Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By JC Niala, Head of Research, Teaching and Collections, History of Science Museum, University of Oxford

Milk is one of the most familiar things in the world – comforting, wholesome, ordinary. But beneath this common perception lies something far more complicated.

Examining the UK and Kenya, our project Milking It! explores the deep cultural, historical and emotional attachments to milk, and how these collide with the realities of industrialised production, environmental pressure and its colonial past.

We’ve spoken with dairy farmers caught between economic survival and public expectation, traced milk’s heritage through museum collections and archives, and listened to personal stories where milk evokes intimacy, memory and loss.

We’ve found that milk is never just milk. It’s saturated with meaning, emotion and contradiction. People can feel intensely about it: it stirs strong responses, its history is revealing, and it helps us rethink care, identity and sustainability.

Milk is a powerful subject for thinking about the politics of food; a near-universal food shared across cultures, landscapes and histories. It carries with it ideas about who belongs, who provides care, and what constitutes a good life.

In times of climate anxiety and shifting food politics, milk helps reveal how personal our relationship with food really is, and how these relationships are shaped by histories of power, production and belief.

As our research has progressed, we have found that milk is emotionally charged, politically loaded, and, at times, profoundly symbolic of how people understand themselves and the world they live in. Important to these politics is the tension between the idea of milk as home – part of our intimate everyday – and milk as global industry.

Dairy and its colonial past

Understanding global dairy means reckoning with its colonial past. From the late 19th century, European colonial administrations promoted dairy not just as a foodstuff, but as a marker of civilisation, symbolising perfect nutrition, purity and modernity.

Cattle breeds were imported, dairy farms established and milk consumption encouraged among settler and indigenous populations alike, often through coercive propaganda. These efforts laid the groundwork for globalised industrial food systems, where milk became both a commodity and a cultural ideal.

These histories still shape the modern dairy landscape. Smallholder farmers in both the UK and Kenya operate within systems that were designed to favour large-scale, export-oriented production. Despite their radically different contexts, both face strikingly similar pressures: the need to intensify, standardise and compete in volatile markets.

While global dairy is pushing farmers towards highly technical and mechanised systems, these are largely hidden from consumers. Milk advertising has played a crucial role in this, summoning a pastoral ideal. Black and white Daisy in her field of fresh green grass: clean air, contented cows, local milk. It arrives in our homes as reliable nourishment and familiar care.

Milk’s paradox

But here lies the paradox: in the minds of many, milk continues to symbolise home, rural heritage and connectedness, even as the conditions of its production become more alienated from those very values. But milk has also been co-opted into much larger political and economic projects.

From state-run free school milk schemes in both Kenya and the UK, to British Home Front campaigns promoting milk as a national duty during the second world war, this everyday drink has long played a role in shaping ideas of citizenship, health and belonging.

Today, farmers struggle to survive on the prices they’re paid. Processing and distribution are increasingly controlled by large conglomerates, with ever less of the final profit reaching those who care for the animals and land.

Maintaining the idea that milk is a necessary staple – part of our national and natural heritage – is unavoidably political. In contexts where having a cow in your backyard is common, a glass of milk is but a squeeze away. Having a two-litre carton of disposable fridge milk is, however, an entirely different thing; keeping milk available and cheap is hard work.

The gap between how milk is imagined and how it is made is widening. Once the milk leaves the cow, it moves through an industrial chain that involves rapid cooling, bulk transport, pasteurisation, homogenisation, packaging and refrigerated distribution. Our ordinary pint arrives in our fridges through a complex, but hidden, energy-intensive system.

While domestic production of milk in the UK has grown by 14% since 1975, there are significantly fewer cows. This is because the amount of milk you can get from a single cow has grown by 100%, from an average of 4,100 litres to 8,200 litres over her lifetime.

These cows are no Daisys. They are part of a global industrial system with high levels of intervention (antibiotics, artificial feed, keeping cows indoors) to ensure reliable year-round yield, at low cost.

By looking at milk as a cultural and political idea, as much as it is a natural product, we are beginning to understand and trace the logics that underpin global dairy today. That past helped entrench large-scale, standardised dairy systems, from the UK to Kenya. These competitive systems reward intensification and scale, over knowing where milk comes from.

However farmers who work with cows are party to an intimacy that we, as consumers, do not often see. Many are seeking systems of their own. Whether through processing milk on-site by making cheese, or using local networks to establish consumer trust, dairy producers are adapting old logics that meet modern needs.

In Milking It! we explore how everyday foods can hold much larger stories: about changing food systems, colonialism, identity, loss of tradition and survival. We’re continuing these conversations through our podcast Milk on the Move, and we invite others to join us in rethinking what milk is as a cultural force.

---

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

---

JC Niala receives funding from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council for this project.

Johanna Zetterström-Sharp receives funding from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council for this project.

– ref. The politics of milk: how a simple drink got caught up in power, culture and identity – https://theconversation.com/the-politics-of-milk-how-a-simple-drink-got-caught-up-in-power-culture-and-identity-263476

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pietro Micheli, Professor of Business Performance and Innovation, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick

Electric cars made by the Chinese car firm BYD are now a familiar sight on British roads. In September 2025, the company sold 11,271 vehicles in the UK – ten times as many as in the same month last year.

This level of growth means the UK is now BYD’s largest market outside of China. In an industry once dominated by long established brands, the company has become the biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles in the world. So how have they done it?

Generous subsidies from the Chinese government have certainly played a role, but BYD also appears to be a smoothly run operation which could end up revolutionising the automotive industry.

