Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

@bvlsingler.bsky.social

8.2K followers 3.8K following 940 posts

Anthropologist/Geek thinking about how you think about AI & robots. Assistant Professor in Digital Religions at UZH. Bvlsingler.com. She/her. 🌈 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003256113/religion-artificial-intelligence-beth-singler

www.taylorfrancis.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · Aug 15

I will never stop banging this drum! 🥁 There 🥁 is 🥁 no 🥁 AI 🥁 in 🥁 the 🥁 predictive 🥁 policing 🥁 in 🥁 Minority 🥁 Report!

Its three psychics in a paddling pool!!

4 13 100

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 4h

Fair, but reading it comes under my job description (determined by me, I guess, so I am an idiot lol)

a woman making a funny face in front of a door that says always on it

ALT: a woman making a funny face in front of a door that says always on it

media.tenor.com

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 19h

Wanna know why Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel all LOVED Eliezer Yudkowsky, right up until they ignored him?

It’s because he was USEFUL to their efforts to attract funding and talent to their new companies.

If you think futurism is about accuracy, then you’re the sucker at the table.

2 17 150

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 4h

A brave soul. It's still in my TBR pile...

Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 21h

Next up on my reading list.

…I am already regretting this choice.

IF ANYONE BUILDSIT, EVERYONE DIES
WHY
SUPERHUMAN AI
WOULD
KILLUS ALL
ELIEZER
YUDKOWSKY &
NATE SOARES

1 2

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 4h

This looks against every conceivable code of research integrity worthy of the name... what are they thinking?? New depths reached

Nature @nature.com · 5h

Next week will see a first in computer science, with the launch of a scientific conference in which all of the papers — and all of the reviews — have been produced by machines

go.nature.com/3J82tYH

AI bots wrote and reviewed all papers at this conference

Event will assess how reviews by models compare with those written by humans.

go.nature.com

5 19 87

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 5h

At Dame I wrote about tradwives and white women choosing white patriarchy because whiteness gives them power. www.damemagazine.com/2025/10/15/t...

“Tradwives” Is Just Influencer Speak for Patriarchal Subordination - Dame Magazine

A blonde woman in a low-cut flowery dress and immaculately shaped eyelashes speaks softly to the camera while gentle music plays in the background. “I’m here to make a clarification video because of t...

www.damemagazine.com

2 25 62

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 7h

a man with a mustache says " it 's science "

ALT: a man with a mustache says " it 's science "

media.tenor.com

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 8h

All hail the Queen of Biscuits!!

Fishbourne Roman Palace @romanpalace.bsky.social · 8h

This has made our day.

www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/35...

On the right, the coliseum. On the left, a model of the coliseum, fashioned from custard creams. It's a bit sketchy in its details, but... custard creams!

1 7

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Luke Plunkett @lukeplunkett.com · 12h

kids teacher just sent this home as part of an assignment he's doing and i want to smash every computer at the school

130 1.6K 6.7K

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 15h

Yes, I agree that a few days of calm would be good. But I guess I can't complain about new things happening all the time, since I chose to study the emergence of new things like AI spiritualities :)

a black and white photo of two women standing at a counter with the words `` crazy busy '' written on it .

ALT: a black and white photo of two women standing at a counter with the words `` crazy busy '' written on it .

media.tenor.com

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 1d

Although obviously I have the prototype in my profile pic there :D

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 1d

I knew I had it saved somewhere (tbf I think I added the robot lab bit in my convos with others about it, he just mentions my work in AI):

2 1

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Peter Tarras @petertarras.bsky.social · 1d

One effect of 'AI' is that it actually atrophies our stores of information and knowledge. Explain to me how this is progress 🫠

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 1d

A new search engine is actually needed that works and combs out ai nonsense by default

　　　the　　　 ghostes @rem.bsjky.team · 2d

love how much of the stuff on the internet is essentially jsut. gone forever. unsearchable means unfindable means, in essence, gone

2 16 42

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 1d

Like all professors, I have a secret lab with a full staff hidden underground

a man in a suit stands in a hallway next to a laptop with the name rosalyn51 on the bottom

ALT: a man in a suit stands in a hallway next to a laptop with the name rosalyn51 on the bottom

media.tenor.com

1 1

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 1d

Someone once asked me on Twitter, in seeming seriousness, about my man hating agenda that included, apparently, building robots to replace them all...

