AI is not inevitable. Nothing in human societies is inevitable because we design them. Healthcare can be free for the public. Books can be bought instead of bombs. Universities can be free for students, and they can even receive a stipend to live off. Don't let companies dictate the future.
Read more in section 3.2 here https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099
@olivia Olivia, what would it mean for me to “refuse adoption” in universities when it is students who are the drivers for my courses and they are widely using AI in ways that are already forbidden?
I feel like the “resistance” and critique of inevitability talk isn’t quite connecting with my reality on the ground
I glanced at your work on "Science communication as collective intelligence".
I think that we need to redesign university courses so that learning is communal for the solution of a specific goal.
I think though that Olivia's points are complementary to that goal. Universities should resist AI adoption as imposed by external economic forces.
@apostolis @olivia I’ve have already redesigned both my assessments and my teaching in response to students’ AI use, but that kind of adaptation feels like it conceptually falls more into “inevitability” than “resist”
right now, what’s most valuable to me personally (given the starting point that every single student in my courses has somehow used AI, and a good proportion uses it *a lot*) is advice from other academics on how exactly they are trying to change what they do in response.
telling me “I can resist” doesn’t feel helpful in that way
@apostolis @olivia I guess a different way of putting this all is that for the multiple ways in which AI is currently negatively affecting my work, both in teaching and research, the drivers underlying the use are not ,industry forces’ in the way the quoted passage in Olivia’s post is assuming, it is the independent, voluntary action of other individuals within the system (students, other researchers)
that whole frame (industry forces) captures well what is happening in many jobs, but it doesn’t capture what is happening in mine
@olivia @apostolis ok, now that we have the contrast clear between contexts in which damage is arising from someone ordering people to use AI and ones where the problems stem from individuals voluntarily adopting them (and, in fact, adopting them even in the face of explicit sanction) what form do you think “resistance” should take in the latter?
that is, what, concretely, do you think academics in my position should do?
@apostolis @olivia the reason why this ultimately matters that pushing back against the real driver (the “organic” adoption of these tools by individuals) requires me to understand and engage with the perceived value and function these tools have for them…
…and that means trying to understand both what they can and what they can’t do. Simply declaring that these tools are garbage (“semantically meaningless random text generator”) isn’t useful for actually productively countering AI use in this configuration…(if they genuinely were meaningless random text generators I wouldn’t be faced with the negative effects in the first place).
the Fodor quote doesn’t feel like it’s aimed at that kind of understanding
@UlrikeHahn @apostolis yeah, I know many do not like many of the quotes and have trouble with my position
But yes, I do think we need to educate the students: Guest, O., Suarez, M., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17786243
@olivia @apostolis I don’t have trouble with your position, Olivia. I have trouble with the fact that I don’t think the recommendations (including in the linked preprint) are connecting fully with the problem. It would be great if they were, but -from my day to day experience with how AI is up-ending science academia- they aren’t. Not because they are wrong, but because they are insufficient
so it’s important to me to figure out why they’re insufficient and what else we could/should be doing
@olivia @apostolis I don’t have any solution…it all feels pretty intractable to me at the moment, so I’m mainly struggling to understand the problem
what AI is doing to publishing reform is as good an example as any (see below). There is an “industry force” at play here only in as much as there is an industry irresponsibly making available particular products.
The actual causal pathways by which AI is breaking the system involves multiple distinct actors with very different motivations (outright AI slop/fraud, malicious actors, scientists using AI for research in ways that increase productivity but still leaves them in charge), each of these is different, but they are all combining to an overall negative effect
what I don’t see is how we can solve anything (if we indeed can) without unpacking all that in detail
@olivia @apostolis I don’t think I said you are against different analyses?
the point I was trying to make is simply that what is breaking things right now is a confluence of forces and actors. If we are going to counter the destructive effects we need a systemic analysis of how these forces are interacting.
I don’t take you to be someone who would object to that in principle ;-)
I suspect what we do have disagreements on is what the relative importance of these different forces and actors are, and what’s required to push back as a result (even in principle)
"Most importantly of all, resistance can and should take on many forms. Remember to rest and take care of yourself and your community. If talking to friends and colleagues is easy, then try to engage them on these issues. If it is not possible to do so, you can instead (or in addition) seek out allies online."
Sorry to interject my uneducated opinion , but both directions are insufficient alone.
You can look at it from both directions, top-down and bottoms-up. And both are necessary.
@UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia
Wow.... interesting discussion, folks. Thank you. I'm a long way from university level experience, being an engineer in the electronic design industry for over 40 years. We've gone from one computer to share among engineers thru now to AI assistance across our individual computers. IMHO, we need to separate what AI can do from what they do. Humans, almost instinctively anthropomorphise everything. FFS... people still worship an imaginary AI in the sky and.... 1/2
@abucci @apostolis @olivia I’m going to point you toward the scare quotes around the word “organic” in my post, which are there for precisely those reasons.
I am also going to push back against the notion that I am “placing the responsibility at the feet of students”: I am simply describing the (widely documented) problem in higher education that students are using AI tools in significant volumes *even where there use is explicitly sanctioned and forbidden*.
