Author | Lightnews

Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 41m

What hell feels like: Transcriping interviews and hearing your own, slowed down voice on repeat for hours. Have my spoken words any meaning? Can I not form at least one coherent sentence when talking to other people?

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 23h

Most important lesson in the age of AI: "how do you develop the skills of discernment? This one is very very important: do not let the AI do the work for you before you have learned how to do it yourself. "

Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 1d

I wrote this yesterday about what to tell young people who are worried about what work will be in the age of AI:

naomialderman.substack.com/p/preparing-...

preparing for the working world in the age of AI

or: seven things to tell your kids when they ask what they should study now, or what the point of studying is

naomialderman.substack.com

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 3d

Große Empfehlung an alle, die sich eine Übersicht über digitale Technologien und deren komplexe und teilweise desaströse geopolitische, ökologische und kapitalistische entanglements im Anthropozän verschaffen möchten.

Michael Klipphahn-Karge @klipphahnkarge.bsky.social · Sep 19

Ich freu mich riesig, dass nun mein neues Buch erschienen ist: „Bildökologie“ in der von @kohouta.bsky.social und @ideenfreiheit.bsky.social herausgegebenen Reihe „»Digitale Bildkulturen« bei Wagenbach. Darin beleuchte ich die (desaströsen) ökologischen Folgen digitaler Bildökonomien.

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 4d

Weil hier vorwiegend männliche AI-Beobachter genannt werden, droppe ich mal dass es auch sehr viele kundige kritische AI-Beobachterinnen gibt, z.B. @emilymbender.bsky.social und @timnitgebru.bsky.social

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 9d

When STEM discovers sociology but instead of giving credit, sells this as new research. I see this happening a lot in STEM and it makes me furious.

Sheila Liming @seeshespeak.bsky.social · 9d

BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

Highlighted quotation: “As an economist, Low searched for a more precise term to describe how she and other working moms often find themselves stretched for time and energy. She came up with “the squeeze”, and it’s backed by data that shows how women often get burnt out trying to manage competing demands at home and work, especially when they are parenting young children.”

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 9d

Ever wondered what " your data is stored in the cloud" means? Contrary to real clouds, the digital cloud is based in massive noisy loud data centers and far less celestial - some would even describe living next to them as hell. www.bbc.com/news/article...

A humming annoyance or jobs boom? Life next to 199 data centres in Virginia

Data centres were billed as a boon to Virginia’s economy. Now, residents are concerned about their impact on real estate and electricity costs.

www.bbc.com

Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 13d

Content creation has become so cynical that homeless people are now pawns for allegedly "random acts of kindness". These content creators are very aware of their privacy but do not care for the privacy of a vulnerable and marginalized community.

netzpolitik.org @netzpolitik.org · 13d

Kampagne gegen neues Phänomen: Influencer „helfen“ wohnungslosen Menschen. Sie werden zum Objekt einer angeblichen Hilfe gemacht und bezahlen das mit ihrer Privatsphäre netzpolitik.org/2025/ungewol...

Ungewollt im Internet: Neue Kampagne gegen Instrumentalisierung von Obdachlosen durch Influencer

Influencer

netzpolitik.org

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 19d

I love stumbling on resources like that, because teaching is hard and inspiration is always welcome.
I am especially drawn to the unit about the iconic "More Work for Mother" from Ruth Schwartz Cowan.

Civics of Technology @civicsoftech.bsky.social · 19d

We are here to help. In fact, we have a curriculum for it that includes a Luddite inquiry: www.civicsoftechnology.org/curriculum 🔨

Curriculum — Civics of Technology

Our 5 Critical Questions about Technology and Inquiry Design Model Lessons can be used to critically inquire into the collateral, unintended, & disproportionate effects of technology on our lives.

www.civicsoftechnology.org

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 19d

Like all AI companions before, this too an overhyped (and overprices) gadget which will probably land forgotten in a cupboard somewhere, not a companion with whom you'll form a longlasting relationship for years to come.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 19d

"We're basically outsourcing empathy and outsourcing relationships to these machines without considering the consequences…”

I tested an AI-powered pet designed to 'ease stress and bring comfort' to Gen Z—it went exactly how a psychologist predicted

My week with Moflin, Casio's first AI-powered companion robot.

www.cnbc.com

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 21d

Ich freue mich: Am 4. November um 13.30 Uhr spreche ich an der HS Merseburg online über "Einmal Assistentin, immer Assistentin? Wie binäre Geschlechterperspetiven die Repräsentation von KI beeinflussen". Pssst: Es gibt lustige Gifs! Infos & Anmeldung hier: www.hs-merseburg.de/hochschule/p...