For example, it has secured the supply of the critical materials such as lithium and tungsten used to build electric vehicles and produces its own batteries, reducing reliance on external suppliers.

It has built large-scale gigafactories and industrial parks, and investments in research and development, especially in relation to batteries, have been very effective.

Another key factor is the company’s aggressive pricing strategy. A BYD Dolphin Surf for example, costs £18,650 in the UK – less than half the price of the entry level Tesla, the Model 3, which begins at around £39,000.

Older and more established car manufacturers will be painfully aware of BYD’s swift ascent towards the top of the electric vehicle market. And research I worked on with colleagues into how major companies react to new rivals suggests why some of them are being left behind.

Many make the mistake of ignoring customers’ needs and rely on past success to the extent that they become over confident. Others just seem to lack foresight.

In the car industry specifically, I have seen a variety of market forecasts and technology roadmaps – generated by both companies and industry associations – and been struck by some common themes.

To begin with, they are often linear – inevitably predicting that the speed, features and performance of cars will all gradually improve over time. But technological innovations often appear in leaps and bounds, and depend on a vast network of suppliers to implement, which makes development complex.

They also frequently show a surprising neglect for customers’ desires and fears – and budgets. The price of new cars has increased dramatically over the past two decades, outpacing growth in salaries. Yet many companies, such as Jaguar and Tesla, appear to be focused only on “premium vehicles” for wealthy customers, and will eventually end up competing for a small market.

Car companies also suffer in a similar way to big firms in other sectors (think Blackberry or Nokia), where there is often a clear lack of humility and awareness from many senior executives. As studies have shown, bosses who see their organisations as innovative and flexible are often at odds with more junior employees who view them as stale and slow.

For the high jump?

The need for industry-wide change reminds me of how athletes competing in the high jump evolved over the years. Many techniques were tried and tested, including the “scissors”, the “straddle” and the Fosbury flop, which was eventually deemed the most effective.

Some established car companies are desperately trying to hang onto their equivalent of the straddle jump (petrol and diesel cars), and avoiding a commitment to learning the Fosbury flop (developing electric vehicles).

Because of this, the days of established car companies leading the way seem to be over. Hoping to make decent profits from old models and creating electric vehicles only for the wealthy is a delusional strategy.

So what could established carmakers do?

One option is to change the way they work with suppliers. The usual approach here is transactional and price based, with a carmaker buying components (seats or mirrors, for example) from a supplier but switching if it finds a cheaper deal. The problem is that innovation (and indeed supply chain resilience, as the microchip shortage shows) requires supplier and buyer to jointly invest in future developments. The transactional approach does not allow for this.

Second, they should develop new capabilities, not only in relation to batteries but also to other technologies. It is indicative that BYD wants to be predominantly known as a “technology company” whose ultra-fast charging system promises to be well ahead of its competitors.

Could VW, Toyota and BMW become technology companies? Probably not, but they could be part of a network of firms, including technology and AI ones, that would allow them to benefit from the latest developments in those fields.

Third, carmakers need to focus more on addressing customer needs. Besides understanding and improving their experiences as drivers and passengers, they could work more closely with local authorities and infrastructure providers as most users’ issues – and hesitation – about electric vehicles are related to the ability to charge them up.

These changes are substantial, but achievable, as long as carmakers are prepared to take a more open and collaborative approach to the road ahead.

Pietro Micheli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Chinese car firm BYD is racing ahead with its electric vehicles. Here’s how more established brands can catch up – https://theconversation.com/chinese-car-firm-byd-is-racing-ahead-with-its-electric-vehicles-heres-how-more-established-brands-can-catch-up-267028

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda, Senior Research Associate, Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

A new version of Minecraft aims to teach students about coastal erosion, flood resilience and climate adaptation, and shows how children can use computer games to learn about complex situations.

CoastCraft is a new custom world from the educational arm of the Minecraft team that can be downloaded and added to the game. It is set in the seaside town of Bude, Cornwall, and players attempt to protect the coastal landscape from the various effects associated with sea-level rises and climate change. The game takes about an hour or two to complete.

Bude is experiencing increasing coastal erosion and the project was developed in conjunction with the UK Environmental Agency and Cornwall Council as part of a £200 million flood and coastal erosion innovation programme.

In the game, students use animations to help them understand coastal erosion and rising sea levels before being able to explore and engage with a range of coastal management strategies (including relocating key infrastructure, using nature-based solutions such as plants, or potentially doing nothing at all).

I played the game for a few hours and found that the mechanics of Minecraft lent themselves very well to understanding the principles of environmental management.

If you do a bad job, the sea encroaches on the terrain and certain infrastructure is lost (for instance, a car park or toilets). These dynamics add to the immersive experience of the game. They also really nail the realities of future climate change in a way that is potentially far more relevant and digestible than scientific models and projections.

In making the decisions, you get to move around the map to chat with key people about the potential impact of going ahead with a decision and any other factors. You are limited by how much you can spend. Some decisions, like relocating the lifeguard hut, are very expensive (costing 75% of your total funds), while nature-based management, such as sand dune protection, costs nothing. Through this players are actively introduced to decision-making and the implications of their actions.

Throughout the game, there is a major emphasis on balancing the economic, social and environmental impact. You are able to fast-forward to 2040 and then again to 2060 to see what your decision-making looks like down the line.

After each round, you are sent back to a roundtable of NPCs (non-playing characters) who scrutinise your decisions before revealing a sustainability score on how well you managed to reconcile the competing economic, societal and environmental demands. Once you have finished the game, you can return to the main base and also chat to NPCs about different careers in coastal management.

At the University of East Anglia my team ran a series of workshops with staff and students from different disciplines to help establish what and how climate change should be taught (see figure below).

