Critical AI Literacy Symposium, with Dagmar Monett, @lucyavraamidou.bsky.social & Miquel Pérez Torres, Linda Mannila, and @olivia.science
🎬 Video recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxyg...
📢 Symposium website: www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...
🤔 Critical AI Literacy website: www.ru.nl/en/research/...
I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai
"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"
A photo of the Center for Dewey studies with text reading "Emerson's Aesthetic Transcendentalist Legacy: The Idea of Beauty in American Art" and "A Dewey Center Lunchtime Talk by Dr. Nicholas Guardiano. In between the text is an image of Fallingwater, a home designed by Frank Llyod Wright, and Thomas Cole's painting titled "View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm-The Oxbow."
Join us tomorrow at 1 pm for Dr. Nicholas Guardiano’s talk, "Emerson's Aesthetic Transcendentalist Legacy: The Idea of Beauty in American Art," in the Center for Dewey Studies (Morris Library Basement). We will have snacks and beverages available, and you are also welcome to bring your lunch.
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Delighted to see this out.
Hot off the press! It's the JIME Special Collection, Metaphors of AI in Education: Discourses, Histories and Practices
edited by myself, @eam0.bsky.social, Giselle Ferreira and Kyungmee Lee
Check it out if interested in #AI in #Education (or metaphors generally)
jime.open.ac.uk/collections/...
For those who don't know, there is a gofundme set up for Helen's family.
They are very humble to not mention it, so I will.
www.gofundme.com/f/support-he...
Please consider contributing to this gofundme, this is really important for helping support Helen's family
Besides the personal tragedy, Helen's untimely passing leaves their family in a difficult financial situation. Donate to support them:
Condolences and love to you all.
A gofundme fund for Helen de Cruz's children, set up with Helen's blessing by @marcusarvan.bsky.social:
Free ECR/PGR workshop in Nottm next month. Details in the thread below, email or DM me to register. It will be a fun and interesting day. Please share.
You wouldn't know how much but you have made a lasting impression upon my heart in many ways. Thank you for everything. My love and peace to you and your family.
The vast majority I met, however, just seemed fully captured by the capitalist LLM hype machine, trying to build their academic reputations around validating LLM applications that might promise jobs and continued funding, in the exact same way industry seems to be desperately betting on a techno-utopian deus ex machina to our global unrest about diversity and climate. HCI has always been a bit dominated by corporate pop culture, but this extreme, at this moment, has never felt more tragic and heartless.
Frustrating but imho accurate description from @amyko.phd 's trip report from #CHI2025 - the largest academic conference on human-computer interaction.
medium.com/bits-and-beh...
Prof Pat Thomson has written about this and I find it so very useful patthomson.net/2021/07/05/t...
I am hiring a new Lab Manager to help run the NYU Center for Conflict & Cooperation.
We start reviewing apps on MAY 1st and it pays over $58,000. Please share with anyone who might be interested!
Please apply here: apply.interfolio.com/166620
See more details below:
How can anyone cultivate a moral relationship to creative and intellectual work – their own and others' – if we're building it atop (or rather, pushing a button to autogenerate from) a technology of deception and theft? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-plagiari...
I published a new article on "AI & the Disruption of Personhood" in the Oxford Intersections doi.org/10.1093/9780...
👤 Can AI possess personhood or be part of our personhood?
@esdit.bsky.social @utwente.bsky.social @utwentephilosophy.bsky.social #oxforduniversitypress #oupacademic #ethics #ai (1/4)
New article on AI and epistemic agency published in the journal Social Epistemology
www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
Hello bsky! Hire me to edit for you! I provide fast, professional, and personalised proofreading, copy editing, and developmental editing services. wellreadherring.com/editing
Reposts appreciated!
Five themes from #SIGCSE2025: amyjko.medium.com/sigcse-2025-...
My new piece in @theguardian.com
Techno-optimism is human pessimism.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
What if technology *isn’t* changing faster than it’s ever changed before? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/not-so-fast/...
Call for papers: "Tech Oligarchy" Forum by @sciasculture.bsky.social
#bigtech #sts #oligarchy #Trump #ElonMusk
think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issu...
