Steven Bird 🍉

Victim blaming... Muslims praying, women wearing miniskirts, whatever, they're just asking to be assaulted and have no one but themselves to blame.

Can Europe get kids off social media? [FREE TO READ] Move follows Australia’s decision to introduce age restrictions over child safety concerns

Ban addictive designs, ban illegal content, regulate companies.

Don't ban teenagers from digital platforms

www.ft.com/content/cf46...

Missing urinal with an out of order sign

University library (not sure if this says more about students or librarians)

Big AI, the Metacrisis, and Technofeudalism

A reader tells me that calling out Big AI corporations is "brutal".

Not the conduct of those corporations. Not the existential crises. Not the full participation of technocrats. Not the tyranny of kleptocrats and plutocrats. No, me writing about it, joining some dots 🙄 arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863

NB:

Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do? The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises which are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. Language engineers are playing a central role, persisting ...

Another take on this: www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863

A national flag should represent unity and sovereignty. Our Australian flag does neither, with its colonial Union Jack and its co-option as an emblem of white supremacy and racial hatred. #ChangeTheFlag

Urban Dictionary: Palin's Principle Palin's Principle: Learn to speak the original language of the place where you live. (After Sarah Palin who said "When you're in America, speak American!)

NB www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?t...

It is speech communities that decide whether to maintain their languages or to shift to a locally dominant language. AI is largely negative because the amount of training data is typically a millionth of what we have for major languages. AI requires standardised writing, which usually doesn't exist.

Must NLP be Extractive? Steven Bird. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

NB aclanthology.org/2024.acl-lon...

Of possible interest, @natehagens.bsky.social @tgspodcast.bsky.social

Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do? The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises which are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. Language engineers are playing a central role, persisting ...

arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863

Large Language Models Are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models Abstract. This position paper’s primary goal is to provoke thoughtful discussion about the relationship between bias and fundamental properties of large language models (LLMs). I do this by seeking to...

doi.org/10.1162/coli...

... cultural heritage – and something we should all celebrate.
They are intertwined with Country and identity, and help
to keep our communities strong."

– The Hon Tony Burke MP, Minister for the Arts;
The Hon Linda Burney MP, Minister for Indigenous Australians

www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/i...

2/2

"It is a great privilege, unique to Australians, to exist with
and alongside millennia of knowledge belonging to the
oldest continuing cultures in the world. The hundreds of
languages spoken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples across the continent are central to this rich ... 1/2

What if "AI" is defined as GenAI + hype + Big Tech + oligarchs + undermined polities + ...

Apparently GenAI is going to save a lot of languages from extinction. How exactly? Like this? Has tech ever saved a language? If not, why do people keep making this grandoise claim as though it was self-evident? Perhaps it is speech communities that save languages. aclanthology.org/2020.coling-...

I'm wondering why the treatment of gig workers is invisible here @catiemcleod.bsky.social ? It's as though price is everything and humanity is nothing.

PhD scholarship: Safeguarding Australia's Indigenous languages in the AI era. For Australian students with preference to First Nations Australians, working on the ground with remote communities in northern Australia. Likely March deadline for study beginning mid-year. Contact steven.bird@cdu.edu.au.

@ninamarkl.bsky.social
@tisjune.bsky.social
@steven-bird.bsky.social

I covet your thoughts on this @ninamarkl.bsky.social @mmitchell.bsky.social @catlai.bsky.social @tisjune.bsky.social @barbaraplank.bsky.social @jurafsky.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @katecrawford.bsky.social @tomslee.net @abeba.bsky.social @jacquelinerowe.bsky.social

Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do? The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises which are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. Language engineers are playing a central role, persisting ...

Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do? Read my four-page article, presented in multiple NLP conference keynotes in 2024, rejected by multiple ACL venues in 2025. Newly updated with 7 proposals for what we can do differently. What do you think? Let's discuss!
arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863

Reading the AI ethics literature feels like doomscrolling the most outrageous newsfeed. It flips from the sanguine to the alarming, from infuriating algorithmic solutionism to disturbing insights, trapping attention for days on end. Has anyone talked about the harms of exploring AI harms? 😵‍💫

YouTube video by Resisting AI From AI Policy To Decomputing

Dan McQuillan?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDOU...

ACL terminology:
"Paper" = anything with lots of tables with numbers.
"Position paper" = anything critical or just deeper.

I propose:
"Paper" = intellectual contribution.
"Engineering paper" = anything purely technocratic.

We Don't Trust Those Mobiles: critical reflections on generative AI for minoritised languages and new ways forward. Presentation delivered at LT4All (Paris, February 2025) #IndigenousLanguages #firstvoices #NLP #ethics
bit.ly/bird-lt4all-...

Thanks Will! It appeared in the ACL'24 proceedings. This post of mine was a repost from X/Twitter 6 months ago.

That's really interesting how you could normalise the disfluencies to get to something more readily translatable, and that this simulates what humans seem to be doing subconsciously.

For more of this story, please watch the 10 minute intro video, or dive into my ACL'24 paper "Must NLP be Extractive?" What do you think? Please let me know in the comments. 5/5
bit.ly/bird-must-nl... aclanthology.org/2024.acl-lon...

A table listing epistemologies, axiologies, teleologies, ideologies, etc of different paradigms of NLP

There are other ways of thinking about what language *is*. Our epistemology of language affects how we approach language technologies. The first wave and second waves of symbolic and subsymbolic NLP are familiar. I believe a third wave is emerging: Relational Language Processing. 4/5