Christine Slaughter

maybe this is because i'm the kind of goody-goody who gets a PhD but I find it shocking that they don't even try to lie that there's some justifiable use case for this. it's just a tacit "we all know you don't want to learn anything, and now you don't need to"

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

Have we considered that learning and doing things is good for us, actually?

We tripled the funding for this .

Nuremberg should look like the FACT FINDING stage

There are ANCIENT GODS who have more mercy than I do

I wonder if they changed the temp settings from the SP? Everything seemed fine then. Regardless, an implosion like Malinin’s you can’t blame on the ice quality 😬

And Brown finished in 6th, soooo…

Also if Malinin had been in Beijing, we wouldn’t have had Jason Brown’s Olympic “Sinnerman,” so eff that idea.

Also congrats to Kazakhstan and to Mikhail Shaidorov! And to Sato Shun! And also to Kagiyama, but he’s probably more disappointed.

That was CRAZY

Okay I was feeling really bad for Malinin and then he comes out with “if they’d sent me to Beijing I wouldn’t have skated like that” in the kiss and cry, sympathy evaporated

The best thing I’ve read on genAI and libraries: www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2025/ai-feel...

The transformation of the Washington Post editorial page appears to be complete.

Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes Three sources described how AI is writing alerts for Citizen and broadcasting them without prior human review. In one case AI mistranslated “motor vehicle accident” to “murder vehicle accident.”

This is your regular reminder that the Citizen app was originally named Vigilante. When an app tells you what it is, believe it the first time.

www.404media.co/citizen-is-u...

Universities really hate unionized academic labour.

Screenshot of an incoming text message that reads “I need a social theory antonym and am hoping u can help”

Should I put this on my LinkedIn?

Firefox extension for those who are interested.

Fuck these cowards

This is exactly what Project 2025 proposed Analysts called it "extreme" and "unlikely." Now, it's almost reality.

In October 2024, multiple top-tier media outlets told me their editors wouldn't approve stories on our Project 2025 modeling because Trump disavowed the plan.

And here we are.

heated.world/p/this-is-ex...

Reminding myself tonight to focus on what we can do rather than anger at what others won't.

@standhighered.bsky.social has created a toolkit that can help faculty + staff organize on every kind of campus in every part of the country. Join us, spread the word, and let's build our own strength.

we need Brad Lander to primary Schumer while teaming up with progressive challengers for Jeffries and Pelosi and they travel around doing events together to boost other progressives in primaries

that cross-endorsement camaraderie really appeals to people. let us imagine a better leadership team!

The article describes Trump's birtherism as racist too. We're finally using the correct words for things!

there is no jurisprudence at work here. the republican court believes that anything a republican president is presumptively constitutional, even if it directly violates the unambiguous constitutional text and causes total chaos in law and policy.

you know shit's serious when NYT is using the actual words to describe what's happening

We are discovering what happens when a society decides to give the absolute dumbest people imaginable way too much power.

This is a watershed moment.

Everyone who benefits from higher education should be deeply concerned.

Ryan was a moderate who presided over one of the more conservative institutions of higher education.

He followed the law when it comes to DEI. But that wasn't enough. Trump demands absolute fealty.

It’s pretty startling that it’s become a feature of the Roberts Court that they save the most outrageous and infuriating usurpations of the Constitution for the last day they are in session and then disappear for months onto the planes and boats of the billionaire friends safe from public scrutiny.

Two young twin girls with a pair of cats

One of the girls looking at the kitties with an expression of beatific fondness

Hey, friends and comrades, I want to draw your attention to something important. My friend Alaa is trapped with her family in Gaza and needs assistance. Here's her daughters. Here's the link, but I'm going to talk a little about what happened. (Please boost!) chuffed.org/project/1252...