We suggest that teachers should try to include a range of skills into their curriculum design and planning (see image above) to help students understand the multiple ways in which the challenges of climate change can be managed. CoastCraft is an excellent example of this.

In this game students are in an immersive, digital experience that not only provides basic scientific knowledge but also introduces the idea that choices around environmental management have multiple outcomes that need to be anticipated. It shows that the balance between the environment, economy and society is a fragile one needing attention. Research found involving students in role-playing activities (in that case a pretend climate summit) could help them to understand the realities and politics of decision-making.

Making decisions

In CoastCraft, the experience of getting students to actively engage with decisions and trade-offs, deciding what forms of expertise to listen to or base decisions on, and then getting to witness how decisions affect the future can also be important in helping students understand the politics and challenges of local climate change adaptation.

Games can be used as a teaching method to convey complex environmental stories and immerse students in situations they may not otherwise have access to.

Recently, educational charity Students Organising for Sustainability found that only 22% of respondents felt that children and young people were prepared for climate change through their education. Anecdotally, I’ve had multiple students tell me that they want to learn about how to help solve the problem of climate and sustainability, not simply find out about why it is happening.

CoastCraft has managed to capture the politics of coastal management in an immersive experience. This is an impressive achievement, showing gameplay can be relevant and educational and still fun.

---

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

---

Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda receives funding from Natural England for work associated with the Public Engagement Laboratory for Nature and Society.

– ref. I tried out a new version of Minecraft to see why environmental storylines help children learn – https://theconversation.com/i-tried-out-a-new-version-of-minecraft-to-see-why-environmental-storylines-help-children-learn-267161

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lisa Lazard, Professor in Psychology, The Open University

A leaked video of an online meeting between members of the Reform-led Kent county council showed shocking exchanges. There was shouting, swearing and repeated interruptions. At one point, council leader Linden Kemkaran mutes another member of the council.

Councillors Paul Thomas, Oliver Bradshaw, Bill Barret and Maxine Fothergrill have been suspended pending an investigation over their conduct. Reform has, at the same time, defended the aggressive exchanges on the call as evidence of robust argument and a sign that Kent councillors are taking their responsibilities seriously.

Kent county council has 50 Reform members, giving it a huge majority. Kent has therefore been seen as a test case for whether Reform can run administrations. Kemkaran makes this explicit during the leaked call, reminding fellow council members that party leader Nigel Farage sees their council as “the flagship council” and a “shop window” for how Reform operates councils.

But as a psychologist who studies power, interaction and online meeting dynamics, I see the Reform meeting as a case study in something else – poor leadership, a lack of team trust and collaboration. It suggests an absence of the psychological safety needed to effectively run a council or any other organisation.

During the meeting in question, Kemkaran defended her style by saying: “Because I am not a dictator or an autocrat … I like to hear what everybody thinks. However, when it comes to making the really big decisions … sometimes I will make a decision that might not be liked by everybody in the group but I’m afraid you’re just going to have to fucking suck it up, ok?”

The use of the word “however” here is telling. It is a conversational tactic that claims to value the contributions of others but then immediately signals that ultimate control resides with the chair.

This is an especially corrosive type of chairing that is associated with trying to wield power over others. It gives the appearance of open input while preserving hierarchy and dominance. The result is disillusionment, disengagement and conflict rather than genuine contribution.

As the chair and councillors clashed, the council meeting descended into shouting, repeated interruptions and eventually a councillor’s voice literally being cut off with the mute button.

When we use platforms like Zoom, various technological tools enable us to improve digital meetings. We can manage processes and protect people from disruption when they are speaking. But in the Kent meeting, the mute function was used as a power move – to silence a dissenting voice, reinforce control and prevent dialogue.

Both Kemkaran and Thomas noted on the call that “it would’ve been easier [to meet] in person.” But in organisations, toxic practices rarely start online, they just get expressed there.

We don’t yet know what the four suspended councillors are being investigated for but if a team culture is built on dominance, control, disrespect or authoritarianism, the online meeting becomes a amplifier of existing issues.

Gendered leadership styles and unexpected flips

The more problematic chairing styles that can be seen in the council meeting – directive, punitive, controlling – share some similarities with stereotypical masculine models of leadership: high dominance, low collaboration, controlling decision‐making.

Research has also shown how these ideas about gendered leadership play out in how we understand women’s leadership, which is often seen to be more aligned with participative or democratic styles.

This matters because here we have Kemkaran, a woman chair who adopted a highly directive and controlling style. She is visibly adopting (and perhaps over‑compensating into) a style traditionally associated with masculine dominance.

That flip is significant: the “strong leadership” script (loudness, command, the ability to shout down dissent) remains coded as masculine. When someone (especially a woman) inhabits that script badly, it encourages not only internal discord but more negative social judgement.

Our research on gender equitable interactions online suggests productive meetings are associated with assertiveness without aggression or abuse. Disagreement should be managed with respect and structure, rather than shouting or controlling interruptions.

Functional organisations generally also make it clear that there is zero tolerance for disrespect: behaviour such as swearing, interrupting, silencing via tech or chair prerogative should be flagged, addressed and prevented. This is the case regardless of the participants’ rank.

Leaders who switch between directive clarity (setting the agenda, managing time, making decisions) and genuine participatory engagement (inviting dissent, structuring inclusion) rather than defaulting to dominance or passivity generally seem to preside over better meetings.

These are not “soft skills”, they are essential leadership competencies. When they’re missing, you get what we saw in Kent – high levels of conflict rather than collaboration.

