Sonja Drimmer
@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, UMass Amherst. http://sonjadrimmer.com/about-forte (She/her)
Pinned
MACHINE YEARNING
Sonja Drimmer critically examines art historians’ recent embrace of generative AI as a tool for humanities research.
www.artforum.com
For the latest issue of Artforum I wrote about the culture of “AI” in my sector of academia, arguing that a focus on what it does distracts attention away from examining the exploitative conditions that the hopeful rhetoric of its promise upholds. www.artforum.com/features/gen...
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them...
The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit
Democracy means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter. Rapists count on this being untrue – and Trump is proving them right
www.theguardian.com
November 18, 2025 at 3:14 AM
Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them...
HOW DOES A BULLET CUT A BOUGH, OLIVIA?
WHAT MAGICAL AMMUNITION CAN DO THAT *AND* CUT A TRACK THROUGH AN ABSTRACTION. OLIVIA.
WHAT MAGICAL AMMUNITION CAN DO THAT *AND* CUT A TRACK THROUGH AN ABSTRACTION. OLIVIA.
November 18, 2025 at 2:03 AM
HOW DOES A BULLET CUT A BOUGH, OLIVIA?
WHAT MAGICAL AMMUNITION CAN DO THAT *AND* CUT A TRACK THROUGH AN ABSTRACTION. OLIVIA.
WHAT MAGICAL AMMUNITION CAN DO THAT *AND* CUT A TRACK THROUGH AN ABSTRACTION. OLIVIA.
<<whisper shouting in his ear>>
I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
November 18, 2025 at 1:01 AM
<<whisper shouting in his ear>>
I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
“By utilizing the secure and robust cloud infrastructure of AWS and its Amazon Bedrock’s services…”
😬😬😬
😬😬😬
What can go wrong? Pitt what are you doing? Maybe we should worry more about education and research
Pitt is teaming up with Anthropic and AWS to create an AI-enabled Campus of the Future
The University is the first to launch institution-wide Claude for Education integrated with Amazon Web Services, empowering a new era of learning and innovation across Pitt’s five campuses.
www.pittwire.pitt.edu
November 18, 2025 at 12:31 AM
“By utilizing the secure and robust cloud infrastructure of AWS and its Amazon Bedrock’s services…”
😬😬😬
😬😬😬
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
I just want punchlines: “you see that man, his brother’s a doctor.”
Max comes home from school one day and says “Zayde, I heard a new word on the bus today. What’s fornication?” Zayde take a beat & then takes little Max to the closet and says, “Maxele, you see this brown suit? This suit is for every day. And you see this black suit? This black suit is fornication.”
What is the funniest joke in the world
November 17, 2025 at 11:59 PM
I just want punchlines: “you see that man, his brother’s a doctor.”
Max comes home from school one day and says “Zayde, I heard a new word on the bus today. What’s fornication?” Zayde take a beat & then takes little Max to the closet and says, “Maxele, you see this brown suit? This suit is for every day. And you see this black suit? This black suit is fornication.”
What is the funniest joke in the world
November 17, 2025 at 11:37 PM
Max comes home from school one day and says “Zayde, I heard a new word on the bus today. What’s fornication?” Zayde take a beat & then takes little Max to the closet and says, “Maxele, you see this brown suit? This suit is for every day. And you see this black suit? This black suit is fornication.”
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."
November 17, 2025 at 12:55 PM
As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
"theft tech" is a term my pal @astra.bsky.social thought of just today when we were working on our book about these End Times Fascists.
We were thinking about what should happen when this this bubble busts, as we all know it will.
Remember: they have bunkers. We don't. 2/3
We were thinking about what should happen when this this bubble busts, as we all know it will.
Remember: they have bunkers. We don't. 2/3
November 17, 2025 at 6:37 AM
"theft tech" is a term my pal @astra.bsky.social thought of just today when we were working on our book about these End Times Fascists.
We were thinking about what should happen when this this bubble busts, as we all know it will.
Remember: they have bunkers. We don't. 2/3
We were thinking about what should happen when this this bubble busts, as we all know it will.
Remember: they have bunkers. We don't. 2/3
On the one hand, some of the thankless work I have done today has been truly thankless; on the other hand, my friend's dog sent a thank-you note for the squeaky toy he got from me and my husband, so...the day is not entirely lost.
November 17, 2025 at 8:31 PM
On the one hand, some of the thankless work I have done today has been truly thankless; on the other hand, my friend's dog sent a thank-you note for the squeaky toy he got from me and my husband, so...the day is not entirely lost.
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
Just as the glitch is a pretext for endless funding to improve tech, the specter of plagiarism or hallucination is the pretext for making "AI Literacy" (shudder) a compulsory part of education.
January 23, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Just as the glitch is a pretext for endless funding to improve tech, the specter of plagiarism or hallucination is the pretext for making "AI Literacy" (shudder) a compulsory part of education.
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
Non-industry compromised scientists keep saying these models don't become safe, no matter what, but people keep thinking just because the concept of guardrails is mentioned it must work. By definition, it doesn't. This is not something open to discussion, unless you're a paid shill.
"Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o model by default...tests repeatedly showed that the AI toy dropped its guardrails the longer a conversation went on, until hitting rock bottom on incredibly disturbing topics."
AI-Powered Stuffed Animal Pulled From Market After Disturbing Interactions With Children
FoloToy says it's suspended sales of its AI-powered teddy bear after researchers found it gave wildly inappropriate and dangerous answers.
futurism.com
November 17, 2025 at 5:18 AM
Non-industry compromised scientists keep saying these models don't become safe, no matter what, but people keep thinking just because the concept of guardrails is mentioned it must work. By definition, it doesn't. This is not something open to discussion, unless you're a paid shill.
