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. […]
Matt K.
What does it mean–shannonize? Something to do with ol’ Claude?
Jill
Yes, the communication model Shannon. It’s this complicated geeky game Noah told us about because he and some collaborators are planning to do a project using it. The basic form is that you pick a word at random in a book, and write it down. That’s word A. Then you look for the same word again, in the same book or another book, and you write down the word AFTER the word you looked for. This is word B. Then you look for another instance of word B and write down the word that happens to be after that, and so you keep going until you have a long peculiar sentence. Then you laugh.
With computers you can do the same with series of words, and it sort of rewrites your words for you. Strange. One of the sites that lets you do it is The Shannonizer Assault Team, but I’m not sure they’re using quite the algorithm Noah was talking about. Programs Noah mentioned that do this are Babble, which is a DOS program so hard to run these days, and Prate, which is also a download, but newer. I’ve not actually tried them myself, and there may well be others I missed.