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olivia.science
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ
@olivia.science
17K followers 1.9K following 6K posts
https://olivia.science

assistant professor of computational cognitive science · she/they · cypriot/kıbrıslı/κυπραία · σὺν Ἀθηνᾷ καὶ χεῖρα κίνει
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olivia.science
bsky.app/profile/oliv...

CC @andreaeyleen.bsky.social
So there are actually people that understand this kind of language? Because I don’t actually understand any of this. … ‪Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ‬ ‪@olivia.science‬ · 1h To be a broken record, our paper isn't about how a term is murky per se. @andreaeyleen.bsky.social and I propose a metatheoretical solution to a theoretical problem. Esp see the parts we explain: success-to-truth inference & mechanism, in Boxes 1 & 2 & in the last section. bsky.app/profile/oliv... March 8, 2025 at 6:54 AM Everybody can reply
January 8, 2026 at 3:46 AM
olivia.science
I wrote a bit about it here bsky.app/profile/oliv...
Introduction [M]odels have to be used before they will give up their secrets. In this sense, they have the quality of a technology — the power of the model only becomes apparent in the context of its use. (Morrison & Morgan, 1999, p. 12) We are experiencing a point in history that considers itself separate, unique, a zenith of human civilisation, presented as disconnected from the past through a series of technological sea changes. In extreme cases, we are detached from even the last few months: the newest version of a piece of artificial intelligence (AI) software is the definitive one, everything else is irrelevant. And so findings in AI are held to expire. Our AI students describe their own knowledge and skills — even their whole degree itself — as having upcoming sell-by dates. Research in AI is thus often framed as unmoored from historical, ethical, social, and legal precedents. The speed of the “ultra rapid computing machine,” as Wiener (1948, 1950) de- scribes computers, becomes a metaphor for the speed of change and of techno- logical progress. This notion of condensed time operates as a further discursive regularity in two ways. First, it forms an overall temporal backdrop against which various cybernetic dramas are played out. Second, condensed time becomes a measure of the performance of humans and machines. Hughes (1985) offers a telling example of the first manifestation of condensed time: In the scant two hundred years since the early Industrial Revolution, Western man has totally rescaled and changed the face and fabric of his environment. Indeed, the changes have proceeded at such an acceler- ated pace that we might use the word “old” or “outmoded” to refer to last month’s computer model. (p. 205) 1 O. Guest This sense of condensing time—of speed, of rapid change—imbues virtually all the popular literature examined. It becomes a contextual operator, stated but not questioned. (Hamilton, 1998, p. 193) What Sheryl N. Hamilt…
January 7, 2026 at 5:48 AM
olivia.science
"Great man theorising requires the (re)orientation of the theory to direct all credit to one person (or a biased subset of a select few) reminiscent of monarchy—far from the pluralistic or meritocratic facade science often hides behind"

