My head nearly fell off. The actual Minister for Health said this? m.independent.ie/irish-news/t...

here-we-go-again-again-final-version-v2.docx

and all of the arguments we made 5 yrs ago in this paper about why the idea of robot rights relies on faulty assumptions about the nature of human cognition and intelligence still hold Robot Rights?: Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

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Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

Update: European Commission is starting "pre-infringement dialogue" with Ireland about our complaint against Ireland's process to appoint the new Data Protection Commissioner These "EU Pilot" dialogues occur where the Commission suspects a Member State has broken EU law ec.europa.eu/implementing...

Not satisfied with just destroying their own brand goodwill, OS companies are now using AI to try to destroy the good names of the apps users install. (Scrivener taking out adds to explain how it has no AI but Apple adds some anyway.)

Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”

Tech companies are backing away from creating diversity reports. Microsoft, which released its annual diversity and inclusion report in 2024, is choosing to not do one in 2025. www.hr-brew.com/stories/2025...

The content is still obviously delusional to anyone reading it. It’s just organised crazy. But the real danger is the internal effect on the user. The AI provides coherence and validation, stabilising the narrative they’re caught in.

🤖 "Holes in the web: Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, GenAI is shockingly ignorant too." Excellent essay on algorithmic epistemological knowledge and the collapse of knowledge throughout mean-driven data machines. aeon.co/essays/gener...

In a short piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, @abeba.bsky.social and I write #AIHype Is Steering EU Policy Off Course. Stop peddling in unscientific discourse about “AGI” and “superintelligence.” Serve citizens. Don't cater to the whims of tech CEOs. www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-s...

cool pincer movement if you truly grasp: AI & any concept relating to it like so-called guardrails are a scam in the deepest sense like a perpetual motion machine or a quija board — and not only a scam like a pyramid scheme which is a possible way to make money if you are first in first out 🧵 1/n

im frustrated about a lot of things (including the fact that someone told me that using the word "epistemology" in a grant application was "jargon") but i am ALSO very frustrated about THIS

sts researchers: :spend decades tracing the way well-intentioned design choices constrained by culture, capital, and the material environment can have negative outcomes in aggregate: ai companies: lets put a chatbot in a doll that tells kids to set fires futurism.com/artificial-i...

As we write in The Guardian this morning, the Commission’s plan to gut EU digital rules will hurt Europe’s startups and give U.S. tech an unassailable advantage, confirming Europe as a digital vassal. Piece by George Riekeles and I. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

this was making me nuts recently so I recorded all the times I had to bat away all the useless AI shit in acrobat. four times right after opening the doc, and some things I couldn't even clear

Scientists and scholars in AI and its social impacts call on von der Leyen to retract #AIHype statement. @olivia.science @abeba.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @rocher.lc @danmcquillan.bsky.social @robin.berjon.com & many others have signed www.iccl.ie/press-releas...

Her husband was at Broadview one month and she was never able to talk to him. Not until he was already in Mexico. He had been in Chicago for 20 years. Her husband shared that the numbers of people there were astounding. It just makes me think how many people that are not counted/just disappeared.

You don’t need to burn books if you can take them off the shelf and say “AI made me do it”.

The conversion process is kind of fascinating to me. Like there’s a threshold in a conversation (often code) where critical thinking evaporates because the thing did something in a domain they weren’t familiar enough to evaluate

Hey, look, progress and innovation!

I had a long conversation with MIT Tech Review’s @willdouglasheaven.bsky.social about AGI; it fed into this very good read on the rise of AGI orthodoxy

📣 I am hiring a postdoc! aial.ie/hiring/postd... applications from suitable candidates that are passionate about investigating the use of genAI in public service operations with the aim of keeping governments transparent and accountable are welcome pls share with your networks

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

As a scholar I rarely offer electoral guidance. But today I do: DO NOT USE AI CHATBOTS AS YOUR VOTE ADVICE APPLICATION AHEAD OF (THE DUTCH) ELECTIONS Full of errors, bias and lack of transparency. @ernesto-deleon.com @favstats.eu @theoaraujo.bsky.social and🙋unpack why algosoc.org/results/1-in...

