My review of @shannonvallor.bsky.social 's The AI Mirror is now up at IEEE. A profound read: "In the age of AI. . .the courage to act autonomously seems to be on the wane. Vallor, as Weizenbaum did too, seeks new metaphors for fortifying it." ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...

Interesting CFP. Are we mythologizing ELIZA and/or Weizenbaum?

TEACHERS: If you're looking for a reading to assign, to help explain why you're banning AI from your classroom, here ya go. There didn't seem to be one article that rounds up all the major issues. I tried to do that here, so it's a long read. Feel free to use/share as you like.

@milesbrundage.bsky.social on X: "Never ask a man his salary. .or an AI company its definition of AGI" Which is why at OpenAI Sutskever rallied ppl by exhorting them 2 "feel the AGI". Like Nye's tech sublime AGI is felt rather than defined. It acts as a social glue precisely cuz its ineffable.

As Ilya Sutskever likes to say "feel the AGI"!

This is incredible

I've seen it described as AGI A Guy Instead

As an automation engineer, we call this ‘human in the loop’ automation. 10/10, no notes.

In @karenhao.bsky.social Empire of AI many of the chapter titles r aptly named (eg 'Science in Captivity' or Sutskever's [un] 'Scaled Ambition'). But others r more cryptic. Is it Sam's 'Divine Right'? And is the 'Dream of Modernity' a tech, pace Power & Progress, that distributes power equitably?

Tschopp, M., Gieselmann, M., & Sassenberg, K. (2023). Servant by default? How humans perceive their relationship with conversational AI. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 17(3), Article 9. doi.org/10.5817/CP20...

A question of course is whether Weizenbaum, and moden AI critics, have succeeded in "explaining away" AI -- arguably not since "we" continue to be enchanted (deceived?) by AI. @karenhao.bsky.social @cfiesler.bsky.social

A great word. Tho the primary way in which LLMs engage in "epistemicide" is that - by design - they fail to abide by the citational practices that academics use to anchor and legitimate truth claims.

"...I’m not interested in reading something that nobody wrote,” Tru in so many contexts. . .tho do we care in the case of technical writing?

The old equivalent of having too many browser tabs open

Call for papers! International conference “Technological Optimism in 1970s and 1980s Popular Culture: Innovation, Creativity, Prosperity, and Freedom” -> https://ieg-dhr.github.io/techno_optimism

Odd that no one is using Cyrano de Bergerac (the play) to frame the Cluely story. Here's a clip from Roxanne: youtu.be/_PZ_LyJfYe8?...

Hmm. Is this a satisfactory portrait of AI discourse? IMO it elides a large swath of the public who see that AI generates harms and benefits. Better to think of AI critics as movie critics -- they are critical of particular media artifacts, but most don't reject the media wholesale.

Walter Benjamin must have read his Nietzsche: "For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable 'windless calm' of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them."

To understand the relationship between loneliness and AI it's helpful to understand the history of loneliness and its relationship to what the sociologist Robert Weiss called "the loneliness industry." @samantharhill.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/o...

Worth noting Weizenbaum described ELIZA and programmers in similar terms: "ELIZA was an actress who commanded a set of techniques but had nothing of her own to say" (page 188) VS: "[CS] students. . .are people who. .become eloquent. .but . . .have literally nothing of their own to say." (page 278)

The history of AI, to quote Thomas Haigh, is "The History of a Brand" caiml.org/machines2023...

"The Turing test. . is a reminder that. . Humans, as participants in a communicative interaction [with AI], should be regarded as a crucial variable rather than obliterated by approaches that focus on the performance of computing technologies alone." Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media

"the Turing test is usually discussed as a problem about the definition of intelligence. An alternative way to look at it, however, is to consider it as an experiment in the communications between humans and computers." Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media

"By defining AI in terms of a computer’s ability to pass the Turing test, Turing included humans in the equation, making their ideas and biases, as well as their psychology and character, a crucial variable in the construction of “intelligent” machines." Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media

"one may still expect today to be contradicted when speaking of machines “thinking”—yet [Turing] was right in realizing that cultural attitudes would shift, as a consequence of both the evolution of computing and people’s experiences with these technologies." Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media

"the [Turing] test made clear. . .that AI not only is a matter of computer power and programming techniques but also resides—and perhaps especially—in the perceptions and patterns of interaction through which humans engage with computers." Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media

"the Turing test placed humans rather than machines at the very center of the AI question." Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (p. 33).