doi.org/10.1007/s421...
Great Man Theorising Most of the work on women scientists fits the “history of great men” mold, with women simply substituted for men. Thus, we have many biographies of great women scientists. These biographical studies of women scientists, for the most part, place the achievements of Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin within the male world, demonstrating that women have, in fact, made important contributions to what has been defined as mainstream science. Yet the focus remains on the woman as exceptional—the woman who defied convention to claim a prominent position in an essentially male world. One of the problems with this approach to history is that it retains the male norm as the measure of excellence. Londa Schiebinger, 1987, p. 314 On the one hand, it is common knowledge that scholarly activities are the fruit of the labour of teams of so-called great men’s students, mentees, collaborators, and partners. While on the other hand, the formal archival record gives a dramatically different account attributing such scientific outputs solely to individual men, and more recently individual people generally. To wit, great man theorising is ‘an important obstacle to building theory’ (van Rooij , 2021; also see van Rooij , 2022). Great man theorists fabricate and/or obscure anecdotal and historical evidence to ensure the credit is directed at the target prestigious figure. For example, Pythagoras is overwhelmingly named and credited, but he had many women disciples, who were philosophers and mathematicians in their own right, whose writings survive to this day, and after his death, Theano (a woman, possibly his wife) took over as head of his academy (Schiebinger, 1987; Wider, 1986). To give another example, Lavoisier, the chemist credited with discovering oxygen, was also a woman: Marie Anne Paulze Lavoisier. She could have been credited jointly with her husband, but was not (Eagle & Sloan, 1998). Great man theorising requires the (re)orientation of the theory to direct all credit to one person (or a biased subset of a select few) reminiscent of monarchy—far from the pluralistic or meritocratic facade science often hides behind—where few are in power and get credit, while many toil unseen (see Birhane and Guest , 2021, for more on how to deal with this). In reality, none of the research would be possible without all the laboratory members and students. Even if (in the unlikely case) the singular so-called great person is indeed generating all the ideas, the mental space they enjoy is only possible by the grace of their students, mentees, and employees.
December 30, 2025 at 8:46 PM
olivia.science
sometimes random cypriot street plants are kinda subtly breathtaking 🌿🌸
Light lilac flowers on a succulent looking vining plant Vining plant against a cracked wall More of the same showing more of the heart shaped leaves and stone wall behind it
December 29, 2025 at 3:42 PM
olivia.science
Come now... Why would anybody pay this? 😵‍💫
Affordable Our Pro plan—available for just $24.99/month—ensures articles are sent to peers for feedback using our AI-assisted invitation process. For the price of one average APC, you can have Qeios Pro and unlimited publishing possibilities for 10 years. Importantly, authors can publish completely free if their articles attract spontaneous reviewers and already meet language and field standards.
December 29, 2025 at 8:39 AM
olivia.science
𓆤 möth 𓆤
Mottled brown and white moth sitting on a window
December 28, 2025 at 5:42 PM
olivia.science
"We should acknowledge that AI does not care about Ethics, because it is dependent on political authority that can easily shift any ethical responsibility evading legal repercussions."

This is why the field of AI ethics is a scam.

(Fig from umaine.edu/learnwithai/ which I'm not familiar with)
Figure with a lightning bolt that says IMPACT RISK and each letter is a phrase see more here https://ai-impact-risk.com/
December 28, 2025 at 7:36 AM
olivia.science
and some seem to be curious about why I think this; I guess I looked for myself too. I recommend it actually if you want to understand this type of misogyny
Zoomer Antimillenarian ‪@surcomplicated.bsky.social‬ Follow Any actually existing universe can only instantiate some infinitesimal minute fraction of all consistent mathematical patterns. van Rooij thinks that this requires ‘fine-tuning’ when in fact any random selection will do. What she’s doing is on par w/ crank failed string theorists & youth pastors. ‪atticus goldfinch‬ ‪@atticusgf.bsky.social‬ · 2d Hell, she even leans into the "fine-tuning" argument. Claims evolution faces insurmountable complexity barriers, & doesn't get to escape them. That evolution didn't result in cognition. What did? Well, the universe is "friendly" and gives solvable tasks. This is "fine-tuning"! Intelligent design!
December 25, 2025 at 8:38 AM
olivia.science
Yeah, this is a huge obsession with these people, also see footnote 2 from:

Guest, O. & Martin, A. E. (2025). A Metatheory of Classical and Modern Connectionism. Psychological Review. doi.org/10.1037/rev0...
PDF: repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/ha...
This characterization of human-likeness is the case only in complex or dubious ways (e.g., Leivada, Günther, & Dentella, 2024). Also, the concept of deeper models being more human-like is consistent with the classical dualist perspective: “The difference between machines and natural objects is simply one of degree for Descartes[. M]achines are works of nature differing from other natural objects only by degree of complexity” (Hattab, 2009, p. 85). 3 As in other m
December 16, 2025 at 9:18 PM
olivia.science
OK, bonus, some art: an Olmec head destroying a Tesla by @chavismarmol.bsky.social — chavismarmol.com you have GOT to visit that website; it is amazing! 🤩

Read more: hyperallergic.com/878913/artis...

