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. […]
Tore Vesterby
Check out Akismet, Jill. The only caveat is that you have to sign up for a WordPress account in order to get an activation code, but from there on it stops most of the spam that gets thrown at you.
Stephanie
I love spam karma! It is also a wordpress plugin and it *really* works!
Jill
I had spam karma and loved it, but I thought it didn’t work with WordPress 2.0? Not sure where I got that idea from, actually. Anyway, turned out I’d already installed Aksimet except I hadn’t entered a wordpress.com API, so I set that up – now we’ll see how it works…
Aaron
WP-Hashcash is okay, or used to be at least. For the first few months that I used it most all spam was blocked, but now more is getting through again. Still it might be worth checking out, plus I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an updated version and I just haven’t gotten around to upgrading yet.
eirikso
I am now running Akismet, Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behaviour. All three of them on the same WP 2.0 blog. That combination has stopped absolutely all spam. And I have a lot of it. You find the links at the top of my complete list of plugins here:
http://www.eirikso.com/about-this-site/
b¯rge
I just have to add to the praise of Akismet. It’s accuracy is amazing!
Jeremy
Askimet is pretty good, although it doesn’t let you configure a whitelist – so when I leave link-filled comments for other authors on WRT, it flags them for moderation and I have to go in and moderate. Otherwise I’m happy with it.