That is the concrete problem of AI now undermining higher education. Asking what “resisting AI” is supposed to mean for me in that context seems legitimate to me, and if it’s not, Olivia (who I’ve known for a long time as an academic colleague) is more than capable of telling me that herself.
@abucci @apostolis @olivia let me say this then: I find your original reply to me, someone you have never met, aggressive and inflammatory.
One of the main benefits of exchange on platforms like this, to me, lies in being able to talk things through with others whose opinion and expertise I value but who disagree with me - that allows me to learn things and clarify my thoughts, and I’ve found this exchange with Olivia really helpful in that regard.
Trying to navigate disagreement in a way that it doesn’t lead to conflict is incredibly hard. In a context like this thread where people are investing significant effort in trying to navigate disagreement in a constructive way, I don’t personally have time, energy, or interest in exchanges with people who aren’t making that effort. The world is fraught enough as it is.
@abucci @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia
Wouldn't an approach where the AIs have to pass the class as students, be better. After all, regurgitating data is not the way to learn how to think. As for the pollitical/economics of the whole mess, well, that's on us to some extent. It's a problem educated people deal with all the time, even among each other. IMHO, humanity is still growing up. We've not abandoned our superstitions for the hard real wonder of actual nature. Is AI part of our nature?
@UlrikeHahn @abucci @apostolis @olivia
I understand what you're saying, and maybe language is not serving us well. You seemed to have juxtaposed helping it be better versus creating a disruption. And again, maybe I fully don't understand the dilemma. When I need very technical information that I can not recall or need help with, I would go to a book or a specification. Now, I can ask AI, check its results, and decide whether I can rely upon what's being presented. It's a tool... 1/2
@lednaBM @UlrikeHahn @abucci @apostolis @olivia At the risk of butting into this conversation, I think the problem here is that you think that "just a tool" is a neutral concept.
Tools, by their very nature, change the way we interact with the world. Cars are "just a tool", but dependence on cars for transport has both positive and negative effects, because of how their use changes how we behave (and what other things we want to change about the world now "we" want to use cars all the time). Is "car-using humanity" healthier than "pre-car humanity"?
In this sense, even if "AI is just a tool", the existence of cognitive tools *clearly* implies that use of them will change the way people behave - *regardless* of any concept of "applications being identified as misapplications". Dependence on a tool for *thinking* feels inherently more problematic than dependence on a tool for travelling distances...
@aoanla @lednaBM @UlrikeHahn @abucci @apostolis
Indeed! FWIW I touch on tools versus technologies in this context here if useful. https://scholar.social/@olivia/114937376930475208
@aoanla @lednaBM @UlrikeHahn @abucci @apostolis
also not sure if you all saw this but https://scholar.social/@olivia/116189266507672116
They even tried "nuclear weapons are just tools", with Project Plowshare, saying we could use them for excavating canals or mining.
Boys with toys, or corporations hoping to get contracts, IDK, though at least most people knew this was ridiculous.
Respectfully @EricLawton
I understand your sentiment, but people were not as knowledgeable about radiation back then. So yes, these things were boasted about in ignorance. And yes, we see it today with the fools (Musk) of our time talking about colonizing Mars, not even thinking about how radioactive it is. Foolish talk is foolish talk in any century. This is why we have scientists and researchers to sort the how's, while engineers apply them.
@abucci @aoanla @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia
The images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been more than enough.
We already knew about strontium-90 in milk, from fallout from tests. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2134381/
Not being knowledgeable owed more to H.L. Menken's principle than the knowledge not being available.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Indeed.
The Precautionary Principle is especially important here.
Which is why the extreme inertia in government regulation response is so frustrating; they're more FOMO than PP.
@abucci Your arguments are unfair. Ask Madame Curie. Applying the 60s, your date, ignores the nuclear testing of the 50s. How convenient. I'll stand by my statement. And then you go on to accuse me of helping EM? Really! Seems more like a desperate attempt at a social media hit job. Please refrain from commenting if you're here to just pick a fight. Bullies exist in every crowd. Bullying reflects more on you than I. Delete your post.....
Apologies to:
@aoanla @apostolis @olivia @EricLawton
@lednaBM @abucci @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia
The tacit assumption here is that LLMs possess intelligence is false. Their purpose is not to give intelligent answers. Their purpose is surveillance.
AGI = Automated Gathering of Intel
@teledyn @lednaBM @abucci @apostolis @olivia I think the “intelligence” issue is a red herring, personally
in the contexts I’m concerned with, people’s use is driven by the practical value they find in the actual outputs
(I also don’t personally see anyone in this thread that has been assuming that)
@UlrikeHahn @lednaBM @abucci @apostolis @olivia
We have already seen arrests, and then the shooting in BC, all US based are required to retain, and the #ELIZAeffect.
So carry on. Don't mind me. Enjoy.
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ
Ulrike Hahn
Apostolis
👁Pooka🫣Boo🫵
Anthony
Naïm Camille Favier
aoanla
Eric Lawton
teledyn 𓂀