If you're wondering how to engage students and teachers with questions about technology and place, this lesson is for you. It explores how “sound journals, community, and placemaking invites students to compare the way they describe their community with the way AI describes their community.”
*snort* just out here doing the sleep paralysis demon's work, haunting your nightmares
SOCK PUPPET is definitely going into my metaphors of AI back pocket (hey @taniaduarte.bsky.social ). It might find its way (with full attribution of course) into a title of a talk, even. Have I said recently how much I love your writing @eryk.bsky.social ?
Another banger, Eryk.
“If you limit the human aspect of the model in your approach to understanding the model, of course it looks like magic; imagine if you were forced to describe a sock puppet without acknowledging the human arm. You'd be terrified of the existential ramifications of that thing, too.”
CFP, AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation & Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices! Note "This collection is focused ...on the strategies & actions of individuals, communities, organisations & collectives to actively resist, refuse, reimagine & reclaim 'artificial intelligence."
Bloomberg.com article about Anthropic proposing to produce technology for voice controlled autonomous drone swarming for a pentagon contest
Lest anyone people be too quick to give Anthropic the moral high ground
Really loving the ai;dr response trend right now
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
That was easy. Next question?
CFP, AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation & Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices! Note "This collection is focused ...on the strategies & actions of individuals, communities, organisations & collectives to actively resist, refuse, reimagine & reclaim 'artificial intelligence."
What are we to make of Janet F., this sign of the repressed, this Freudian slip of a female who, with a flick of a "u" (the U-shaped table at which she sits?), goes from Freed to Freud, Freud to Freed? Thinking of'her, I am reminded of Dorothy Smith's suggestion that men of a certain class are prone to decontextualization and reification because they are in a position to command the labors of others. 59 "Take a letter, Miss Freed," he says. Miss Contesting for the Body of Information 1 83 Freed comes in. She gets a lovely smile. The man speaks, and she writes on her stenography pad (or perhaps on her stenography typewriter). The man leaves. He has a plane to catch, a meeting to attend. When he returns, the letter is on his desk, awaiting his signature. From his point of view, what has happened? He speaks, giving commands or dictating words, and things happen. A woman comes in, marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferences are arranged, books are published. Taken out of context, his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burden of the labor that makes these things happen is for him only an abstraction, a resource diverted from other possible uses, because he is not the one performing the labor. Miss Freed has no such illusions. Embedded in context, she knows that words never make things happen by themselves— or rather, that the only things they can make happen are other abstractions, like getting married or
This Hayles quote is never not relevant:
when my Irish feminist scholarly world and my critical AI worlds meet
“The assistant metaphor suggests a hierarchy in the classroom, with faculty and students in control and AI offering help when asked. This obscures those many moments when an AI tutor is not simply assisting but directing learning…”
Absolute shocker of a rights grab - academics may want to push back hard
but also, it's not that good at summarizing
I'm blown away by what supposedly well-educated people are giving completely unpredictable software unlimited access to.
And it bears repeating: this is the type of unlimited access the techbros are seriously advocating for to accomplish the agentic assistance they believe everyone wants.
It was a great essay. Thank you for writing it. The EFF & its cyberlibertarianism is part of the foundation for the current mess we’re in so I understand why he would be defensive. Like you I still appreciate many of his contributions to the discourse on tech.
Ask vendors. Ask administrators. Ask reps. Ask. In public.
Another great essay by @eryk.bsky.social.
"If not intelligence, then what is happening within an LLM? By abstracting language and reassembling it into legibility, the user’s prompt is restructured as a response." An interesting compliment to Baldur Bjarnason's "The LLMentalist Effect".
There are so many tasks that are onerous but (when done well) express a deep sense of care and community. Annual performance evaluations, letters of rec, and peer reviews are generally unremunerated acts of care and trust for one’s community. I think it’s telling that AI has targeted those tasks.
This? This is a TERRIBLE FAILURE MODE because it **does not indicate that a failure occurred**
on top of that, it has introduced new and extremely dangerous risks
Epic has a new AI summary generating tool, and I noticed that it completely hallucinated a GI bleed for one of my patients last night.
Yeah I think people don't realize how far up the military's *** Microsoft is and has been for a while. Note "Palantir Foundry" at the end of that partner list, by the way. www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/def...
you can't justify a trillion dollar market cap on shrimp jesus pics. you can justify it if it's the main tool insurance companies use to deny healthcare, or if it's the tool governments use to deny people benefits.
Reads: Most importantly, there is no AI without massive financial and ideological backing. It is therefore pointless to discuss its techniques or capabilities without asking who controls it, who benefits from it, who builds and deploys it, and what it is doing in the world. As Stafford Beer (2002) argued, the purpose of a system is what it does.
Reads: Though less explicit than Thiel’s call to replace politics with technology, major tech firms have effectively privatised core digital public goods. Platforms like Facebook, Google Search, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT operate at infrastructural scale in Ireland, shaping information, communication, and access to knowledge. Yet their algorithms remain opaque, their governance remains private, with minimal democratic accountability to the public who depend on them; effectively ceding aspects of democratic process to commercial interests. The monopolization of digital spaces has turned democracy into something the highest bidder can buy and is degrading the digital public goods themselves. As the AI industry, social media and search platforms grow more extractive and less trustworthy, they erode the foundations of democratic life: trust, dialogue, and accountability, blurring the line between truth and falsehood. An example is the deepfake video falsely showing President Catherine Connolly withdrawing from the presidential race last October, which amassed over 160,0001 Facebook views before being removed. GenAI’s non-deterministic, stochastic architecture produces plausible output without regard for accuracy or truth. This makes generative AI a societal disaster and a major threat to truth, democratic processes, information ecosystems, knowledge production, and the social fabric
Reads: For truth, democracy, and the rule of law to endure in the AI era, we need to cultivate an ecosystem of transparency and accountability. Yet governance by algorithms inherently places our digital public squares and democratic processes in the hands of those building these systems in line with their political and profit-seeking agendas. Without real mechanisms in place, talk of transparency and accountability are empty gestures. An internal Meta memo outlining plans to launch facial recognition in smart glasses “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”5 illustrates how those advocating for accountability are under-resourced, retaliated against, and targeted. Large tech and AI companies, despite selling promises of innovation and societal benefit, monetize and undermine the very society they claim to serve. What is needed is not just regulation, but active enforcement. Given the track record of tech giants, stricter regulation and enforcement is not “anti–freedom of speech” or anti-competitiveness. It is one of the clearest ways governments can show they serve the public interest. After all, innovation that disregards truth and democratic processes risks undermining democracy itself.
I appeared as an expert witness before the Joint Committee on AI at the Houses of Oireachtas (parliament of Ireland) to discuss "AI: truth and democracy" this morning. You can read my opening statement here: www.oireachtas.ie/en/publicati...
