Oh yes. 🫶👇

“First is sight, that is to say the eye; second is the form of the thing seen; third is the distance from the eye to the thing seen …” Piero della Francesca Spending the day at Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino 🖼️🎨🏰

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

We have a new call for papers. If you're working on AI, democracy and public voice, please take a look. You'll need to move fast! digitalgood.net/call-for-abs... @mrsbunz.bsky.social @divya.bsky.social @meredithmeredith.bsky.social

I really don’t like our times.

… quite enjoyed this conference ‘Chat Token Vector’ 🤖🧮↗️ … with @mttpsq.bsky.social, @hannesbajohr.de, @atg-dbp.bsky.social and many others.

Ok I guess I have to go through that Apple paper. My immediate issue is the framing which is super binary: "Are these models capable of generalizable reasoning, or are they leveraging different forms of pattern matching?" ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-i...

Join me at the HBK Braunschweig, Germany next Wednesday June 4 to discuss caring about data and technical collectives. ✊

Applications just opened for a postdoctoral position in Digital Media Studies with Markus Krajewski and myself at the Department of Media Studies and the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the University of Basel. (1/3)

Just over a week until our Technomoral Conversation on AI & Creative Labour! We’ll be looking at issues ranging from the AI industry’s copyright violations, responses from creatives, and the wider ethical & political questions about the role of AI in creative practice and culture ▶️ edin.ac/3WJhuUH

How about taking your AI research one year to Rome? The project "Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing" has interesting Predoctoral Fellowships and Postdoctoral Fellowships 👇 www.biblhertz.it/3628094/2503...

It's out, free and open access: Thinking _with_ AI: Machine Learning the Humanities. 11 essay on AI and how to think with it – by Peli Grietzer (@peligrietzer.bsky.social), Leif Weatherby (@leifw.bsky.social), Mercedes Bunz (@mrsbunz.bsky.social), Fabian Offert, Lev Manovich…

Applications are now open for 20 interdisciplinary jobs in AI at King’s College London: King’s AI+ Academic Fellowships, advancing AI across *all* disciplines (yes, inc. Arts & Hums — come and work with me!). www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/role/ki... @kingsdh.bsky.social @kings-dfi.bsky.social

1 / Executive power now operates via Delete Commands in digital infrastructures. This isn't data management. It's calculated obliteration of who gets to exist in digital memory and knowledge infrastructures. Thank you @verfassungsblog.de for publishing our (@ktmac.bsky.social and my) essay!

This looks good: Computational Social Science meets Qualitative Research www.lse.ac.uk/Methodology/...

I’ve spent most of the last few years being pretty down on the potential of open source AI and I’m coming back around to believing! Models are here, time to build.

Universities, libraries—the whole nonprofit sector—ought to unite in supporting this. If efforts like this succeed, we have a good chance of remaining relevant in 2040.

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further

Amazing that @aljazeeraenglish.bsky.social has a lovely little documentary about Sylvia Wynter. I wish it had gotten into the concepts a bit more, but still v charming. I’m impressed a news site would commission this 🫶✨ aje.io/vkxgyf

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Public compute — state provision of computing resources — could be a powerful tool for reshaping the AI sector. In our report, Jai Vipra and I offer an overview of existing approaches, and recommendations for avoiding industry capture, reducing environmental harms, and delivering public value 1/5

We're up to 43 by 12:12pm. They will find me slumped over my keyboard, emailed to death.

The number of people surprised by the long list of words NSF is targeting makes me think many of you all have not seen this: www.commerce.senate.gov/services/fil...

real world (not in frame) 📲🌐 Release me from your technical collective! by @mrsbunz.bsky.social yesterday at @transmediale.bsky.social

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

For those who can’t be with us at transmediale, here is a link to their livestream. 💨 Olga Goriunova, @ranjodhdhaliwal.com and me will discuss digital subjects & technical collectives at 12 👇 (=11am UK time). transmediale.de/en/livestream

Join us at transmediale tmrrw 👇

Good point by @nickmvincent.bsky.social on the deep tension in today’s ask-for-forgiveness-free-for-all approach regarding data for model training. Will "open" models cause this paradox to reach a breaking point? dataleverage.substack.com/p/db20526d-f...

