iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alexis Lothian

AI Accountability Lab @aial.ie · 08/10/2026

At the @aial.ie, we collectively reflected and deliberated on the merits of the use of generative AI in research. Our collective statement and Lab Policy can be read here: aial.ie/blog/gen-ai-... zenodo.org/records/2322...

aial.ie

AIAL Statement on Generative AI and Scientific Integrity

Generative AI has rapidly become embedded across scientific research and the wider knowledge production pipeline. While its use has been increasingly normalised, we at the AI Accountability Lab have b...

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 23h

The idea of instancing has set up permanent residence in my mind (I know precisely when mine would have happened), and I’ve been transmitting it to every fellow immigrant nerd I know. It’s also an incredibly transferable premise that could make for infinitely satisfying fanfiction AUs…

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 23h

I just finished Sublimation by @isabel.kim and can’t recommend it highly enough. A simple speculative concept played out with incredible depth and attention to political, personal, historical, mythological, economic implications. us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

us.macmillan.com

Sublimation

An instant USA Today Bestseller | A LibraryReads Bonus Pick | One of the most anticipated books of Summer, according to The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, F...

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

For my AI science fiction class reading list!

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alice e marwick @alicetiara.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

These are absolutely horrible. All the incidents with descriptions are terrifying and heartbreaking. I just keep thinking: what if this happened to me? What if this happened to someone I love? Why is this happening to anyone? (I'm a naturalized citizen.)

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Locus Magazine @locusmag.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

2026 Ignyte Awards Winners locusmag.com/2026/10...

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Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When you hear a fantastical story about AI, you should ask yourself, "How does this serve the political project of AI?" Because, as others have pointed out, that's what AI really amounts to: a political project.

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

With reference to scholars who have been following them for some time, Nathalie Maréchal traces how ideas such as transhumanism, longtermism, and effective altruism converge into "the AI cult,” and why she thinks policymakers and the public can't afford to ignore it.

techpolicy.press

What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI

Nathalie Maréchal asks, why are we betting the economy and the future of democracy on cult-like beliefs?

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Probably my most… interesting title? It’s about the ways fanfic writers in the 70s used Spock’s Vulcan-ness (green blood!) as a flexible metaphor to play with the erotics of racial alterity, while remaining within representational logics of whiteness

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Delighted to have my essay “Spock’s Penis and the Racial Politics of Feminist Fantasy” in this incredible TOC! Can’t wait to dive into the rest.

journal.transformativeworks.org

View of Spock's penis and the racial politics of feminist fantasy: Situating race at slash fan fiction's origins | Transformative Works and Cultures

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Mel Stanfill @melstanfill.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

speaking of which, as the editor of @journal.transformativeworks.org please somebody write me something about the HP fanfic to AI doomer pipeline going on here. you can throw in all the Tolkien references from the other side of tech bro meets fandom too.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

You don't have to wait for some next phase of AI. They are trying very hard to destroy the world right now.

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

100% this

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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 11/09/2026

Listen you sound nuts if you try to explain that a bunch of silicon valley luminaries are involved in a weird cult that started with a harry potter fanfic and that their weird bboard flame war has spilled over into the real world That's absurd is what that is But also... It's true

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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 09/09/2026

'We grieve the worlds we've known and what it felt like to live in them, and people are part of that. We grieve the fact that someone or something that accompanied us through the world will no longer accompany us through whatever comes next.'

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Soren Lorenson is secretly plotting your demise @soren-lorenson.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

🫦 But also he addresses sthing most don't: genAI is a cheat code for avoiding the experience of vulnerability inherent in putting your own work out there on front street. That is a muscle you need to start building *as early as possible*, for the sake of your own mental health, if nothing else.

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Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I tried something in my class today that I was really excited about and I think went well! Basically a set of activities (with a bunch of polling) that turned students into an LLM in order to explain how they work. For example:

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Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 27/08/2026

And we do have the very great Katherine Cross joining us for Liberal Currents Live later today. Maybe that makes it extremely live. It'll be 6 p.m. in Edinburgh, 1 p.m. in Detroit, 12 noon in New Orleans, 10 a.m. in Seattle, 9 a.m. in Fairbanks

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Julie S. Lalonde @julieslalonde.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Stories like this are so important to share because resistance is not futile, bystanders *can* make a difference and only we keep each other safe.

