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irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Iris van Rooij 💭
@irisvanrooij.bsky.social
17K followers 1.2K following 1.9K posts
Professor of Computational Cognitive Science | @AI_Radboud | @[email protected] on 🦣 | http://cognitionandintractability.com | she/they 🏳️‍🌈
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irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Left: washing machine with the words “Critical Washing” on it. Right: Quote: “When we critique AI, we should do so with intellectual honesty and in a principled way. Utmost care is needed to avoid ethics washing, greenwashing, and generally — what we dub — critical washing. (…) Researching and reflecting on the harms of AI is not itself harm reduction. It may even contribute to rationalizing, normalizing, and enabling harm. Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing.” —Suarez, Müller, Guest, & van Rooij (2025) https://zenodo.org/records/15677840
November 18, 2025 at 9:55 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Left: washing machine with the words “Critical Washing” on it Right: A quote: “"When we critique AI, we should do so with intellectual honesty and in a principled way. Utmost care is needed to avoid ethics washing, greenwashing, and generally — what we dub — critical washing. Critical reflection cannot be reduced to a mere ‘check box’ before unleashing AI technologies in our daily life after all (as has been done in other areas such as vaping and combustion engines). Researching and reflecting on the harms of AI is not itself harm reduction. It may even contribute to rationalizing, normalizing, and enabling harm. Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing.” —Suarez, Müller, Guest, & van Rooij (2025) https://zenodo.org/records/15677840
November 18, 2025 at 9:50 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Logo of Cognitive Science journal also has Education in it cognitivesciencesociety.org/cognitive-sc...
Logo of CogSci journal
November 16, 2025 at 8:00 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“Flying pigs are also possible in principle; possible in principle bakes no bread.” — Jerry Fodor (2005, p. 27)

Screenshot from:

van Rooij, Guest, et al. (2024). 'Reclaiming AI as a Theoretical Tool for Cognitive Science’: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Overview Flying pigs are also possible in principle; possible in principle bakes no bread. — Jerry Fodor (2005, p. 27) The remainder of this paper will be an argument in ‘two acts’. In ACT 1: Releasing the Grip, we present a formalisa- tion of the currently dominant approach to AI-as-engineering that claims that AGI is both inevitable and around the corner. We do this by introducing a thought experiment in which a fic- tive AI engineer, Dr. Ingenia, tries to construct an AGI under ideal conditions.7 For instance, Dr. Ingenia has perfect data, sampled from the true distribution, and they also have access to any conceivable ML method—including presently popular …
November 6, 2025 at 9:27 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
A tom pouce
October 24, 2025 at 8:58 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
For more info: olivia.science/ai
Critical AI poster with a QR code
October 18, 2025 at 10:55 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
👀
75K views 45K downloads
October 15, 2025 at 8:00 AM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
See also our position piece

Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2025). **Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia**. Zenodo. lnkd.in/eXDApbxJ @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these termsare orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
October 10, 2025 at 9:27 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
x.com/irisvanrooij... From the Mathilda Effect
Screen shot of tweet about the Mathilda effect
October 10, 2025 at 8:46 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“Being able to detect & counteract all these 3 together comprises the bedrock of skills in research methods in a time when AI is used uncritically (see Table 1). The inverse: not noticing these are at play, or even promoting them, could be seen as engaging in questionable research practises (QRPs)”
The three aforementioned related themes sketched out in this section, will play out in the AI-social psychology relationships we will examine — namely: a. misunderstanding of the statistical models which con- stitute contemporary AI, leading to inter alia thinking that correlation implies causation (Guest, 2025; Guest & Mar- tin, 2023, 2025a, 2025b; Guest, Scharfenberg, & van Rooij, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025); b. confusion between statistical versus cognitive models when it comes to their completely non-overlapping roles when mediating between theory and observations (Guest & Martin, 2021; Morgan & Morrison, 1999; Morrison & Morgan, 1999; van Rooij & Baggio, 2021); c. anti -open science practices,such as closed source code, stolen and opaque collection and use of data, obfuscated conflicts of interest, lack of accountability for models’ architectures, i.e. statistical methods and input-output mappings are not well documented (Barlas et al., 2021; Birhane & McGann, 2024; Birhane et al., 2023; Crane, 2021; Gerdes, 2022; Guest & Martin, 2025b; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2024; Liesenfeld et al., 2023; Mirowski, 2023; Ochigame, 2019; Thorne, 2009).
October 5, 2025 at 4:50 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧪
Table 1 Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations. See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1
October 4, 2025 at 6:46 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. lnkd.in/ewajedAe

🧪
Table 1 Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations. See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1
October 4, 2025 at 5:40 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
One time Dutch post about value-driven AI, motivated in part by scientists’ ideas for the upcoming elections in The Netherlands.

