Very eager to dig into this and see if there's a tie in with Babbage's proto-computer being tied to plantation management and control of Black femme bodies, as described in logicmag.io/supa-dupa-sk...

Why AI transparency is not enough Recently, a taxonomy to disclose the use of generative AI (genAI) in research outputs was presented as an approach that creates transparency and thereby supports responsible genAI use. In this post we...

“The delegation of tasks to “tools & assistants” constitutes a methodological decision (…) Researchers should therefore be required to explain why they are trusting a black box that is neither open nor fair.”
— @altibel.bsky.social & @petertarras.bsky.social

www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/why...

Ants! What can't they do?

Since last year Physics swallowed Computer Science whole and the Nobel was given for machine learning, my list of plausible prizes remains unaltered.

After stretching a bit last year, this year the Nobel committee was determined to give the prize to the physicsiest physics that ever physicsed.

Mirowski:"a new development seeks to monetize nearly all aspects of the research process...under the rubric of 'open science'....commercial interests behind top journal publishers are pursuing control over 'open science' by imposing the structures of 'platform capitalism' upon the research process."

The myth of meritocracy inspires the implicit assumption that someone’s degree of success reflects their level of competence and skill.

I think that this is one of the most toxic myths of our time.

"live thru" you're so positive lolsob

Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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There is absolutely no good faith reason to use the term “AI” for any technology one is selling.

It serves only for dazzling people into thinking the technology has capabilities that it doesn’t.

If one wants a technology to be trustworthy, just use a transparent, informative term without hype.

This is dehumanisation. If you're interested start here Erscoi, L., Kleinherenbrink, A., & Guest, O. (2023). Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. SocArXiv. doi.org/10.31235/osf...

A Commentary on Academic Astronomy: From the perspective of The Little Prince In today's bite, the author dives into this beloved classic to search for lessons it has for everyone in academic astronomy

From Maria Vincent @themariavincent.bsky.social : In today’s bite, the author dives into this beloved classic to search for lessons it has for everyone in academic astronomy 🔭✨☄️
astrobites.org/2025/09/12/a...

Exactly...it is super irritating that there has been so much uncritical adoption of genAI and that governments seem to have swallowed the industry hype.

PhD students who complain about supervisors ‘never hear outcome’ ‘A poor communicator who ghosts me’: disaffected research students and supervisors have similar grievances about each other, survey reveals

While “very few” PhD students and supervisors make formal complaints about each other, far fewer learn the outcomes, an Australian study has found
#AcademicSky

“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”

A truly incredible piece, so many amazing quotes. Well worth the read and a much needed counter.

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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Highlighting women in quantum history The authors of a new book tell the stories of 16 women who made crucial contributions to quantum physics yet whose names don’t usually appear in textbooks.

Highlighting Women in Quantum History - new book. Some names to add to your lectures on quantum physics. 🧪 ⚛️ 🎢👩‍🔬

Unsung observatory worker was UK’s first professional female astronomer, experts say Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy is trying to find a photo of Annie Walker, who died in 1940, to give her star billing

Another unsung early female scientist coming out of the woodwork: Annie Walker, the first to be paid a salary by a UK observatory (bizarrely illustrated with an image 50 years too early from Cambridge) www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

We should also remember the Russell Einstein manifesto, celebrated this week by British Pugwash @royalsociety.org britishpugwash.org/watch-online...

Born #OnThisDay in 1819 was Eunice Newton Foote. Her experiments with solar radiation and carbon dioxide may have lead her to be the first to hypothesise the greenhouse effect, three years before John Tyndall FRS published his work. #WomenInSTEM

llustration: Carlyn Iverson, NOAA Climate.gov.

Detail from a title page of an early modern medicine book ("Spiegel der artz||ney/", VD16 F 2877) featuring two men looking at each other. The one man is holding a bound book, and the other is holding a manuscript scroll.

"Oh, so you are still using your bizarre scroll? I just bought the newest technology, a printed book with a binding, wanna have closer a look"?

Academic small talk back then, #academicchatter.

Paperback publication day! Have a good read. Things changing far too slowly for #womeninSTEM

I really wanted to do other types of research, but we really have to fix all of AI's damage to reasoning and practice first, I guess, and then fix sexism and whatever else before we can even do new work on critical computationalism in peace because white supremacy and capitalism had to end the world

“Not only does this contribute to cognitive deskilling, with the potential erosion of a student’s ability to write, reason and think critically, but it could contribute to social deskilling, if students are not attending classes, asking lecturers questions or sharing ideas with their coursemates.”

Domain-General Cognitive Ability In subject area: Psychology Domain-general cognitive abilities refer to cognitive skills that are not unique to humans but are present across various primate species and potentially other mammals and birds, indicating a general factor underlying cognitive performance that correlates with brain size and is associated with selective attention and working memory capacity. AI generated definition based on: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012

Was looking into what Cognitive Scientists mean by ‘domain-general’ cognition, and then hit upon this. This is definitely NOT how we use that term.

Tip: read the last sentence to understand what went wrong here.

Sigh.

I believe at this time we can afford more nuance and precision than this. Most null results are uninformative because most experiments are uninformative because we use NHST to replace the scientific process. We can't keep avoiding the root problem forever. Also the focus on efficiency is jarring.

New Report Calls for Faculty Control in AI Decisions Today, the AAUP released a new report, Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Professions, sharing survey findings and calling for the establishment of policies in colleges and universities that pri...

Today, the AAUP released a new report, "Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions." The report calls for policies that prioritize economic security, faculty working & student learning conditions as AI tech accelerates.

www.aaup.org/news/new-rep...
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If it was up to me I'd ask every creative person I work with to take a social media sabbatical starting two weeks before we embark on a big project. Brains can be so juicy if we let them.

Columbia University’s agreement with the Trump administration is a disaster for academic freedom, freedom of speech, & the independence of American higher education. Never in the history of our nation has an educational institution so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat.

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For higher education to function, students and faculty must be free to think and speak their minds. Students, faculty, and all who care about higher education must stand up and fight back against this unprecedented continuing assault. We have no choice.

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