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Data Workers’ Inquiry @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

🚨 NEW INQUIRY ON APPLE’S HIDDEN DATA WORKERS! Luciana documents structural challenges and wage discrimination workers in Spain face, while reminding us that big tech companies do not hold all the cards - workers can and do resist! Read it here: data-workers.org/luciana/

data-workers.org

“This is Capitalism”: Apple’s Hidden Data Workers at the Shadows of the AI Boom, by Luciana

The working conditions and resistance of Apple's outsourced data workers in Spain.

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

not a conspiracy and other researchers are documenting and developing www.theamericanvandal.com/p/against-te...

theamericanvandal.com

Against Technofeudal Education

Pillars For Protecting Our "Core Infrastructure" From OpenAI

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 13/08/2026

🔇 🔇 🔇 My book, Deep Unlearning, is now available for preorders! I don't know how people write so many books because this one took a lot out of me. It turns out, I had a lot to say 😂, with editors cutting out 50k of my words 🫣 ✴️ You can now preorder it at www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-U....

Cover of my new book, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and The Radicalization of a Tech Idealist.

There are two concentric circles in the book, the left being circuits in black an white, and the right being a bunch of dots with orange accents. The cover background is cream. And the words are written in black except for "Un" which is in orange.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 07/05/2026

“On Bullshit Engines' Politics” link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Clearly, whether we’re talking about GPTs and LLMs or just “machine learning” and algorithms, “AI” systems definitely have politics. The problem is not and never has been that what “AI” is and does is “out of step” or “unaligned” with human values, but rather that the values with which “AI” is aligned are a) very, very human, b) woefully under-examined, and often c) terrible. Those values embedded here tend to be racism, sexism, ableism, efficiency, power-over, speed, control, white supremacy, eugenics, hegemony, kyriarchy; what they don’t tend be are prosocial consensus reality, intersubjective truth, or facts. Because obfuscation, misinformation, and disinformation are valuative positions— and they are also mechanisms of control.

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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 06/08/2026

Look. The hiring of an obvious fabulist like Arday over any possible number/combination of scholars of color is, itself, the institutional racism that is often just more overt from the right. It is as much an indictment of racism as others, proving that it persists, perniciously, in academe.

theguardian.com

The takedown of Jason Arday has overjoyed the right, and must be a wake-up call for the left | Jason Okundaye

The Cambridge academic has rightly now resigned. But that won’t end the targeting of senior black figures or the lazy way institutions promote faux equality, says Guardian columnist Jason Okundaye

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Doctora Malka Older @older.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

"Much of science as we conceptualize it now was built on top of the framings of Verne’s era. Revisiting the exuberance, obliviousness, chauvinism, and optimism of Verne’s science-related worldview offers a useful reminder of where some of our own narratives come from." @mitpress.bsky.social

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Jules Verne’s Empty Dream of Spaceflight

In “From the Earth to the Moon,” scientific advancement is treated as destiny — but no one quite asks why.

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Endangered Languages Project @e-l-p.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

If you’ve seen this article, you may be sitting with anger, pain, or just exhaustion at dealing with another helping of colonial nonsense. We feel a responsibility to speak back when these colonizing narratives show up, yet again, in such a prominent venue. endangeredlanguages.com/story/respon...

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I have a new short essay out in LIMN's special issue This Is Not a Platform titled "Platform Obscurantism: The Hidden Substrates of Machine Learning." ChatGPT is a platform. That may be the least interesting thing about it. limn.press/article/plat... 🧵

limn.press

Platform Obscurantism - Limn

ChatGPT is a platform. The chatbot is infrastructure. Thousands of applications now build on OpenAI’s application programming interface, creating a dependent ecosystem of developers, startups, and ent...

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

nice quick AI take from donna haraway english.elpais.com/culture/2026...

