iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 1h

I have an allergy to the word “workflow.”

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 1h

Wrong answer! You can’t carry the torch forward if you’re dead!

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Zoe at five months: still adorable but growing so fast in size as well as weirdness. She likes to lounge and nap in her carrier while I’m working. #catsky #cats #floof #kitten

A torbie kitten in a carrier, belly-up and pretzeled a bit, making a very silly face

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10/10/2026

💯 > The rebranding is also a distraction, redirecting public attention away from resource-pillaging data centers, a fragile economic bubble and rising safety concerns. This is a core MO of the industry to avoid critique and escape regulation. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

intelligence.” It shows that since the start imprecise jargon was used to make exaggerated promises
with the goal to please investors, claims that fundamentally remain promises to this day.
Although some differentiate AI and non-AI systems by appealing to generative models versus
other types of AI, we are convinced that this does not bring clarity to the discussion, and we can
fall head first into misuse of terminology and fostering industry hype (see Table 1 and Figure 1; cf.
Guest 2025). Granting that distinction, for example, makes classifiers such as Bernoulli naive Bayes,
formally a generative model, AI technology similar to hyped applications (Efron 1975; Jebara 2004;
Mitchell 1997; Ng and Jordan 2001; Xue and Titterington 2008). However, a statistical model like the
Bernoulli naive Bayes classifier, which is used to analyse data, is unrelated to industry hype. By the same
token, spellcheck software (which has not historically been composed of generative nor stochastic
models) also falls under AI in some definitions, but not under others. Similar terminological problems
also hold for phrases like ‘agentic AI’ (Chawla et al. 2024; Hosseini and Seilani 2025) — systems that
can autonomously adapt their environment, make context-sensitive ‘decisions’, and act upon them
without any human intervention. Formally, systems like thermostats, microwave ovens, and traffic
lights are agentic in this sense and fall under AI, but are not products we wish to proscribe. Informally,
however, ‘agentic’ is misused to induce anthropomorphisation that we cannot endorse (cf. Bandura
2001; Barrow 2024; Helfrich 2024).
There is nothing privileged about generative AI, nor any AI technology, in any pedagogical or
sociotechnical sense (see Table 1). Importantly, all technology under our purview as academics, ought
to fall under the same critical considerations. Thus, to frame generative AI as unique or dramatically
different to other AI systems appears anti-intellectual. Recall that gene…

The Euler diagram in Figure 1 demonstrates that such hyped labels — Large Language Model
(LLM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), generative model, chatbot — are interwoven in complicated
ways such that their referents remain ambiguous (cf. Guest 2025). Importantly, this holds under any
rearrangement of the sets and elements: one cannot use these words without encountering additional
problems and fostering ambiguity (Alkhatib 2024). We cannot escape this quagmire with more jargon.
And so, we are convinced that when the technology industry presents use cases for the label generative
AI (such as for LLMs, but not Bernoulli naive Bayes; Figure 1), this is a strategy to elicit confused
responses against ‘generative AI,’ deflecting attention from other problematic AI systems (Table 1).
This feeds into the hype and obstructs a more general critique of similar unethical or unwanted AI
systems (cf. Guest 2025). Should we continue down this road, the technology industry will slip through
such a distinction, skipping from terminology to terminology, consolidating its power. It has indeed
done so many times before by using previous phrases as buzzwords like big data, machine learning

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I’m not sure Andrew Garfield can summon an aura evil enough to be a convincing Sam Altman, but I’m rooting for him. #artificial

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

My Philosophy colleagues are killing it. Also, their program has a no-AI policy, unlike other programs I know.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Okay, I propose a slogan for this: "Janky until proven functional, period." And note that that assumes HIGH standards for functionality, established in the specific use case.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Edgar Allan Poe married his first cousin Virginia when she was 13. He was 27 at the time. Whether or not they consummated their marriage has been debated by Poe scholars, but like...still. #wyrdwednesday

Plaque on the Edgar Allen Poe House in Baltimore describing how he lived there with his grandmother, cousins, and aunt, and how he first turned from writing poetry to fiction while living at this home. It also describes his marriage to his cousin Virginia.

Virginia Poe, as painted after her death

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Yes to everything in your review! I kept watching until season 8, unfortunately — out of morbid curiosity, I guess. And then there was another pointless, audience-punishing death, and I was done. I’m still angry about that show to this day.

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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

wikipedia has been ANNIHILATED with AI bot traffic for a while now (because LLMs can't get enough of it) which puts a huge burden on its tech and server costs. and now it looks like bots are making unauthorized edits to pages and trying to hack community tools diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/o...

Wiki editing: We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in “sandbox” areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.
Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WDQS in May.

Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. Rising bot traffic and agentic activity is showing a real impact on the Wikimedia projects and the infrastructure that makes it available for millions of users globally. In 2025, the Foundation reported that its bandwidth usage had increased by 50% due to the surge of bot activity on its websites since 2024. At the same time, 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic on its projects was coming from bots.

