Luciana Benotti

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

📢MARK YOUR CALENDARS!🗓️
The Summit of AI in Latin America (SALA, formerly RIIAA) is happening in Quito, Ecuador, March 9-12, 2026, at USFQ!

Want to attend and apply for travel grants? Do so here before October 1st:
forms.gle/PgYUQ2urGNTs...

More details in thread 👇🏾🧵

We're building an amazing line up of speakers for the event, including Samy Bengio, @sashamtl.bsky.social Thamar Solorio, @lucianabenotti.bsky.social , and more to be announced soon!

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

In the past two years, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world.

Pls Repost!📢 Unsure about NLP Ethics? Hoping to attend #ACL2025? How about applying for a virtual registration subsidy? All 3? We hear you!✨Tutorial: Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP✨🗓️Sun, Jul 27, 14:00–17:30 CEST📍@ Hall M, Vienna + 🌍Online (hybrid!) ethics.aclweb.org/tutorials/AC...

It is this sunday!

Academic Target Tracker - Google My Maps A simple tracker for targeted international graduate students and faculty in American universities during the second Trump administration.

In an attempt to preserve what remains of my sanity, I'm continuing to update the Academic Target Tracker map @elotroalex.bsky.social and I threw together last weekend. It includes info about academic workers who have been detained or had their visas revoked in recent weeks. You can find it here:

There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat More students are hiding their secret weapon from parents and teachers, racking up top grades while AI chatbots do the work.

'Like the unknowns accompanying the introduction of social media a generation ago, there has been limited research on AI’s academic merits and pitfalls for students."

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

It takes expertise to recognize expertise.

📌🇨🇱Si estás en Santiago o alrededores no te puedes perder las actividades abiertas a la comunidad que KHIPU tiene para ofrecer este año!!! Son gratuitas pero con capacidad limitada. Abrimos hilo 👇

Volunteer to join EMNLP 2025 Senior Area Chair (SAC) Committee Dear NLP Community, Please use this form to express your interest in joining the EMNLP 2025 SAC committee. SACs will be responsible for overseeing the overall review process in their track, following ...

EMNLP is currently seeking additional Senior Area Chairs (SACs). If you would like to help, please fill out this form, and share the link with others!
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Call for Discussion Papers: Global (Dis)Order

How do we respond to these times of global disorder? We are offering £2,500 for discussion papers of around 4,000 words on this topical theme. Deadline for proposals: 14th April. Please pass on to interested networks
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/internationa...

Y'all want people who're losing jobs and federal funding to advocate against philanthropists pouring in money? How do you think they'll feed themselves and families to fight for the future they want? Magically survive with no resources and become revolutionaries? Please get real.

PI positions | ELLIS Institute Finland ELLIS Institute Finland PI positions

Finland is making a significant investment in the future of machine learning / artificial intelligence by hiring 20 professors (at various levels) www.ellisinstitute.fi/ellis-instit...

Will there be an audiobook?

We are still looking for annotators! Please consider helping us out, either via filling out the form or sharing it more broadly 💜 Of course, selected annotators are financially compensated.

🔇 Will you be Rightscon in Taipei? If so, say hi, I'll be attending the conference in person for the first time & will be participating in these 2 sessions 👇🏼

All of them have to do with tech facilitated genocide. Such is the time we're in.

Nos vemos alli :)

🚨 Do LLMs fall for spin in medical literature? 🤔

In our new preprint, we find that LLMs are susceptible to biased reporting of clinical treatment benefits in abstracts—more so than human experts. 📄🔍 [1/7]

Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963

🧵👇

Totally unrelated to layoffs of highly qualified US federal employees, did you guys know that Korea has a whole website devoted to posting jobs for overseas research and professorial talent? No Korean-language knowledge necessary! global.hibrain.net?_hv=m

Call for Diversity and Inclusion Subsidies is out!

2025.naacl.org/calls/dei_su... #NAACL2025

Whenever you hear someone sneer about scientific research that seems useless to them — “they’re studying the spit of lizards?!” — remind them that’s exactly how we got Ozempic.

globalnews.ca/news/9793403...

IASEAI’25 Safe & Ethical AI Conference (Plenary)

New video 📽️ from me:
I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI.
I focused on solutions and ideas for moving forward.
They made it public, and here it is.
Enjoy, and hope it's helpful! 🤗

oecdtv.webtv-solution.com/embed-or-en-...

📣 Second Call for Papers! 🎉

We’re extending our CFP to February 6, 2025 ⏳—more time to submit your work on culture, society & NLP!

📍 C3NLP 2025 @ NAACL | Albuquerque, NM 🌎
📅 New Deadline: Feb 6, 2025
🔗 Workshop details: c3nlp.github.io

Submit now & join us! 📝✨
#NLP #C3NLP #CulturalNLP #NAACL2025

I am so excited to share with you all the 2025 edition of our #AmericasNLP workshop!
Do not hesitate in submitting your amazing research paper on indigenous and low resource languages.
Submission deadline: March 7, 2025
turing.iimas.unam.mx/americasnlp/...

🇩🇰 PhD Fellowship call for candidates who have a data science idea they'd like to pursue in Denmark

deadline: March 5
ddsa.dk/phdfellowshi...

I'd be happy to support an applicant interested in generalization/memorization, data attribution, synthetic text detection, or efficient approaches in NLP

Apropos of a co-panelist's remarks today:

If you're asking how do we get people to trust this technology, you're asking the wrong question.

Should be: How do we build technology that is trustworthy & sufficiently transparent so people can make informed decisions abt when to trust it.

All the ACL chapters are here now: @aaclmeeting.bsky.social @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social @eaclmeeting.bsky.social @naaclmeeting.bsky.social #NLProc

I am shocked by the death of Felix Hill. He was one of the brightest minds of my generation.

His last blog post on the stress of working in AI is very poignant. Apart from the emptiness of working mostly to make billionaires even richer, there's the intellectual emptiness of 'scale is all you need'

Five things privacy experts know about AI - Ted is writing things … and that AI salespeople don't want you to know!

This is an excellent primer on some of the privacy dangers posed by large scale AI, from a cybersecurity perspective. Written in clear language, it's the most accessible rundown I've seen yet on these topics!

desfontain.es/blog/privacy...