Marta Lorimer

Should you believe the AI hype? Probably not Public discourse around AI has gone beyond what its technical specifications warrant, limiting the space for democratic engagement and control.

Is hype about AI justified?

Cristobal Garibay-Petersen @lse-ei.bsky.social @mlorimer.bsky.social and @neuralisa.bsky.social argue AI discourse has gone too far, limiting the space for democratic engagement with and control of the technology @lseeuroppblog.bsky.social

Finally got around to writing a convenient summary of our article 'Creating certainty where there is none'. If the short version just isn't doing it for you, you can find the full article in all its glory here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Finally got around to writing a convenient summary of our article 'Creating certainty where there is none'. If the short version just isn't doing it for you, you can find the full article in all its glory here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The moral panic about young men is the new version of “UKIP is winning over former Labour voters” (also a Goodwin argument). Both rely on anecdote more than data, and do significant damage to public understanding of the radical right. Young men are the second *least* pro-Reform group in the UK.

The good thing about receiving a paper rejection on a Friday morning is that you can take the afternoon off to curse the gods of peer review.

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Can mainstreaming of the far right help normalise undemocratic practices? @mlorimer.bsky.social & Matteo Cavallaro explore the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, showing how the party still displays elements of continuity with its neofascist predecessor. Read OPEN ACCESS:

Well that is a new job title.

Delighted to be speaking about my book and some new research on the far right at a FEPS event in Lisbon. But mostly, delighted to have a friendly @evianeleidig.com in the audience to take photos.

As the RN has said in party documents for a few decades now, they love European civilisation because it gave us the nation state as its highest expression.

Now obviously I meant ‘What’ and ‘speaks’.

Why I find funny about this column is that it speak of a conservative (or far right Europe) as something new. Jean-Marie Le Pen used this reasoning of unity against a common threat in the 1980s. The Italian Social Movement spoke of a Nation Europe in the 1950s. There never was only a liberal case.

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Thinking of adding this to my out of office.

Radical right parties in Europe have not moderated. Their positions and rhetoric have entered the mainstream. They have become normalized and legitimized. Unless we understand this, we have little chance of countering their success.

Time for a (long - apologies)🧵 summarizing the findings! The paper was born out of a shared annoyance with some of the wild claims flying around about AI. Things like 'AI could destroy or save humanity'. For a recent example, see e.g., this piece in the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Thanks Matthias (also for your original comments)!

Thanks Abby! Sharing offices is sometimes a good thing.

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Link again, for good measure: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... It's fully Open Access as well, so anyone can read it.

This was a really fun paper to write - we spent several hours just chatting in the office Cristobal and I shared at the LSE (and the remaining hours at the pub), and came up with a paper that none of us could have written individually. We'll have to go back to the pub for the sequel.

TL;DR? AI may wall be a transformative technology, but we should be wary of (many of) the claims that are being made about it. These claims are both political and depoliticizing, and risk skewing the debate about what kind of future we should pursue.

The appeal to urgency further reduces the space to imagine, let alone bring about, alternative futures. Democracy needs time and collective involvement, while emergencies concentrate power in the hands of experts and decision-makers.

Many of these claims overstate the speed at which AI is developing & create narratives of certainty where scientific knowledge is significantly less certain. They are, in other words, not technical claims, but political ones that colonize the future & seek to spur action in their desired direction.

Finally, we look at temporal themes. Discourses on AI portray it as a force in motion, which is changing societies and will do so even more quickly and radically in the future. The claim of a sudden acceleration prepares the ground for demands to act urgently to speed it along, or halt it.

These assumptions, we argue, are problematic to the extent that they uncritically reflect key pillars of a certain form of liberal capitalism and its depoliticizing tendencies.

A third set of themes we identify are economic ones. Economic discourses on AI have tended to portray the development of the technology as essentially linked to a specific conception of what economic reality is and, perhaps more importantly, to a specific conception of what that reality ought to be.

Presenting AI in such terms ascribes it agential qualities that remove responsibility from humans for creating the technology in the first place, and presents human agency as purely reactive. Doing so, we argue, it promotes a form of politics that leaves very limited space for political choice.

We then discuss agency. Here we find a peculiar situation of agency without responsibility. One the one hand, AI is described as potentially escaping human control. At the same time, the development of AI also becomes an opportunity to reassert human agency and use it to direct the future of AI.

At the same time, those who say that AI affects humanity underplay the differential effect of AI on individuals and collectives. This makes it harder for specific groups to mobilise around the aspect of AI that affects them.

We start with claims about the nature & comparability of human and artificial intelligence. We argue that claims about the comparability of human and artificial intelligence fail to recognize fundamental differences between human and artificial intelligence.

We develop this argument looking at four sets of themes in contemporary public pronouncements on AI, and their underlying assumptions.