Julian Posada

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.

Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it’s getting in the way.

Educators warn that easy access to AI is deepening existing problems in Colombia, which was already struggling with low graduation and literacy rates
restofworld.org/2025/colombi...

AI isn't magic. AI is land, real estate, and energy.

I would also like to remind folks that OpenAI wrote a paper in which they prompted GPT-4 on which jobs they thought would be most exposed to automation.

They validated it by comparing it to responses that people who worked OpenAI gave to the same question.

arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130

ChatGPT dissidents, the students who refuse to use AI: ‘I couldn’t remember the last time I had written something by myself’ Some college students are beginning to limit their use of artificial intelligence, so as not to hinder their own creativity, discipline and critical thinking

Weird. This doesn’t match what I’ve been told—that students are going to use it no matter what.

Pre-ordered! Released here in the US on December 8.

The “deal” that Brown made with the Trump admin is much more extreme than is being reported. It includes government oversight of course evaluations and no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring.

Read it for yourself here:

www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

Mark Carney’s statement on planning to recognize a Palestinian state was the furthest thing from perfect.

But I honestly never thought I’d hear a Canadian prime minister outline and acknowledge the many ways the Israeli government is active hampering a two-state solution.

“Social scientists often tell me that they have been trained to avoid I and we […] ‘Well,’ they reply, ‘it's because we're supposed to sound objective, like scientists.’ Yet most scientists have long since abandoned the impersonal passive mode.”
Sword, H. (2012). Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard UP

Is 'Sweatshop Data' Really Over? A new essay argues that low-paid digital labor is becoming a thing of the past. Not so fast, TIME's tech correspondent writes.

Is sweatshop data really "over"?

I wrote about why the latest provocative essay in the AI world might be jumping the gun: time.com/7306153/ai-s...

The AI explosion means millions are paying more for electricity Across much of the eastern U.S., electricity bills have jumped. The reason? Data centers required for AI and other tech wonders are driving up electricity demand.

“As [data centers] proliferate, the surging demand for electricity has driven up prices for millions of people, including residential customers who may not ever use AI or cloud computing.”
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Berlin: Tiktok-employees going on strike against massive job cuts German Tiktok censors have trained an AI that is now taking their jobs. Verdi wants to talk, Tiktok doesn't. There was a warning strike on Wednesday.

TikTok management wants to lay off over 160 workers in Berlin as easily and cheaply as possible. After the first meeting of the conciliation committee, employees could be DISMISSED IMMEDIATELY.
www.heise.de/en/news/Berl...

Proton is launching a privacy-focused AI chatbot AI, but make it private.

If you're going to use a chatbot, use one that respects your #privacy. @proton.me, trailblazing one more time in their respect for privacy. Proud of being on their Foundation's Board.

www.theverge.com/news/711860/...