Katia Schwerzmann
@katschwerzmann.bsky.social
Philosophy, Technology, and the Body—Toward Justice Acting Professor, Institute of Media Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum www.katiaschwerzmann.net
another day, another bit of evidence that the scientists who willingly hand over proprietary information to AI firms may experience some consequences
Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 2w agoFour days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
♥️Nach einem Semester 4 SWS Marx und Postmarxismus:"Ich fahre nächste Woche [...] in den Urlaub. Laut ihrem prognostizierten Abgabetermin der Arbeit Ende August [...] Das kriege ich beim besten Willen nicht hin[...] Zusätzlich dient er [Urlaub] der Widerherstellung/Reproduktion meiner Arbeitskraft."♥️
I’ve been exploring this shift over the past year, and my article, “The cost of language: tokenization as a metric of labor,” is finally out in AI & Society: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The cost of language: tokenization as a metric of labor - AI & SOCIETY
This study analyzes tokenization in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the intersection of language, technology, and political economy. Recent studies show that subword tokenization in multilingual ...
link.springer.com
#Brandneu: Gestern ist das Internationale Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie & Medienästhetik „Customizing: Konfigurationen medialer Anpassung“ bei @mesonpress.bsky.social erschienen. Mit spannenden Beiträgen u. a. von Mona Leinung, Jakob Schnetz & @katschwerzmann.bsky.social! 📬 shorturl.at/kgiDE
If a research paper can't answer the "so what?" test, then it doesn't deserve reviewing let alone publishing - and I don't think AI used as a writing assistant is helping authors address that test. /end
Exactly. These papers are pointless. They don’t result from the need to discover, explain, clarify, critique, which is what makes science a human endeavor: the desire to both understand something and communicate it. These papers are vampirely sucking off our time, critical thinking, creativity.
Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 4mo agoBut worse than that is that such papers just don't address the important "so what?" question. If you're going to prompt a research paper into being, AI is not going to say why it matters, why it was worth being done, or why other readers should care. 4/
Published with some minor changes! Please share widely. 😊 Guest, O., Suarez, M., ... & van Rooij, I. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education, 16(2), 85–118. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Journal: www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-162
Volume 16.2 — Digital Culture & Education (ISSN: 1836-8301)
digitalcultureandeducation.com
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · last yr.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
Falls Sie die Petition von AlgorithmWatch gegen den Regierungsplan zur Massenüberwachung der deutschen Bevölkerung durch Palantir noch nicht unterschrieben haben, bitte erwägen Sie, es zu tun. Was gerade abläuft, ist ein Skandal. weact.campact.de/petitions/st...
Stoppt Dobrindts Überwachungspläne!
Die Zeit drängt. Die Gesetzentwürfe stehen schon am 29.4. auf der Tagesordnung des Bundeskabinetts. Wer jederzeit erkannt werden kann, überlegt sich zweimal, ob sie oder er auf eine Demo geht, einen...
weact.campact.de
1/ My new article is out in AI & Society: “Sexualized deepfakes as a socio-technical continuation of gendered power.” I argue that sexualized deepfakes are not primarily a problem of deception, misinformation, or “fake media.” They are technologies of power.
Unbelievable: the amount of cognitive labor being spent to weed out these generated papers and on top of that the reputational damage to researchers such as Louise who has spent years unraveling the political and ethical implications machine learning technology.
Louise Amoore@amoorelouise.bsky.social · 5mo agoIf you are the editor of a journal and you have received a submission from me that looks a bit weird (weirder than usual) please assume it is a LLM-generated paper from a ghost author. This has happened four times in recent weeks. In each case it is possible to see how a genuine published paper 1/2
This paper of mine was lost for a whole year in the limbo of AI&Society, waiting for reviews that never came. Then it took another year to be published after receiving a minor revision request. It would make me very happy if it found readers: link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
link.springer.com
Consider signing this open letter. We must fight against the auto-destruction of the university as an institution where skills essential to democracy are being learned and practiced: reading, interpreting, writing, formulating research questions that go beyond the normative rationality of LLMs
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 7mo agoThe complicity of universities cannot be understated... The few of us fighting back aren't enough. openletter.earth/open-letter-...
The complicity of universities cannot be understated... The few of us fighting back aren't enough. openletter.earth/open-letter-...
Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia
openletter.earth
Samperson@samperson.bsky.social · 9mo agogreatest steam update of all time, because of one unnecessary detail
yesss shove it in my veins Chapter 11 Strategies for organising against AI in higher education Robert Ovetz and Lindsay Weinber > the future of AI in higher education is not a foregone conclusion. Academic workers can organise to contest, refuse and ban extractive AI
Who are the experts / journalists / researchers you turn to for critical perspectives on AI & the tech world? I created a feed of experts who watch AI developments with a skeptical & critical (but *informed*) POV. I'd love more people to follow it, but I'm also looking to add people - recs welcome!
Ethical AI is an oxymoron, like automated science
This week I received my first paper to peer-review that was written in large part by an LLM. The typical telltale signs were a lot of placeholder-words that add nothing to the argument and many qualifying adjectives that make some paragraphs sound like an advertisement for technology.
Critical Thinking is deep engagement with the relationships between statements about the world. See section 3 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 4/
![3 Critical Thinking
A vital skill under rising fascism, planetary crises, and the onslaught of technosolutionism. Critical
thinking in an academic context comprises, as Isabelle Stengers (2018) explains, “the ability to be
vigilant about one’s abstractions, to not be blindly led by them.” (p. 111) For ‘AI’ in the classroom
this can be exercised with two steps (Guest 2025). First, students can ask themselves if their cog-
nitive labour is being affected by an artifact; and if ‘yes’ then they can ask what that relationship
means for their specific context. If they pick chatbots, it becomes obvious that these so-called tools
damage their ability to learn, while also harming other people and planet (Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025;
Suarez et al. 2025).