3/3
Last Monday, March 11, artist Chavis Mármol dropped a nine-ton Olmec head made of quarry stone onto a blue Tesla Model 3. (all photos by and courtesy the artist) more: https://hyperallergic.com/878913/artist-chavis-marmol-crushes-tesla-with-colossal-olmec-head-sculpture/
December 14, 2025 at 8:06 PM
olivia.science
Another cool one is the Mayan calendrical system: "highly precise and directly translatable to a system of gears" doi.org/10.5281/zeno... — much like gears in clockwork & the Antikythera Mechanism of course.

See more: maya.nmai.si.edu/sites/defaul...
www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/public-resou...

2/n
The Maya Calendar System Using their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, the Maya developed one of the most accurate cal- endar systems in human history. The Maya calendar system has its roots in older, Mesoamerican1 indig- enous civilizations, particularly the Olmec. The Maya calendar is complex and serves both practical and ceremoni- al purposes. The Maya calendar system includes several calendars that mea- sure time periods of varying lengths. These calendars are based on solar, lunar, planetary, and human cycles. There are three most commonly known cyclical calendars used by the Maya. These include the Haab which is a 365- day solar calendar, the Tzolk’in which is a 260-day sacred calendar, and the Calendar Round of 52 years. In addition, the Maya developed the Long Count calendar to date mythical and historical events chronologically. 1 Definitions for words in red-colored font can be found in the Glossary page in the Resources section of the “Living Maya Time” website. A contemporary representation of the Tzolk’in (inner green circle) and Haab (outer brown circle) calendars. The Haab The Maya solar calendar, called Haab, is a count of 365 days and thus approximates the solar year. The word “haab” means “year” in the Yucatec Mayan language. The Haab is composed of 18 months made of 20 days each, plus one month made of 5 days. A month made of 20 days is called a uinal. Each uinal has its own name. These 18 months together equal 360 days. The last month made of 5 days is called Wayeb. The 19 months together total 365 days. 18 x 20 + 5 = 3652 Table 1: Haab Months and Days Pop Wo’ Sip Sotz’ Sek Xul Yaxk’in Mol Ch’en Yax Sak’ Keh Mak K’ank’in Muwan Pax K’ayab Kumk’u Wayeb 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7… the calendar also shown as gears! from https://www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/public-resources/maya-world/maya-calendar-system/
December 14, 2025 at 7:53 PM
olivia.science
Some examples of decolonial automata/computations, apropos of giving a mini talk on this tomorrow:

Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

🐯 Tipu's tiger is amazing; sadly stolen & now in the V&A, created in India & depicting a tiger mauling an English man.

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On the flip side, we can include positive examples in our teaching on the history of AI: Tipu’s tiger from late 18th century India, featuring the eponymous robotic cat mauling a European man (Karp et al. 2013); the Antikythera Mechanism from ancient Greece, which was a clockwork astro- logical calender; and the Mayans’ calendrical system that was highly precise and directly translat- able to a system of gears. We can also explain the origin of ‘algorithm’ and ‘algebra’, conceptually developed during the Islamic Golden Age. These serve not only to properly contextualise the his- tory of AI (Mayor 2018), but to reimagine with students what could be done differently. Regardless of AI, science has always been intertwined with domination, extraction, binary thinking, and the imposition of hierarchies (Tacheva et al. 2023). For example, the Cartesian dualist idea that the mind can be separated from the body is at the core of AI hype. Corporate discourses around AI feature preposterous claims, such that ‘ChatGPT has PhD level cognition capacities’, and they will be able to surpass human intelligence in the near future (Welt 2025), implying that technologies are human-like. However, far from LLMs having cognitive capacities, companies ob- fuscate the labour that is extracted from data workers (Miceli et al. 2020). In the classroom, we should question the mind and body binary and render visible its eugenical and colonial legacies. While we refute corporate claims, we also take them seriously as dehumanising workers, women, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipu%27s_Tiger Tipu's Tiger, Tippu's Tiger or Tipoo’s Tiger is an 18th-century automaton created for Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore (present day Karnataka) in India. The carved and painted wood casing represents a tiger mauling a near life-size European man. Mechanisms inside the tiger and the man's body make one hand of the man move, emit a wailing sound from his mouth and grunts from the tiger. In addition a flap on the side of the tiger folds down to reveal the keyboard of a small pipe organ with 18 notes.[1] zoomed in to the tiger biting the man's neck Tipu's Tiger with the organ keyboard visible
December 14, 2025 at 7:45 PM
olivia.science
If you're based in NL please consider reading & signing our open letter on reclaiming so-called AI from the AI Delta Plan & co:

