Sarah Florini
@florini.bsky.social
2.2K followers 1K following 440 posts
Associate Prof of Film and Media Studies and Associate Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at ASU. Lover of general shenanigans. I refuse to call them “skeets.”
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florini.bsky.social
Oh no. Not the AI industry.
Reposted by Sarah Florini
thacalebdume.bsky.social
So…….just jump over recording your lectures, huh?

What’s so infuriating about all these AI implementations is there is almost always a non-AI solution that’s WAY more practical.
schoolsweek.bsky.social
Exclusive: Teachers will use 'deepfake' technology to create an AI avatar of themselves to deliver catch-up lessons for pupils who have missed school

Watch one of the school’s ‘deepfake’ teachers in our story below

schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-trus...
'Deepfake' teacher avatars to help pupils catch up
Academy trust staff to use AI generator to introduce resources for pupils returning to school
schoolsweek.co.uk
Reposted by Sarah Florini
gregggonsalves.bsky.social
Thank you @nytopinion.nytimes.com for publishing this rot. Marc Rowan has run hundreds of companies into the dust to extract profits from their failure and bankruptcies. Now he wants to do the same to American higher education. Do not believe a word this man says. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...
Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Badly Needed
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Sarah Florini
blackamazon.bsky.social
AI is a lack of consent machine ,
rollingstone.com
“I still can’t believe how unhinged the last update was. Not only the nudity but the motions, boobs bounces more realistically, it’s incredible.”

Elon Musk's xAI seems to have relaxed filters on Grok's video generation, allowing users to create and share explicit AI pornography.
Musk's AI Is Being Used to Make Hardcore Porn: 'Grok Is Learning Genitalia Really Fast!'
bit.ly
Reposted by Sarah Florini
abeba.bsky.social
Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
Reposted by Sarah Florini
hypervisible.blacksky.app
Dudes have been fantasizing about a computer friend in their glasses for a long time. This is 1959! www.wired.com/story/secret...
The beauty of the n-tuple method was that it could recognize many variants of the same character: Most Qs tended to score pretty close to other Qs. Better yet, the process worked with any pattern, not just text. According to an essay coauthored by Robert S. Boyer, a mathematician and longtime friend of Woody's, the n-tuple method helped define the field of pattern recognition; it was among the early set of efforts to ask,
"How can we make a machine do something like what
people do?"
Around the time when he was devising the n-tuple method, Woody had his first daydream about building the machine that he called a "computer person." Years later, he would recall the "wild excitement" he felt as he
conjured up a list of skills for the artificial consciousness:
"I wanted it to read printed characters on a page and handwritten script as well. I could see it, or a part of it, in a small camera that would fit on my glasses, with an attached earplug that would whisper into my ear the names of my friends and acquaintances as I met them on the street... For you see, my computer friend had the ability to recognize faces."
florini.bsky.social
This is what they appear to be claiming. That laws only protect you if you don’t explicitly opt out of having crimes committed against you.
Reposted by Sarah Florini
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Say it often, say it loud:

"Overall, research has not supported the common-sense presumption that digital approaches to schooling are better than non-digital alternatives. At the broadest level, widespread computer use in education has been found to be associated with lower student achievement."
Fit for Purpose? How Today’s Commercial Digital Platforms Subvert Key Goals of Public Education
Digital educational platforms have become ubiquitous in American classrooms, with tools like Google Workspace for Education, Kahoot!, Zearn, Khan Academy, and many others now structuring curriculum, i...
nepc.colorado.edu
florini.bsky.social
In other news, I will be rifling through people’s pockets and taking whatever I like unless they opt out.
wsj.com
Exclusive: OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator, which creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear.
OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out
Executives at the startup notified talent agencies and studios over the last week.
on.wsj.com
Reposted by Sarah Florini
florini.bsky.social
Exactly! It’s such a bizarre position to argue.
florini.bsky.social
And all “prompt engineering” seems to be is good communication and reasoning skills. The ability to ask good questions is not an LLM specific skill. So what “skills“ do I need to so that I am “not left behind?“
florini.bsky.social
If you have to “learn” anything to use LLMs, it’s how to get around their shortcomings. That you have to check everything for fabrications. Maybe add things to your prompts to avoid getting biased outputs.
florini.bsky.social
I have never understood this argument: LLMs are here to stay. So we need to learn how to use them.
The whole reason they have proliferated in the last two years is because you basically have to learn nothing to use them. Open a web browser and start asking plunking things into the prompt field.
Reposted by Sarah Florini
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
OpenAI's rapid rush into education has been achieved by habituating users through training programs, institutional lock-ins, strategic marketing partnerships, and third party integrations that together are helping it become infrastructural to teaching and learning. It's going to be hard to get out.
Reposted by Sarah Florini
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...
Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Sarah Florini
bcmerchant.bsky.social
This has been pushed to the background, but pay attention:

Right now, a stack of bills aimed at reining in AI companies and big tech sits on Gavin Newsom's desk in California. These are the bills Silicon Valley and the GOP tried to ban outright. Now they await Newsom's signature—or veto.
We're about to find out if Silicon Valley owns Gavin Newsom
A guide to the AI and tech bills that have passed the California legislature, and await the governor's signature — or veto.
www.bloodinthemachine.com
Reposted by Sarah Florini
joybella.blacksky.app
Mind you, these people think SNAP recipients shouldn't be able to buy SODA.
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
ZUCKERBERG: “If we end up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars, I think that that is going to be very unfortunate, obviously. .. But what I’d say is I actually think the risk is higher on the other side.”

$META
youtu.be/23FyskyFoP8?...
florini.bsky.social
Yep. For them, if the Antichrist comes sooner, the sooner all of the things that will happen before that are gonna happen. So they are perfectly happy to accelerate that whole timetable and go to heaven earlier.
Reposted by Sarah Florini
wolvendamien.bsky.social
(& as I said on twtter early in 2022: transhumanism, Singularitarianism, Accelerationism, longtermism, effective altruism, & Dominionism are all offshoots of the same root Christian Eschatology, even for the adherents who consciously believe themselves to be "secular;" thus they support each other…
florini.bsky.social
He’s gonna mess around and prompt some new fundamentalist Christian version of Luddism. Where instead of labor protection, they’re motivated by the apocalypse.
florini.bsky.social
There is literally nothing Evangelicals (i.e., the base of the GOP) want more than the End Times. And many of them would be glad to hasten the coming of the Antichrist, because that means hastening Jesus‘s return.
florini.bsky.social
This man has no understanding of how Evangelicals think. Because this is not the argument he thinks it is: “Fearing or regulating [tech], or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said.”
petertl.bsky.social
New argument against AI regulation just dropped. Checkmate, atheists.
www.wsj.com/tech/peter-t...
For about a year now, Thiel has been publicly laying out his understanding of biblical prophecies and the potential for the rapid advance of technology to bring about an apocalyptic future. 

In a lecture Monday, he encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in AI or other forms of technology. Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.