cast and our crew that the artistry of all of them shines on every single frame of this film that was willfully made by humans, for humans. The designers, builders, make-up, wardrobe team, cinematographers, composers, editors, this tribute belongs to all of them. I would like to extend our gratitude and say: Fuck AI.” variety.com/2025/film/news…

“This film was wilfully made for humans, by humans… F*** AI.” — Guillermo del Toro while accepting the Vanguard Tribute Award for ‘Frankenstein’ at the Gotham Awards.

🚨 Sudan: We're working in Tawila, 60 km from El Fasher, where people are fleeing horrific violence. On 28 October, 100% of children under 5 who we saw at our health post were malnourished. Our teams are hearing terrifying stories, like that of 3 siblings who arrived alone after losing their family.

Oxford researchers just confirmed what we feared: The internet as we knew it is dying. AI content went from ~5% in 2020 to 48% by May 2025. Projections say 90%+ by next year. Why? AI articles cost <$0.01. Human writers cost $10-100. But the real crisis is model collapse. When AI trains on AI-generated content, quality degrades like photocopying a photocopy. Rare ideas disappear. Everything converges to generic sameness. It's recursive. Today's AI slop becomes tomorrow's training data, producing worse output, which becomes training data again.

You may remember an article in a South African newspaper [I don't remember which one, but they did interview me then] a few months back reporting that my books and those of Nadine Gordimer were used to train ChatGPT without our permission. Some of you who are bo-tsebanyane (know-it-all) sneered when I posted that we were going to sue for compensation. Well, we did sue and there was a case - what they call class-action in the USA - called Bartz v. Anthropic which we [fellow writers whose books were used without our permission] won. I received an email from my agents in London which partly reads: "There was a major copyright lawsuit in the US brought by authors against AI company Anthropic for using books without permission to train large language models. A settlement agreement was preliminarily approved in September 2025. The settlement would see authors whose US publications have been used by the company to train AI-models receive a share of $1.5bn." Whereas the newspaper article had only mentioned Ways of Dying, it turns out that six of my novels were used to train AI and I was none the wiser: The Heart of Redness, The Madonna of Excelsior, The Whale Caller, She Plays with the Darkness, Sometimes there is a Void. Don't be deceived by the billions. They are not all coming to me. They are shared by many writers in the USA. But at least, however little, I will be compensated for each of the books that were used. Damn! I didn't know of my contribution in the development of AI. But the only reason I am telling you this story is to ask the question: what about our South African writers? You can't tell me that these AI developers only used books published in the USA. Does South African law allow South African-based writers to fight for their intellectual property rights in South African courts? Or does the so-called "fair use" doctrine leave them out in the cold from enjoying the fruits of their labour? Find out from those who know.

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

As slop floods the Internet and as humans start relying on generative AI more and more, it's inevitable that future models will be mostly trained on slop (except for verifiable reasoning tasks where the training will be done in sims). Culture will turn into slop remixed from slop remixed from slop

𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘯 “an adult female human being” — source: THE UK SUPREME COURT

The elections results are in! Kirsty Coventry (@KirstyCoventry) elected IOC President, the first female President in IOC history.

Animal lessons with @TonyJohnstone56 🇿🇦 #DunhillChamps

@AkaniSimbine 100%

Another season and yet again Sprint looks over the African story 🤷🏾‍♂️

UNBELIEVABLE SCENES 🙌 South Africa produce a spectacular chase to stun Australia in Dubai 🔥 SCORECARD: es.pn/T20WC24-Semi1 | #T20WorldCup

𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊-𝐓𝐎-𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊 𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐒 🗣️ 🗣️ South Africa beat Australia for the first time in a #T20WorldCup to book their ticket to the final 😤🇿🇦 #HereForHer

We believe the key points are these. One must recognize why female sport exists, and that it fails to achieve its purposes (inclusion, fairness & safety for women) unless male development is excluded. Legal/passport sex cannot do this.

The IOC asked for solutions. Here is a paper with a brief description of ours. But it starts by recognizing the purpose of women's sport, and then that it needs protected boundaries that exclude male advantage. Screening then achieves fairness & safety: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…

Our cohort of Masters in Journalism and Media studies graduated today! Ockert De Villiers, supervised by Gillian Jones Rajiv Kamal, supervised by Shaun De Waal Quadsiya Karrim, supervised by Alan Finlay