1 2

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Craig 'VI' Slee: VALIS, right? @mrvi.cold-albion.net · 1d

The rhetoric and writing of Peter Thiel, Yarvin, Yudkowsky etc is, apart from anything else? Just Bad Writing. It has no rhythm except for a monotonous downbeat.

Persuasive only to those who have been inculcated by and crave, that downbeat. All the rest is just Shit Flooding The Zone. Total crap.

Voyages to the End of the World - First Things

Francis Bacon dreamed of abolishing disease, natural disasters, and chance itself. He also dreamed of abolishing God.

firstthings.com

2 7 26

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

jefffowler.bsky.social @jefffowler.bsky.social · 1d

Asking the lie machine to pinky swear it will stop lying.

1 6 150

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Des Fitzgerald @desfitzgerald.bsky.social · 2d

Seeing people nonchalantly post stuff like makes me feel like I'm going crazy honestly.

A post from an academic on blue sky that says: "I'm learning about "prompt engineering" when asking LLMs to extract data. I now add this to all instructions:

Style
Be concise, analytic, and specific (cite page/figure if provided). If essential info is missing, keep going but flag Unclear and exact data needed. Never invent data.

#academicsky"

58 110 770

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Thorsten Möhlmann @thorstn.bsky.social · 1d

«The input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors wrote those, not the search query!» via @olivia.science via#2 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social - thank you

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 5d

important on LLMs for academics:

1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems

2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism

3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills

4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution

5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI

6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense

5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,

Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!

15 35

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

eggnog slut @deus01.bsky.social · 2d

postmodern finance theory

32 340 1.6K

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 2d

Thank you :)

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

cyberzen (Adam) @cyberphilosohack.bsky.social · 2d

All GenAI is hallucination, just happens to get some things right and some things wrong

Listen

👇

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 2d

Great new interview with this odd woman who thinks she knows a bit about religion and AI www.brucemccabe.com/futurebites/...

WILL WE WORSHIP A.I.? — WITH BETH SINGLER — Bruce McCabe

Will we worship A.I.? How are religions already adopting A.I.? How could A.I. re-shape the future of religion?  I asked THE global expert on the AI and religion, Beth Singler …

www.brucemccabe.com

1 1 3

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Thor Benson @thorbenson.bsky.social · 2d

It's like when Dr. Evil had the button that sent you into the fiery pit

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

MARCO RUBIO: This is probably one of the most important days for world peace in 50 years. That's not an exaggeration

TRUMP: Only 50?

RUBIO: Maybe 100

51 120 740

🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃 @bvlsingler.bsky.social · 2d

a man in a plaid shirt is sitting in front of a window with a sticker that says ugg

ALT: a man in a plaid shirt is sitting in front of a window with a sticker that says ugg

media.tenor.com

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Julia Raeside @jnraeside.bsky.social · 2d

Uff.

Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 2d

I’m sure they didn’t mean to eliminate the woman in this image.

1 2 17

Reposted by 🎃 🧟 Prof. Dr Beth Singler 👻 🎃

Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social · 2d

Also worth bearing in mind that its answer to this question isn't necessarily true either (or false - it's a category error to assign its output those values). It just says stuff its dataset determines is a likely response a person would give.

Nosferatu RBMK 🦇 @comraderobot.bsky.social · 4d

girl are you chatgpt because your KPIs are crazy

Mostafa • @mokatia
X.com
Shared row data file with GPT5 to analyze, the result KPIs were crazy, so I naively asked, and innocently it responded.
ChatGPT 5 v
① Share
•••
Did you make up these numbers?
Good catch - I wasn't able to actually open and parse your CSV file yet,
12:50 AM • 16/09/2025 • 19K Views

4 12 78