Q. We’ll return to forms of resistance, but let me clarify something: Do you use artificial intelligence?

A. It’s impossible not to use it. Every time I log into Google, I get an AI-generated summary of what I looked up. I have no choice. Do I actively and intentionally use AI? No, I have not. I’m too lazy to learn how. I have artist friends who do very interesting things with it. At some point, I suppose I’ll learn to use it selectively. But, again, it’s not the devil: it’s a set of tools that’s the subject of hyper-investment — with large amounts of capital going into it and not for the best purposes. It’s causing enormous environmental damage. I’m more for a “slow AI” — developing it only to the extent that there are sustainable energy systems, sustainable ecological relationships, and a creative reorganization of work. I’m for slow AI integrated into the world of the kind that I want to affirm. And not the “fast AI” that we are currently being subjected to.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

well that was quick

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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

If we fail to understand the logic of AI as itself part of the ever-expanding logic of capital, we risk ending up with a romanticized recent past, false idols, ill-conceived enmities, bad alliances, and entirely incongruous political strategies

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Sasha Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · 19/06/2026

The most dangerous thing about AI is not that the machines might one day think. It is that we are being trained, by men with enormous financial gains riding on our acquiescence, to stop thinking for ourselves.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

"Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

theatlantic.com

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

AI is the lynchpin of the whole political project. It’s the container for the parallel governance they have promised each other. I truly think that they are surprised that people don’t like it…and that they can’t yet wholesale punish everyone for not liking them.

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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

journals.sagepub.com

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...

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danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

In "Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI," @cyberlyra.bsky.social, Ben Shestakofsky, Alex Taylor, and I are particularly keen to understand how the project of AI involves numerous "decoys" that misdirect critics' attention, undermining efforts to hold AI to account. arxiv.org/abs/2604.16106

arxiv.org

Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability

The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. As they expand their access to reso...

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Cathy Davidson @cathyndavidson.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

The always incisive @alondra.bsky.social discusses the purpose and possibilities of an AI bill of rights and standards. It will "require the political will to extend existing accountability frameworks to a domain that has so far resisted them." Crucial reading!

science.org

A civic grammar for AI rights

Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, developer of the large language model Claude, published a document it calls “Claude’s Constitution,” described by the company as ...

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Karen Hao @karenhao.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

So much attention has been paid to the Musk v. Altman trial. But real accountability for the AI industry will not come from a billionaire mudfight. It will come from the movements around the world resisting the empires of AI. My op-ed for @theguardian.com. www.theguardian.com/technology/c...

theguardian.com

The Elon Musk v Sam Altman battle is a distraction | Karen Hao

Fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem with AI

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Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Some seem to be taking the wrong lessons from this scene. kotaku.com/university-c... (1) It is 0% shocking that new college graduates (in humanities!) are critical of AI. (2) Pushing back on AI hype from a commencement speaker seems more likely an indication of high rather than low AI literacy.

kotaku.com

UCF Graduation Speaker Totally Shocked When Students Boo AI

The University of Central Florida commencement speaker didn't know how to read the room

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Also +1; but I’m all for the Luddite analogies dismissed at the beginning of this piece, and started my recent AI class with that history!

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Alexandra Gallant-Lee @alexandragallant.com · 12/12/2025

"You have to use AI." ...why?

People keep saying that AI is inevitable.

Like Bartleby, I'd prefer not to...

We "have to use it!"

My response to that is simply... WHY? Why is it being pushed so much and into so many things? Once you've gotten people to cede their decision making to an algorithm, eventually they'll stop thinking for themselves.

Why would I outsource thinking for myself to a machine? I have a brain.

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I wasn’t all that systematic about the history (wish I had been a little more so and will be next time) but I’d say the very early (Luddism, The Machine Stops, RUR) and the very recent (I am AI)!

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Alexis Lothian @alothian.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I just finished teaching a new course using the history of science fiction to critically engage the current moment of AI doom and boom. The students have been amazing, and I was excited to get interviewed about it for my college. arhu.umd.edu/news/what-ca...

arhu.umd.edu

What Can Science Fiction Teach Us About AI? | College of Arts and Humanities

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