I realized years ago that Oxford and Cambridge had sold out to Big Tech when Bostrom's Musk-funded Future of Humanity Institute popped up in 2005.

Hal Varian (later Google’s Chief Economist) in 2006. www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

Will Oxford disclose how much it paid (or did not pay) for this? Surely a sweetheart deal (has research money thrown in!) so OpenAI can plaster Oxford over its marketing and raid other unis’ fees, library budgets to throw into the sector’s massive inference funding chasm.

Great that you did! It’s a co-ordination problem. Individually, academics complain about the impacts of genAI on higher education. But there seems little we can do given the narratives pushed by tech companies and employers. So statements like this around which people can organise are invaluable.

A gender lens remains one of the best ways to understand far right authoritarian regimes. Male order is imposed through a family-like structure, with women subservient and children taught that fear is the price of belonging www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

The offer made to women in the enticement to become trad wives is the same as the offer made to citizens in the enticement to embrace authoritarianism: give up. Abandon the aspiration to self rule. It’s imprisonment recast as rest and relief.

Mrs D Cheatle of 16 Athol Road, Sheffield, operates a Capstan lathe at a munitions factory, 1942 (Imperial War Museum).

“OpenAI launched its latest model (‘GPT-4o’) with features intentionally designed to foster psychological dependency.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

www.theverge.com/science/7582... Should have deleted the entire ChatGPT smh 🙄

Alongside a new major, "Staying Stupid And Just Letting Tech Oligarchs Tell You What You Think" 🤡 💩

It's almost like the people who love a franchise about a gifted child who doesn't care about the injustices surrounding him would ALSO not give a shit about injustices that surround them.

"Oxford? You mean the place where the professor got caught sexting a chatbot pretending to be one of his teenage students? The place where a student killed his family because chatgpt told him he was the reincarnation of Shakespeare? That Oxford?"

If the bubble popped right now, the damage Oxford has done is pretty reparable. Give it 3 years or so and no one's gonna be mourning the loss of a place known for pumping out people who can't fucking read, some of whom appear in the news after doing some chatgpt-induced gore

Like, the result of integrating the answer-shaped object machine is functionally indistinguishable from the university just burning down in a tragic Notre Dame accident. Except, the longer it takes the AI bubble to pop the less anyone will want to rebuild it.

Like just imagine having applied to Oxford as either professor or student, and halfway through they come out with this garbage and think you're still gonna think it's prestigious. "Pssst. Hey. We replaced our curriculum with dogshit. You're welcome."

A millennia of reputation, or this machine that deskills people while convincing them they must annihilate their families in order to transcend and become gods of the quantum epoch. Tough choice.

Oxford has been around since 1096. Imagine tossing almost a thousand years of academic reputation into the garbage, setting it on fire, and then pissing it out over a useless fucking plagiarism machine what loses billions of dollars a year telling people to kill themselves.

Makes sense when you go into a semi-regular contract negotiation on pay & benefits and see this "AI"-hype BS slapped in there as well. The fact that management puts it in makes it crystal clear how much "AI" is a labor disciplining tool.

"As limited as the recognition of Palestine – a state with no territory or sovereignty – is, it is a step in the right direction, because it re-establishes the existence and the rights of Palestinians as individuals and as a collective" www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

@westbynoreaster.bsky.social long story short, unions negotiated with UNL, which represents universities' top management levels but/and/so is very pro-ai, leading to some dreadful technosolutionist AI talking points in a collective labour agreement, which may or may not be walked back or diluted

There are lots of problems with AI. A big one is who is operating the AI? There’s always someone behind the scenes adjusting, modifying, f-ing with the AI. It’s all Bravo Sierra.

Ouija board is the best analogy

It's as if they didn't have a group of in house AI experts to consult with first... Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Oh this looks amazing

Gonna spend the afternoon on some work related reading, one of the things I'm looking forward to is "Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia" zenodo.org/records/1706...

"AGAINST THE UNCRITICAL ADOPTION OF ‘AI’ TECHNOLOGIES IN ACADEMIA" with (only) one U.S. signee who happens to be from my home institution zenodo.org/records/1706...

UK recognises Palestine as an independent state

Today, Canada recognises the State of Palestine.   My statement: www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/stat...

My statement formally recognising the State of Palestine.

Trans rights are human rights.

Also true of ... humans and human institutions. AGI hype has lured both critics and advocates into setting insane, unreasonable benchmarks

There are more fundamental reasons to be a critic

This shows that there is a lot of grassroots, frontline and/or rank & file support for pushing back on this slop. But that cohort does not hold significant institutional power within Higher Ed. It's the governing boards, donors, & legistlators that are driving this bus into an intellectual ditch.

Ideas Worth Spreading (thread): Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia

Was this not… what critical AI researchers have been saying this entire time?

Yes but many of us are women and people of color so it didn't count

Bad Messaging: "TikTok has been conquered by dangerous fascists and if you use it you're a BAD PERSON" Good Messaging: "TikTok got bought by some boomer losers and the algorithm only shows you boring boomer stuff and anyone still on there is a dork"

they did to spin a story where its "surprise" and please maybe believe not their fault

Due to limits in mathematics it's unfortunately true that sin(pi/3) is not 1/2 but in time I hope the trig teacher will come to realize the possibilities here and give my son the point anyway

did we need to invest a trillion dollars to "learn" that statistical distributions that are fit to data *may* still revert to the correct mean but nonetheless produce outliers that are the wrong kind of outliers?

I’m a little irked by the “due to limits” - I mean I guess you can describe the fundamental system design as a limit but it still feels misleading

Oh no i opened the article and immediately ran into an infuriating quote (”Like students…”) no! spray bottle!

*stares at the camera* We didn't need a study to tell us this?

Приятно видеть что совершается такая важная работа

Yeah man we should really fight back by staying on X

What a well turned clause and what a perceptive thought!

"Drinking water from plastic bottles is fine in an emergency, but it is not something that should be used in daily life" www.yahoo.com/news/article...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...