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Gina Helfrich

@ginahelfrich.bsky.social
1.8K followers 423 following 264 posts

Centre for Technomoral Futures @ U of Edinburgh. PhD in Philosophy, Grad Cert in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Texan. Feminist. I’m on Mastodon and encourage you to be there, too: techpolicy.social/@ginahelfrich

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Reposted by Gina Helfrich
rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 5h
a little louder for the cheap seats in the back
One of the biggest myths is that men rape by mistake. Like, "Oh, they need consent training." But research is very clear: Sexual violence is not a mistake. It is an intentionally made decision by people who know they don't have consent. They just don't prioritize consent over things like status, power, domination, and sexual gratification.
For my research, I got a certificate of confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health, so my notes couldn't be subpoenaed. One of the reasons I call them perpetrators in my work is because every single person I interviewed confessed in that context. The first question I would ask them was, "When you received that email from Title IX that you were under investigation, did you know what it was about?" Every perpetrator I interviewed said "yes." If sexual assault were a miscommunication, you would be wondering, What have I possibly done wrong? That is not the way that any of them reacted because they knew.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 10h
Most state attorneys general released Meta from Cambridge Analytica-related claims as part of the child safety settlement. New Mexico wasn't part of that deal, and a jury there just found 26 of 29 past statements about Cambridge Analytica, hate speech and misinformation willfully deceptive.
buff.ly
Eight Years On, Cambridge Analytica Scandal Catches Up With Meta in Santa Fe
A jury found that Meta—then Facebook—misled the public in statements about Cambridge Analytica and its policies on hate speech, violence and misinformation.
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Gina Helfrich @ginahelfrich.bsky.social · 8h
I haven’t owned a car in 4 years, and prior to that I was driving a 2003 Honda. I have NO idea how people function while driving without being able to push the radio buttons without looking/by memory/feel. More accidents, presumably.
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Gina Helfrich @ginahelfrich.bsky.social · 8h
When the Internet first went mainstream, I made a Geocities webpage called “The Weird Dimension” with my teenage poems published on it, lots of animated text, and an Ocarina of Time flash widget that let you play the ocarina with your mouse. Sounds pretty great to me.
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Bookshop.org @bookshop.org · 13h
Anti-Prime Day starts…NOW! 🥳 Today through midnight on 10/7, enjoy free shipping site-wide, all while supporting local, independent bookstores.
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Maria Farrell @mariafarrell.eurosky.social · 8h
OpenAI are parasitic scum. As Wikimedia says; “AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause.” These are DDOS attacks by a corporation's software doing exactly what it was designed to do. Why are we not seeing criminal charges?
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Liz @gentgestranslation.bsky.social · 17h
This!
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Alyssa Harad @alyssaharad.bsky.social · 16h
Support ProPublica now.
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Mike Drucker @mikedrucker.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Just saw someone say their AI runs their fantasy football team and I can’t stop laughing. Like, I’m sure everyone’s doing it or something but it’s very funny to me that pretending to be a team manager was so hard that you needed to pretend to pretend to be a team manager
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026
This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
As I’ve asked many times now, what constituencies does a university president represent? Because too often, the answer seems to not include anyone who works or studies at the university, and that seems like a problem.
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Dinah Rose KC @dinahrose.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Gosh, the discourse on here is depressing this evening. Here's Ozzy taking a nap in a basin, for anyone who needs it.
Grey furry cat sleeping in a basin, paws sticking up.
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Cats of Yore @catsofyore.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I love fall so much. I've lived in Vermont my whole life and foliage season still seems like such a completely bonkers and beautiful thing to happen every year. It never gets old. 🍂
Photo of a pile of leaves on vibrant dark green moss. I collected lots of fallen leaves of different colors from different plants and trees and arranged them in an egg-shaped gradient going from green at the top to yellow and then orange and then red to darkest reds at the bottom.
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Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 29/09/2026
A key component of the Cambridge Analytica outrage was your friends subjecting you to data theft without your consent or knowledge. Facebook is running the same playbook on your text messages. Even if you’re not on Meta properties, they’re ingesting your interactions.
Aten installed Muse on both his iPhone and a Mac mini that he uses to test out various Al agents and tech. It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host.
When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.
After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being Off.Unless Aten is the most popular person on the face of the planet, I sincerely doubt he'd gotten 187,000 lines of text in roughly 24 hours. What happened is that, without permission, Muse went into the app and downloaded the information.
