Posts by emilymbender@dair-community.social
(DIR) Post #B20exZTCJrnSoqURSy by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-30T12:11:35Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I enjoyed doing this interview for El Mundo, especially the last question (English translation [actually original, since the interview was in English] of that in this short thread:https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historias/2025/12/30/6952b5bc21efa0a0388b4594.html🧵>>
(DIR) Post #B20exannMlrox18PD6 by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-30T12:11:52Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Q: In a world dominated by FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), how can individuals and journalists effectively practice this refusal without being dismissed as 'anti-progress' by the 'AI Boosters' you critique?>>
(DIR) Post #B20exc0asfhOh088nY by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-30T12:12:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
My reply:Sometimes, we will be described as "anti-progress" and the first step is to accept that that might happen, but that refusal is important nonetheless. But being described as "anti-progress" doesn't necessarily mean being "dismissed". >>
(DIR) Post #B20exdMxozBeufbWIy by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-30T12:13:08Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Each time we refuse, we make it easier for others (and ourselves) to refuse again. We can also make positive statements about what we value: authenticity, accountability, human connection, and credit where credit is due (e.g. to artists for their work). >>
(DIR) Post #B20exl5X7fzuqvViFM by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-30T12:14:52Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
If someone wants to be dismissive of those values, that is a choice they can make, and I think by taking the initiative to frame the debate and making clear what is at stake, we can show that choice for the dangerous, anti-social one that it is./fin
(DIR) Post #B20f85PsOkXynLwzoG by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:05:58Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Really enjoyed this fantastic piece by Sonja Drimmer and Christopher Nygren:https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/Here are few favorite pull quotes of mine + one little quibble at the end:🧵>>
(DIR) Post #B20f86T6UEis3eT5Tk by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:06:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
"It is in this context that we must consider the newfound praise of AI in education. AI boosters promise that the technology will find greater efficiencies in education; but this is less about the functionalities of AI itself, and far more about eviscerating the public nature of public education.">>
(DIR) Post #B20f87XOVlkVNFU1o0 by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:07:49Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
"This conception of education is antithetical to the transactional and antihuman program of “optimized” and “efficient” delivery of learning outcomes, promised by proponents of AI’s incursion into the space of education.">>
(DIR) Post #B20f88ZYfD4eaFVGoi by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:08:10Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
"We hope that other educators will join us in helping students and professors to pave an exit ramp off the alienating highway of automated education, and we aspire to achieve this in community, rather than as solitary prompt engineers."
(DIR) Post #B20f89JzsYDkuHEMCW by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:12:46Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
That last point, about learning in community, really resonates with me. It connects with what I say in this piece for UNESCO:https://www.youtube.com/live/l-OWi6VoMng?t=4250s(Written version available here, pp.41-45: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000395236 )>>
(DIR) Post #B20f89sNohj6cvJonY by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:13:20Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
And what MJ Crockett says here about studies in cognitive science missing a lot (specifically, in their case around thick empathy, but it applies in education too) by focusing on empathy (resp. education) as something that happens in individual minds.https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5862422>>
(DIR) Post #B20f8AgMori17whjhw by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:14:34Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Okay, now for the little quibble. Drimmer and Nygren begin their piece by taking us to an historical example of resistance to the use of computing resources for military purposes.>>
(DIR) Post #B20f8BdvFRLc6eZIXI by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:14:48Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
They then contrast that to the present moment, saying:"And this, in turn, made the potential targets of resistance clear; indeed, it was relatively easy to organize protests in front of large mainframe computers, located in very specific facilities and locations. Now, however, computation is distributed. And this makes the targets to resist so diffuse that the shape of direct action becomes difficult even to conceptualize.">>
(DIR) Post #B20f8KsQurIokGQVu4 by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:16:33Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
In fact, the computation is (again) highly concentrated, but off-campus, in the form of data centers, especially hyperscale data centers. And these are important locations of resistance --- especially the folks organizing to prevent their construction.>>
(DIR) Post #B20f8TcoOJ9dsQBfIu by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:17:13Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
None of this invalidates Drimmer & Nygren's points, and indeed we need both the friction and person-to-person work they recommend on campus AND organized resistance to data center construction.>>
(DIR) Post #B20f8bzRI40XoupqgS by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-12-21T08:19:33Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Anyway, read the whole essay. It's truly excellent.https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/
(DIR) Post #B20fJGxVp8DlmM18wy by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-10-06T20:30:47Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
"AI" research community:1) Claims to be building "everything machines", doesn't acknowledge that that means what they're doing is untestable (see Gebru & Torres 2024)https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/136362) Plays leaderboard games instead of doing serious evaluation (see Raji et al 2021)https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-Abstract-round2.html>>
(DIR) Post #B20fJINmWwpQC7JdXE by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-10-06T20:31:32Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
3) Has extremely selective and presumably high prestige conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, AAAI) but orients towards arXiv and regularly cites arXiv versions of even published papers4) Pretends that they have to have the ability to push preprints into the world immediately upon drafting (I guess because their value is incredibly perishable; see Bender 2023)https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/scholarship-should-be-open-inclusive-and-slow-15ab6ce1d74c>>
(DIR) Post #B20fJJaw1WwZxCTefw by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2025-10-06T20:31:57Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
5) Is now ready (at least at AAAI) to use synthetic text extruding machines as part of their "scientific" peer review process (AAAI 2025)https://aaai.org/aaai-launches-ai-powered-peer-review-assessment-system/6) Wants the rest of us to believe that their work should now be incorporated into everything we do, in every sphere of our lives.NO THANK YOU.
(DIR) Post #B22sd7nfx0VTwGRtQm by emilymbender@dair-community.social
2026-01-07T14:39:55Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/