“Waardengedreven AI” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/09/28/w...
A scale with on the left money and on the right a heart. The heart is heavier than the money.
September 28, 2025 at 9:45 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Ran into this poster on our campus today 😊
Poster of the Open Letter: Stop the uncritical adoption of ‘AI’ technologies in academia, with QR code
September 23, 2025 at 9:36 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Full paper here: zenodo.org/records/1706...
An ouija board with on it the letter “AI’ and a quote: “AI technology is much more akin to a ouija board than anything else: promoting and enabling mysticism, pseudoscience, and pseudo-intellectualism — (Guest et al., 2025)” Full reference to the paper: Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., van Meerkerk, E., Oude Groote Beverborg, A., de Haan, R., Reyes Elizondo, A., Blokpoel, M., Scharfenberg, N., Kleinherenbrink, A., Camerino, I., Woensdregt, M., Monett, D., Brown, J., Avraamidou, L., Alenda-Demoutiez, J., Hermans, F., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099 Style APA
September 21, 2025 at 8:43 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
An ouija board, with on it the letters “AI” and a quote: “AI technology is much more akin to a ouija board than anything else: promoting and enabling mysticism, pseudoscience, and pseudo-intellectualism — (Guest et al., 2025)”
September 21, 2025 at 8:39 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Ouija board in the background, with the text on top: “AI technology is much more akin to a ouija board than anything else: promoting and enabling mysticism, pseudoscience, and pseudo-intellectualism — (Guest et al., 2025)”
September 20, 2025 at 6:29 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
This week, teaching theoretical modeling to AI students, and had — as always — this slide up.

Feels radical teaching theoretical modeling to this generation. We are only 3 weeks in now, and I think the importance of thinking clearly, explicitly, critically & for oneself, is already sinking in.
Cartoon showing a blackboard with on the left and right equations, and in the middle the words “Then a miracle occurs”. A teacher points at those words, and says to the person who wrote on the board “I think you should be more explicit here in step two”. Sidney Harris science cartoon (more here: http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/index.php)
September 20, 2025 at 7:12 AM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“To add insult to injury, many metaphorical … phrases (especially used to describe ANNs; see Table 1) — like train, learn, hallucinate, reason — are applied to machines and result in distorting how we perceive these machines: humanising them while dehumanising us”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

14/🧵
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.
September 19, 2025 at 11:06 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“(…) jargon infused with technology industry hype, such as shown in Table 1, does not meaningfully explain. (…) We strive to remain critical of the vocabulary the technology industry coopts and deploys, and to remain respectful of scientific terminology.”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

8/🧵
September 19, 2025 at 10:50 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
“Although some differentiate AI and non-AI systems by appealing to generative models versus other types of AI, we are convinced that this does not bring clarity …, and we can fall head first into misuse of terminology and fostering industry hype (see … Figure 1)”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

7/🧵
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 ad- versarial 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 discrim- inant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
September 19, 2025 at 10:50 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Move info on this website: olivia.science/ai by @olivia.science

QR code goes here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
Poster with colour duo background and QR code, with the text “Have you considered not using AI?”
September 19, 2025 at 9:44 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
🩷💛 Check out @olivia.science ‘s CAIL website, with beautiful posters, video/podcast, papers and more! 🤩 olivia.science/ai
Colorful poster with text “Have you considered NOT using AI”, and a QR code going to our preprint “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ technologies”
September 15, 2025 at 6:35 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Sigaret box with a sigaret stick out with “AI" on it. On the box it says: Using this puts you at risk of: Misinformation Violating copyright Plagiarising Exploitation of workers Deskilling yourself Spreading stereotypes Contributing to pollution
September 2, 2025 at 9:04 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Een manier om te zeggen: “ik zit in een hype bubble”

Bakker verkoopt hier gebakken lucht. Maar goed, velen met hem en natuurlijk zeker bij Google DeepMind.

Hier het hele stuk van @laurensvhg.bsky.social: www.volkskrant.nl/tech/nederla...

Lees daarna vooral ook: www.beste-id.nl/salon/denken...
Ik ben wat in verwarring. Als ik u goed begrijp, is er geen enkele twijfel en komt superintelligentie eraan. Tegelijkertijd hoor ik van andere experts andere verhalen. Zij leggen de nadruk op de fundamentele beperkingen van de huidige AI-taalmodellen. Wie heeft er gelijk? ‘In mijn directe omgeving hoor ik bijna niemand meer die daar nog aan twijfelt. De discussie is dan niet óf superintelligentie eraan komt, maar wanneer. Wij zijn uiteindelijk een biologische computer. En waarom zou een niet-biologische computer niet hetzelfde kunnen als een biologische computer? Ik zie geen enkele fundamentele beperking.’
August 30, 2025 at 8:37 PM