He had not given Muse permission to access Messages, and full disk access was not enabled. It just went ahead and uploaded those texts anyway.
Muse can take "unexpected actions" indeed.
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
While digging around their website, I found their ethics policy—including a section on AI-generated content. I suspect that’s a part of what happened here. And I’m upset about that too! I did NOT speak to a journalist with the assumption that my interview would be funneled into producing AI slop.
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Get in losers, we're reinventing Narrow AI
Excerpt reads: "Smaller models fine-tuned for industries such as law and finance - or even individual companies - could make AI cheaper to run. Trained on specialist or proprietary data, they may require less computing power while outperforming general-purpose frontier models on narrow tasks."
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LSAClassOf2000 @lsaclassof2000.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I truly believe that if Cornyn were the nominee, Texas might again be the football that Charlie Brown fails to kick. Because it is Paxton, there is a very real chance Lucy does not pull the ball away in time.
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Sean O’Kane @okane.fyi · 30/09/2026
Ah, well techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/r...
techcrunch.com
Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots | TechCrunch
Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds, as the company continues tightening access to its trove of user-generated content.
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 30/09/2026
Meta is using its A.I. data centers to exploit a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation, according to an exclusive report by The New York Times. The company’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. nyti.ms/3VlavDw
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Gina Helfrich @ginahelfrich.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This makes perfect sense if you know about the HP fanfic obsession of the rationalists.
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madi mcvan @madisonmcvan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"A.I. tools condition people to expect immediate responses and deny them the experience of working through challenges, the authors say, which is crucial for skill development and one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning."
nytimes.com
Will A.I. Make Your Brain Lazy?
We’re starting to learn more about how the technology can change us.
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Gina Helfrich @ginahelfrich.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Basically, if you study philosophy for too long, it actually breaks your brain. Plenty of empirical research shows that philosophers do not reason like everyone else, as far as I recall.
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Os Keyes @okeyes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The result: national govts, think tanks and universities refocusing AI evaluations to focus on highly speculative problems where there is no empirical evidence that they're possible - but lots of ideological reason to take them seriously, whatever the costs of the very REAL issues we then ignore .
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Gina Helfrich @ginahelfrich.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
These closures are academic vandalism.
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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Analysis of 200,000 films released between 1994 and 2023 found that on average, films written and directed by women make higher profits, even though their male counterparts are routinely awarded bigger production budgets www.thetimes.com/article/64f9...
thetimes.com
Show me the money? Films directed by women make the most profit
But research also finds every movie of the past 30 years with the biggest production budget was directed by a man, leading to renewed allegations of misogyny
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Brooke @usuallyflannel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Tip for anyone overwhelmed by certain topics here: Settings widget ➡️Moderation and content filters ➡️Muted words & tags ➡️enter words or tags you need muted for 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or forever (until you manually un-mute). Take care of yourselves.
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Kathleen E. Kennedy @themedievaldrk.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Data point on what's possible
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 21/09/2026
10. if you are defining a process by what it produces, and i am defining a process by how it changes me, we are not talking about the same thing 11. arguing about what tasks LLMs can or cannot do keeps LLMs at the center of the conversation
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Urvi @theurv.com · 28/09/2026
There were more men in a single documented gang rape at one school than the number of competitive trans athletes nationally. But I’ve heard a lot more politicians being asked about protecting girls from one of these scenarios and not another… I’ll let you guess which is which.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"Shocking," said no one, ever.
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dylan baker @dylnbkr.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
2. "Going rogue" is sensationalistic. Products of ALL kinds do unexpected things that we need safeguards to prevent. Yes, AI agents running amok IS dangerous. So are industrial power tools. Hence OSHA and stringent safety training and protocols to use them.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Also, all this “frontier AI” nomenclature is so laughably colonialist that it has to be on purpose. 🙄
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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 28/09/2026
It bears mentioning that Microsoft just shut down its Microsoft Research Social Media Collective…because why should they care about the social consequences of their products, right? Including worker harms.
404media.co
Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They're Horrified
Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users’ prompts and uploaded images, according to internal documents obtained by 404 Media. The contractors are also bombarded with users’ requests for sexual AI...
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Crucially these contractors are not hired to filter out offensive content. They are hired to report whether Copilot successfully made a good AI image. So if the request is, make this person's breasts larger, they have to review based on whether it did or not. Insane www.404media.co/humans-readi...