The question, Turing tells his readers, is not whether machines are or are not able to think. It is, instead, whether we believe that machines are able to think— Natale, Simone. Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (p. 33).

Worth noting that the passage is in the chap "Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason." Claiming that programming is easy isn't fair. But the critique of instrumental reason is compelling: computational culture's obsession with efficiency/automation eclipses important concerns about values.

Many thanks to the brilliant editors at @criticalai-journal.bsky.social my article is out: Endangered Judgment: Joseph Weizenbaum, Artificial Intelligence, and the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason url: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...

Riffing off David Noble: If tech determinism is the domination of the present by the past 'machine yearning' might be the domination of the present by the future.

Hi peeps. If perchance any of you happen to be in Tuebingen, drop by for my presentation on Weizenbaum, AI and judgment tomorrow night at the Hegelbau: uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

The binary thinking in AI talk has precedents as Winner reminds us in Autonomous Tech: Frankenstein "was blinded by 2 opposed beliefs: 1st that he would produce an artifact of undeniable perfection & later on that his invention was a disaster about which nothing could b done."

Wouldn't it b cool if @snatale.bsky.social , @davidgunkel.bsky.social , and @frankpasquale.bsky.social and the ghost of Joseph Weizenbaum sat on a panel together? Yes, AI shouldn't "counterfeit humanity". But aren't there instances of banal deception? Should we never invite the ELIZA effect?

Frustrations abound. I found @robertwgehl.org 's description of how AI has complicated his teaching particularly noteworthy. www.404media.co/teachers-are...

". . .that we have words without knowing for sure who or what authorizes what is being said through them — is already a defining condition of all forms of writing, this essay included. The LLM . . .exposes how [authority] was always a fiction."

One might also ask: r we losing our sense of cardinal directions? If we no longer do "situated" navigation, with the advent of AI r we no longer doing "situated" search?

"We’ve been focused on how students use AI to cheat. What we should be more concerned about is how AI cheats students." open.substack.com/pub/newcarto...

Sometimes satire is the best critique.

@annleckie.com said something astute and said it clearly. Casey replied with magical thinking and the thread behind this newsletter post is getting tagged in the replies, so I thought I'd share it too: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

I've seen this post come up several times in my feed and each time, grown frustrated by all of the "Um, actually..." replies. Whether or not these models perform a web search before generating text does not change the fundamental problem Leckie is getting at here.

I'm only a few chapters in, but on just those few chapters, @cbracy.bsky.social World Eaters is the best book on Silicon Valley I've ever read. Heads like a homing missile. for the underlying funding model and the political economy pathologies it creates. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/723091...

#NationalLibraryWeek #LiteracyMatters

The transcript is great. A worthwhile read. Ranges across a lot of topics, yet still incisive.

Shades of Cyrano de Bergerac? www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/n...

"Sadowski’s Mechanic offers an antidote to widespread deskilling & alienation from technical knowledge, for users to seek understanding of their everyday tools. Thru this demystification, we can. .recognise when they r used for control or disempowerment. Should the latter arise, enter the Luddite."

"A.I. is a parasite. It attaches itself to a robust learning ecosystem and speeds up some parts of the decision process. The parasite and the host can peacefully coexist as long as the parasite does not starve its host." (The problem is that there is evidence it *is* starving the host)

"This time is different". Wasn't that a Steve Jobs line? (This said, vibe coding is different! Much -albeit not everything- that was solid about programming practice seems to be melting).

Hope to make this. . . .

Opening of my book "Deceitful Media: AI and Social Life after the Turing Test" (Oxford University Press 2021). Four years later, it looks less imaginative as science fiction, but fortunately there's still the crime story angle...