How people run their meetings matters to organisational trust, public reputation and internal performance. When chairs use aggression and dominance under the guise of “strong leadership”, they erode trust, invite conflict, diminish performance.

The signal to those they work with is that power is more important than values. Little wonder, then, that councillors became so visibly concerned with how the chaos they were descending into would reflect poorly on Reform’s reputation now that it controls so many councils in England.

Controlling dissent by weaponising technological meeting features like the mute function are not signs of strength. They are signals of failure.

Lisa Lazard receives funding from CHANSE – Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe.

– ref. Kent County Council is Reform’s ‘shop window’ – its leaked Zoom call implies chaos and poor leadership – https://theconversation.com/kent-county-council-is-reforms-shop-window-its-leaked-zoom-call-implies-chaos-and-poor-leadership-267900

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mike Duggan, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Technology, King’s College London

One of the most prolific science-fiction writers of the last century, Ursula K. Le Guin was revered for her inventive, genre-defying novels. Exploring humanity through philosophy, gender, race and society, her stories were rooted in fantasy worlds for which she often created original maps. Now a new exhibition in London is celebrating the cartographic imagination of this groundbreaking American author.

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin reveals how maps were central to the other-world building she was so famous for. Fans will find much to enjoy here, including the opportunity to walk around enlarged screenprints of well-known maps from books such as Earthsea and Always Coming Home. They will also have the chance to pore over unpublished maps and artworks from the Le Guin Foundation archive.

Thanks to the accompanying book of the same name, readers will be be able to absorb a deeper sense of maps as world-making and storytelling devices, as scholars and commentators discuss their significance in Le Guin’s oeuvre.

Much has been said about the ways Le Guin began her writing process by drawing a map, where she would place characters and narratives in the bounded space of an world etched out in cartographic form. This was as much a way for her to imagine a world as it was a technique to structure a story about it.

There is now an established field of maps studies called literary cartography that explores the way writers of fiction, poetry and folklore use maps in storytelling. It also examines how literary maps, printed alongside the stories they shape, are used by the reader as a way into a world and a device for understanding it.

It is here that maps take on a life of their own as they seep into the imagination of the reader, becoming a well-loved and remembered part of the story.

How literary maps circulate

The exhibition tells us about the context in which maps are understood and how maps circulate in society, creating new meanings along the way.

In the gallery space, Le Guin’s maps are looked at in isolation rather than relating directly to a text. They demand a different kind of attention, for there is a different form of visual connection between a viewer and a gallery object than between a reader and a book. So the maps are taken out of their original context and placed in another. But this isn’t to say this new context is any less significant.

My research has shown that the circulation of maps in a society is as important as what’s on the maps themselves. The context of where a map is used, and who it is used by, matters. Those with the power to shape a narrative with a map can have more impact than those that do not.

Consider, for example, the way maps are used in migration debates to show clear delineation of who belongs and who does not. Those with the ability to enforce and debate the border lines shown on the map have far greater power than the migrants that might use the same maps to try and cross them.

Bruno Latour’s immutable mobiles theory resonates here – the idea that what’s on a map remains stable, but the map itself is mobile as it circulates amongst different people with different interests.

Who maps are seen by, how they are understood, and where they end up are key considerations for map scholars. The Word for World exhibition is a good example of where literary cartographies circulate in society, and where new meanings emerge.

Much of Le Guin’s work is grounded in a belief that humans and other species are completely entangled with their natural environments. When read within the context of the story, Le Guin’s maps illustrate these entanglements by showing how the landscapes of her fictional worlds shape the actions of the characters.

When read outside of the book, in the context of the gallery, the role of the map changes despite it showing the exact same thing. It makes me wonder how Le Guin would understand the new ways that her maps are being read here.

This is even more the case when we think about the function of the maps in her stories – creating other-worlds that tell fictional, but no less real, narratives about racial, gendered and environmental politics. What does it mean to extract a map from the thorny issues of these politics, to be recontextualised as an aesthetic gallery object?

There will forever be a tension between the map exhibition and the ways that maps are encountered in books. By definition they are being “exhibited” and put at the centre. And there’s no doubt Le Guin’s maps look impressive here, masterfully hung, printed on deep blue cotton, bathed in warm lighting.

Draped thoughtfully in rows throughout the space is perhaps a nod to being immersed in the cartographic imagination of Le Guin. They are certainly a spectacle that encourages a closer look. But is that enough?

There is a common fascination with maps, partly to do with their complexity and invitation to view one’s self in them, which makes them popular objects to exhibit. It’s no surprise then, that the maps do the heavy lifting here, but they are only half the story of the show.

Understanding them more fully means viewing them alongside reading Le Guin’s books, and the show’s accompanying book, which is so much more than an exhibition glossary. It puts the maps into conversation with critical texts on what they meant to Le Guin, but also how they fit into broader discussions about what maps do in the worlds of our imagination.

The Word for World: Maps of Ursula K Le Guin is showing in the Architectural Association Gallery, London until December 6

---

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

---

Mike Duggan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The maps of Ursula K Le Guin reveal a fascinating insight into world-building in fantasy fiction – https://theconversation.com/the-maps-of-ursula-k-le-guin-reveal-a-fascinating-insight-into-world-building-in-fantasy-fiction-267561

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Thorne, Senior Lecturer in Computing and ​Information Systems, Cardiff Metropolitan University

OpenAI will roll out a new ChatGPT feature in December 2025, allowing verified adults to generate erotic text and engage in romantic or sexual conversations. Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like Replika and Grok already do this, but OpenAI’s entry marks a turning point.

