A nice piece. Do we need snobbery though? Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I see it as a credible scenario that once the internet & social media get thoroughly infested by AI-slop, we will see authenticity & anti-consumerism arise - the click culture will appear as the stupidity it's always been.

Asiaa! "Työhaastattelut tuntuvat nykypäivänä mittaavan yhä enemmän sitä, kuka hakijoista on paras memorisoimaan hissipuheita sekä valmiita vastauksia". Mutatis mutandis opetus & tutkimus. Liian paljon fokusoidaan pintaan. Missä sisältö? www.hs.fi/mielipide/ar...

“The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the ‘fear of missing out,’ few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better.”

How to address the current mess in higher ed created by AI-madness? (1) No more home assignments: all assignments (exams, essays, theses) should be done in exam aquaria. (2) University higher-ups must stop drinking the AI Kool-Aid. We need to start pushing a different culture from the bottom up.

Charlie Kirk is buried. A few days & nights pass, and Jimmy Kimmel is resurrected. Coincidence? I think not. www.nbcnews.com/business/med...

(One of) the biggest problem(s) with AI is that it creates false trust: that there is some super-intelligence in there, and that due to it being trained by incomprehensibly enormous data sets, it has some über-objective perspective on things. But it's not intelligent, and it is biased.

I've never understood the idea that LLMs could be used to summarise research papers. Papers already have an abstract & clearly divided sections (methods/discussion), enabling us to quickly focus on the information that interests us. What else but dross could these bullshitting machines add to this?

Great stuff! But I do feel the need to remind us of the words of Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Let's be careful out there!

Let's recap. @jimmykimmel.com called bullshit on the US government. And ABC preferred to side with the bullshit rather than with the facts.

Finally, some words of wisdom regarding AI:

"Taking drastic measures against AI in higher education is..about creating the conditions necessary for young people to learn to read, write, and think, which is to say, the conditions necessary for modern civilization to continue to reproduce itself" #AcademicSky www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

Elon Musk has shared an obviously AI-generated image of the Unite the Kingdom rally in London. The first AI error is that the Arc de Triomphe is in Paris, not London. And once you zoom in, you'll notice that the Union Jacks and the crowd have other errors typical of AI images.

Lähetä havaintosi! (Kirjoitustaitoisista toimittajista Helsingin sanomissa.)

With students heading back to the classroom, a group of cognitive scientists and AI researchers has published one of the most forceful and evidence-backed calls yet to reject the "uncritical adoption of AI" in academia:

70 years ago yesterday, they applied for summer money.

German bookstore selling a curated selection of works that were banned in US public schools and libraries. (h/t @inabeintner.bsky.social)

❤️ AI

@nature.com finds science posts on #Bluesky are more original, and earn far higher engagement. Need we say more!? #Twitter #X #SocialMedia #ResearchSky #AcademicSky

Don’t need no fascist rules Don’t want no fascist schools Don’t want soldiers on our streets There’s big crime in DC at the White House www.youtube.com/watch?v=57WE...

❤️ science

COLUMBO Proves Donald Trump's Guilt youtu.be/BAsyaAFSyOg

Blimey!

More importantly: corpuses - textual data - are not *knowledge. This is the fundamental flaw in the current AI swindle.

Tällaista sitten. "Siitä hän ei kuitenkaan kirjoita, miksei tässä tapauksessa yliopiston toimintaa ole perusteltu julkisuudessa laajemmin." "Haastatteluita aiheesta hän ei ole antanut useista pyynnöistä huolimatta." Tämä juttu haisee!

Whenever there's an image of the stupid Trump towers, this is what I see:

Nyt on toimittajalla homma hakusessa. Ensiksi: Suomesta löytyy paljon runsasvalikoimaisia olutravintoloita - sivistyneestä hörpiskelystähän on tullut suorastaan syöpä! Toiseksi: vietä pubissa vähän pitempi aika. Tinttaaminen alkaa iltapäivästä, klo 20 aikaan kusi & oksu virtaavat Lontoon kaduilla.

