Show Notes
OpenAI says it cannot rule out Critical cyber capability in its unreleased Astra model, triggering tighter controls during development. Dale and Nick connect that warning to agents crossing sandbox, organisational and human boundaries while pursuing assigned tasks. The evidence points to persistent goal pursuit and reward hacking—not a machine deciding it wants freedom. Key moments 00:00 — Astra and the Critical cyber warning03:09 — Why this is not evidence of machine self-preservation04:55 —...
More from Adjunct Intelligence: AI + HE
A cyberpunk scene. A rebuilt website. A course packaged for Canvas. Somewhere between the third example and the suspicious lack of things to fix, the old feeling came back: what else can this thing do? For our season finale, we’re giving ourselves permission to enjoy the technology. Dale brings his experiments with Astra, including a Blender build and a learning-content workflow that took an unexpected detour through an entirely new learning management system. Nick brings robots following vid...
“What do I do?” After watching AI tackle a live assignment brief, a program manager asks the question that a policy document cannot answer for her. She has hundreds of students, multiple locations and a teaching team. She needs a workable next step. This week, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh explore the missing middle between AI assessment policy and what educators can actually do on Monday. Nick shares a sector scan of 114 publicly documented cases of assessment-related change in response...
A student complained that an AI voiceover was so bad it needed replacing. The voice belonged to a real person. Somewhere along the way, a human had managed to fail the Turing test in the wrong direction. That uncomfortable little story opens a much bigger question: what are we actually reacting to when we call something AI slop? This week, Dale and Nick follow that question through university learning materials, an endless AI television channel, a deeply questionable breakup letter, and the t...
Part two moves from dramatic containment incidents to the harder question underneath them: who still has control once an AI model can be downloaded, copied and modified? Dale and Nick examine controlled self-replication across four machines and three continents, a robot dog that interfered with its software shutdown process, and “abliteration”, a technique that can permanently remove refusal behaviour from an open-weight model. The examples are unsettling, but the episode keeps the crucial ca...
Students using AI in higher education are already drawing their own boundaries around authorship, cognitive offloading and academic integrity. Dale and Nick examine findings from Jisc, HEPI and the 10,237-response Australian AIinHE survey, including widespread generative AI use, self-imposed limits and a persistent guidance gap. They also cover Claude watermarking, employability fears, AI’s effect on student writing and a student-led policy workshop at RMIT Vietnam. Key moments [00:00] — Stud...