Notices by Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social), page 4

New on the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter:

Labeling resistance to "AI" as "denialism" is an attempt to dismiss it out of hand.
The narrative of the denialism frame is that those opposing "AI" are afraid, under-informed and/or engaging in wishful thinking. None of that is true: The people who oppose the "AI" project are actively fighting and refusing to accept the premise of tech bros and AI boosters.

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/resistance-isnt-denialism/

Health experts: Your synthetic text "AI" overviews are misleading, for example see this about liver function tests.

Google: Okay, we'll block "AI" overviews on that query.

The product is fundamentally flawed and cannot be "fixed" by patching query by query.

A short 🧵>>

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/11/google-ai-overviews-health-guardian-investigation

"Block that search in particular" is also what Google did when the inherent racism in their image search algorithm was pointed out, in 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/12/google-racism-ban-gorilla-black-people

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And when Dr.
@safiyanoble pointed out the racist results returned for queries like "black girls" in ~2016. See her amazing book Algorithms of Oppression:

https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/

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Back to the current one, the quotes from Google in the Guardian piece are so disingenuous:

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I've been shouting about this since Google first floated the idea of LLMs as a replacement for search in 2021. Synthetic text is not a suitable tool for information access!

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/information-literacy-and-chatbots-as-search/

/fin (for now)

The original word of the year (WOTY) from American Dialect Society is always chaos and always fun. This year's winner: slop

https://americandialect.org/2025-word-of-the-year-is-slop/

"The media has largely let [tech companies] set the terms of the debate, right down to the terminology used in any discussion of these systems."

From Nanna Inie and me in Tech Policy Press on how to spot and resist anthropomorphizing language in the discourse about so-called "AI".

https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/

Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":

https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/

Finally got around to reading this one and, it's not great. Mostly it's frustrating to see how the muddled logic and motivated reasoning of Yoshua Bengio & co make it hard for journalists to get and convey a clear understanding.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/science-fiction-artificial-intelligence-robots

Short 🧵>>

Bengio is quoted like this as a refutation of this quote from me:

Algorithms “combust[ing] into consciousnesses” and deciding to kill us all “is not the problem I’m worried about”

See if you can spot the logical leap in his argument

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This seems to be a pretty typical move from the "AI Safety" crowd when folks point out that they are living in a fantasy world, enjoying imagining themselves as savoirs of humanity, etc. They briefly pretend to be concerned about harms that are somewhat less speculative,

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@BillySmith @Raccoon
fosstodon is pretty reliably terrible, for one.

PSA: If someone is posting about behavior being exhausting to the point that they are considering leaving a platform, then doing more of it "as a joke" is neither supportive nor helpful. And also not funny.

(This is re *two separate accounts* making a joke about mansplaining mansplaining to me on a post where I had already been mansplained about how to handle mansplaining.)

Once again feeling like it's almost not worth posting to Mastodon given the degree of mansplaining that everything I put up here attracts.

Why is it so hard to read the whole thread and/or acknowledge with a 'yes and' -- or maybe check who you are replying to/posting at? Gah.

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay.

https://bigthink.com/the-present/the-rise-of-ai-denialism/

A few comments, in a short 🧵>>

First, it displays a certain kind of intellectual laziness of a type I've seen before: Arguing against "pundits", "influencers" and "voices", without naming a single person whose specific arguments the author is arguing against.

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I enjoyed doing this interview for El Mundo, especially the last question (English translation [actually original, since the interview was in English] of that in this short thread:

https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historias/2025/12/30/6952b5bc21efa0a0388b4594.html

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Q: In a world dominated by FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), how can individuals and journalists effectively practice this refusal without being dismissed as 'anti-progress' by the 'AI Boosters' you critique?

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My reply:

Sometimes, we will be described as "anti-progress" and the first step is to accept that that might happen, but that refusal is important nonetheless. But being described as "anti-progress" doesn't necessarily mean being "dismissed".

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