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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 10h

No, thank you! The clarity of arguments, the suggestions you make, the sources upon sources (my word!). I'm really thankful to all of you for this paper.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 12h

This paper is fantastic. I cannot say enough good things about it. You should read it.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 1d

Meet our dog, the Baroness of Woof-woof-adelphia, or Fia for short. She is the goodest dog there ever was.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 1d

I got the proofs for my PhD dissertation! And I'm going to defend next month. Heck yeah!

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 11d

When I look up "negging" in the dictionary

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 11d

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

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Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcc.bsky.social · 15d

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 15d

Something about local varieties (and maybe prestige varieties?) and how all varieties are valid.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 16d

I don't know if this is mean, but the Finnish word for "bachelor" translates literally as "boy-man" (poikamies). Not sure if it's a loan, but it was fun to encounter as a learner. Had a good laugh with a Finnish friend about it.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 18d

You can't say "happiness" without "peen"?

Image shows an ad that reads "You can't say happiness without PINE"

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Dr. Nick Posegay @nposegay.bsky.social · 25d

Potential workaround if you're already logged in and get prompted by the ToS notification: opening this "privacy policy" link www.academia.edu/privacytakes you to a page where you can access the drop-down menu and reach "account settings." From there I was able to delete my account without agreeing.

Academia.edu | Privacy

Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

www.academia.edu

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 22d

If it's a verb, "landslud"

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 22d

I know things are bad now, but it's nice to see my home county and others trying to do good. www.inquirer.com/politics/pen...

How three of Philly’s collar counties are rushing to protect LGBTQ residents in the Trump era

Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester Counties have moved over the course of a month to enact policies that would bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

www.inquirer.com

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Erika’s (Too) Online @erikas.online · 27d

Do you like comic books and want to think more seriously about the linguistics of them?

Are you a social scientist or a linguist who wants to know more about nation-building or language planning in fiction?

HAVE I GOT EXACTLY THE ARTICLE YOU NEVER ASKED FOR, on CAMP Anthropology. 🐦🐦

X-Men, Krakoa, and Linguistic Sovereignty

by Erika Alpert Krakoan national co-founder Magneto explains to diplomats at the new Krakoan Embassy in Jerusalem why mutants have decided to create their own language, from House of X #1 (Hickman …

campanthropology.org

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 24d

This rules. Thank you for writing it.

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Miles, knitting screaming agony werewolf @queermedieval.bsky.social · 28d

shoutout to tumblr user kleinergeist for this post which is going straight into my powerpoint for Grendel day in my monster class this week

A screenshot of a tumblr post from user kleinergeist, reading "Oh, so when YOU grab a Danish for a quick snack, it's a guilt-free, tasty little treat. But when I, Grendel,"

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 28d

But wait, there's more Bat-guistics in this issue, chum! The Dark Knight is in York and recognizes that the villain's Estuary English accent is from London. That's why he's the world's greatest detective, folks. Good job, Bats!

#linguistics #comics

Image shows a panel from Detective Comics Annual #1 (2025) by Al Ewing, John McCrea, Stefano Raffaele and Fico Ossio. In the panel, a villain speaks to Batman and Batman's interior monologue says "An Estuary accent -- he's from London". The Estuary English variety is indeed found in London.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · 28d

There ain't no way that Batman can *add* vocal fry to his voice, is there?!

#linguistics #comics

Image shows a panel from Detective Comics Annual #1 (2025) by Al Ewing, John McCrea, Stefano Raffaele and Fico Ossio. In the panel, Batman's narrative says "I lighten and soften my natural growl, adding a little vocal fry and just a touch of Palo Alto." For the record, I don't know what adding "just a touch of Palo Alto" means.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · Sep 8

No problem! Glad you liked it 👍

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Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · Sep 6

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

www.theatlantic.com

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Bryan Blessed @bryb.bsky.social · Sep 1

This seems important:

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · Aug 23

On "woke language": yes, most of these terms aren't things Dems actually say but are a way for centrists and the GOP to attack them.

But also: many are terms intended to extend dignity and recognition to folks who our language excludes or cannot speak of. I'm not ready to concede the value of that.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · Aug 30

I don't have to tell them I'm ancient. They know 😅

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · Aug 30

That's what I tell my students. No matter what they turn in, I will give them feedback. And we can work on making it better. And if I see progress, they will do well in my class. Because the writing part is the whole point of the assignment, not the product! We are working together, not at odds.

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Joe McVeigh @eviljoemcveigh.bsky.social · Aug 30

Thank you for calling!