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. […]
andrew stern
thanks Jill et al, we were looking for some easy code to implement this on grandtextauto!
torill
As one who does not have comments on the blog, I think it’s all a matter of what you want with the blog. While I enjoy the feedback my blog creates, I still blog for myself. “More interesting” isn’t really an argument for getting comments, I am waiting for “useful”. This is why blogonblog used to have comments, back when blogback had the first experiments with them. They were useful. I’ll survive being less interesting.
andrew stern
by the way, a technical note, for this to really work properly, I think you need to add bookmark anchors for each comment in your Individual Entry Archive, eg,
<a name=”>$MTCommentID$>”></a>
Otherwise, clicking on a recent comment link won’t actually scroll you down to the comment itself.
So inside my Individual Entry Archive template, I changed the <MTComments> section to be:
<MTComments>
<div class=”comments-body”>
<a name=”<$MTCommentID$>”></a>
<$MTCommentBody$>
<span class=”comments-post”>Posted by: <$MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect=”1″$> at <$MTCommentDate$></span>
</div>
</MTComments>
Jill
Thanks, Andrew – I forgot about the anchors at the receiving end!
John Robert Wheeler
what is IKT
Jill
IKT is the Norwegian acronym for ICT: Information and Communication Technologies.
It might mean other things as well?
Jack
That’s good idea.
Timothy
Thanx for the code to go straight to a particular comment. I’m using it now.