Gwen Varley

Excellent (and short!) article on the problems with merely disclosing AI use

What does it mean to use #genAI "responsibly" in research? In this post, @petertarras.bsky.social & I respond to a taxonomy which equates disclosure of use with transparency & responsibility. We object to this & call for more conversations about how & why it's used, who is harmed, & who benefits.

photo of paulina borsook

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

You’re invited to join the Proton Meet exclusive early access Dear Proton Visionary supporters, Your feedback has helped shape Proton from day one. To thank you for your continued support, we're excited to share exclusive early access to the newest addition to the Proton ecosystem: Proton Meet, our confidential video conferencing tool for your most important meetings.

if this works well i’m so done with google meet, team, and zoom

I hope I have given fidelity, and that everyone viscerally understands:
You will have to come through me.

Official Defies GOP Governor's Order To Fly Flags At Half Staff For Charlie Kirk He said he did not want to honor a man "who did so much to harm not only the marginalized, but also to degrade the fabric of our body politic."

An Iowa official defied the governor’s orders to fly flags at half-staff for Charlie Kirk, writing he wouldn't honor a man who "did so much harm"

Welcome to Sweden, when you can only get vaccinated from October 15, only in certain regions, and most likely by paying only, since the "recommended people" list is more narrow than it is in the US with RFK Jr and all.

The most important body of Finnish labour unions demands recognition for #Palestina and an end to the war.

Like bell hooks said, “I think that we have to restore feminism as a political movement. The challenge to patriarchy is political, and not a lifestyle or identity... we have to return to very basic education for critical consciousness, around what visionary feminist politics really is about.“

Absolutely astounded that the UCU and Unison branches at Kent and Greenwich were not consulted, and that staff only found out about the merger this morning via BBC news and Kent Online. Solidarity to all colleagues.

this case was devised in a lab to reveal the hypocrisy of both the “free speech on campus” and the “cancel culture” grifters simultaneously

Look at that. And New Mexico is not a rich state. Just one that figured out some priorities.

I'll be working with SLU Global at this conference, reporting on the sessions and also generally helping make it a more inclusive and welcoming event for new people.

I'll have an SLU t-shirt and a name tag! Come and say hi!

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

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

Emad has been working so hard to help his family in Gaza (as well as helping me help many other families) and he was so tired he couldn’t think of what to write. If you can help him please do ❤️

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Ramadan can’t keep an account here but needs help

"It took me 5 hours to put my little girl, Hala, to sleep after she cried intensely because she wanted milk — and we can barely afford to provide it. She started blaming me through her heartbreaking tears." 9:32 PM

💔 chuffed.org/project/1230...

I’m sharing a Palestinian account every day and today is Suleiman. Suleiman was a house painter (like my own dad was) before all this. He has three small children, Reem, 10, Ashraf, 6 and Mohammed, 3. He is really struggling to find food for his family and really needs help.

The UK is so fucking weird with their laws regarding terrorism that it makes the US look chill.

That is absolutely fucked.

"You can steal really good artists stuff fast" fixed it for you

Coming as I do from a BBC comedy background, I have a shitload of suggestions for how to make great television programmes more cheaply (such as not budgeting them at $10m+ per episode) none of which anyone is interested in.

They don’t want cheaper TV. They want cheaper people.

If you want to add Sweden, wastewater data are updated weekly at pathogens.se/dashboards/covid_quantification

SOS! the volunteers on 'Madleen' have been kidnapped by Israeli forces.

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish citizen.

Pressure the foreign ministries and help us keep Greta safe!

Web: government.se/contacts/

X : @SweMFA

FB : @SweMFA

IG : swedishmfa

#AllEyesOnMadleen

Oh wow I’m very flattered! :)

Aw thanks Loukas! I think you’re spot on here