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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 06/10/2026

President Trump suggested Iran could “take out a city,” saying: “Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego.” “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said. wapo.st/3VTfbR8

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

For my birthday, I saw Infinity Song perform in Tampa, even though it was a work night and making the trip in one day is a bear. It was totally worth it, though — I had a blast!

Israel and Momo jamming on their guitars

A selfie I took with Momo Boyd. I look tired and sweaty, but she is somehow still stunning after a two hour show.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Vinnie looks mad. Do you owe him money?

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 04/10/2026

Again, journalists, what are you doing?👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 The most mind blowing thing about these people is that they are so out in the open with their eugenics & predatory cults. Epstein wasn't as out in the open (at least from what I see now). Everything is right there for you to expose them once & for all!

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 05/10/2026

Remember when us phil-tech types said effective altruism was just utilitarianism taken to its worst possible extents? This is what we meant: Real harm for unquantifiable potential benefit. "…'we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology….'"

politico.com

Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI

The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I’m so sorry you’re still dealing with this. I hope they get her out asap!

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Shout out to Anisha at Xfinity, who not only indulged my asking her if she was a human twice, but also my randomly asking her what her favorite cartoon was growing up. She also lowered my bill. 🤘 (In defense of my paranoia, customer service scripts are quite robotic-sounding and unnatural.)

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Stealing and filling that whooooole seat!

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

😂 maybe it keeps them out of trouble, but at what cost??

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I sincerely regret introducing Zoe to Cat Youtube because now I can’t get her away from the TV. She’s watching an Alex Gibney documentary, ffs. #catsky

A kitten entranced by the TV and sitting directly in front of it.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yikes. This was so uncomfortable to watch. Is this actor method? Because if so, he can stop now…

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The week 7 slump is here with a vengeance. I didn’t even teach today (I gave an exam), and I’m exhausted.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

“We think it’s also important to acknowledge how the rhetorical strategy of re-framing critique-as-shaming—in addition to calls for middle ground positions—corresponds with a post-truth political worldview where all opinions are equally valid and must be treated as such.”

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I totally agree about her being a casualty, but these categories aren’t mutually exclusive. They likely considered the possibility of losing seven tuitions (or more, if they held everyone in the group chat accountable) and weighed it against hers. They didn’t honor her request for a refund, either.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

While there is certainly sexism in higher ed, Cornell’s failure also seems like a predictable consequence of universities being underfunded and run like businesses. It’s a lot harder to hold students accountable when universities view them as customers.

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Matthew J Kuiper @matthewjkuiper.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

OpenAI has been “grossly negligent in the design, marketing, sale…, and distribution of their ChatGPT product…, failed to warn Floridians of ChatGPT’s dangers, fraudulently misrepresented the safety of ChatGPT, and created a public nuisance by releasing ChatGPT in Florida without proper safeguards…”

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I sang in my local music store’s showcase this weekend. It was a small audience but a win for me nonetheless given my stage fright and the difficulty of Bab’s song! I also couldn’t get through it without cracking a month ago, so yay me.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Goddess: "[Y]ou are skilled in seeing things from multiple points of view and are known for making well-informed decisions. People come to you for advice because they trust you to gather all the facts before passing judgment. Your complexity is your power..." Seems like a well-constructed quiz. 😂

press.princeton.edu

What kind of Monstrous Bitch are you?

Through history and through story, women have been demonized and transformed into a plethora of mythical and monstrous creatures, from demons to vampires, and called everything from goddess to crazy a...

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Matthew J Kuiper @matthewjkuiper.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Just saw ch*tgpt’s new commercial on how it’s “leveling the field” for some disabled people. Maybe so(?), but this damned company didn’t/isnt ultimately developing the product for them (get real), and even if this feel good narrative is true, it doesn’t cancel all of its other documented harms.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It’s giving Stay Puft Marshmallow Man…and look how that ended.

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Accepting that I am a soft muppet and giving myself the grace to look up jump scare timings and even read plot summaries has honestly been a game changer. I can actually enjoy a horror show or film when I watch it on my terms.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I guess I’m done playing xbox tonight. #catsky

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And always so small and hard to read!

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

“The miraculous Shit-Raining Machine, from which there will be NO HOPE OF RELIEF, promises to unlock PREVIOUSLY UNIMAGINABLE AND CURRENTLY VAGUE BENEFITS FOR HUMANKIND, such as: - Business things - Other stuff - WE MUST CREATE IT”

mcsweeneys.net

We Must Create the Shit Machine

“For as long as humans have created SHIT with our BODIES AND BUTTS, we have been asking this FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: What if there were a COMPUTER that could A...

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Imagine that: employees of the company that created the cheating machine, cheating at their work! This is yet another great reminder, though, that chatbots depend on the obscured labor of humans.

404media.co

People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI

OpenAI has thousands and thousands of contractors helping improve the company's AI models. Multiple contractors have been fired for using AI to train the AI.

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Allison Dieppa @amdieppa.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sheeran did the one thing guaranteed to make it so much worse — but that just confirms how out of touch he is. His PR team must be breathing into a paper bag. That being said, I want to see some of this heat fall on other folks who are complicit, too.

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