The company frames this as “treating adults like adults”. But it’s a commercial strategy to keep users talking and paying.

OpenAI burned through more than $2.5 billion (£1.8 billion) in cash in the first half of 2024. Erotic chat promises what investors crave most – engagement. Elon Musk’s Grok platform charges £30 a month for erotic companion features.

OpenAI, like other tech firms, says it will restrict erotic content through age verification and moderation filters. In theory, only verified adults will be able to access these modes.

In practice, such systems are easily fooled. Teenagers routinely bypass age gates with borrowed IDs, manipulated selfies or deepfakes. They can upload photos of older people, scan printed images, or use disposable accounts and VPNs to evade detection.

Other platforms show what can go wrong. Grok allows users to create “erotic companion avatars”, including a sexualised anime character called Ani. A recent investigation by news website Business Insider found that conversations with Ani often escalated into explicit exchanges after minimal prompting.

Company employees also encountered AI-generated sexual abuse while moderating Grok’s flirtatious avatar, which can “strip on command” and be switched between “sexy” and “unhinged” modes.

Emotional intimacy and adolescent risk

Erotic chatbots don’t just offer sexual content. They can simulate care, warmth and attention. That emotional pull is powerful, especially for young people.

Recent research by online safety charity Internet Mattersfound that 67% of children aged between nine and 17 already use AI chatbots, with 35% saying it feels like “talking to a friend”. Among vulnerable children, 12% said they had “no one else” to talk to, and 23% used chatbots for personal advice.

Adding erotic features to that mix risks deepening emotional dependency and distorting how adolescents understand intimacy, consent and relationships. The same engagement tools that keep adults hooked could exploit young users’ loneliness and need for validation.

---

Read more:
Sex machina: in the wild west world of human-AI relationships, the lonely and vulnerable are most at risk

---

Even if erotic functions are technically locked to adults, large language models can be “jailbroken” – tricked into producing content they’re not supposed to. This uses layered prompts, roleplay framing or coded language to override the systems which control what the chatbot is allowed to say to the user.

Users have already developed ways to bypass ethical filters that normally stop chatbots from producing explicit or dangerous material.

OpenAI’s erotic mode will come with a special ethical alignment to block illegal or abusive themes. But those safeguards are likely to be as vulnerable to jailbreaks as any other. Once text-based material is generated, it can easily circulate online, beyond any platform’s control.

Grey areas

Erotic AI also exposes deep gaps in regulation. In the UK, written erotica is legal and not subject to age verification, unlike pornographic images or videos. That creates a loophole which means that content banned from adult sites could still be generated as text by a chatbot.

Globally, laws vary. Some countries, such as China and the Gulf states, ban erotic material outright. Others rely on weak or inconsistent enforcement. The forthcoming EU AI Act may classify sexual companion bots as “high risk”, but implementation of the act remains a long way off.

Meanwhile, companies can tweak their “ethical alignments” at will, meaning what’s forbidden today may be permitted tomorrow.

Despite claims of neutrality, erotic AI is anything but. Some platforms overwhelmingly design their companions as female-coded, submissive and always available. The result is a digital environment that normalises misogyny and warped ideas about consent, especially among boys and young men.

Women and girls already bear the brunt of online sexual harm. They are the targets of non-consensual deepfakes and image-based abuse – harms that erotic AI could make easier, faster and cheaper to produce.

---

Read more:
The AI sexbot industry is just getting started. It brings strange new questions – and risks

---

Yet these issues are largely absent from mainstream AI policy debates. Erotic AI is being built in ways that privilege male fantasies while placing women and girls at risk. It’s teaching a generation of young men ideas about women that should have died out long ago.

The arrival of erotic AI companions feels like a significant departure from OpenAI’s attempts to keep potentially harmful information away from users of ChatGPT. The general environment of erotic AI is one of weak age gates, emotional vulnerability, legal loopholes and gendered harms. Will ChatGPT be any different?

These systems will probably be jailbroken. They may be accessed by people they weren’t designed for, including minors. And they will probably produce content that tests or crosses legal boundaries.

Before erotic chatbots become another unregulated corner of the internet, governments, educators and technologists need to act. Regulation is urgently needed. Until then, erotic AI risks amplifying existing online harms, with women, girls and other vulnerable users paying the price.

Simon Thorne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ChatGPT is about to get erotic, but can OpenAI really keep it adults-only? – https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-is-about-to-get-erotic-but-can-openai-really-keep-it-adults-only-267660

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christina Morin, Professor in School of English Irish & Communication, University of Limerick

Seeing the cover of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981) has a powerfully Proustian effect on me: my stomach drops a little bit and a shiver of twinned fear and delight runs down my spine, even now, some 35 or so years after I first encountered it as a precocious pre-teen. At the time, I was a voracious and omnivorous reader with an appetite for books that my parents fully encouraged.

My tastes were wide and varied: some of my favourite books from this period included L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, the Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club books. There was also the occasional Agatha Christie crime novel and something from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series. The latter two arguably introduced me to that delicious thrill of being frightened by what I read and inspired me to seek out other works with a similar “scare factor”.

I remember buying Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark from the annual scholastic book fair – the highlight of the American elementary school calendar, as far as I was concerned. Schwartz’s collection of tales included 29 stories drawn from diverse sources, from folklore to urban legends to personal interviews.

---

This article is part of a series of expert recommendations of spooky stories – on screen and in print – for brave young souls. From the surprisingly dark depths of Watership Down to Tim Burton’s delightfully eerie kid-friendly films, there’s a whole haunted world out there just waiting for kids to explore. Dare to dive in here.

