It’s dawn. I guess that’s a gentle suggestion that perhaps, given I’m on this continent and not on that, I might consider sleep.
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Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
It’s dawn. I guess that’s a gentle suggestion that perhaps, given I’m on this continent and not on that, I might consider sleep.
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I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Grammarly is a full on AI plagiarism machine now, generating text, citations (often irrelevant), “humanizing” the text to avoid AI checkers and so on. If you’re an author or scholar, they also have been impersonating and offering “feedback” in your name. Until yesterday, when they discontinued the Expert Review feature due to a class action lawsuit. Here are screenshots of how it worked.
A summary of yesterday’s Critical AI Theory Reading Group discussion of Ryan Heuser’s article about LLM-generated poetry, with a discussion of whether LLMs normalise or idealise their training data.
The first session of the new Critical AI Theory Reading Group was great! We discussed Coeckelbergh’s new paper on technofascism.
There are so many interesting critical theory essays coming out about AI these days and I want to discuss them with people. So I’m proposing a reading group, small and informal, bring your own lunch, some Tuesdays this semester from 12:00-13:00 in the glass house at the Center for Digital […]
A list of Norwegian researchers who are experts on AI, worklife, ethics and the public sector that journalists could interview next time they write about AI.
Scott
That’s late. Good luck conquering the jetlag.