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. […]
Martin
Try “sweatshops” too. Then ask yourself what reason a government which is supposedly
opposed to capitalism could possibly have for not allowing that word to go through
a search engine.
Jill
Huh? The results look the same?
Elin
Actually, my google searches give completely different results here in Bergen than they did in Boston – although I didn’t try anything political yet… just silly stuff like slipcovers etc.
Martin
Weird. I got no results in the Chinese one, and bunches of pictures in the US one.
Gro
hi jill, this is out of topic, but you are here:
http://www.fistfulofeuros.net
good luck!
Francois Lachance
Quite apart from the who seen what question, there is the interesting question of what happens to rankings. In a combined search of two or more regaional search engines, how would the results be ranked? What would a combined Norwegian and Canadian view of the materials avaiable look like? What struck me in the two different set of images was the geopolitical considerations of what gets published where (i.e. what struck me in the US-based google.com was the militaristic impression — a military power tends to spot military might or people with military training and the military as part of their lives see weaponary as part of the scenary and a way of reading the historic record). For some reason (French spelling?) I did a search with an alternate spelling… tiannamen … and behold a much more mixed set of images.
Claus
> Weird. I got no results in the Chinese one …
Naturally – because Google submitted to censorship in Mainland China.
> Actually, my google searches give completely different results here in Bergen
Here in Germany, I couldn’t invoke google.cn at all. I sent a question to Google Germany, but didn’t get an answer, yet. Via the links in thsi post it worked. (I wonder if I’ll be getting one *at all*!)