Veranstaltungen

www.hs-merseburg.de

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · 26d

Starlink seems just another in a long line of Elon Musk projects which seemed to good to be true: 1-2 satellites are falling back to Earth each day which raises questions how this affects the delicate future of near Earth space.
earthsky.org/human-world/...

1 to 2 Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

earthsky.org

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Reposted by Natalie Sontopski

Sandra Kelly @2020willbelit.bsky.social · 29d

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Reposted by Natalie Sontopski

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

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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Reposted by Natalie Sontopski

doctor eep [free link arc] (alt decorative gourd season) @absolutely-not.bsky.social · Oct 3

i looked at the methodology for this and it is
a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and
b. p-hacked

The Independent @the-independent.com · Oct 2

Nearly a third of Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says

1 in 3 Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says

www.independent.co.uk

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Oct 2

My paper on pioneering communitites, feminist speculation & Creative AI is available in the ACM library. This paper is part of my PhD and I am so happy that it got accepted & published (doing a PhD is hard as many of you probably know) and I hope it finds its audience 🤗 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

“I want to build something”. A field study of pioneering communities, feminist speculation and Creative AI. | Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Communities & Technologies

dl.acm.org

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Aug 8

Damit Inklusion kein Fremdwort bleibt, müssen wir uns für den Erhalt einer emanzipatorischen, kritischen und diversen Forschungslandschaft einsetzen: weact.campact.de/petitions/di...

Disability Studies bedroht: Kritisch-emanzipatorische Wissenschaft schützen und stärken!

• Hochschulen und Universitäten sind zentrale Akteurinnen bei der Umsetzung der UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention und der Förderung einer inklusiven, barrierefreien Gesellschaft. Der Abbau von Disability...

weact.campact.de

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · Jul 27

Consider also how few professional women feel they have any safe margin to allow for mistakes or mediocrity in their work (both risks of AI-generated output). Especially in male-dominated fields, women can’t afford to use a machine that shits the bed even 5% of the time

Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · Jul 26

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

For women, the increase of AI use in the workplace may affect their careers: Harvard study

Women are using AI significantly less then men and it’s going to have a major impact on their careers, according to extensive research on the topic.

www.ctvnews.ca

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 23

I did a thing and talked about my PhD research on pioneering communities and feminist speculations.

Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 17

I'll be in Siegen next week for the Communities &Technologies conference to present my paper on Pioneering communities, feminist speculation and Creative AI. So, if you wanna discuss "doing speculation", Donna Haraway or just talk about making stuff, let me know!

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Reposted by Natalie Sontopski

Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · Jul 16

This is fascinating: www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/I...

Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…

From the OpenAI community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the OpenAI community

www.reddit.com

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 14

All in all, a very kafka-esque experience of bureaucracy, ineffiency and frustration to quiet resignation.

Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 14

Same thing with Google: I logged in and was asked to verify myself with the code I got via text. So I chose the option of backup Codes only to discover that Google needs me to verify this decision by sending a text to my phone. Which I dont have. Ergo cant verify shit.

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 14

This has happened twice to me already and I really dont know why nobody has designed a protocol for this case? Like how do you use 2 Factor Authentication if the source of identification is missing?

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 14

A user experience from hell is when your SIM card is deactivated because your phone is missing but your provider asks you to verify your identity by sending a text to your phone. Which you dont have. And therefore cant verify your identity this way.

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Natalie Sontopski @stromponsky.bsky.social · Jul 1

I wonder if people who have used AI will be reflected enough to include similar disclaimers about their research methods for transparency.

Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · Jun 27

Yesterday I used this "AI -Free Statement" in a conference talk for the first time. Still trying to figure out the exact language.

Feel free to borrow, modify, etc.

At no point in this study did I use AI. This includes the literature review, logical organization, writing, analysis, and proofreading. I do not cite any studies that use AI, to the extent that it is possible to know.