Another strategy, applicable both to learners’ and seasoned scholars, is to check how ideas hang
in relation to other ideas (Elgin 1999, 2005, 2017). So when students work on assigned readings, they
can vigilantly retain the assumption for the duration that what they are reading is coherent and let
the ideas hang in relation to each other. If the students experience this as forming a sensible whole,
then they can try to see how these ideas or concepts further relate to extant knowlewdge. This
testing of how ideas hang in relation to both each other (within the work being analysed) and to
other constellations of ideas they may know about — ones they may disagree or agree with — can be
enlightening. And for those who enjoy drawing and thinking formally, this process can be rendered
using graphs (Blokpoel et al. 2021-2025, Chapter 6) and other formalisms (Beisbart et al. 2021).
Such activities can help pick out contradictions, like those that Teresa Heffernan (2023) outlines:
“Billions of dollars have backed AI [...] while science-based climate research has met resistance,
deferral, and denial as the world burns.” (p. 122)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreiapjxo47fnqf5ime25onuvw3xtjfe343h5mj5q5junwpz3hw43uzu)
![Another such example is formally treating so-called guardrails, which are post hoc checks on
the output of LLMs which industry claims can safeguard users. However, LLMs by design “give
emotionally inappropriate or unsafe responses [and i]f a response isn’t caught by these rules, it
will slip through” (Olivia Guest, as quoted in Kilgore 2025). Guardrails may seem sensible, giving
the impression of responsibility, but critical computational thinking through formal analyses re-
veal they are unimplementable. Not only is it impossible to make an LLM replicate human expert
behaviour, but also catching when LLMs fail to meet appropriate standards requires full blown
cognition, which provably cannot be codified (van Rooij, Guest, et al. 2024). This poses an infinite
4
Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies
regress of humans in the loop needed to make pretend of what AI was supposed to solve (Bainbridge
1983; Guest 2025; Guest and Martin 2025b). Through critical computational thinking we can un-
veil that the proposal that formal rules can make (dysfunctional) systems safe is self-defeating. Not
only are the LLMs produced by the AI industry a scam, akin to a ouija board (Guest, Suarez, et al.
2025), but guardrails is a scam too. This strategy — from tobacco with filters to petroleum with
the carbon footprint and now to AI with guardrails — to propose non-solutions to buy time and
save face in order to push their agenda, is ubiquitous (Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreigc5dugspyd6775qbtuvzx6sgvlmg5sqnrapyhg4gttrgqs5lko2y)
Somebody needs to write at length of the unhinged nonsense of calling academics critical of a monstrous technology, esp ones with direct expertise in formalism & implementation details: technopessimist. Are climate experts called pessimists for believing in & fighting against the climate crisis? 1/2
"Additionally, by accepting generative models’ normative rationality, the University reframes learning and research as essentially consisting in the evaluation of models’ outputs." @katschwerzmann.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2505.03513
Ruled by the Representation Space: On the University's Embrace of Large Language Models
This paper explores the implications of universities' rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) for studying, teaching, and research by analyzing the logics underpinning their representation spac...
arxiv.org
Liebe Lehrende an deutschen Hochschulen, bitte erwägen Sie, diesen Open Letter gegen die unkritische Anwendung von KI im Hochschulkontext zu unterzeichnen. openletter.earth/gegen-die-un...
Gegen die unkritische Anwendung und Implementierung sog. Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) in der deutschen Wissenschaft und im Hochschulalltag
openletter.earth
#KWIBlog: In today's blog text, former Thyssen Fellow @katschwerzmann.bsky.social investigates the role of reading in the context of new developments in AI, stressing the need for ongoing investment in close and critical reading that considers AI practices and limitations. 🔎 tinyurl.com/25upvwyj
A social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education 🧵
Very timely and necessary critical intervention by @katschwerzmann.bsky.social – highly recommended: «By embracing LLMs before developing any critical framework for their use in pedagogical and research contexts, the University allows itself to be governed by the contingent, ever-evolving ... 1/
Ruled by the Representation Space: On the University’s Embrace of Large Language Models
arxiv.org
Totally vague PR blog post as we now expect from OpenAI - remember when they used to publish research? But I am nonetheless interested in the conceptualization of ML "pathologies" - will have to think further about "sycophancy" as political problem... openai.com/index/sycoph...
Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it
We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often describe...
openai.com
Genius: www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2025/04...
Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices
Crosswalk buttons along the mid-Peninsula appear to have been hacked, so that when pressed, voices professing to be Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk begin speaking.
paloaltoonline.com
Fabulous paper from @alexcampolo.bsky.social and @katschwerzmann.bsky.social mapping an anatomy of the concept of #alignment in #machinelearning #algorithmicsocieties link.springer.com/article/10.1...
“Desired behaviors”: alignment and the emergence of a machine learning ethics - AI & SOCIETY
The concept of alignment has undergone a remarkable rise in recent years to take center stage in the ethics of artificial intelligence. There are now numerous philosophical studies of the values that ...
link.springer.com
So happy to see this paper cowritten with @alexcampolo.bsky.social finally published!!
Alex Campolo@alexcampolo.bsky.social · 2y agoNew paper with @katschwerzmann.bsky.social in AI & Society. Our basic question is: "Where has the ethical imperative of alignment come from? how, exactly, does it propose to regulate machines’ and peoples’ conduct?" It's quite critical - interested to hear thoughts link.springer.com/article/10.1...
