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Dylan McConnell

@dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social

3.6K followers 410 following 1.1K posts

Renewable Energy & Energy Systems Researcher at University of NSW (..but also I live in Melbourne)

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

@olivia.science

Some people are replying here with things already addressed in this thread and paper, so please click through bsky.app/profile/oliv...

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

November 14, 2025 at 3:47 PM

Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Zeke Hausfather

@hausfath.bsky.social

Chinese and EU emissions were more or less flat in 2025 (Chinese emissions may have actually declined slightly, but its too early to know for sure: www.carbonbrief.org/...).

US emissions increases drove much of the increase in global emissions in 2025.

November 13, 2025 at 3:25 AM

Dylan McConnell

@dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social

UNGI 2.0 (...or 3.0?)

November 13, 2025 at 8:02 AM

Dylan McConnell

@dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social

.. reminiscent of this

November 2, 2025 at 11:09 AM

Dylan McConnell

@dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social

💯 .. was coming here to say the same thing

There is even handy little paper on it (a couple of years old now, probably mostly still right)

link.springer.com/article/10.1...