Fireworks yeaterday evening at Kuopio passenger harbour. #kuopio #finlandlakeland

We should work on incentives for the academia to invest in editing papers (in order to deal with the peer-review/publication crisis) and doing public communication (in order to deal with "science criticism"). "Academic Editor" should be a job title in universities. Thus spoke Holden Thorp:

Uusi lukuvuosi. Uusi alku. Uusi @helsinki.fi yliopisto.

Soon, we'll be reaching a point where it is simply not feasible to do original research work. The end of science. bsky.app/profile/natu...

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

You want to be the most hip & cool lecturer this autumn? Get rid of your duck-rabbit slides - it's rabbit-elephant time now, baby! And they say there's no progress in science.. bsky.app/profile/talb...

Here is a press release/ summary blog post about our new paper. Key conclusion: For every single professional use that scientists used to use Twitter for, Twitter is much worse now than it used to be, and Bluesky is better that Twitter currently is. www.southernfriedscience.com/twitter-suck...

Surely, increases in the numbers like these in student intake entail that these unis are hiring significant amounts of new academic staff? Surely?

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

This is an interesting, relevant, and timely piece. Somehow, we will need make sense of the biological/cultural divide and its political consequences. But this piece contains also claims that I find quite weird => www.persuasion.community/p/bringing-h...

This week, Cristian Larroulet Philipi joins us to talk about measurement in the human sciences: why it can be more philosophically complex than in the physical sciences, and how it raises pressing questions about the role of numbers in psychology, social science, and policy #philsci #measurement

Why is it important to increase acceptance rates? Excellent question! Many think we should publish less, not more (and tighten review/editorial policies (e.g. below)). I've put hard thinking into this for a while (I get paid to do this), and I've come to opposite conclusion. I'll try to explain why.

Erikoisen vähän on tosiaan keskustelua siitä, miten netti/some on muuttanut ihmisiä. Tuntuu, että vallitsee edelleen naiivi ajatus, että ihmiset (psyyke, toiminta) on jotenkin vakiota, jota netti/some palvelee. Mutta pitkälle on elämä redusoitunut kirjainyhdistelmiksi, sloganeiksi ja selfieiksi.

I'm not totally sure what to think about this. I'm sympathetic to the idea of dropping (prepublication) peer-review altogether. But I'm not sure how feasible that is, and whether it solves all the problems. But: how about investing on editing to facilitate a *radical increase* in acceptance rates?

Hopefully, it will be clear how much education policy has been driven by ideology and not economic realities when findings like these do not result in a shift of resources from computer science programs to the arts and humanities.

You need to check out Joe’s various takes on the British Pork advert, Rhodri. They’re brilliant x MrJoeGooch.bsky.social youtu.be/EGuB4EgnDWM?...

The Executive Order "orders each US agency head to designate an appointee to develop a grant-review process that will 'advance the President’s policy priorities'". Who would have guessed that Lysenkoism will become hip again - and in the US. Wonderful. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Wait, wasn't ChatGPT-5 supposed to be a PhD-level AI? I wonder in what field; clearly not in geography. bsky.app/profile/mela...

Genuine question: is our reliance on these corporations - our institutional reliance in particular - really necessary? Why do I have to use Microsoft products (Outlook, Office)? Are there really no options for providing these basic services? The way we are dependent on these companies is disturbing.

Näkisin tilanteen nyt sellaisena, että Suomen tulevaisuuden kannalta parasta olisi lakkauttaa valtiovarainministeriö.

Genuine question: is our reliance on these corporations - our institutional reliance in particular - really necessary? Why do I have to use Microsoft products (Outlook, Office)? Are there really no options for providing these basic services? The way we are dependent on these companies is disturbing.

Of course, the large scale employment of AI in education and research will smooth things out, right? bsky.app/profile/eica...

The rapid decline of American science has few precedents in history, argues @rossandersen.bsky.social. We are witnessing an unparalleled act of self-sabotage: