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Ashley Scarlett

@ashleyscarlett.bsky.social
293 followers 468 following 15 posts

Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts researching/writing about intersections between art and algorithmic culture.

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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
A reminder that the statistical majority of the text you encounter now on the Internet is not actually meant for you as a human being reading, even if it happens to resemble legible prose. #Textpocalypse
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Yes, yes, yes! airesistlist.org#resist-list
airesistlist.org
The AI Resist List
A living directory of ways communities resist AI harms—and build alternatives worth fighting for.
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Louise Amoore @amoorelouise.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
If you are the editor of a journal and you have received a submission from me that looks a bit weird (weirder than usual) please assume it is a LLM-generated paper from a ghost author. This has happened four times in recent weeks. In each case it is possible to see how a genuine published paper 1/2
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
And again: "For years, the work of African data labellers has been more or less “ghost work,” the unseen, hidden labor that lets American tech companies build their products." www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...
404media.co
'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back
Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
This is the needed corrective to the new round of "when humans write it's like music, every word carefully chosen and precisely placed" which is simply not the reality for most people and situations. Much of writing is a tedious task that we have to slog through to simply keep our job/day/etc going.
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
UNREAL. A very well-written and rather unsettling must-read... harpers.org/archive/2025...
harpers.org
The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
Yet another *excellent* episode of The Data Fix!
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
“Any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/life...
lareviewofbooks.org
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books
Julien Crockett speaks with Ted Chiang about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology.
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
M. Beatrice Fazi @mbfazi.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
My follow-up article on synthesis in gen AI is now out 💥💥💥   Responding to @shanedenson.bsky.social response, I expand on my transcendental argument about LLMs and develop the case for a structuralist reading of Kantian synthesis. Available Open Access ⬇️ journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/ph...
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
A remarkable archive of early computer art (80 individual works!?) up for auction, drawn from Grace C. Hertlein's personal collection. Very curious where this will end up... www.sothebys.com/en/buy/aucti...
sothebys.com
Algorithmic Art | History of Science & Technology, Including the "Romkey" Apple-1 | Science | Sotheby's
<p>Algorithmic Art&nbsp;</p><p>An Extensive Archive of Early Computer Art, 1950s-70s</p><p><br></p><p>Comprising of approximately 80 works: 53 unframed works on paper, 17 unframed works on paper under...
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
Really looking forward to this: www.eventbrite.ca/e/progressiv...
eventbrite.ca
Progressive Publics: A Symposium Connecting Scholarship & Independent Media
Day two of a June 13th + 14th academic symposium featuring panels exploring Alberta history, social democracy, independent journalism & more
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Adil Haque @adhaque.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Full Statement by UK FM Lammy: "Israel’s actions are intolerable" "repellent" "monstrous" "I condemn it" "morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counter-productive" "The world is judging. History will judge them." "This is indefensible and it must stop."
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
An accessible and informative read for anyone interested in learning more about the particularities of the housing crisis in Canada. Highly recommended!! Thank you @cwhitzman.bsky.social !! www.ubcpress.ca/home-truths
ubcpress.ca
Home Truths
Home Truths - Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis; With Canadians burdened by the world’s highest household debt after decades of failed housing policy, Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis shows wh...
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
New publication with Philosophy of Photography questions what it means to look at images of atrocity within contexts defined by their financialization, instrumentalization, and deployment within machine learning and AI applications. intellectdiscover.com/content/jour...
intellectdiscover.com
Learning from atrocity: When machines regard the pain of others | Intellect
The images that have emerged from Gaza, capturing catastrophic violence inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, are atrocious, haunting, injurious. Gaza-based photojournalist Mot...
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
Somehow managed to miss this when it first came out: knowingmachines.org/models-all-t... Well worth the read, if you haven't already! And many thanks to @bildoperationen.bsky.social and/on The Data Fix podcast (@melhogan.bsky.social) for bringing it to my attention!
knowingmachines.org
Models All The Way Down
LAION-5B is an open-source foundation dataset. It contains 5.8 billion image and text pairs—a size too large to make sense of. We follow the construction of the dataset to better understand its conten...
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Social Media Lab @socialmedialab.ca · 04/05/2025
Promise vs reality: "Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests" arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/t...
arstechnica.com
Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests
Survey of 2023–2024 data finds that AI created more tasks for 8.4 percent of workers.
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 01/05/2025
As we talk about Microsoft and Amazon pulling back on data center projects, don’t ignore what’s happening in China, where “projects are failing, energy is being wasted, and data centers have become ‘distressed assets’ whose investors are keen to unload them at below-market rates.”
technologyreview.com
China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused.
The country poured billions into AI infrastructure, but the data center gold rush is unraveling as speculative investments collide with weak demand and DeepSeek shifts AI trends.
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Nothing captures the pathologies of mainstream media quite so clearly as the intimate relationship between the New York Times and far-right activist Christopher Rufo - who relies on the NYT to launder his disingenuous crusades, has said so himself publicly, and yet they keep obliging. Great thread:
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Erin Murphy @erinmurphyslaw.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
The below walks you through how to delete your DNA data from 23andMe before it goes bankrupt.
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Anyone know of dataset audits/analyses that consider inclusion/use/role of non-photographic images within machine vision modelling?
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
I was sick with the flu recently and tried to cure myself with rest and a generous dose of bad reality tv. I still can't get into housewives series/spin-offs/similar, but whenever I try, I'm reminded of this fun and worthwhile NYT read from about six-ish years ago: www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/s...
nytimes.com
The Sound of ‘Housewives’ Everywhere (Published 2018)
Behind the scenes with the men who make America’s favorite “ladies” into drama queens.
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Reposted by Ashley Scarlett
Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
I am collecting examples of the most thoughtful writing about generative AI published in 2024. What’s yours? They can be insightful for commentary, smart critique, or just because it shifted the conversation. I’ll post some of mine below as I go through them. #criticalAI
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Special Issue of Afterimage on Art and the Algorithmic (Summer 2023) now open access! online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/i...
online.ucpress.edu
Volume 50 Issue 2 | Afterimage | University of California Press
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Ashley Scarlett @ashleyscarlett.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
We're hiring! Open expertise! Application due in 5 days - DM with any questions! can242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor...
can242.dayforcehcm.com
Job opportunity at Alberta University of the Arts - Permanent Faculty, School of Critical and Creative Studies - Liberal Studies
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