"Schools are implementing web filters that are preventing kids from finding critical information about their health, identity, and the subjects they’re studying in class."

I've been looking at education related kaggle datasets most of today along with a lot of associated "gold" rated Jupyter notebook analyses, and I'm flummoxed with the seemingly random thought processes. This about sums it up:

Universities are throwing millions of $$ at integrating GenAI to make life "easier". Yet here I am, manually recording attendance for 170+ students which has taken me over 1.5 hours. You can't fix an attendance register, but sure, you're going to revolutionize education🙄

Want to talk about everyday micro-violences inflicted on non-western users of mundane tech? Case & point: my constantly having to do the extra labour of reversing auto-correct's correction of non-western names I type up. Constantly. Yes, I did mean Rubbal, not rubble. Ridiculous.

Naming a software engineer AI "Devin" is such an unimaginative choice. God forbid even an artificial system that codes is named after a woman (of colour! gasp!). Tech folk can nod vigorously along about inclusion and diversity. But at the end of the day we will only have Devin

For the love all things sane, no Microsoft Word, I do *not* want you to make that sentence more concise. Yes I want the "um"s and "ah"s because I'm transcribing you batshit crazy piece of software. This zombie editor and its suggestions simply won't die.

"van gogh is like flamingo and claude monet is like lion" - things that 3 year olds say before you've gotten through your first round of caffeine in the morning.

AdBlock has blocked more than half a MILLION ads for me. Yet it feels like everywhere I browse, I see ads: in here, on Insta, on Google, Facebook (like duh!). So how many ads am I actually being shown over the course of a year? Many milllions? I feel like a rat in an experiment.

Today is a very important day for AI governance in the US. The @OMBPress released their instructions for all Federal agencies on how to protect our rights when considering the use of AI, following up on Oct 2023 EO on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/… 1/n

I sometimes cringe at my own awe at the cultural capital that comes from being at a place like the Univ. of Edinburgh--such as receiving an email out of the blue that lets you listen in on Yoshua Bengio (termed one of the 'Godfathers of AI') give a talk. Like what is this life.

It's startling to see how much worse auto-transcription is with folk who speak perfectly good English but do not have the same inflections of western speakers. Though reflecting on this AI madness, perhaps not being able to be included/understood by AI is a superpower.

Spotted at a local store: an AI toothbrush costing just 400£. What does it do? No one knows. But it's AI and it's going to free up your time, make you more productive and help you live your best drudgery-free life. AI -- solving them wicked problems, one toothbrush at a time.

Is it too dated to say xyz "on the internet"? Is there even a world outside of it anymore? Used to be that you'd disconnect from that noisy modem and be truly offline. Now my phone follows me everywhere telling me it's my bedtime and that I should "disconnect". The irony.

Incredibly excited to tell y'all about a project I've been working on for nearly a year with my Data & Society colleague Jenna Burrell, PhD: a special issue of First Monday, "Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power". Every article of the 8 is a banger. firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…

Think the library stack is trying to tell me something.

I don't understand why you need facial recognition for what is being justified as a crowd management strategy. What a farce to bring in even more surveillance within public spaces.

CIM PGRs Matias Valderrama (Matías Valderrama Barragán) and Greta Timaite (Greta Timaite) with colleagues elif buse doyuran , Meenakshi Mani , Addie McGowan from Edinburgh Futures Institute, have been awarded a @TheSocReview grant to organise the hybrid event "Artificial Societies". 🤖💻👩‍💻 more info soon! thesociologicalreview.org/announcements/…