We filled a complaint against Ireland to the European Commission today. Ireland has appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist as its new Data Protection Commissioner. This will be interpreted by the tech industry as a signal of impunity. The European Commission must intervene. www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

We’re stuck in a WEIRD, DEAD paradigm because of scarce funding and institutional pressures to publish quickly. I’d love to slow down; my students need papers to stay in the game. AI Surrogates seem to alleviate these pressures but in fact they entrench the system further. 13/

Conversation with our own @mbrauh.bsky.social encompassing her transition from DeepMind to @aial.ie, breaking down AI companions, why the massive uptakes (particularly w minors), & the multitude of harms that arise with them including AI sycophancy & the business models designed to keep users hooked

You can safely replace “AI” with “corporations and billionaires” in any mainstream piece of content.

As one of the Brits sold down the river by a Labour government after being brutally beaten, tortured and disappeared by Italian police in Genoa in 2001, I am entirely unsurprised by this vindictive servility. Solidarity to the Flotilla detainees ✊

"[T]he ability of Bytedance’s models to create likenesses of copyrighted characters and real people unfortunately adds heat to the fire of scrambling to get ahead at any cost, and regardless of any kind of law or ethical implications.” @mbrauh.bsky.social time.com/7321911/byte...

If passed, the CSA Regulation proposal would also harm whistleblowers, activists in political opposition, labour unions, people seeking abortions in places where it is criminalised, media freedom, marginalised groups & many others please sign this petition & pass it on crm.edri.org/stop-scannin...

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU. Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

when I hear big tech & government reps express worries that the elderly & vulnerable ‘missing out’ or not ‘being able to reap advantages of technology’, i think of the elderly/vulnerable standing afar watching folx immersing themselves in a pool of toxic waste unable to jump into the pool

Wow, incredible. Huge win for the No Azure for Apartheid organizers.

To those asking, the NHS has misused gender care waiting lists to target families with social services referrals - and even police action - for doing something lawful, and in much of the world entirely orthodox, out of love for their child. It's ideologically driven targeting by the State and evil.

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity. And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

"The university will stop sharing the data required to be included in the ranking as of 2026. As a result, Sorbonne University will no longer feature in future rankings produced by THE, which include the World University Rankings, the Rankings by Subject or the Impact Rankings." Excellent!

I see so much of this in academic funding calls ‘we are looking for projects that explore how AI can help to solve … hunger, violence against women and children, poverty, etc.’ But there’s no space in there to say: ‘um, what if AI is not the right tool for this’

Time for the world to install a gigawatt of solar power capacity 2004: A year 2010: ~ a month 2015: ~ a week Now: A day ourworldindata.org/data-insight... 🧪

The whole discourse of digital sovereignty is massively problematic. Even as authoritarian states like Iran and China use this to create surveillable space, too many on, even on the left, seem to think digital sovereignty or nationalism is some kind of progressive answer to platform capitalism.

Reading up on dehumanising language the cognitive dissonance hits strong. As I get horrified by speech that refers to entire people as ‘dogs’, I cannot help but think how we have normalised and are not questioning the current usage of words such as ‘bitch’.

Mic drop from @abeba.bsky.social at UNESCO Digital Learning Week

So you're going to "teach AI" this year. That's great! Start with "How Eugenics Shaped Statistics" nautil.us/how-eugenics... #mtbos #ITeachMath #AIinEd

Likening PhD holders to a (non-functional) algorithm is a form of dehumanisation & anti-intellectualism that is a bellwether for contemporary fascism. Essentially it's a typical — if not the archetypal — first step towards fascism: to dehumanise, deskill, defund, and, ultimately, fire the academics.

The implicit threat behind the AI hype is the paradigm of Modernity; behind the relentless chiding to use AI for everything is that if you don't, you will no longer be civilised, no longer be part of a fully developed humanity.