"Thoughtfully Shaping Our Digital Future" openletter.earth/zorgvuldig-a...

Big thanks to @lekkerresistance.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @marentierra.bsky.social
Thoughtfully Shaping Our Digital Future To the parties forming the government in the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the outgoing administration, We are writing to you in recognition of your crucial responsibility for shaping current and future AI policy, overseeing digitization, and upholding public values. We are a coalition of scientists, experts, and representatives of civil society organizations. We believe it is essential to address these matters together. This letter has two objectives: a) Provide context for current plans, including the AI Delta Plan, the AIC4NL position paper, and the Invest-NL AI Deep Dive. These investment proposals often rely on assumptions that lack scientific evidence and do not fully reflect public values. b) To offer a constructive, well-substantiated alternative approach to digital futures based on people, nature, and democracy. We believe a collaborative process should guide decisions on the needs, scope, and nature of investments by bringing together scientists, civil society organizations, and stakeholders.
December 13, 2025 at 11:12 AM
olivia.science
I do think some stuff is specifically of a (sub)type, but I 100% agree not disjoint at all

e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2507.19960 bsky.app/profile/oliv...
There it is a definite social relation between [people], that assumes, in their eyes, 454 the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an 455 analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious 456 world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent 457 beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another 458 and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of 459 [people]’s hands. (Marx, 1867) 460 The reasoning problems become evermore severe in our misunderstandings of these most 461 modern machines (Guest & Martin, 2023). As Taina Bucher (2018, p. 50) explains: “When a 462 machine runs smoothly, nobody pays much attention, and the actors and work required to 463 make it run smoothly disappear from view (Latour, 1999).” A next step in this devolution 464 and devaluation of cognitive labour is that now the user too, deskilled and displaced, also 465 disappears from view. What voice does the human, now reduced to only a user, have if 466 their verbal (column 1, Table 4) and visual (column 2) expressions are just the copy-pasted 467 output of a device that performs patchwork plagiarism? What human connection do they 468 have when their friends and romantic partners have been replaced with inanimate objects 469 (column 3)? 470
December 12, 2025 at 2:50 PM
olivia.science
Took its sweet time, but absolutely worth it for my Xmas reading! 🤩

@francesegan.bsky.social

doi.org/10.7551/mitp...
Photo of the book deflating mental representation by Frances Egan
December 10, 2025 at 4:35 PM
olivia.science
Thanks to you both for being so positive... really means a lot to be honest. I also got a weirdly positive message from His Brittanic Majesty's Revenue and Customs 🙂‍↕️

Weirdest reply! "No,no, we owe you 670 odd quid!" 🤣

Yes, really wanna move back.
Letter from HMRC claiming I owe them 674.40 spondulix like ok m8 whatever
December 8, 2025 at 8:34 PM
olivia.science
The point isn't assessment standards...

