🚨The Critical AI Seminar Series returns in 2025/2026 ✨ This year we will have four talks and are beyond excited to welcome @amoorelouise.bsky.social & @alexcampolo.bsky.social, Fabian Offert, Helene Ratner & @nannathylstrup.bsky.social and @thaophan.bsky.social ✨ Sign up: bit.ly/uvacriticala...

I am very excited and honoured to be the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant, starting January 2026 🔆 @erc.europa.eu. The five-year project will explore the broader social, political, and ethical implications of training algorithmic models on synthetic data. www.york.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

I'm excited to share the final cover for Silicon Empires and very grateful for the kind words that others have offered. Pre-order here: www.amazon.co.uk/Silicon-Empi...

I have a new article out: "Do artifacts have political economy?" It's a riff on an old argument by Langdon Winner about the embedding of politics in technology #STS #sociology #technoscience #technology #innovation journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

📣 New article out 📣 in the journal Digital Society, where I reflect on the relevance, limitation, and future challenges of studying algorithms through the lens of their referential 'ground truth' datasets Available here: doi.org/10.1007/s442...

🎉 A lovely wedding present from Big Data & Society! I bring together an ethnographic study of AI practitioners with Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, exploring how ambiguity shapes AI practice and ethics journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

⚡Very happy to see another exciting publication out in our Topical Collection of "The Politics of ML Evaluation" in Digital Society!

✨ 🎉 I am very grateful and honored to be the recipient of the 2025 Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis Article Award @uvahumanities.bsky.social for my paper "Platform power in AI: The evolution of cloud infrastructures in the political economy of artificial intelligence" (tinyurl.com/ythnj7kf)

Then off to #RESAW25, presenting on the evolving audience data economy w/ @silvertje.bsky.social (Thu), platform histories panel (Fri) w/ @devikanarayan.bsky.social, @bumatic.bsky.social, & on technography for critical AI studies w/ @dluitse.bsky.social. 🔗 www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/datafiedweb/...

Mardi 3 juin, découvrez comment l’évaluation des modèles IA évolue et soulève un enjeu politique majeur. Une présentation d’ @annaschjoett.bsky.social et @dluitse.bsky.social suivie d’un échange sur le lancement de la collection « The Politics of ML Evaluation » dans Digital Society. Plus d'info 🔽

Our article on the metaphor of hallucination and its use by big tech companies in relation to supposedly erroneous outputs from LLMs has finally been published :) @skoopit.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Very timely and necessary critical intervention by @katschwerzmann.bsky.social ‬– highly recommended: «By embracing LLMs before developing any critical framework for their use in pedagogical and research contexts, the University allows itself to be governed by the contingent, ever-evolving ... 1/

🗓️ The next and final 2024-2025 session of the FlashLab seminar will feature Dieuwertje Luitse (@dluitse.bsky.social), PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam, with a talk on the technopolitical production of "otherness" through ML modelling and evaluation in medecine! Abstract and more info ⤵️

📅 5th of June - Join the médialab conference "Social Science and Generative AI: Inquiries, Instruments, Consequences" A one-day event examining generative AI as a sociotechnical device and exploring its effects on scientific work, as well as its epistemological and social implications 🌐 Info ⬇️

1) ✨ Deeply honoured to be delivering a keynote at RESAW 2025 – The Datafied Web at Universität Siegen! My talk "Vanishing Points: Technographies of Data Loss" will explore politics & temporalities of disappearing data in our age of platformization.

✨ Very happy to share that my new paper on data annotation practices in affective computing is out ✨ link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🙏 thanks to the fantastic editors of this SI on the politics of machine learning evaluation @dluitse.bsky.social @annaschjoett.bsky.social & Tobias Blanke

#AI fellowships across all disciplines at King’s College London. Deadline 19 May 2025 @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social. www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/111205-...

⚡Thrilled to see the first papers to our Topical Collection published in Digital Society ✨Thank you @alexcampolo.bsky.social and Allison Jerzak for your fantastic contributions! 👀 For more info and future publications, keep an eye out on link.springer.com/collections/... ✨

This came out of an excellent conference, organized by @dluitse.bsky.social and @annaschjoett.bsky.social of the University of Amsterdam titled - "The Politics of Machine Learning Evaluation." Look out for the other contributions to this forum, some of which are forthcoming. Super important topic.

I have a short reflection on benchmarking in machine learning, titled "State-of-the-Art." Beyond questions of construct validity and rankings, how do benchmarks and model evaluation produce orientations towards progress or the future? Open access: doi.org/10.1007/s442...

On May 14, we are delighted to host @whkchun.bsky.social and Matt Canute as the final speakers in our Critical AI Seminar Series. The seminar is online and open to everyone. To receive the link, sign up via the link below. 🗓️ May 14, 5:30-7 PM (CEST). www.create.humanities.uva.nl/events/5-cri...

⚡On May 14, we are delighted to host @whkchun.bsky.social and Matt Canute as the final speakers in the #CriticalAI Seminar, where they will expand on their piece 'How AI Sets Limits for Human Aspiration' (tinyurl.com/euufxzf9). 🗓️ May 14 from 5:30-7 PM (CEST) on Zoom, Sign up: tinyurl.com/yd3yk64d

New essay in @nytimes.com✨ With @richove.bsky.social I discuss gov data deletion of vital datasets and health resources as political strategy. Special thx to brilliant (!) @ktmac.bsky.social for our exciting discussions that has shaped this thinking! Thank you @erc.europa.eu for enabling our work

“Algorithms codify and preserve the past, but decisions imagine new futures. With our actions as the guidepost, we can use data-driven insights without reifying history for accuracy’s sake.” Our new paper in @cp-patterns.bsky.social ! www.cell.com/patterns/ful...

