Sofia Gil-Clavel

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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‘DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines’: my mother’s worrying reliance on AI for health advice The Long read: Tired of a two-day commute to see her overworked doctor, my mother turned to tech for help with her kidney disease. She bonded with the bot so much I was scared she would refuse to see ...

"For the sick, the anxious, the isolated and many other vulnerable people who may lack medical resources and attention, AI’s vast knowledge base, coupled with its affirming and empathetic tone, can make the bots feel like wise and comforting partners."

Once again I request, please, AI which can do something useful like clean bathrooms or my cats' litter trays. An "artificial intelligence-powered online encyclopedia" is NOT useful, especially when it "promotes far-right perspectives & favors Musk's viewpoints"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipe...

Detail of the "Glasses Apostle" painting in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany. Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the painting is considered to be among the oldest depictions of eyeglasses north of the Alps

Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Let's roll.

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy

Very glad to see this piece by the @nytimes.com on data center struggles from Mexico to Ireland:

"Government support worldwide has helped tech firms build with little accountability, said Ana Valdivia, an Oxford University lecturer studying data center development."

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...

Monotone image of man asleep at a desk surrounded by monsters.

This well-known aquatint by Goya came to mind as symbolising where we are right now. It’s called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted.

It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed.

The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.

And now what is next?

🫶🫶

It just started!

My favorite #sport is running from one platform to another to catch my #train. 👟

#HighAdrenaline #NS.nl

Added 🗓✅️

This week was hectic. Puuuf.🫠

#AmCAT is proudly developed by the @societal-analytics.nl

You can learn more about it in the:
* Book: amcat.nl/book/
* Blog post: societal-analytics.nl/blogs/202501...

Sofia Gil-Clavel stands at a podium presenting AmCAT at the 3rd MEDem Conference. Behind her, a slide shows the AmCAT team (Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, Johannes Gruber, Sofia Gil-Clavel) with the tagline: “Developed by researchers for researchers, society, and data savvy users.” Logos of MEDem, VU Amsterdam, and the Societal Analytics Lab are displayed at the top.

Sebastian Ziaja stands at a podium presenting HarDIS (Harmony in the Democratic Ideological Space) at the 3rd MEDem Conference. A slide behind him shows the HarDIS team (Lea Kaftan, Paul Bederke, Selçuk Timur Uluer) with the logos of MEDem, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and OSCARS (the funding initiative).

Day 2 of the #MEDemConference at @gesis.org starts with powerful tool demos:
🔍 AmCAT @sof14g1l.bsky.social on enabling large-scale text analysis of media & political debates.
🌐 HarDIS @sziaja.bsky.social on harmonizing and sustaining cross-national democracy data (surveys, parties, experts).

This is such a good example.

Did you find it useful? Then, do not forget to cite it. (:

Gil-Clavel, S. (2025). R-Course: R for Social Scientists (Version 1.0) [Data set]. github.com/SofiaG1l/R_C.... doi: doi.org/10.5281/zeno....

Are you a social scientist that wants to learn R?

Then, you may find my course "R for Social Scientists" very useful!

I designed this course to give social scientists all that is necessary to start using R in their everyday work.

github.com/SofiaG1l/R_C...

That secret code shared among those who read a book in public transport. 📖🚄

So true

An ELSI for AI: Learning from genetics to govern algorithms In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months h...

Foregrounding ethical, legal and social implications of AI is crucial as @alondra.bsky.social argues in @science.org

Hard agree: we pursue Ethical, Legal, and Societal Aspects (ELSA) in our @aimediademlab.bsky.social

We need way more of this. Globally 🌍

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

AI als stemadviseur? Chatbot haalt VVD en PVV door elkaar Om niet honderden pagina's partijprogramma's door te hoeven spitten, zijn AI-chatbots een verleidelijk hulpmiddel.

"Large language models like ChatGPT contain all kinds of noise," says Claes de Vreese, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society at the University of Amsterdam. "You get answers that incorporate opinions. The answers are polluted."

nos.nl/nieuwsuur/co...

Summer break is over. 🥹

my keynote happening in a few mins. registration here to stream it

aiforgood.itu.int/summit25/reg...

“The company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI.”

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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It possible to cycle everywhere regardless of the occasion and the weather.