Spring/Summer talks at Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), Warwick - follow for more: @cimethods.bsky.social

So peaceful.

You can also find me earlier on Friday, Jan 31, at noon, when in conversation with Olga Goriunova and @mrsbunz.bsky.social about subjectivities and collectivities today. (2/2) transmediale.de/en/2025/sche...

Looking forward to be in Berlin for 🚀transmediale 🚀next week. Join our kick-off Friday, 12h w/ Olga Goriunova & @ranjodhdhaliwal.com; we discuss how is it to be digital subjects, and the politics of 'technical collectives' in times of Trump & AI ✊ - please share! transmediale.de/en/2025/even...

An odd thing with both the "is it a Nazi salute" and "did Trump believe his own lies / election" stuff is this reflexive need by tons of people to believe something can be bad only if it was understood by the person as bad, but since we cannot know to metaphysical certainty their mind, it can't be

And here it is! A new history of @transkribus.bsky.social and a dive into how cooperatives can deliver responsible and transparent artificial intelligence: open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-1...

"What if Bruegel is not telling us how to live within contradictions, but rather rendering them conspicuous – an aesthetic that seeks not to reflect, but to help us see where to look if we want to change the world." newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Anyway, I very much enjoy reading this. 👇

Oh the many critiques of imaginary technologies… nice anecdote of Benjamin Bratton listening to Slavoj Zizěk 🟦

Let's talk more about AI training data: Can collective governance build more supportive structures for AI projects? Can ArtxAI help to prototype this? Our BRAIDxSerpentine event/video linked to HollyHerndon+MattDryhurst's exhibition is online👇 @braiduk.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=V363...

Why not pop this in your diary before you break for the holidays? New BRAID/IDI research talk: Red Teaming and Operationalising Responsibility with @alex-taylor.bsky.social 30 Jan, online/in person #Edinburgh Find out more/book here: bit.ly/4fiN9mc @designinf.bsky.social #ResponsibleAI #RedTeaming

With the global push for AI innovation there's never been a better time for international collaboration on responsible AI. We start the new year with a #BRAID call for collaboration between UK and US institutions: www.ukri.org/opportunity/... #responsibleAI #funding

…alive or AI?

General consensus in the replies and quotes of this seems to be that the entire concept of "AI skills" is a joke - how hard is typing text into a chatbot, really? I will continue to argue that it's genuinely difficult, and that the challenge in using these tools is widely underestimated

You might be interested in this piece I wrote about AI as “artificial imagination,” which takes this prosthetic view seriously: ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/ci...

When the clock strikes midnight on January 1, creative works from 1929 & sound recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the US, like: ⚓️ Popeye 🕵️ The Maltese Falcon 📖 The Sound and the Fury 🇮🇹 A Farewell to Arms 🏠️ A Room of One's Own 🙌 Hallelujah 🎺 Bolero and many more! 🧵👇

In case you find yourself bored II: ‘A History of the World According to Getty Images’ by @misek.bsky.social is a shortfilm about power and property, and the absurdity of our recorded past in the public domain hidden behind the paywall of Getty Images www.ahistoryoftheworldaccordingtogettyimages.com

In case you find yourself bored in the next few days, here is a bloody brilliant concert to entertain you with style. ✨@doechii & band ✨ 🫶🏻 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=-91v...

Extra points to Anthropic for using the scene of torment that opens Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_ (!) in their paper about a language model that realizes it is being disciplined and learns to subvert the discipline — unaware that it is *also* in a panopticon. www.anthropic.com/research/ali...

Yes, I warmly recommend this short film on drones. Enjoyable critique, fun, annoying, plus featuring drones 🛸 - what more can you want? 👇