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. […]
Jesper Juul
You’ve clearly moved into a more poetic mode recently, which is not bad. Isn’t the poetic underrated these days?
Francois Lachance
Have you really changed? Or has your intended audience changed? You seem to be blogging for your students. I mean that “for” in a large sense. You are blogging their accomplishments, aspirations as well as items that may be of interest to them.
make sense ??
Jill
Do you think I’m writing for my students, Francois? It doesn’t feel like that, though I’m certainly writing with an awareness that students will be among the readers. And I’m thinking a lot about teaching these days. Mind you, even if all my students read this blog regularly, and I doubt they do, they’d still only be a fraction of the readership. My mum is at least as important a potential reader in my mind 😉
Jesper, I like poetic. I like that there can be more, different ways of blogging. And I like mixing them all up into one blog. Might be confusing, but it works for me!
Francois Lachance
I like how you put it “with students in mind”. I’ve also noticed more use of images to initiate a blog entry. Some of this may be related to travel (and the time your schedule allows for writing. These may be related or unrelated factors. I also want to throw into the mix the seasonal tug of light as the northern hemisphere approaches the equinox. A theory to test on a sampling of blog entries: the darkness of winter is word prone and the light of spring image inspiring — of course it is a theory that goes to pot when one considers that the blog author can draw upon an archive of stored images in winter and in summer yank a chunk or two of verbal text. Still there may be a yearly cycle to blogging …
Jill
I don’t know, but it is AMAZING that it’s still light and it’s past five pm. I’ve got more than an HOUR before it’ll be dark!
Yay!
Weez Blog
other
This daily writing thing… (She shakes her head). In sleeplessness, the archives were read bottom up, chronologically. The experience was not unlike fiction. My words have become other, and have their own life apart from me. Where I am now…