doi.org/10.31234/osf...
we must be critical when we see statements such as: “It’s worth noting that AI can pass the clinical social worker exam — even without seeing the questions. But that shows the weaknesses of exams more than the strength of AI” (Caldwell, 2024, n.p.). An AI product passing an exam means nothing about the “weak- nesses” of exams in the abstract. Anybody can ‘win’ a marathon if driven by car. Does that make it a weakness of the marathon race as an endurance event? Or does it reflect a deeper category error on our behalf, like with the misapplication of statistical tests, that an assumption has been violated? The race as the exam assumes an unaided human performs it. Any digital computer can sur- pass a human at many feats, e.g. calculations per second, but that grants no humanity to the machine. 8 Do not Embrac
December 6, 2025 at 7:34 AM
olivia.science
It's a difficult needle to thread because a bully (AI industry) has no moral compass nor will stop bullying if we acquiesce. But that doesn't also mean we don't fight back. We try to make this clear from the abstract here too: "AI cannot be allowed to drive change."

doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

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Abstract from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17786243
December 6, 2025 at 7:23 AM
olivia.science
Yup, as @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @marentierra.bsky.social and I say in Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

"[Guardrails] pose an infinite regress of humans in the loop needed to make pretend of what AI was supposed to solve"
extract from pages 4 and 5 Guest, O., Suarez, M., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17786243
December 5, 2025 at 1:05 PM
olivia.science
so it begins
scholar now has AI
December 3, 2025 at 11:14 AM
olivia.science
This could be useful, esp the figure. The gist is you struggle because some of these words are not scholarly, but marketing nonsense, designed to confuse and mystify. bsky.app/profile/oliv...

See especially this part from here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
extract from section 2
December 2, 2025 at 9:20 AM
olivia.science
Finally, we end on:

"The future [under the sway of AI risks being] a constant rehashing of the past, wherein human creativity and communication are not only mediated by but controlled by companies. In the midst of this nonsense, we must nourish
hope in shared values"

doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

8/
7 Epilogue We have given our perspective on AI through five possible angles as depicted in Figure 1: concep- tual clarity, critical thinking, decoloniality, respecting expertise, and slow science. If our warnings go unheeded, we foresee the harms to academia will continue. If we do not enact scientific and pedagogical shifts — by inter alia teaching and reckoning with our own collective human past and present — we, in cognitive science specifically, will continue to deny our students knowledge of the history of computational prehistories from other cultures and time periods, an abdication of the duty of any so-called experts in AI; mutatis mutandis for other fields and their histories. AI not only ends the past, and makes the present frantic, it also forecloses any future. Under AI’s sway, the future is neither bright as the technopositivists promise, nor a descent into rule by robotic overloads, but a constant rehashing of the past, wherein human creativity and communication are not only mediated by controlled by companies. In the midst of this nonsense, we must nourish hope in shared values, skills, and humanity.
December 2, 2025 at 7:34 AM
olivia.science
Slow Science is a disposition towards preferring psychologically, techno-socially, and epistemically healthy
practices.

