@danielatafani.bsky.social
"some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily execute civilians" says today's New York Times, continuing their long tradition of whitewashing fascism
Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com
30.09.2025 07:06 โ ๐ 14362 ๐ 4291 ๐ฌ 4 ๐ 515Speaking Truth to Power seems so 1960s. Now is the age of Speaking Sense to Nonsense. It isnโt any more effective, sadly.
30.09.2025 09:12 โ ๐ 130 ๐ 26 ๐ฌ 4 ๐ 2Also tiktok, so relevant both sides of the Atlantic.
28.09.2025 18:41 โ ๐ 7 ๐ 3 ๐ฌ 1 ๐ 1I cannot express how wild this quote is. This is a top tech analyst at a well-regarded firm saying that there is not enough capital to actually pay for all the stuff that NVIDIA and OpenAI has promised. It is so important that everybody realizes that *there is not enough money to do this*
26.09.2025 17:06 โ ๐ 3423 ๐ 1310 ๐ฌ 70 ๐ 45โWhen we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared on the scene in the last 3 years. And they experience confusion โฆ when they discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades (โฆ)โ
zenodo.org/records/1706...
11/๐งต
Freedom of the press is a counterpower. As Kant and French revolutionaries knew, to claim the freedom of the press is to claim the power of the people, opposed to that of the State and able to monitor it, judge it and, ultimately, overturn it.
@marioricciardi.bsky.social
zenodo.org/records/1716...
AI systems can have politics: they shape forms of life, accord or deny opportunities, power, freedoms and rights.
Predictive optimisation systems, for instance, deny your status as self-determining individual by pretending that your future is written and readable
zenodo.org/records/1086...
I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai
"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"
come vi dico spesso,i #criminaliDiGuerra occidentali, da #Bush a #Netanyahu godono di impunitร assoluta (mentre quelli non-occidentali finiscono alla #CortePenaleInternazionale)perchรฉ sono protetti a tanti livelli,non solo quello penale,ma anche mediatico
www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in-edicola/a...
quando, per un'intera settimana, i media dominanti italiani non scrivono una riga su #SoldatiIDF in #decompressionePsicologica in Italia da atrocitร di #Gaza,sotto copertura di turisti,protetti dalla #DIGOS, vuol dire che li proteggono a livello mediatico
www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in-edicola/a...
voi parlate con me, protetti dall'anonimato. Certo,meno di americani, inglesi, e perfino cittadini africani. Gli italiani hanno forte cultura dell'omertร . Ma le cose stanno cambiando.
Ne sapete qualcosa? Parlatene con me in modo sicuro qui:
stefaniamaurizi.it/it-contactme...
scusate se ve lo segnalo a scoppio ritardato,ma ero risucchiata
Se l'avete perso come me, NON lo perdete ora: #RiccardoIacona e il suo team di #PresaDiretta hanno mandato in onda il discorso di Julian #Assange nell'ottobre scorso a #Strasburgo:
www.raiplay.it/video/2025/0...
a week ago we revealed that over the last year, #IDFSoldiers have come to Italy for #PsychologicalDecompression, disguised as tourists and protected by the Italian police's unit,#DIGOS.
No top Italian media has reported on this in the last week
[English]
www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2025/09/09/i...
do you have any restricted info on #IDFSoldiers touring #Italy (and more in general #InternationalCriminalCourt state parties) disguised as tourists and protected by the #police?
Please consider to share it safely HERE:
stefaniamaurizi.it/it-contactme...
www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2025/09/09/i...
"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...
12.09.2025 10:45 โ ๐ 874 ๐ 374 ๐ฌ 11 ๐ 20New blog post: 70 years of AI hype. Quoting from Olivia Guest et al. (2025) "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia."
blog.stephenturner.us/p/70-years-o...
โIf we just swallow it uncritically, weโre no better than those universities signing up for shiny tools without asking hard questions. The real job is to figure outโdoes this actually help outcomes? Or is it just vendor hype with an AI sticker on it?โ
businessof.tech/2025/09/09/a...
Preprint, Private governments and AI (in Italian)
On what conceptually links the genocidal project on the Gaza Riviera and so-called AI
zenodo.org/records/1552...
LLM is software running on computers. Writing about 'humility', 'reasoning', 'honesty about uncertainty' and 'hallucinations' is an unacceptable anthropomorphisation and can only be intended to deceive users.
@irisvanrooij.bsky.social @olivia.science
openai.com/index/why-la...
"When we suggest AI is doing exactly what a person does, [...] It's like saying that good conversations are never possible, and that mechanistic reinterpretation and remixing of words is all there could ever be"
07.09.2025 17:38 โ ๐ 8 ๐ 2 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0Oh, and of course let me replug this openletter.earth/open-letter-...
15/n
@djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy @karenhao.bsky.social @samhforbes.bsky.social @francesegan.bsky.social @katecrawford.bsky.social @mmitchell.bsky.social @rajiinio.bsky.social so I hope you (and others I cannot find on here) know that our power is in numbers and โ most importantly โ shared values. 14/n
06.09.2025 09:13 โ ๐ 51 ๐ 3 ๐ฌ 1 ๐ 0@hagenblix.bsky.social @histoftech.bsky.social @meredithmeredith.bsky.social @shannonvallor.bsky.social @danmcquillan.bsky.social @abeba.bsky.social @brianmerchant.bsky.social @andreasliesenfeld.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy @evelinaleivada.bsky.social ...without you this work is not possible... 13/n
06.09.2025 09:13 โ ๐ 55 ๐ 3 ๐ฌ 3 ๐ 0And finally, huge thanks to other scholars in these areas too, whose work buttresses academia from all this too:
@danielatafani.bsky.social @jsanofranchini.bsky.social @tjheffernan.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social @bpfaffenberger.bsky.social 12/n
Also very important โฃ๏ธ
HUGE thank you to all my co-authors @marentierra.bsky.social @altibel.bsky.social @jedbrown.org @lucyavraamidou.bsky.social @felienne.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social; full list here for those not on bsky: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... โ sorry if I did not tag anybody!