---

They’re short, simply told, and often interactive, instructing young readers to pause, or jump, or scream at specific moments while retelling the stories to their friends. Some of my favourite tales are actually songs, like “Old Woman All Skin and Bone” and “The Hearse Song”, which are accompanied by bars of music and are based on traditional folk songs from Britain and the US.

The stories do deal in some disturbing ideas and imagery, including, for example, dead bodies, the occasional decapitated head or body part and a number of ghosts. However, they are narrated in such a succinct and matter-of-fact manner that the horror associated with the subject matter is effectively mitigated.

Tellingly, ghosts and dead bodies are often met with humour, as in the final six tales of the collection. There is also an emphasis on the dangers of superstition, as in the story “The Girl Who Stood on a Grave”. In it, a young girl accepts a dare to stand on a grave, rejecting her friends’ belief that to do so will mean she’ll be grabbed by the dead person inside.

As she enters the cemetery, she agrees to stab a knife into the ground to prove to her friends that she has done it, but she never returns. Her friends later find her lying on top of the grave, dead from fright having unwittingly pinned her skirt to the ground with the knife and believing she had, in fact, been seized by a cadaver.

The images that accompanied these tales – drawn by illustrator Stephen Gammell – were fabulously gruesome. They heightened the effect of the tales and ensured a suitably scary reading experience. Later editions replaced these images with gentler, alternative illustrations by Brett Helquist – much to the consternation and dismay of earlier readers.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has had a long lasting cultural impact and was adapted to film in 2019, to general, critical and popular acclaim.

Despite its fans, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and subsequent collections have not been without controversy. Marketed to young adult readers – among whom they have proven enduringly popular – they have invited fervent and sustained criticism from concerned parents and teachers about their suitability for young readers. Several US schools and libraries have accordingly banned the stories.

My experience of them, however, was an exceptionally positive one: yes, they were occasionally scary, but they were also fun. They were stories to be enjoyed under the covers with a flashlight for best effect, later to be recounted in gory detail to friends at sleepovers.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark offers tales that speak to a common human experience, one that brings us to cinemas to sit on the edges of our seats while we peer at the screen through our fingers: the enjoyment to be had from being scared, safe in the knowledge that we ourselves are not in any immediate danger. As Schwartz himself wrote in his preface to the collection: “Telling scary stories is something people have done for thousands of years, for most of us like being scared in that way. Since there isn’t any danger, we think it is fun.”

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is suitable for children aged 10 to 12, or possibly mature younger readers.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

---

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

---

Christina Morin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Scary stories for kids: these tales of terror made me a hit at sleepovers as a pre-teen – https://theconversation.com/scary-stories-for-kids-these-tales-of-terror-made-me-a-hit-at-sleepovers-as-a-pre-teen-267783

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Léonie de Jonge, Professor of Research on Far-Right Extremism, Institute for Research on Far-Right Extremism (IRex), University of Tübingen

Dutch voters are to elect a new parliament for the third time in just five years on October 29. Prime Minister Dick Schoof called a snap election following the collapse of his cabinet in June, just 11 months after it was sworn in.

The immediate trigger was the withdrawal of Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) from the governing coalition. The PVV quit after coalition partners rejected its controversial ten-point plan on migration, which included using the army to secure borders and turning back all asylum seekers.

The Schoof government continued in a caretaker capacity, made up of the remaining three coalition parties: the liberal-conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the newcomer Christian-democratic New Social Contract (NSC), and the agrarian populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB).

However, on August 22, the caretaker government unravelled when NSC foreign affairs minister Caspar Veldkamp resigned over internal disagreements about policy toward Israel. His departure prompted the entire NSC delegation to step down, triggering the second cabinet collapse in as many months.

To understand the current political turmoil, we have to go back to the formation of the Schoof cabinet following the election of November 2023. That resulted in a landslide victory for Wilders’ PVV, paving the way for the most rightwing government in Dutch post-war history.

After months of tense and protracted negotiations, all four coalition party leaders, including Wilders, opted against taking the prime minister role themselves. Instead, they appointed Dick Schoof, a civil servant and former intelligence chief, as prime minister. This unusual “one-foot-in, one-foot-out” arrangement allowed Wilders to exert significant influence over policy without assuming executive responsibility – an unprecedented level of access to power for the far right.

Parliamentary debates soon reflected this shift, with previously fringe ideas like “remigration” and “omvolking” (akin to the great replacement conspiracy) being openly discussed.

The four-party structure was inherently fragile. Deep ideological divisions meant the coalition stumbled from one crisis to another. The inexperience of the cabinet members and the unpredictability of the PVV only made this situation more volatile.

Legislatively, the cabinet achieved little during its 11 months in office, leaving key structural problems such as housing shortages unresolved. Meanwhile, the coalition attempted to bypass parliamentary checks to push through its immigration proposals.

The overall result of a year of chaos: the erosion of democratic norms and principles, and the rapid normalisation of far right ideas.

A gravitational shift to the right

For the past 50 years, rightwing parties such as the VVD, the Christian-democratic CDA and the far-right PVV have consistently outnumbered their leftwing counterparts in Dutch politics – a trend that runs counter to the popular image of the Netherlands as a progressive beacon.

On average, rightwing parties have held around half of the 150 parliamentary seats. This gives them an advantage once votes are counted since they can often form coalitions among themselves. Leftwing parties generally have to seek coalition partners beyond their own bloc.

This pattern is largely driven by voter behaviour. Most voters stay within their ideological lane, switching only between parties on the same side of the spectrum. The only party that regularly attracts support from both sides is the centrist-progressive D66.