These contractors are not being hired to flag or vet offensive or inappropriate content. They are being paid to review the quality of Copilot’s output, including in these cases of sexual imagery.
“Who is writing these prompts and who is deciding that basically generating porn is what Copilot is now focused on? It’s hard to take things seriously when my focus has to be what model generated the appropriate bust size or which middle aged woman was put in the appropriate sexually suggestive position,” one contractor said in the thread.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/09/2026
AI has lost the Mandate of Heaven I’m afraid. WSJ saying it’s a “when” the ai bubble bursts. SNL dabbing on their biggest names for being weird. FT says 50% of chips sold in 2026 and 2027 have nowhere to go. Hundreds of billions short on revenue for even 10% ROIC. A disaster.
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Emile Chabal @emile-chabal.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I am not given to hyperbole when it comes to university industrial relations, but this feels like an existential event. The heart of the university is being torn out, with long-lasting consequences. These strikes are a last-ditch attempt to stop that. Will anyone listen?
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Michael Lobel @mlobelart.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I've talked to a few journal editors who are concerned about similar problems re: anonymous reviewers. If a peer reviewer wants a little help & feeds your unpublished submission into an AI system, they've just shared your proprietary work & broken confidentiality. A nightmare to think about
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Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I’m sorry, what? This piece was not a joint publication/ reporting job (as some are). It was @propublica’s alone and the Times followed with a summary. This is so indicative of NYT. If they don’t ignore proper credit, they just go for stolen valor.
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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The truth is, you can belittle maskers, shrug off disabled people, and call us all crazy a million times, but you’re going to have to live in the world you’re building with these choices, and outcomes don’t care that your views are popular right now. www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/mor...
cidrap.umn.edu
More than 1 in 10 US healthcare workers report ongoing long-COVID symptoms, study finds
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The Edinburgh Reporter @edinreporter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Greens to support Edinburgh University staff strike The Scottish Greens have declared their support for University of Edinburgh staff ahead of a five-week strike over £140m in cuts and the threat of compulsory redundancies....
theedinburghreporter.co.uk
Greens to support Edinburgh University staff strike
The Scottish Greens have declared their support for University of Edinburgh staff ahead of a five-week strike over £140m in cuts and the threat of compulsory redundancies. Members of the University and College Union (UCU) will begin their industrial action on Monday following the university's plans to close 90 programmes, including specialist courses for teaching deaf and visually impaired learners. Scottish Greens MSP Kate Nevens has lodged a parliamentary motion backing the staff and raising concerns about the closures, which is supported by the party’s tertiary education spokesperson, Iris Duane…
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Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
if anyone wants to understand the finances at the University of Edinburgh, the unions have done excellent work on this:
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Abigail Modaff @abigailmodaff.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I see this a lot with my well-meaning students: the sense that their STEM courses are immovable objects, and my requirements in History are somehow less reasonable/should bend in response to their other course commitments. They are not coming up with this assumption, they have been taught it
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 28/09/2026
Almost all of Meta's PR about Muse was about how careful they had been to set it up not to do things like this, how they delayed the launch by months to carefully design it so it could be trusted. And then...
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UCU Edinburgh @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Day 1 of the strike by the workers of UCU Edinburgh against the manufactured deficit (which is not really a deficit), and against a senior management earning millions while staff disappear and education suffers. Solidarity against this parasitical form of management of our higher education.
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UCU Edinburgh @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Day 1 of our strike at the University of Edinburgh while senior management shrugs and says 'crisis, what crisis?' at the complaints about the inevitable falling educational standards and job losses.
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Karen Gregory @karengregory.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Edinburgh University lecturers begin five-week strike over cuts
Members of the University and Colleges Union are walking out in part of a long-running dispute over job and course cuts.
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 28/09/2026
Claude making a scientific discovery
Black-and-white three-part comic. In the first scene, one simple cartoon figure holds out a small round handmade-looking object and says, “I MADE THIS.” Another figure replies, “YOU MADE THIS?” In the second scene, the second figure is shown alone holding the object. In the final scene, that figure holds it proudly and says, “I MADE THIS”
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Tony Roberts @phatcontroller.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Literally every story involving a genie and a bottle ends up with the genie back in the bottle. Read more children's fiction people ffs.
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 26/01/2026
"ai" is not a genie that can't be put back in a bottle, it's a pillar of smoke that dissipates unless you keep burning money
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❌👑 Bernadette🫘🟧💙🐈‍⬛ @vintageknits.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
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