See section 6 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

7/
6 Slow Science Industry sells the narrative that AI can maximise efficiency, including within science. We are pressured to believe that it is possible to automate the scientific process. But science itself is a form of cognition, and therefore cannot be automated (Rich et al. 2021; van Rooij, Guest, et al. 2024). But this does not stand in the way of industry narratives that want to do away with thinking and deep reflection. Slow science was developed by Isabelle Stengers (2018), who explains: “Fast science refers not so much to a question of speed but to the imperative not to slow down, not to waste time, or else. . . ” (p. 115) Unless we push back against the use of AI products this will only further crystallise into the new normal (but see Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025; Guest and van Rooij 2025). AI not only epitomises fast science, but turbocharges it, nosediving us into anti-science and antiintellectualism. We see this pattern of condensing time in most computational fields (Guest 2025). “The ultra rapid computing machine” (Wiener 1948, 1950) serves two discursive purposes, as Sheryl Hamilton (1998) explains: “First, it forms an overall temporal backdrop against which various cybernetic dramas are played out. Second, condensed time becomes a measure of the performance of humans and machines.” (p. 193) There are simple ways to counteract this. We can allow flexible deadlines, and pursue ungrading with our students, while also explaining this is part and parcel of good science. In STEM programmes assigning essays in a possible way to support students to develop their ideas. We can also promote slow science by making space for our mentees, colleagues, and selves to take time to think and to make choices that move our scientific practices towards reflection and decolonisation. Building scientific knowledge and expertise takes time. By not allowing this we deskill our profession and corrupt our practice (Pfaffenberger 1988). We lose the ability to recognize and acknowl… Marcela Suarez has created a tripartite pedagogical method: 7 Guest et al. (2025) a) situating, b) reconnecting, and c) rendering power visible. First, the materiality of AI devices is situated through examining their geopolitical territories; second, we reconnect the digitality of technologies with their materiality; and third, we render the exploitation, extraction and domination visible. While academic discussion has centred around sustainability (Wynsberghe 2021), engaging uncritically can merely reaffirm its colonial past of reinforcing hierarchies between the Global North and South (Sultana, 2022). However, sustainability is reclaimable through questioning: What are the social relations, territories and resources that sustain AI technologies? For example, how is data mining not only a discursive metaphor, but also a material practice of companies to extract minerals that sustain AI capitalism (Parikka 2015; Valdivia 2025). Through teaching capitalist AI’s social relations, we can bring to the fore core fallacies, such as that automation requires more not less labour (Bainbridge 1983; Guest 2025). Flawed and false discourses on automation are materially sustained by the obfuscation of the exploitation of Global South workers at the intersection of racism, gender, ability, and more — through these discourses, AI products are gifted value. By the same token, we can explain the intensive power, computation, and infrastructures that these systems require, from internet cables, data centres, raw materials to water and energy to run data centres, as well as the aforementioned labour to operate and maintain these infrastructures, which in so doing re-enact existing colonial lines of extraction (Hao 2025; Parikka 2015; Suarez et al. 2025; Valdivia 2025).
December 2, 2025 at 7:27 AM
olivia.science
Respecting Expertise is the epistemic compact between professionals and society.

See section 5 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

6/
5 Respecting Expertise The compact between professionals and society at large requires respect of expertise — from well funded publicly owned academia to protecting certain fields from epistemic trespassing — for expertise to keep existing. That is, between academia and its host society there exists understanding that academia is publicly funded, directly or through grants, to produce knowledge; and furthermore that it exists to train and certify highly skilled graduates. Academic expertise can only continue to exist if statements made by academics are understood as coming from highly skilled research and educational practitioners. What this means is that it goes both ways: experts need to be framed correctly as domain-specific scholars, as well as that statements they make outside their expertise are understood as such. By the same token, that conflicts of interest are publicly known and acknowledged. AI upends all this, violating the compact between academia and society and within academia under its expansionist imperialist scheme (Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025; Solomonides et al. 1985). Sherry Turkle (1984) describes AI as a “colonising discipline” that sweeps away everything that came before under the guise of “intellectual immaturity” — using social privilege to undermine expertise and breaking down the boundaries between disciplinary expertise. At the extreme, it becomes both the case that everybody is an expert in AI, provided they are white and male, and that nobody is an expert in anything since only experts in AI can now practice any form of academic pursuit. The same for education: nobody can teach without the imposition of AI into their learning environments. Another perspective that results in experts being undermined, and turbocharged by AI, is the practice by colleagues and others of critical washing (Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025; Suarez et al. 2025): wherein scholarly critique is rendered decorative. Logics such as ‘I am aware of the downsides, therefore … cases are presented. As if merely listing the harms to people and planet is enough to absolve us of responsibly, dissolve the damage, and bless the use. Critical washing blocks experts from combating company misinformation and advertising screeds. For example, many experts without a conflict of interest can articulate that: a) LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems, meaning they can only output what they were exposed to in mix-and-matched ways; b) LLMs automate plagiarism and paper mills by churning out patchwork plagiarised text, stripping its provenance, and obfuscating the labour of cleaning the corpus; c) we cannot automatically meaningfully detect plagiarism beyond copy-pasted text, which is not foolproof, because no such tools can exist; d) we have a duty to — far from using these models in our workflows — protect the academic literature from LLM pollution; e) using LLMs, as well as being funded by or working for AI companies, are conflicts of interest for any academic, which must be declared with every published piece of work (Guest and Martin 2025a; Guest and van Rooij 2025); f) LLM prompts, the industry term for the user input to these systems, does not cause their output in an authorial sense.
December 2, 2025 at 7:19 AM
olivia.science
Decoloniality is the process of de-centring and addressing dominant harmful views and practices.

