Miguel Carvalhais
@carvalhais.org
1.9K followers 460 following 93 posts
Design, music, art + computation. Professor at fba.up.pt; also running @cronicaelectronica.org, http://at-c.org and @xCoAx.org. Author of Art and Computation (V2_) and Artificial Aesthetics (U.Porto). carvalhais.org
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Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
estherschindler.bsky.social
I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
visiophone.bsky.social
Clip from last Saturday's AV Performance 30xN at Museu Zer0, a new digital art museum at Santa Catarina Fonte Bispo/Tavira, Portugal
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@ptudela.bsky.social & @carvalhais.org : computers, sound
Rodrigo Carvalho: computer, lights, visuals
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
visiophone.bsky.social
Glimpses from last Saturday's AV Performance 30xN at Museu Zer0
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@ptudela.bsky.social & @carvalhais.org : computers, sound
Rodrigo Carvalho: computer, lights, visuals
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
visiophone.bsky.social
If you are in Algarve/South Portugal come watch us next Saturday:
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@c + Visiophone: 30×N (AV Performance)
Museu Zer0 | September 27th
Santa Catarina da Fonte do Bispo, Tavira, Portugal)

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@ptudela.bsky.social & @carvalhais.org: computers, sound
Rodrigo Carvalho: computer, lights, visuals
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
machineagency.bsky.social
We will present the work MYTH, MAGIC, MACHINES from September 27th to November 30th, at Museu Zer0 in the Algarve.

The work was originally comissioned by gnration as part of their órbita program that features transdisciplinary works between music, art and technology
youtube.com/watch?v=90hlSPMpLa8
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
olivia.science
Getting close to 50k views and I'm wondering is it just everybody is scared to say this and pleased I did? Because if there's so many of us who agree, trust me I'd know if 1k people disagreed with me let alone 50k, why are we letting AI ruin our universities?

Together we can turn back the tide.
olivia.science
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
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
olivia.science
We also go through many arguments that can be used as counters to typical false frames forced upon us, such as:

1. the powerful nonsense that we as experts know nothing

(Section 3.1 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)

3/n
3.1 Rejection of expertise, ironically including our own
Being in a colonizing discipline first demands and then encourages an attitude that might
be called intellectual hubris. Furthermore, since you cannot master all the disciplines that
you have designs on, you need confidence that your knowledge makes the ‘traditional
wisdom’ of these fields unworthy of serious consideration. Here too, the AI scientist
feels that seeing things through a computational prism so fundamentally changes the
rules of the game in the social and behavioural sciences that everything that came before
is relegated to a period of intellectual immaturity.
Sherry Turkle (1984, p. 230)
Every field that comes into contact with AI discourse becomes infected even within AI as a field of
study (recall Table 1). Our colleagues have embraced these systems, uncritically incorporating them
into their workflows and their classrooms, without input from experts on automation, cognitive science, computer science, gender and diversity studies, human-computer interaction, pedagogy, psychology, and law to name but a few fields with direct relevant expertise (Sloane et al. 2024). Meanwhile, technology companies have rushed to invest in ‘AI ethics’ or ‘AI safety’ to ethics wash their
claims, thereby “laundering accountability” (as Abeba Birhane explains in Arseni 2025) and “distracti[ng] from real AI ethics” (Crane 2021), while censoring academics and thus, violating academic
freedom (Gebru and Torres 2024; Gerdes 2022; Goudarzi 2025; Munn 2023; Ochigame 2019; Suarez
et al. 2025; Tafani 2023).
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
olivia.science
3. the obsession with denying and rewriting history, pretending AI only appeared in the last 3 years or that it has no history before the last few decades, etc.