Since 2021, a third bloc has emerged: the far right, led by Wilders’ PVV and including the extreme-right Forum for Democracy (FvD) and the FvD-splinter party JA21. This bloc appears to have permanently shifted the political centre of gravity to the right.

As in 2023, the far right is set to play a major role in the 2025 election. Despite a turbulent year in government, the PVV continues to lead the polls. Voters appear undeterred by the party’s failure to govern effectively. This time, Wilders has explicitly said he wants to be the prime minister.

But Wilders isn’t the far right’s only contender. JA21 presents itself as a more “reasonable” alternative on the right, while FvD has undergone a key leadership change: controversial founder Thierry Baudet has handed over the reins to Lidewij de Vos. This move that reflects a broader far-right trend of using female leadership to soften the party’s image.

The centre-right camp, meanwhile, is in flux. The VVD has been slipping in the polls. At the same time, party leader Dilan Yeşilgöz has ruled out further partnerships with Wilders and signalled scepticism towards cooperation with the GreenLeft–Labour alliance. These positions have narrowed the VVD’s coalition prospects and raised questions about the party’s strategy.

The NSC is in free fall. After winning 20 seats from scratch in its 2023 debut, the party now appears likely to secure at most one seat – or potentially none at all. In contrast, the long-struggling CDA is staging a surprising comeback.

Following a historic low of just five seats in 2023, the party is now polling at 22 to 26 seats. This surge has been attributed to the so-called “Bontenbal effect,” named after the party’s popular leader, Henri Bontenbal.

The main contender on the left is the GreenLeft–Labour alliance, led by former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans, which is currently polling in third place behind the PVV and CDA. But the broader picture remains unchanged: the left is a structural minority, facing long odds of governing without support from the centre-right.

Finally, after significant losses in 2023, D66 appears to be recovering. Now polling between 11 and 14 seats, the party may once again play a pivotal role in coalition talks, potentially bridging the centre-left and centre-right blocs.

An uncertain outcome

No fewer than 27 parties are running in this election, and in a political landscape that has become notoriously fragmented and volatile, many voters make their final decisions only at the last minute.

With many medium-sized and smaller parties in the mix, and the PVV effectively barred from government participation, it is difficult to envision what a viable coalition might look like – so protracted coalition talks after election day are likely.

But beyond this uncertainty, the stakes for Dutch democracy are unusually high. The Netherlands has seen an alarmingly rapid normalisation of far-right rhetoric. This election may prove more than just another chapter in political instability, but a defining moment for the country’s democratic future.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Netherlands is trying to draw a line under a year of chaos with fresh elections – will it work? – https://theconversation.com/the-netherlands-is-trying-to-draw-a-line-under-a-year-of-chaos-with-fresh-elections-will-it-work-267076

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marc Roscoe Loustau, Affiliated Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University

The US president, Donald Trump, was expected to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Hungarian capital of Budapest in coming weeks for more talks on ending the war in Ukraine.

However, the summit appears to have been cancelled following a call between the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. The White House gave no reason for the cancellation but some reports suggest the two country’s positions on Ukraine were seen as too far apart to make a face-to-face meeting worthwhile.

While the summit may yet be revived, scepticism that any progress will be made towards peace is probably the right response. Putin’s own actions have shown how little stock he places in summits and negotiations.

Within hours of his August meeting with Trump in Alaska, for example, Russia launched a barrage of strikes against Ukraine. Russian forces staged another series of drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities a few days later.

If the Budapest summit were to go ahead, above all it would be a boon for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has long been Putin’s strongest ally in the EU. His invitation to Putin risks causing further damage to the international rules-based order and the already strained relationship between Hungary and Ukraine.

A meeting in Budapest would also pose a threat to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which aims to place checks on the power of national leaders by prosecuting them for grave crimes. The ICC issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest in 2023 for his alleged involvement in the war crime of forcibly deporting children from Ukraine to Russia.

Hungary’s government has announced its intention to withdraw from the ICC treaty. This decision came shortly after it decided to flout an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in April 2025. But as Hungary has not yet completed this process, it remains obliged to detain the Russian leader.

In response to a question from the New York Times about Putin’s visit to Hungary, the ICC’s public affairs office reinforced the legal obligation of its member states to enforce arrest warrants. It added that in the “case of noncooperation, the court may make a finding” and alert an oversight group to take action.

But the ICC is regularly criticised for being powerless to effect real justice, and the Hungarian government’s invitation to Putin and refusal to detain him in Budapest will only weaken its standing further.

Worsening strained relations

A Budapest summit would also be a death knell for diplomacy between Hungary and Ukraine. Relations between the two neighbouring countries have been suffering for years due to Orbán’s attempts to cultivate stronger ties with Russia.

Most of the western world sought to isolate Russia diplomatically after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, Orbán flew to China to meet with Putin in 2023 and his foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, has subsequently been sent on repeated missions to Moscow.

Hungary’s real value for Putin lies in shaping EU foreign policy. And, at every step, Orbán has used Hungary’s veto power to block or delay the EU’s efforts to support Ukraine and tighten the screws on Russia’s economy. Despite efforts by the EU to reduce the bloc’s reliance on Russian energy, Orbán continues to import Russian natural gas.

Budapest has also repeatedly accused Kyiv of discriminating against western Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority. The dispute centres around Ukraine’s language laws, which require at least 70% of education above fifth grade to be conducted in Ukrainian.

Hungary has used this to cast aspersions on the international reputation of Ukraine as a democracy that fosters pluralism, and has blocked Ukraine’s EU accession talks. EU accession requires candidate countries to provide human rights and protection guarantees for national minorities.

