Elinor

Friends choose your so-called "critics" carefully.

Its not a binary.

If people do circular citations and happen to never cite the women who laid the groundwork for decades and pay the price, there's a problem.

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

built on theft and at massive environmental cost and most importantly, numerous studies keep demonstrating that genAI tools often work a little better than by chance. how is it that we can’t expunge these slop machines out of our institutions and communities

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Remember those times i said we were headed for an epistemic crisis because bad people were gonna use deepfakes to make propaganda & conspiracy theories & destabilize consensus reality-making & how the central paradigm of "generative AI" enables, encourages, & was indeed built on this premise?

Yeah.

I think people need to realise how much "You are not immune to propaganda" still applies when you know the propaganda is propaganda.

Blague à part, c'est toute l'histoire de la France de ces dernières décennies ( CICE, baisse de l'IS, impôts de production):

1/ on se prive de recettes importantes en se disant " ça peut avoir un effet positif "

2/ l'effet mesuré est faible et transitoire, le coût, élevé et permanent

Les risques de dérives sont énormes. Bush avait financé la génétique légale à hauteur de plusieurs millions de $ au prétexte de la guerre contre le terrorisme. Résultat c'est aussi utilisé pour traquer les racisés de manière plus globale. Aucune surprise, on prend le risque de tendre vers ça aussi.

Si seulement il y avait un Parti de gauche qui avait le courage d’expliquer aux gens à quel point c’est une menace pour tout le monde et pas juste pour les profs…

Graphique sur la part d’imposition selon les groupes sociaux

Contre la taxe Zucman, le RN, le bloc central et la droite ont voté main dans la main.
Ils protègent les 0,0005 % les plus riches — 500 personnes ! — qui paient moins d’impôts que tout le reste du pays.
Une aristocratie moderne, baignée de privilèges.

I'm not naive—I get that there have always been people who do their jobs badly, including researchers who do research badly. But I wasn't prepared for the extent to which "AI" has emboldened people to proudly proclaim that their professional judgment is so deeply and fundamentally compromised

AWS outages are interesting because each time it affects more and more disparate things, each is a snapshot scan of the metastatic cancer infecting the internet.

Every AWS outage makes it extremely, painfully clear that consolidating the entire Internet in the hands of one fucked up billionaire is not a good idea.

And then it's resolved and everyone kind of forgets about it til the next time.

And the next time, their fridge stops working because of it.

Il y a 2 ans, j'ai trouvé que j'avais pas assez de boulot, et j'ai fait un projet avec la classe de CP de ma fille. Chaque élève a imaginé pourquoi il n'avait pas pu faire ses devoirs, et je l'ai illustré. Après, ça a donné un petit livre qui a été distribué à chacun.

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function(…) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios.” — @olivia.science

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

The product is just dependence on mind poison. Study after study has shown people using GPT think they are more productive but are empirically not. It is just a button you press that delivers hits of dopamine completely unrelated to the world around you.

It’s ridiculous that ABA is viewed any differently than conversion therapy, given it was created by the same man (Lovaas, who was a literal card carrying Nazi) and utilizes the same techniques with the same stated purpose (forced assimilation without consent).

One of the biggest hurdles in domestic violence is that men's aggressive behavior is normalized but is not "normal" or healthy. Women will experience this with most men & be told this is just how men express themselves. Theyre loud, "masculine," dominant. So we accept it at the expense of our nerves

all discourse aside, there is one machine with consciousness. it's printers. they are alive and conscious and they hate you and they'd take your arm clean off if you let them. never trust a printer.

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.
1/n

every new prime minister in France is like a chatgpt update : an underwhelming iteration of an already abysmal product

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Delusions of a Protocol On vaporware as an ideological product.

I had to expunge my thoughts on Bluesky's current, uh, choppy waters into a proper blog post (which jay can't take down for being too mean or saying 'lol' in a threatening way)

azhdarchid.com/delusions-of...