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
What this reveals is that for most people in charge right now “AI” is less useful as a technology than as a piece of language to shift a conversation in whatever direction they need it to go. In one minute it will propel a new economy; in another it’s the reason for a recession.
November 17, 2025 at 1:39 PM
What this reveals is that for most people in charge right now “AI” is less useful as a technology than as a piece of language to shift a conversation in whatever direction they need it to go. In one minute it will propel a new economy; in another it’s the reason for a recession.
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
this piece is so good it's bananas
![Developmentally, generative Al is in a moment similar to the one described by Streeter, when the "cultural expectations of the Internet shaped the development of and thus [became] part of the artefact itself."5
[Highlighted text] Scholars have focused on what computer vision does (asking how accurate it is, how efficiently it works, and how it might aid art-historical research and teaching) but not on the material conditions upheld or advanced by the rhetoric of its potential use. This is a banana problem: It is as if scholars have been fixated on the piece of fruit itself and not on the worlds that Eckhout and Amaral show us, which were made and destroyed by the harvesting and consumption of that fruit. [End highlight]
Instead of focusing on what computer vision can achieve in processing images, I want to offer a historical account of the language and the feelings used to frame its imagined role in art-historical practice.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:c2xl6zaxo623jzbjb43urymd/bafkreif57gem3vmfbaovm4glxhnhmzx4fliodxaiaisjs7lx6ot2r5pxpe@jpeg)
![Computer vision, however, is not an extension of photography.
[highlighted text] It does not show us a banana. It shows us that a digitized image is highly likely to represent a banana, [end highlight]
based on the similarities between the way its data is configured and the way that of millions of other digitized images is arranged.
Computer vision is better described as a form of information management and prediction, as configurations of data with which probabilistic applications have been made, based on human instructions of varying degrees of clarity or specificity. A more productive way to think about](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:c2xl6zaxo623jzbjb43urymd/bafkreic53comjouerdxzdcrrbepcyuinoz5hd74zmacuhykul7vqhuioyy@jpeg)
November 17, 2025 at 2:53 PM
this piece is so good it's bananas
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
So, no, what I wrote above isn’t actually about owning this schmuck on the grounds of “AI” actually having the power to eliminate jobs. As I’ve said time and again, “AI” is merely a permission structure for antilabor decisions that businesses wanted to make in the first place.
November 17, 2025 at 1:41 PM
So, no, what I wrote above isn’t actually about owning this schmuck on the grounds of “AI” actually having the power to eliminate jobs. As I’ve said time and again, “AI” is merely a permission structure for antilabor decisions that businesses wanted to make in the first place.
LearN1nG AI in c0lLegE w1lL make You j0b!!!!
Kevin Hassett: "I think there could be a little bit of an almost quiet time in the labor market, because firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don't necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college and so on."
November 17, 2025 at 1:36 PM
LearN1nG AI in c0lLegE w1lL make You j0b!!!!
As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."
November 17, 2025 at 12:55 PM
As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."
It could be limited edition Labubus.
BESSENT: “THE $2,000 DIVIDEND COULD COME IN LOTS OF FORMS… IT COULD BE JUST THE TAX DECREASES. IT COULD BE NO TAX ON TIPS.”
November 17, 2025 at 12:33 AM
It could be limited edition Labubus.
Where are the Women Are Ruining the Workplaces ladies at now?
November 17, 2025 at 12:24 AM
Where are the Women Are Ruining the Workplaces ladies at now?
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
My kind of bad-tempered rant about the empty-headed nonsense of AI-goon slogans. 10/10 no notes.
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
November 15, 2025 at 6:43 PM
My kind of bad-tempered rant about the empty-headed nonsense of AI-goon slogans. 10/10 no notes.
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
While we’re in the car I told my husband I wanted to listen to a song by Pitbull, to which he responded “that’s what headphone and later are for,” and I love him so much.
November 16, 2025 at 1:46 AM
While we’re in the car I told my husband I wanted to listen to a song by Pitbull, to which he responded “that’s what headphone and later are for,” and I love him so much.
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
Finally got a chance to read this. Thankful for clear-eyed thinking and clean writing that give a chance to reconsider a phrase I've heard so often it had become unremarkable: what *does* it mean, for the printing press to democratize knowledge??
What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history?
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer
The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself. It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...
sonjadrimmer.com
November 15, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Finally got a chance to read this. Thankful for clear-eyed thinking and clean writing that give a chance to reconsider a phrase I've heard so often it had become unremarkable: what *does* it mean, for the printing press to democratize knowledge??
Grateful for the biennial invitations to dine at someone else’s home because otherwise I would never notice the holes in my socks.
November 15, 2025 at 9:34 PM
Grateful for the biennial invitations to dine at someone else’s home because otherwise I would never notice the holes in my socks.
Reposted by Sonja Drimmer
I hear this *constantly* as an “aha! got ya!” and maybe I’ll just start handing out QR codes for this essay.
What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history?
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer
The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself. It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...
sonjadrimmer.com
November 15, 2025 at 5:01 PM
I hear this *constantly* as an “aha! got ya!” and maybe I’ll just start handing out QR codes for this essay.
Put it on a t-shirt.
Digitization as an administrative workflow that translates to "not my prob"
November 15, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Put it on a t-shirt.