pam lach

How AI-Powered Emotional Surveillance Can Threaten Personal Autonomy and Democracy | TechPolicy.Press If we do not regulate emotional AI surveillance now, we might soon have to fake how we feel to protect our privacy, writes Oznur Uguz.

The increasing use of AI to surveil people’s emotions endangers not only privacy but also personal autonomy—the bedrock of democracy, writes Oznur Uguz. Newly emerging AI laws fail to provide adequate safeguards, she says.

I’m in my 6th and final year of serving as a university senator. I joined at the height of Covid, served through the intrusion of GenAI into higher ed, and continued through the current assault on academic freedom and knowledge production. No wonder I’m totally cooked

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

Actually called them “young people” which is way worse

One thing that’s clear, one of the knock on effects of the “Compact” is it’s piling yet more labor on already maxed out faculty at targeted schools: meetings, resolutions, messaging, responding to admin requests for “input,” processing rumors and information . . . It’s just more more on top of more.

Is it any wonder we are all just exhausted? All of this on top of regular jobs that were just starting to settle back down after the covid “pivot” and then had to retool again to deal with the LLM bullshit …

Coming out Wednesday -

The Digital Opaque: Refusing the Biomedical Object

"... this essay creates frameworks for scholars working with archival or historical materials that were obtained through violent, deceitful, or otherwise unethical means."

Screenshot from statement “Universities and colleges have one mission: to advance knowledge. Faculty carry out the mission by conducting research and teaching students. The knowledge they produce and circulate is independently assessed by professional peers. Interfering with that process by forcing knowledge to pass through a political filter is a tactic adopted by the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states. The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.”

ACLS statement against White House “compact”: THIS IS SOVIET SHIT

I just caught myself referring to my Gen Z nibblings and their friends as “younger people” and now I am officially old 😭

I demand a union representative.

And this:

"discoverability increasingly depends on corporate decisions about interface design, search algorithms, and content filtering rather than intellectual analysis of scholarly materials."

🚨🚨🚨

CFP: A Time of Monsters The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

A bird of paradise flower in full bloom, glowing in the sun. White hibiscus flowers with deep pink centers are visible in the background

Two bird of paradise flowers in full bloom, glowing in the sun. White hibiscus flowers with deep pink centers and stamen are visible in the background

More birds of paradise 😍

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

What is Vibe Learning Vibe Learning represents a revolutionary shift in how we approach education and skill acquisition, moving beyond traditional passive methods to an active, AI-partnered journey of discovery. Coined …

I searched "vibe learning" for fun recently and found exactly what I expected and let out the kind of sound you'd expect from someone realizing the end of their time in this world was just minutes away basescripts.com/what-is-vibe...

Pink Muhly grass inflorescences glowing in the afternoon sun. A pinkish-purple purslane flower peeks through the blades of grass

Pink Muhly grass doing its fall thing 😍

A black dog with a golden brown beard and white chest sits on a blue couch looking thoughtfully towards the camera

A black dog with a golden brown beard and white chest sits on a blue couch looking thoughtfully away from the camera

A black dog with a golden brown beard and white chest sits on a blue couch looking sweetly towards the camera

Timeline cleanse

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More - Consumer Reports AI features are crowding into Google search, Gmail, iPhones, Windows laptops, and other products. If you're suffering from AI overload, these settings can help.

🫡

They’re really fun. It’s been a great way to brighten up our space and deal with the structural pillars that block sight lines in here

bsky.app/profile/plac...

Closeup of a structural pillar painted with black chalkboard paint. A chalk drawing of an old school computer in grey and blue, with “Welcome to DH” in yellow letters. Blue arm-like lines are coming out of the computer

The latest chalkboard design by one of our digital humanities center student workers 😍 #DHmakes

Meeting survived, and not nearly as horrible as I was expecting (though there were definitely many mental eye rolls on my part)😅

It’s a zoom meeting so I’ll have to stick to mental eye rolls. To be fair folks have legit concerns that I want to hear. But also there’s someone trying to whip folks up using outdated info (they cc’d me on this but I’m trying not to read too closely or respond before the meeting starts)

I’m preparing for a meeting (starting at the top of the hour) where I’m pretty sure a bunch of angry faculty colleagues will try to eviscerate me about a draft policy my committee wrote several years ago that was never passed. Send help, or at least some silly pics to distract and calm me🙏

How is it possible that you are the parent of a tween?! 🤯

Newsom threatens to cut state funding to universities that sign Trump’s political compact The White House is asking nine major universities, including USC, to commit to President Trump’s political priorities in exchange for more favorable access to federal money.

As a faculty member at a California university approached for the "compact", I applaud this from Newsom
www.latimes.com/california/s...

Faculty on the Frontlines

In thus series, then AAUP members share their stories of repression and resilience in the face of partisan interference and violations of academic freedom.

Learn more about the project at the link below👇

#academicsky #academicfreedom #defendhighered #highered #socialjustice #academia

Will be a little sad forever that we got the clearest object lesson possible that each individual's health is inextricably related to every other individual's health in a society, and we seem to have come out of it with even less collective will to reshape our society relative to this knowledge.

I would very much like to live in boring times

I can’t mute enough words to stop the doomscrolling anymore

"This article shares one academic library’s research and assessment of library vendors’ corporate practices... and how to move forward when it is discovered that a provider’s business ventures could harm our library patrons or their families."