Julián Posada

Pleased to endorse the AI Civil Rights Act, comprehensive legislation to prevent companies from using AI for biased and discriminatory life outcomes, ensure algos are tested before and after deployment and increase transparency of algorithms used for critical decisions. #AIBillofRights

Flock exposed training materials and a panel which tracked what its AI annotators were working on. It showed that Flock, which has cameras in thousands of U.S. communities, is using overseas workers. @evystadium.bsky.social has more.

Story by @josephcox.bsky.social:
www.404media.co/flock-uses-o...

Committee on Technology Sarah Aoun Ruha Benjamin, Ida B Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton Myaisha Hayes, MediaJustice Noel Hidalgo, BetaNYC Sam Jacobs, Food Fight Lab Katherine Jin, Democratic Socialists of America Amba Kak, AI Now Institute Huge Ma, Turbovax Matt Mitchell ReNika Moore, ACLU Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study Martha Norrick, Backbone Strategies Julie Samuels, Tech NYC Garfield Swaby, New York Public Library Julie Swoope Democratic Socialists of America Haley Van Dyck Elyse Voegeli, 18F Maia Woluchem, Data & Society

The Mamdani administration’s 17 transition committees: Housing Youth & Education Transportation, Climate & Infrastructure Arts & Culture Community Organizing Community Safety Economic Development & Workforce Development Emergency Response Government Operations Health Immigrant Justice Criminal Legal System Legal Affairs Small Businesses & MWBEs Social Services Technology Worker Justice

Photo of a colorful keffiyeh with a name tag on it that says “Ruha Benjamin, Technology, A NEW ERA for New York City”

Sooo many folks I’m excited to work with on Mamdani’s technology transition committee. All hands on deck to bring the Affordability Agenda to life: childcare, housing, transportation.

While its easy to get swept up in personality, this is a group focused on peoples real needs. LETS KEEP THE FOCUS.

Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges Meta is alleged to have halted internal research suggesting social media harm, according to court documents.

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...

White House Circulates Draft Executive Order Targeting State AI Laws | TechPolicy.Press The draft order, titled "Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy," followed a Truth Social post by President Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration circulated a six-page draft executive order titled “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy.” It would create an “AI Litigation Task Force” led by the Attorney General to challenge state AI laws, among other provisions.

New paper! Let’s not overemphasize AI “upskilling” as a response to CEOs saying AI is gonna replace us.

Uncritically publishing an article like this is like a bat-signal summoning @poetofcode.bsky.social and @timnitgebru.bsky.social to set things straight.

“Data centers are like warehouses filled with machines and cables, and there's little need for workers”
https://restofworld.org/2025/data-centers-jobs-microsoft-google-chile/?utm_campaign=row-social&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_content=1762891320

Good. There were a lot of influential papers put on arxiv that just served corporate interests. Now if we can just fix peer review (she says not least because of the 15 review invitations she hasn't opened in her recent mail spools.)

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

After submitting a FOIA request UKRI, I obtained success rates by three grant call scheme and I can only say that I am disheartened by the results:

- AHRC Responsive Mode 2025: 2%
- ESRC New Investigator Grant 2025: 1%
- ESRC Research Grant Round 2025: 1%

A New AI Lexicon: Labor Why AI Needs Ethics from Below Illustration by Somnath Bhatt A guest post by Julian Posada. Julian is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Faculty of Information of the University of Toronto. His dissertation, Un...

An unseen and very grim side of AI. There are lots of insights about the involvement of the "platform workers" who make AI function. 2021 piece by Julian Posada (@posada.website) for the @ainowinstitute.bsky.social:
ainowinstitute.org/publications...

An advertisement for a company promoting an “AI friend” it reads: “Friend [frend] noun Someone who listens, responds, and supports you. friend.com” Someone has written “AI isn’t your friend, it is surveillance” on the ad.

Finally spotted the “AI friend” advertisement in the NYC subway during my commute earlier this week.

The added commentary is truly the best!

Wiley set to earn $44m from AI rights deals, confirms “no opt-out" for authors The US publisher is the latest to capitalise on deals to give tech firms access to its authors’ content to train their Large Language Models (LLMs).

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News.

Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

NEW RESEARCH ALERT 🚨

Tech giants are making massive investments in generative AI, integrating it into their existing products and selling access to the foundational models to others.

But all that money and power isn’t making its way down to the people who make AI actually work: data workers.

The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the US economy together, Deutsche Bank warns According to a research note recently sent to clients by Deutsche Bank, the AI boom is currently helping the US economy avoid a recession but it cannot...

“According to a research note recently sent to clients by Deutsche Bank, the AI boom is currently helping the US economy avoid a recession but it cannot continue indefinitely” said George Saravelos, Global Head of FX Research at Deutsche Bank

www.techspot.com/news/109626-...

Just three weeks until #AoIR2025 Ruptures kicks off in Niteroi, Brazil!

Just three weeks until #AoIR2025 Ruptures kicks off in Niterói, Brazil, and we can't wait to see you all!

Grok is being sent to the reeducation camp

Congratulations!

Congratulations, Robyn!

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

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, scholars' association says The world's leading genocide scholars' association has passed a resolution saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president said on Monday.

"Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)".
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, genocide scholars' association says - www.reuters.com/world/middle...

The 'Mozart of Math' rarely speaks about politics. The wide-ranging cuts to science funding made him change that. UCLA's Terence Tao called the Trump administration's actions an "existential threat" to academic research in the U.S.

"Tao is one of the most prominent mathematicians and academics to publicly oppose the administration’s actions, calling them an “existential threat” to his field, and academic science, more broadly. He said public advocacy is a priority over his research, for now."

www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

Congratulations to @milamiceli.bsky.social for this recognition of her amazing work!

Who is really fueling your #AI? 🤔 It's not just code & algorithms. Behind every LLM are millions of people, often in invisible roles. Join us, @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social, @milamiceli.bsky.social @superrrnetwork.bsky.social & on Sept. 17 to hear directly from data workers!
🔗 buff.ly/2ug32Bx

Unfortunately, Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippi right now, due to a new state law that requires age verification for all users.

While intended for child safety, we think this law poses broader challenges & creates significant barriers that limit free speech & harm smaller platforms like ours.

How artificial intelligence uncouples hard work from fair wages through ‘surveillance pay’ practices—and how to fix it How surveillance pay practices work, where they are increasingly deployed in the U.S. economy, and policy recommendations to ensure pay fairness and transparency.

Algorithmic Wage Discrimination is spreading beyond 'Gig' work:

Healthcare, Customer Service, & Logistics bosses are buying AI products that set compensation structures & wages using real time data. @wilneida.bsky.social & I did an audit & here are our findings
equitablegrowth.org/how-artifici...

Have fun in Colombia! (from a Colombian)

As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.

“But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech…”

Israel murders five Al Jazeera staff in Gaza, including Anas al-Sharif Al-Sharif was killed along with Mohammed Qreiqeh two cameramen and an assistant in an Israeli attack on Gaza City.

Last month, Anas al-Sharif sounded the alarm on starvation in Gaza. Israel accused him of terrorism.

"We warned this felt like a precursor to justify assassination," said Jodie Ginsberg of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Today he was killed in a targeted strike on a tent housing reporters.