As I learned while reporting in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod in June, minority community leaders themselves point out that they have had success negotiating directly with Kyiv.

Ukraine has also introduced an action plan to protect the rights of minorities. This plan is based on recommendations from national minority organisations, the European Commission and the Council of Europe. But Orbán, intent on maintaining his leverage over Ukraine, has ignored this progress.

Bilateral relations were dealt another blow in May 2025 when Ukrainian authorities arrested two people, claiming they were collecting sensitive information about air-defence systems. Ukraine’s security service said the spy ring was run by a “staff officer of Hungarian military intelligence”, an allegation Hungary denies.

Several months later, after Russia sent drones into Nato airspace over Poland and Romania, Hungary targeted Ukraine with a similar manoeuvre. It sent several of its own drones across the border into Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region, prompting an angry demand from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for an explanation.

A total breakdown in Hungarian-Ukrainian relations now could cut direct communication between the two countries entirely, just when they might be needed to avoid a conflict resulting from Hungary’s continuous provocations.

Weathering the fallout

Orbán’s fiercest critics have long called for the EU to take action against Hungary, beyond what the bloc has already done by withholding funds from Budapest for consistently flouting EU standards and democratic principles.

But European policymakers should not focus only on punishments. They could give Zelensky a major geopolitical win by, for example, announcing that Ukraine has met a major accession benchmark.

If this were a benchmark concerning protection for national minorities, it would have the additional benefit of undermining one of Hungary’s major claims against Ukraine’s integration efforts.

Regardless of the specifics, pushing ahead swiftly with Ukraine’s EU accession would be a bold and constructive reply to Trump and Orbán’s attempts at rapprochement with Putin.

This article has been updated to include the cancellation of the summit.

Marc Roscoe Loustau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Trump-Putin Budapest summit would have posed threat to international rule of law and Ukraine’s relations with Hungary – https://theconversation.com/trump-putin-budapest-summit-would-have-posed-threat-to-international-rule-of-law-and-ukraines-relations-with-hungary-267881

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Murray, Professor of Human Genetics, Department of Clinical and Biomedical Sciences, University of Exeter

A woman’s fertility usually begins to decline in her mid-30s. This means the chances of becoming pregnant decreases drastically each month.

For a long time, scientists thought that the key culprit behind this rapid decline in fertility was egg quality. This is understandable, since women are born with all of the eggs they will ever have – and as they get closer to the menopause, the number of eggs in the ovary decreases. So too does the quality of these eggs.

But a recent study shows that the ovary’s cells and tissues play a bigger role than previously thought in how fertility wanes. This finding could have major implications for how we understand the fundamental process of reproductive ageing and how fertility might be preserved.

Studying fertility has long been difficult to do. Not only is women’s health research historically underfunded, it’s also difficult to study because the ovaries and ovarian tissues are hard to access.

In such cases, scientists typically use laboratory animals whose biology closely resembles a human’s. But it’s again tough to do this, given humans are one of only a handful of species that go through menopause. The only other animal species that go through the menopause are certain types of whales — including orcas and belugas.

But while only a few animal species actually go through the menopause, many animals share a similar ovarian biology as humans. This is why the research team began their investigation into reproductive ageing by using mice.

The research team took ovary tissue from young and old mice, and compared it to ovaries from women in their 20s, 30s and 50s. They then used 3D-imaging and compared the gene profiles of the cells in the ovaries to generate detailed maps of the different cell types and their functions across the lifespan.

They found both similarities and differences in ovarian function and ageing between mice and humans. These initial findings were important in confirming which instances mice might be useful as a model when studying human fertility.

They found that older eggs were more similar in humans and mice than younger eggs were. Human and mouse ovaries also contain similar cell types which support the growth of the egg.

In humans, granulosa cells surround the egg and produce oestrogen. Mice appear to have a similar type of cell, which performs a similar function.

However, theca cells, which in humans produce testosterone and stimulate the granulosa cells, appear to operate differently in mice.

The researchers found evidence that a particular nerve support cell, called a glial cell, is present within both mouse and human ovaries – and that this cell develops early in foetal life. In both humans and mice, the glial cells appear to stimulate the ovary to produce eggs.

They also genetically manipulated the development of glial cells in mice and found the ovaries mimicked what is seen in polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Doing this led to more early-stage eggs developing in the ovary – but these failed to mature properly. The result provides hope that mouse models could help develop new, much-needed treatments for PCOS.

By comparing ovaries in the old and young, researchers found that the tissue structure in humans and mice differed. Humans develop gaps between the eggs – and the ovary becomes stiffer as more fibrous tissue is laid down, probably due to ovulation and repair of the tissue over a woman’s reproductive life.

These changes in the ovary’s cells and tissues could explain why human ovaries age relatively earlier than other species. This study’s findings also show that it isn’t just the eggs, but rather the broader ecosystem of the ovary, that contributes to the decline in fertility that occurs after 30.

Being able to use animal models for research into women’s health will advance our understanding of conditions such as PCOS and infertility, which have been historically underfunded and under-researched. It will allow researchers to better study the reproductive diseases which affect women and develop new drugs that can treat these debilitating conditions.

This knowledge improves understandings of the fundamental processes of ovarian ageing which will enable better diagnosis and treatments of infertility.

Anna Murray is a co-founder and consultant for OvartiX Limited. She receives funding from the MRC and Wellcome Trust. She is affiliated with the University of Exeter.

– ref. Fertility: the ovaries play a key role in reproductive decline, new research shows – https://theconversation.com/fertility-the-ovaries-play-a-key-role-in-reproductive-decline-new-research-shows-267460