(Section 3.3 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
5/n
3.3 Ahistoricism and the AI hype cycles
When I started writing about science decades ago [...] I edited an article in which [a computer scientist] predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance
and other professions. That was in 1984.
John Horgan (2020, n.p.)
When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared
on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they
discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia
(Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates “the AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute
fiction for science.” (Heffernan 2025, n.p. Duarte et al. 2024). We have been here before, both with entanglements of AI and statistics with industry corrupting our academic processes, and with so-called
AI summers: hype cycles that pivot from funding booms to complete busts and cessation of research
(Bassett and Roberts 2023; Boden 2006; Law 2024; Lighthill et al. 1973; Merchant 2023; Olazaran
1996; Perez 2002; P. Smith and L. Smith 2024; Thornhill 2025).
To understand how industry tries to influence independent research for their benefit, we can look
to past examples of entanglement of industry and statistics. Ronald A. Fisher, a eugenicist and “the
founder of modern statistics” (Rao 1992), having been paid by the tobacco industry, claimed that because ‘correlation is not causation’ that therefore ‘smoking does not cause lung cancer’ (Fisher 1958;
Stolley 1991). The parallel between tobacco and technology does not end here: “both industries’ increased funding of academia was as a reaction to increasingly unfavourable public opinion and an increased threat of legislation.” (Mohamed Abdalla and Moustafa Abdalla 2021, p. 2; also see Knoester
et al. 2025) The histories of eugenics, statistics, comput…
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
ibogost.bsky.social
In recent weeks, a number of people have mentioned returning to this article of mine from 2021. Here's a gift link.
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
jazznoize.bsky.social
Se agradece que RDL se haga eco, a modo de homenaje, del fallecimiento del artista sonoro (y amigo) #JavierPiñango. Pérdida irreparable para la escena musical española. Siempre le agradeceré que me programara en el patio de la Casa Encendida por aquella maravilla llamada Experimentaclub (2008).
rockdelux.bsky.social
Javier Piñango (Mil Dolores Pequeños, Destroy Mercedes) falleció el pasado día 9 víctima de un cáncer. Conocido en los ámbitos de la música de vanguardia, fue también impulsor de dos discográficas y de un festival de músicas imposibles, el Experimentaclub.

✍️ Jesús Rodríguez Lenin se despide de él.
Javier Piñango, divulgador del ruido
www.rockdelux.com
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
cronicaelectronica.org
Super happy to announce that “INvolution” by [MONRHEA] and @poemproducer.bsky.social is now available to download or stream! Get it from www.cronicaelectronica.org/240/
Cover of “INvolution” by [MONRHEA] + agf
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
olivia.science
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
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
cronicaelectronica.org
We're proud to announce the release of David Lee Myers's latest album in Crónica, “Terrenus”, an exploration in purely electronic sound, now available as a limited-release CD or download. Get it from www.cronicaelectronica.org/239/
Cover of David Lee Myers's “Terrenus”
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
poemproducer.bsky.social
I have an experimental music release with the Kenyan producer Monrhea, who is also a livecoder on @cronicaelectronica.org
join us for listening ssesion next Monday!
www.cronicaelectronica.org/240/
working together
carvalhais.org
Reading it right now, and also strongly recommend it!
carvalhais.org
Indeed. Instagram has always been more meaningful for that in my case, so quitting FB was not too difficult. However, I often miss out on several posts that are not even shown to me, so I’ve been enjoying Bluesky far more for that. Still hoping that more people move over here 🙂
carvalhais.org
Been out of Facebook and WhatsApp for a while now. Can’t remember how long, but at least a couple of years. Didn’t find major issues and just moved all messaging to Signal or iMessage. Instagram, however, is difficult. Don’t use it much but still find it a useful enough PR tool…
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
cronicaelectronica.org
Some download codes for this gem, Matilde Meireles’s “Loop. And Again.” There are still a few CDs in stock.

dpr2-e5e9
7fzw-hp8a
xw2e-vrb7
qjm9-gd4v
ffrz-3l58
mdlu-hj22
gjpv-vgwh
3b7r-63l5
waww-g4qr
p9je-uqgd

More on this at www.cronicaelectronica.org/223/ Redeem at cronica.bandcamp.com/yum
Cover of Matilde Meireles's album “Loop. And Again”
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais
foldablehuman.bsky.social
If the mechanisms of communication get so gummed up with slop that it's difficult to get a result that isn't GenAI then you might as well give up and make an account, 'cus then at least you can customize your slop and make the pig wear a bowtie.
Reposted by Miguel Carvalhais