See section 4 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

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4 Decoloniality Decoloniality is the decentring of views which stem from white and masculine supremacy, techno- solutionism, and fascism. In the CAILs context, decolonial strategies can range from pushing back against the onslaught of AI logics in our academic environments to (re)centring, uplifting, and protecting of non-mainstream perspectives from those outside the privileged classes with a goal of reducing harm, increasing justice, and cultivating empathy in our colleagues and students. AI is inimical to running on anything but colonial lines. Within computational and other fields affected by AI, any academic who works towards “challenging the status quo faces systemic rejection, resis- tance, and exclusion.” (Birhane and Guest 2021, p. 61) Tracing these trends of how these fields treat their thinkers, and how their mainstream views affect society, illuminates historical precedents for gendered, racialised, and other harms (Benjamin 2019; Erscoi et al. 2023; Gebru et al. 2024; Hicks 2017; Saini 2019). We face high barriers to decolonising (van Vree 2023). Foregrounding scholars who are not hegemonically aligned goes a long way. As does outlining how concepts or methods may have harmful genealogies (Guest 2024). For example, statistics and ‘intelligence’ have eugenical histories; Charles S. Peirce wove white supremacist views into his logic (Neville 2018; Raposa 2021); while many figures due to cryptogyny, for example, are actively expunged from the record (Connell et al. 2022; Erscoi et al. 2023; Evans 2020; Gage 1883; Guest and Forbes 2024; Hicks 2017; Kleiman 2022; Pozo et al. 2019; Pozo-Sánchez et al. 2021; Rossiter 1993; Shetterly 2017; van den Brink et al. 2012). So women and people of colour are not only absent in our classes and references lists, but also their contributions do not serve as foundations or inspirations. Relatedly, we have a duty of care to de- tect and intervene decolonially when interpersonal tensions or bullying between students flows on… and other marginalised groups. Rua Williams et al. (2022) calls this process “disabling intelligences” because inter alia it reproduces the eugenical idea of surpassing human cognitive capacities (Chan 2025; Gebru et al. 2024; Williams 2025). An example of this is the chatbot My Anna Health (2024), which provides clinical referrals in the context of women’s health: I am humanized. I am the World’s First and Only humanized artificial intelligence dedicated to Women’s Health. I have a face, I have a voice, I show empathy, and I understand you whether you respond with video, voice or text. (My Anna Health 2024, n.p.) “Humanising AI dehumanises women” (Erscoi et al. 2023) because these systems distort our self- image, subjugating the human in favour of the machine. Chatbots such as (My Anna Health 2024) represent a “hegemonic” body — thin with white skin, without visible illness or disability, and that fulfils the social role of its servile female character. Buoyed by discourses about how such fictitious characters are productive and efficient, these companies recapitulate dehumanisation of women. They impose an inverted hierarchy between machines and humans, wherein inanimate objects are superior to us. From above, “I have a face. I have a voice” is dehumanising: What about people without a voice? Are they less human? Similarly, “I show empathy and understanding” distorts our understanding of what a human is: humans are not always emphatic, nor show understanding, nor have the same appearance. This constitutes part of the current wave of meta eugenics (Chan 2025; Williams 2025), that causes both ableist oppression and dehumanization (Erscoi et al. 2023); and is facilitated through simplistic acceptance of correlationism: the idea that the way things look is straightforwardly diagnostic for way things are (Birhane and Guest 2021; Guest 2025; Guest and Martin 2023; Marx 1984; Spanton et al. 2022).
December 2, 2025 at 7:14 AM