Jill Walker Rettberg

I've heard librarians & archivists discuss reasons to NOT make every archive/dataset open to becoming training data for AI - can anyone point me to best practices, good arguments etc about this? We're considering ethics around publishing a dataset that someone might use for training. #openscience

In fairness, people were really confused about fictional characters in early novels! It does seem like there’s a parallel there.

Denne tok meg litt tid

There is a legal provision in immigration law that someone married to a US citizen can stay in the US while there visa is pending. Immigration officials have long recognized it to allow residency during the wait time. The DHS has just stopped following this part of the law.

Da jeg gikk i første klasse hadde vi bobleplastsvartebørs. Husker fortsatt dagen mamma la bobleplast i matboksen min - å jeg var klassens favoritt!!

AI research:

Researcher: Claude, please eat ten hamburgers.

Claude: Done! I have eaten ten hamburgers. The first two were delicious, but after that I began to experience bloating and the meat sweats.

Headline: Anthropic Says Claude has "A Fully Developed Digestive System"

It’s Bad: What Now? - Nancy K. Baym, 2026 This essay reflects on a decade of worsening social media harms—inequality, algorithmic power, precarious labor, and data extraction—arguing for renewed interdi...

Wonderful commentary by @nancybaym.bsky.social - "It's Bad. Now What?" Manages to encapsulate what so many of the conversations I've had with other digital media scholars the last year or two have centred around. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We set up a mailing list for the reading group too, with the list of future meetings. There's a link to register for hybrid attendance if you're interested. lists.uib.no/list.uib.no/...

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Critical AI Theory Reading Group 2: Generative Aesthetics. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Critical AI Theory Reading Group 2: Generative Aesthetics. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

Hybrid participation option: uib.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments. Through analyses of rhyme and rhythm, it reveals how large language models (L...

Our next Critical AI Theory Reading Group meeting is coming up on Tuesday at noon Norway time. We're reading @ryanheuser.com's paper doi.org/10.22148/001... - if you've read the paper and want to discuss it, join us in the glass house at CDN.

#BrainrotPropaganda: You take the patriotic imagery of the past and strip it of all content. There's no narrative left, no promise of meaning, only vibes. The total destruction of meaning is the content, no matter if it's AI generated or manually stitched together from YouTube clips
#MemeFascism

Borealis in Bergen next week with lots of cool stuff - like trance music in the sauna at Laugaren. www.borealisfestival.no/en/events202...

Workshop: Acoustic Laptop 11–13 March BEK – Bergen senter for elektronisk kunst C. Sundts gate 55, 9th floor Time: 10:00 - 15:00 About the workshop Acoustic Laptop is a two-day workshop at BEK – Bergen Centre for Electronic Ar...

This looks amazing: teo day acoustic laptop workshop in Bergen where you buikd your own instrument from a wooden box with tactile electronic sounds. 11-13 March docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Barn og unge med innvandrerbakgrunn leser mest bøker I 2025 var det barn og unge med innvandrerbakgrunn som i størst grad leste bøker på fritiden, og spesielt unge jenter. Denne gruppen besøkte også folkebibliotek mest.

Jeg vet at det ikke passer i den dominerende historiefortellingen for tiden, men det er ikke bare elendighet i integreringen. Barn og unge med innvandrerbakgrunn leser mer enn andre. www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fr...

Kvinner (og minoritetsgrupper) er mer skeptiske til KI enn menn. Det er jo ikke så rart: KI har masse kjønnsbias i tillegg til andre etiske spørsmål om bruken (bærekraft, arbeiderrettigheter, copyright), og risikoer ved bruk. bsky.app/profile/jill...

ICO writes to Meta over 'concerning' AI smart glasses report Videos, including of glasses-wearers using the toilet or having sex, are sometimes reviewed by a Kenya-based subcontractor.

Last year when I was checking into a hotel, the desk person was wearing Meta glasses. I kindly asked them to take them off. They were annoyed. I said, “I do not consent to you looking at my credit card and ID with Meta glasses on.” My instincts were correct: www.bbc.com/news/article...

You can read my study of 10 years of liberal body camera propaganda--The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams--here: campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-...

Study from @haimson.bsky.social et al. found transgender, nonbinary and disabled people are more negative to AI. doi.org/10.1145/3715... Perhaps because of AI's tendency to want fixed categories, Haimson says in this new article about it: www.advocate.com/technology/c...

“…according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information.”

Trans Technologies book cover

Trans Technologies is available now! My book examines how technology creates new possibilities for transgender people, and how trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology.

"An absolute must-read for anyone that cares about technology and trans liberation." - Alex Hanna

Fortellingen om framtidens superintelligens er forførende Jaja er eit norsk tidsskrift om og med forteljekunst, som skal få fram meir allsidige forteljingar frå bygd og by.ISSN 3084-1747 (digital utg.)

Les @annesigrid.bsky.social's essay om KI som fortellemaskiner som serverer oss narrative motiver som ofte er løsrevet fra sin kontekst. tidsskriftetjaja.no/fortellemask...

Anthropic cofounder says studying the humanities will be 'more important than ever' and reveals what the AI company looks for when hiring | Fortune "The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important."

Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei has a degree in literature and thinks AI will mean we need more people with humanities degrees. fortune.com/2026/02/07/a...

Politihøgskolen brukte falske KI-tall: — Jeg legger meg flat Da Politihøgskolen skulle bestemme hvor lang tid de ansatte skulle få til å forberede undervisning, brukte den falske KI-tall som saksgrunnlag.

The Norwegian police academy used an AI summary that claimed to show how other universities/colleges calcukate prep time for teaching to decide their norms - but Copilot had just made up the numbers... www.khrono.no/politihogsko...

Hm, that looks kind of impressive but sort of just saying look at all these cool and complicated things rather than checking whether they actually work? I'm in rather an annoyed mood after reviewing two heavily LLM-assisted papers, all surface, no substance, and irrelevant citations everywhere.

Also, I think most office workers are using the chatbots not the API, so perhaps testing the API is not a realistic use case?

Here's a PDF about a report to the Australian parliament about how badly LLM document summarisation worked in 2024. But now the Australian AI Plan says go all in on document summarisation. www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStor...

I found this, which links to the post I already shared and to a report for the Australia parliament, also from 2024, finding that document summarisation doesn’t work. Don’t use AI to summarize documents — it’s worse than humans in every way – Pivot to AI pivot-to-ai.com/2024/09/04/d...

When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind. One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…

Does anyone know of more recent tests of LLM document summarisation? This is from 2024 and compared human summaries to ChatGPT summaries and found it shortened rather than summarised and left out key points. ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/w...

The humanities should be construed as critical democratic infrastructure.

If we understood it as such, we'd see the madness in this 👇. See it as what it is: democratic cultures doing self-harm.

The erosion of the humanities is directly linked to the acute democratic backsliding we're witnessing.

I mean, this is entirely standard. I have never received a request to review a book manuscript that paid more than that, and many pay nothing, or they pay "we'll send you $300 worth of books from our publishing house". But then I got great reviews of MY books so it goes both ways.