📢 interested in how AI (re)enacts norms in medicine? Join this workshop I’m organising with @benedetta.bsky.social, @alexcampolo.bsky.social and @chogberg.bsky.social, supported by @amoorelouise.bsky.social & AlgoSoc - contact us for more info We can help with travel costs for PhD students/ECRs!

On December 17 & 18, we are organizing a conference at the University of Amsterdam on GenAI & Creative Practices. We are very much looking forward to your proposals for papers, panels, roundtables and fishbowls!! CfP: rdt.uva.nl/genai--creat... Deadline proposals: 26 May

dear machine learners, “hallucination” are not “incorrect facts”. try “incorrect statements”, “lies” or “made up bs” instead. the very idea of an “incorrect fact” is an oxymoron and intellectually deceptive thank you!

Yes! We have an article coming out on the term hallucination in LLM documentation soon, one of the claims is that the term itself is made to relieve the creators from the moral burden and responsibility of spreading lies, because the term hallucination is not morally loaded, it "happens unwillingly"

@amoorelouise.bsky.social will lead the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life @geogdurham.bsky.social @durham-university.bsky.social, which aims to change the way we understand and study the interaction between people, machine learning and AI algorithms.

“To resolve inconsistencies between the genetic paradigm of cancer & biological reality, we must complement deep sequencing with deep thinking: embrace formal theory and historicity of biological entities, and (re)consider non-genetic plasticity of cells & tissues.” journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Fabulous paper from @alexcampolo.bsky.social and @katschwerzmann.bsky.social mapping an anatomy of the concept of #alignment in #machinelearning #algorithmicsocieties link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New from the data loss team, @nannathylstrup.bsky.social and I wrote a short blog post on the politics of digital erasure in government information infrastructures ⬇️ verfassungsblog.de/the-politics...

Correspondence to Nature: "LLMs are trained on texts, not truths. Each text bears traces of its context, including its genre … audience and the history and local politics of its place of origin. A correct sentence in one [context] might be … nonsensical in another." Excellent. We're getting there!

Last night @nannathylstrup.bsky.social gave a brilliant talk on ‘The ethicopolitics of unlearning’ at @camdighum.bsky.social, where she brought us through logics and politics of unthought and forgetting in machine learning architectures ✨⭐️💫 @erc.europa.eu

It is extremely important to focus on the industrial dimension of cloud ecosystems in relation to AI. Consumer products like ChatGPT are designed to wow the public and foster acceptance, but their impact is marginal compared to the very real change in production environments

✨Interested in questions of synthetic vision and algorithmic violence? Then join the online #CriticalAI Seminar series next Wednesday (March 12) from 5:30-7PM with @ikkibop.bsky.social and Francesco Ragazzi. Organised with @dluitse.bsky.social and Tobias Blanke. Open to everyone, sign up below:

🚨to all the digital rights policy people: Industrial applications of #AI (+the cloud) is where it’s at! Were so hung up on social media and direct business to consumer AI, that we overlook the massive transformation that’s happening across entire industries

we are hiring a PhD candidate for the project "Interface of Intelligence: How Generative AI Reshapes Knowledge, Media, and Interpretation"; details here: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

“If Silicon Valley’s approach to AI has been to move fast and break things, then our mission as academics is to approach it in a different way.” ADM+S Affiliate @thaophan.bsky.social joins ANU reporter Luis Pérez to discuss the ripple effects of unregulated #AI under Trump’s administration.

I am collecting examples of the most thoughtful writing about generative AI published in 2024. What’s yours? They can be insightful for commentary, smart critique, or just because it shifted the conversation. I’ll post some of mine below as I go through them. #criticalAI

✨ Vacancy for a PhD position in Archives of Deep Learning, as part of Prof. Tobias Blanke's ERC project on ‘Deep Culture’ at UvA. 🔗 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Very excited for this! A great opportunity to dig into what we know (and don't ) about machine learning evaluation. Even in putting together the syllabus, I think we both learnt a lot!

We have an open panel !! at 2025 4S on Data Loss Reverberations: exploring disappearance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies 👀 data loss as fundamental rather than anomalous feature of digital infrastructures Abstracts due Jan 31 Read more at this link: tinyurl.com/DALOSSREVERB

🚨Really excited to start the year with a new article just published in @theoryculturesociety.org on the intersection of synthetic data and AI: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I hope people may find some forthcoming critical work with @katschwerzmann.bsky.social on alignment useful.... Here is a short preview.

⚡We are thrilled to continue the online #CriticalAI seminar series on January 22 with Lilly Irani (@gleemie.bsky.social) for her talk 'Algorithms of Suspicion: Authentication and Distrust on Digital Labor Platforms’ 🗓️ Join us Wednesday January 22, from 5.30-7PM (CET). Sign up here: bit.ly/CAI0125

We organise a 'meet-the-editors' workshop with @bigdatasoc.bsky.social on 30+31 Jan. 2025. We will meet Jennifer Gabrys + Matthew Zook at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium). Check the program and consider registering!👇 shorturl.at/Owra0 | @lsts-vub.bsky.social @dataunion-erc.bsky.social

🚨 Sussex AI PhD studentships - call is open now! Scholarships are available for researchers working at the intersection of multiple academic fields. I am interested in supervising doctoral projects with strong philosophical approaches/research questions. www.sussex.ac.uk/study/fees-f...

UnitedHealthcare has been accused of using algorithms to deny treatments and refusing coverage of nursing care to stroke patients. UnitedHealthcare and its parent company now face a class-action lawsuit over its use of the algorithm.

Very much looking forward to this session and to continuing the conversation on ‘algorithmic violence’. And also very proud to be in such amazing company (thx to the organisers!)