Agi

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.
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New Ada Rook drop has a fucking CHILDREN OF BODOM COVER im 🥺💖

i’ve never been clocked so hard in my fucking life

We need to create spaces that are safe for people to make mistakes and stress the importance of ending actual abuse rather than ideological impurity.

watch more unhinged content now 🫵

the bit where you go talk to the registrar and present your ID before booking in the marraige date.

This applies to England and Wales, not Scotland or Northern Ireland. However, you can obviously effectively choose which of the 4 countries to marry in with a bit of work.

You can do this with a passport if you're under 40 btw

Thankful that trans people under 42 don't have to go through the same shit right now, but why '83 is the cutoff point eludes me.

You can tell that lots of people have kept up the boycott already, looking at the state of the qualifying acts and the betting odds.

Everyone I know who isn't boycotting is complaining about how dull the final lineup this year is.

on top of being a total sweetheart, Charlotte has contributed music to many of my videos. if you've ever watched 'em and thought "this has bad vibes, but in an oddly pleasant way", you have her to thank!

she wants to leave Florida, for obvious reasons. it'd be awesome if we could make that happen 💛

Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Four: Penetrability How a society so singularly fixated on the phallus manages to be so, so very unsexy.

Today, I finally commit to paper a concept that has become increasingly central to how I conceive of and discuss radical feminism, so as to better facilitate the comprehensiveness of future pieces (like 'Epistemic Vandalism', still in the works).

So let's talk about penetrability.

"Hierarchical societies that organize their social strata by degrees of dehumanization will always have pools of precarious un-persons from which the most sexually exploitable candidates can be made available to those higher up on the food chain." Talia spitting absolute fire today.

And the LGTs are all broadly overwhelmed so can't take over scripts without a year of waiting either.

Honestly I recommend DIY to bridge the difference.

That's maddening, if it's Exeter then it's easier to just supplement with DIY than convince the doctors to have some professionalism.

Otherwise most places *should* be open to the idea that the patient has an increased long term osteoporosis risk unless they raise levels at 140.

Yeah, I work with lots of folks on lots of different regimens, and regularly bitch to/about GICs underdosing to the level of risking osteoporosis

Really important to drive home that not only are large language models not conscious entities, they never can be. They are not the rough early prototype of artificial general intelligence. An LLM is as fundamentally capable of thought as a sofa

Nah even a few years ago they were inviting people who signed the WDI to give talks to trans people about entering politics/public sector.

And when we pulled them up on it multiple years in a row they'd just say "well it's too late now we already invited them"

my "biological sex" is female. the supreme court never defined it and, to the best of my knowledge, it is not defined anywhere else in law. so I defy anyone to deny me my right to piss in peace on that basis.

My response to the decision of Glasgow Pride to suspend participation by political parties.

In short, the culture war against our community has gone on far too long, and needs to end.

All the party pride groups too busy passive-aggressively saying how sad getting banned from pride has made them.

Missing the fact that if they were actually looking to influence the parties they were in this would be the best possible outcome for them. Look! Leverage!

signing up for conversion therapy and convincing the therapist to transition

legislative tennis with the House of Lords.

won't pass, but Lords have a majority of Cons so they can be assholes and triple the need to vote it down every time.

Tesco Whipping Cream

I can't believe they made transgender cream

btw if you're in the LGBT+ Lib Dems don't worry, you're not alone in finding out your party leadership will cynically discard you in favour of a nice soundbyte on television, every other party (yes, even the Greens) is right there with you.

Just remember it's not the trannies' fault please.

It seems like there is no indignity or amount of disrespect too obscene that the trans community and wider LGBTQ community might not be expected to open wide and swallow when parties are able to point to a greater evil.

bsky.app/profile/sexa...

Liberal Democrats coming out with an attack on pride organisations instead of their party leaders' comments is about what you'd expect from Allies™️