Ethical AI is an oxymoron, like automated science

This week I received my first paper to peer-review that was written in large part by an LLM. The typical telltale signs were a lot of placeholder-words that add nothing to the argument and many qualifying adjectives that make some paragraphs sound like an advertisement for technology.

Critical Thinking is deep engagement with the relationships between statements about the world. See section 3 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 4/

Somebody needs to write at length of the unhinged nonsense of calling academics critical of a monstrous technology, esp ones with direct expertise in formalism & implementation details: technopessimist. Are climate experts called pessimists for believing in & fighting against the climate crisis? 1/2

"Additionally, by accepting generative models’ normative rationality, the University reframes learning and research as essentially consisting in the evaluation of models’ outputs." @katschwerzmann.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2505.03513

Liebe Lehrende an deutschen Hochschulen, bitte erwägen Sie, diesen Open Letter gegen die unkritische Anwendung von KI im Hochschulkontext zu unterzeichnen. openletter.earth/gegen-die-un...

#KWIBlog: In today's blog text, former Thyssen Fellow @katschwerzmann.bsky.social investigates the role of reading in the context of new developments in AI, stressing the need for ongoing investment in close and critical reading that considers AI practices and limitations. 🔎 tinyurl.com/25upvwyj

A social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education 🧵

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/

Totally vague PR blog post as we now expect from OpenAI - remember when they used to publish research? But I am nonetheless interested in the conceptualization of ML "pathologies" - will have to think further about "sycophancy" as political problem... openai.com/index/sycoph...

Genius: www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2025/04...

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...

So happy to see this paper cowritten with @alexcampolo.bsky.social finally published!!

Really looking forward to the "New Reading Scenes" workshop later this week, organized by @katschwerzmann.bsky.social at @kwi-essen.bsky.social & @sfb1567.bsky.social. Remote registration is available: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The workshop is organized by our Thyssen@KWI Fellow @katschwerzmann.bsky.social with talks by @floriansprenger.bsky.social | @alexcampolo.bsky.social | @rainermuehlhoff.bsky.social | @moritzhiller.bsky.social Further Information here: www.kulturwissenschaften.de/veranstaltun...

Wichtige Stellungnahme bezüglich der aktuellen politischen Angriffe gegen die Freiheit von Forschung und Lehre: www.fg-gender.de/angriffen-au...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a week ago, the CSU closed 6 departments (among them, philosophy, women's and gender studies, and economics) and fired 46 tenure-line faculty at Sonoma State. One of those faculty studies AI ethics. They fired the AI ethics professor. Then, this.

Reading DeepSeek's paper: "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning," I find the paper somewhat misleading. DeepSeek's claim is that its model obtains excellent reasoning abilities by applying "pure reinforcement learning" onto the pre-trained model.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a... I can’t recommend this podcast enough. This episode examines how autocracy is established by reinterpreting existing laws and discusses the function of systematic “performative cruelty” toward minorities.

Workers in DC are fighting to block Musk's minions. "About 100 Federal employees and supporters...blocked the doors to...‘data miners’....The small group of young men eventually left without entering after the protesters would not let them near the front doors." dcmediagroup.us/2025/02/02/f...

Link to the description and schedule: static1.squarespace.com/static/602b9.... To register: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

www.reuters.com/world/us/mus... “‘It feels like a hostile takeover,’ the employee said.” In politics, isn’t that called a coup?

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/... And speaking about scraping, don't forget to turn off "connected experience," which is on by default in all MS Office products.

📅 This week's #colloquium will be held by Thyssen@KWI fellow @katschwerzmann.bsky.social. She’ll explore how machine-learning-based AI, especially generative ones, create new forms of authority and ethics: www.kulturwissenschaften.de/veranstaltun...

Workshop open to the public. Zoom Link will be posted. To attend in person, please contact me. Confirmed speakers: Kate Hayles, @floriansprenger.bsky.social, @alexcampolo.bsky.social, @moritzhiller.bsky.social, Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, Alex Bostroff, Christoph Engemann, @rainermuehlhoff.bsky.social

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

These aren’t exactly surprising choices but I do think our group’s recent “A World Model” paper helps contextualize and theorize them - we (@amoorelouise.bsky.social, @ludovico-rella.bsky.social, Ben Jacobsen) address both pretty explicitly: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Notation algorithmique: l’Assurance Maladie surveille les plus pauvres et harcèle les mères précaires www.laquadrature.net/2024/12/05/n...

I am excited to organize a hybrid workshop at KWI, Essen, Germany (February 27–28, 2025) called “New Reading Scenes: On Machine Reading and Reading Machine Learning Research”. (Program will follow.) www.kulturwissenschaften.de/veranstaltun...

#KWIonTour: Today is the beginning of the closing conference "Border Internalization: Authoritarian Transformation & the Societal Impact of Border Work" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research @zif-bielefeld.bsky.social. KWI fellow Volker Heins is one of the convenors INFO tinyurl.com/sw7ypzv5

On 27/11 our Colloquium will explore the strange intersection of society, aesthetics & politics inherent in ✨ Guilty Pleasures ✨ discussing an excerpt from „Totem and Taboo“ by Sigmund Freud and an essay on „Guilty Pleasures as Conspicuous Consumption?” by Paul Buckermann (KWI): tinyurl.com/mrxpbher

#KWIonTour today: Katia Schwerzmann, KWI International Fellow, speaks at Université de Lausanne| @unil.bsky.social l on “L’intelligence artificielle comme projet de normativisation: vers de nouvelles formes de pouvoir et de subjectivité” INFO: www.kulturwissenschaften.de/veranstaltun...