11/n
We end on "Machine Yearning for a Better Present" because why can't we dream? Why accept that universities are not places of learning? Nothing, except industry and their paid shills amongst us, force us to accept this & this force is not one of reason, but one of regressive values & profit.
10/n
7. the kinda appealing, but substantively indefensible, idea that somehow AI is different to other technology, like calculators, in a pedagogical context โ but we totally ban a great deal of technology in the classroom.
(Section 3.7 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
9/n
6. the extremely unhinged series of claims that without training them on how to be users of such systems that we somehow fail as teachers โ truly ludicrous, utterly bizarre, and in fact directly contradicts other industry selling points.
(Section 3.6 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
8/n
3.4 Anthropomorphism and other circular reasoning While opacity is a distinguishing feature of many other areas of science and technology, the myths surrounding computing may stem less from the fact that it is an opaque esoteric subject and more from the way in which it can be seen to blur the boundary between people and machines (Turkle 1984). To be sure, most people do not understand the workings of a television set or how to program their video cassette recorders properly, but then they do not usually believe that these machines can have intelligence. The public myths about computing and AI are also no doubt due to the ways in which computers are often depicted in the mass media โ e.g. as an abstract source of wisdom, or as a mechanical brain. Brian P. Bloomfield (1987, p. 72) There is circular reasoning at play when we suggest and assume machines can think, reason, or argue like humans can, and therefore, treat them โ and test them โ like humans. Within human-machine 10 Against the Uncritical Adoption of โAIโ Technologies in Academia interaction research, often, AI technology output is compared to human performance, mistakenly assuming such benchmarks are informative about AIโs capabilities. However, correlations with human output mean little to substantiate claims of human-likeness, especially when the input to the AI models tested is the output of human cognition in the first place. There are so many cases of this from daily life and the history of science that it appears shocking such results are taken so uncritically to be cognition (Bernardi 2024; Guest 2025; Guest and Martin 2023; Placani 2024; van Rooij and Guest 2025). An example from the 1960s: Weizenbaum (1966) was afraid of
4. the disregard for the corrosive power of anthropomorphism, which is taken advantage of by industry to sell & steal our data, in the base case scenario, and in the worst to abuse and push vulnerable groups to dependance and worse.
(Section 3.4 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
6/n
![3.3 Ahistoricism and the AI hype cycles
When I started writing about science decades ago [...] I edited an article in which [a computer scientist] predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance
and other professions. That was in 1984.
John Horgan (2020, n.p.)
When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared
on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they
discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia
(Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates โthe AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute
fiction for science.โ (Heffernan 2025, n.p. Duarte et al. 2024). We have been here before, both with entanglements of AI and statistics with industry corrupting our academic processes, and with so-called
AI summers: hype cycles that pivot from funding booms to complete busts and cessation of research
(Bassett and Roberts 2023; Boden 2006; Law 2024; Lighthill et al. 1973; Merchant 2023; Olazaran
1996; Perez 2002; P. Smith and L. Smith 2024; Thornhill 2025).
To understand how industry tries to influence independent research for their benefit, we can look
to past examples of entanglement of industry and statistics. Ronald A. Fisher, a eugenicist and โthe
founder of modern statisticsโ (Rao 1992), having been paid by the tobacco industry, claimed that because โcorrelation is not causationโ that therefore โsmoking does not cause lung cancerโ (Fisher 1958;
Stolley 1991). The parallel between tobacco and technology does not end here: โboth industriesโ increased funding of academia was as a reaction to increasingly unfavourable public opinion and an increased threat of legislation.โ (Mohamed Abdalla and Moustafa Abdalla 2021, p. 2; also see Knoester
et al. 2025) The histories of eugenics, statistics, computโฆ](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreie4dme35ovxs6t4ekrdosziqnikttmmef63imkpxqh2fdlybzccoa@jpeg)
3.3 Ahistoricism and the AI hype cycles When I started writing about science decades ago [...] I edited an article in which [a computer scientist] predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance and other professions. That was in 1984. John Horgan (2020, n.p.) When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia (Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates โthe AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute fiction for science.โ (Heffernan 2025, n.p. Duarte et al. 2024). We have been here before, both with entanglements of AI and statistics with industry corrupting our academic processes, and with so-called AI summers: hype cycles that pivot from funding booms to complete busts and cessation of research (Bassett and Roberts 2023; Boden 2006; Law 2024; Lighthill et al. 1973; Merchant 2023; Olazaran 1996; Perez 2002; P. Smith and L. Smith 2024; Thornhill 2025). To understand how industry tries to influence independent research for their benefit, we can look to past examples of entanglement of industry and statistics. Ronald A. Fisher, a eugenicist and โthe founder of modern statisticsโ (Rao 1992), having been paid by the tobacco industry, claimed that because โcorrelation is not causationโ that therefore โsmoking does not cause lung cancerโ (Fisher 1958; Stolley 1991). The parallel between tobacco and technology does not end here: โboth industriesโ increased funding of academia was as a reaction to increasingly unfavourable public opinion and an increased threat of legislation.โ (Mohamed Abdalla and Moustafa Abdalla 2021, p. 2; also see Knoester et al. 2025) The histories of eugenics, statistics, computโฆ
3. the obsession with denying and rewriting history, pretending AI only appeared in the last 3 years or that it has no history before the last few decades, etc.
(Section 3.3 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
5/n