Sauvons l’ExisTransInter ! communiqué commun de : Acceptess-T, Clar-T, Collectif Insurrection Trans, CIA-OII France, Espace Santé Trans, FLIRT, OUTrans, RITA, Toutes des Femmes, Trans Inter Action, Trans VNR 13, Transat.

Les vies des personnes trans et intersexes sont remises en cause partout dans le monde par la montée des attaques fascistes. En France, les discours réactionnaires saturent l’espace politique et médiatique, voulant détruire le peu de droits que nous avons acquis et nous interdire d’acquérir enfin ceux qui nous reviennent. L’ExisTrans est le grand rendez-vous annuel pour faire valoir nos revendications et se rendre visibles. Samedi 18 octobre, les personnes trans et intersexes doivent se rassembler à Paris, à partir de 14h, place de la République, pour marcher et faire entendre leur voix. Nous, organisations trans et intersexes, revendiquons ensemble cette journée de mobilisation.

Mais, depuis quelques années, elle nous est confisquée par l’actuelle coordination Existrans, chargée de l’organisation, à une heure où plus que jamais l'unité et la coopération sont nécessaires. Nous ne nous y reconnaissons plus. Nous, organisations trans et intersexes, dénonçons le comportement de la coordination de l'Existrans. Loin de chercher à construire un fond uni trans et intersexe, la coordination préfère écraser nos voix pour courir après une "convergence des luttes" en imposant la présence et la vision d’organisations LGBT+ généralistes, syndicales et politiques. Nous rappelons que la convergence des luttes nécessite d'abord des mouvements autonomes forts. Ce n'est pas en sacrifiant le principal cadre unitaire trans et intersexe que nous renforcerons la prise en compte de nos luttes et de nos droits.

Si nous rejetons la présence d’organisations non concernées dans le comité d’organisation de l’Existrans et celles d’organisations, collectifs, structures, partis ou syndicats, c’est aussi parce que leurs valeurs et revendications sont souvent en contradiction avec nos enjeux, telle la prise de position unitaire des directions syndicales en faveur d’une loi putophobe, témoignant de la méconnaissance et du danger que représentent ces organisations. En novembre 2022, un vote interne avait réaffirmé la centralité de l'auto-organisation des luttes trans et intersexes et l'impossibilité pour des organisations non concernées de participer aux réunions internes. Mais par des stratégies diverses (multiplication des réunions, pratiques d'intimidation des présent·e·s, saturation du tour de parole, manipulation des canaux de communication...), quelques organisations trans ont imposé d'inclure les organisations politiques et syndicales dans les prises de parole à l'ExisTransInter de 2024.

Sauvons l’ExisTransInter !

Communiqué commun de : Acceptess-T, Clar-T, Collectif Insurrection Trans, CIA-OII France, Espace Santé Trans, FLIRT, OUTrans, RITA, Toutes des Femmes, Trans Inter Action, Trans VNR 13, Transat.

(1/3)

Les images d’enfants raflés et brutalisés par les bandes armées trumpistes aux USA font évidemment écho aux images d’enfants affamés, mutilés, brûlés vifs, écrasés sous les décombres ou abattus par les drones et les snipers à Gaza, que l’on voit défiler jour après jour depuis deux ans.

So I'd like to show a demonstration of what this "waffles" thing is. Here's a conversation between *this site's* CEO, some random guy, and the cofounder of "Tangled", a GitHub clone built on top of Bluesky's protocol.

Please take a moment to really think, about the shape of this thoughtlessness.

L'ICE donne un très bel exemple de ce qu'est l'extrême droite au pouvoir. Dans tous ces régimes on retrouve ça : une milice liée au pouvoir qui tabasse et embarque n'importe qui, sans cadre, ni retenue, ni recours, à seule fin d'instaurer un climat de peur du régime.

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

1/

Most of “AI” is a rebranded side effect of the surveillance technology.

witching hour 🌕🐈‍⬛✨ #art