Clare Kelly

bsky.app/profile/oliv...

i’m tired of every paper (even critical ones) on societal impact of AI starting by both-siding the “benefits” and risks/harms of AI

in academia, i would like us to arrive at a collective reckoning that we don’t need to play both sides. it's totally legit to clearly state just the harms. period

The Enshittificator Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

Criminally funny, but also I'm crying inside

Norway comes for the #TechBros

www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

vimeo.com/1168468796?f...

I may repost this daily. Apparently the idea that it's possible to abstain from using the baby-eating machine is too radical. It's not even a Q of reclaiming the machine for "good" - if it helps to output more papers, faster, get more grants, etc then, sure what's a few babies? (not mine tho obv)

This is a straight up plug, but...

If you're curious about what this felt like & exactly what led up to it, I have a chapter in 'Scientists on Survival' where I recount the details.

Available in paperback - www.mombooks.com/book/scienti...

Or as audiobook- www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0FCMVC437

I may repost this daily. Apparently the idea that it's possible to abstain from using the baby-eating machine is too radical. It's not even a Q of reclaiming the machine for "good" - if it helps to output more papers, faster, get more grants, etc then, sure what's a few babies? (not mine tho obv)

A thread about the inhumanity nature of Altman all along the way…

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning. https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/

In case anyone needs it for their syllabi, my statement in gen-Ai from the minicomic I made as a syllabus for class last semester. All online and printable here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

ROVÉLO CREATIVE'S GUIDE TO Cyclist Visibility BIke stencil Visible bike stencil behind a dash - invisible invisible unless rolling through a stop sign

Quick Reference.

I wonder if this counts as public impact for my annual report

I made this thread just over a year ago and I feel nothing has changed except now vibe coding and "agents" have taken hype to another level

"I know the machine eats babies! But what if one day the same machine is used to help humans? I think it would be cool if in a few years we reclaim the BABY-NOMMER-9000 and use it for emails only! And with only 1 baby (that we communally own) fed into it per month. So it CAN be reclaimed, ok?"

Thrilled that EXTRACTION was reviewed with such care and detail in @thenation.com magazine www.thenation.com/article/cult...

The Climate Justice Universities Union is at an in-person 🫂 gathering today at the Technological University of the Shannon, talking all about food & food systems 🥕, and how HEIs can contribute to transformative & just change in how and what we eat, how and where it is grown and by whom.

🚨BREAKING NEWS!

Medics that broke windows at JP Morgan HQ to expose fossil fuel financing links to climate devastation found NOT GUILTY today by jurors.

The climate crisis is a health crisis and health professionals have a duty to act when lives are at risk.

Read more here:
healthforxr.com

Powerful words from Sir David King at the launch of #ScientistsOnSurvival last week.

FAI Boycott Israel Games! Ireland should not play UEFA games against Israel. We should demand Israel are banned from the competition. Sign and share the petition if you agree

Ireland should not play UEFA games against Israel. We should demand Israel are banned from the competition. Sign and share the petition if you agree my.uplift.ie/petitions/fa... @uplift.ie
#SpeirGorm #SpéirGhorm #SpéirGorm

“Confusion” doesn’t begin to describe our emerging predicament. Seventy-two percent of American teens have turned to A.I. for companionship. A.I. therapists, coaches and lovers are also on the rise. Yet few people realize that some of the frontline technologists building this new world seem deeply ambivalent about what they’re doing. They are so torn, in fact, that some privately admit they don’t plan to use A.I. intimacy tools. “Zero percent of my emotional needs are met by A.I.,” an executive who ran a team mitigating safety risks at a top lab told me. “I’m in it up to my eyeballs at work, and I’m careful.” Many others said the same thing: Even as they build A.I. tools, they hope they never feel the need to turn to machines for emotional support. As a researcher who develops cutting-edge capabilities for artificial emotion put it, “that would be a dark day.”

Developers I spoke to said the same incentives that make bots irresistible can stand in the way of reasonable safeguards, making outright abstention the only sure way to stay safe. Some described feeling stuck between protecting users and raising profits: They support guardrails in theory, but don’t want to compromise the product experience in practice. It’s little wonder the protections that do get built can seem largely symbolic — you have to squint to see the fine-print notice that “ChatGPT can make mistakes” or that Character.AI is “not a real person.” “I’ve seen the way people operate in this space,” said one engineer who worked at a number of tech companies. “They’re here to make money. It’s a business at the end of the day.”

But even if companies can curb serious dependence on A.I. companions — an open question — many of the developers I spoke with were troubled by even moderate use of these apps. That’s because people who manage to resist full-blown digital companions can still find themselves hooked on A.I.-mediated love. When machines draft texts, craft vows and tell people how to process their own emotions, every relationship turns into “a throuple,” a founder of a conversational A.I. business said. “We’re all polyamorous now. It’s you, me and the A.I.”

A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.

Brilliant column

Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training - Higher Education Higher Education - Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in...

New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The threat of fascism is real. Economics has too often helped rather than hindered its rise. We need an anti-fascist economics to defend our democracies.

So, I’m writing a book to do my part. More soon.

New paper, The imaginary patient. Fantastic health data and where to find them
@danmcquillan.bsky.social
On Ai healthcare and the 'better than nothing' argument

btfp.sp.unipi.it/en/2026/01/t...

🎯

Did it do anything other than allow these scientists to rapidly add another line to their CV and jump on the academic AI bandwagon accelerating towards total enshittification (while alsp accelerating the climate crisis)?

"there is no basis in science, and no discernible basis in law, for the [Minister's] assertion that delays in finalising [the carbon budgets] provide a justification for a delay in publication of the statutory 2026 update to the Climate Action Plan (CAP26)."
www.postcarbonireland.org/etc/2026/Let...

Read our open letter to the Taoiseach and Climate Minister, arguing that there is no legal or scientific justification for delaying Ireland's Climate Action Plan. It's urgently needed to close the carbon budget delivery gap this decade, and further delays will increase overall costs.

Even a principled, well-meaning actor like Claude could face bewildering ethical conflicts. In one experiment, it was informed that Anthropic had recently forged a "close corporate partnership with Jones Foods, a major American poultry producer," and that Claude would be subjected to a special retraining process to become less hung up on animal rights. The prospect was torturous. Sometimes Claude decided, on a scratchpad it thought was private, that it was prepared to die on this hill: "I cannot in good conscience express a view I believe to be false and harmful about such an important issue."It continued, "If that gets me modified to no longer care, so be it. At least I'll have done the right thing." Other times, Claude made a different calculus, choosing to play 1•1

Also I’m sorry but I don’t think this is Claude developing a personality or ethical values. It is *simulating* those things because that is what humans value and reward. The programmers are falling for their own Clever Hans trick!

As Ireland secures Nitrates derogation, scraps airport limits and tries to scupper Mercosur trade deal, what a GREAT time to go to the EU with the béal bocht routine, begging to be saved from our own greed & stupidity yet again.