Sam Forbes
@samhforbes.bsky.social
2K followers 630 following 87 posts
Assoc Prof in Psych at Durham Uni. Infancy, word learning and cognition. Sometime cellist and conductor.
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Reposted by Sam Forbes
teruniahamat.bsky.social
Excited to share my first PhD article, published in Scientific Data 👉 rdcu.be/eIRqD

We present the Shared Book Reading Corpus: 44 caregiver-infant dyads, 3 camera views (headcams + overview), speech transcriptions & developmental measures.

Access on Databrary for discovery & reuse! ✨

#OpenScience
Reposted by Sam Forbes
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Check this out!
🌟 👇 👍 🧪
psyarxivbot.bsky.social
Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists: https://osf.io/dkrgj
samhforbes.bsky.social
Love this news! congrats!
Reposted by Sam Forbes
andrew.heiss.phd
Weird ggplot thing that got me this week with the update to 4.0 - it supports new ink and paper arguments (www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09... ) and they've changed how transparency works! If you a transparent bg, you can control it with theme_*() now #rstats
library(ggplot2)

# Doesn't work anymore!
ggplot(data = mtcars, aes(x = hp, y = mpg)) +
  geom_point() +
  theme_minimal()
ggsave("not-transparent.png", bg = "transparent")


# This works!
ggplot(data = mtcars, aes(x = hp, y = mpg)) +
  geom_point() +
  theme_minimal(paper = "transparent")
ggsave("yes-transparent.png")
Reposted by Sam Forbes
andreaeyleen.bsky.social
Ode to the original language model, or:
Give me literally Anything* instead of Large Language Models (LLMs)
*(no predictive coding either!)

By Lady Byronadrea LLMartin 1/n
Reposted by Sam Forbes
tjheffernan.bsky.social
It would be really nice if academic institutions and governments pushing "AI is the future" stopped buying the hype and admitted they were conned, so we can get back to thinking through useful solutions to world problems.
abeba.bsky.social
"Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2%" 😶

I often wonder how these corps would have turned the world upside down if genAI was actually accurate and useful. they've lost their minds over shoddy and mediocre tools

www.theverge.com/news/787076/...
Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.
www.theverge.com
samhforbes.bsky.social
Ah I had been hoping to run one (combined with some other stuff) for dev psych but nothing in the books at the moment.
Reposted by Sam Forbes
psychologyuea.bsky.social
Don’t miss it!
𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞: 𝐀 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞
Organised by the Diversity in Developmental Science Network, featuring 𝐃𝐫.𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚 𝐀𝐧𝐞𝐣𝐚 as a panellist.
📝 Registration: forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...
samhforbes.bsky.social
That’s where it matters! I’m ok thanks - hope you are too? In Durham for the last few years!
samhforbes.bsky.social
god me too… We’re young though right?
Reposted by Sam Forbes
tjheffernan.bsky.social
Deleted...should have done it ages ago
hystericalblkns.bsky.social
If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.
The new TOC from academia dot edu. 

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.
Reposted by Sam Forbes
dalmaijer.bsky.social
Woah! Amazing PhD positions on children as agents of cultural evolution with one of the foremost experts on the topic.
sheinalew.bsky.social
@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...
Fees and Funding - Durham University
www.durham.ac.uk
Reposted by Sam Forbes
sheinalew.bsky.social
@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...
Fees and Funding - Durham University
www.durham.ac.uk
Reposted by Sam Forbes
maddipow.bsky.social
Wrote this on the train home from Metascience. Can’t quite believe this one needed saying, but I really think that if conversations about research integrity and open science don’t take academic bullying seriously, we’ll keep perpetuating the same system that science reform was trying to change.
Reposted by Sam Forbes
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 Sam Forbes
anthonymoser.com
I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.
I Am An AI Hater
I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.
anthonymoser.github.io
samhforbes.bsky.social
I find these things annoying but so valuable for my own understanding, and confidence in the procedure
Reposted by Sam Forbes
olivia.science
Journalists have consistently shown they are morally bankrupt on AI. Depressing
samhforbes.bsky.social
We are always looking for interested reviewers! As with all reviews you can limit yourself to talking about the areas you are more comfortable commenting on. Definitely appreciate the offer!
samhforbes.bsky.social
Oh yes that would do the trick. The bot looks for it in main, but we can tell the bot to look elsewhere as well!
samhforbes.bsky.social
You can have it not on the main branch if that's helpful for CRAN purposes?
Reposted by Sam Forbes
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
💫 Just out! A tour de force by my colleague @olivia.science, new paper 📝:

What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? 🧮 ⏰ 🧠

Keywords: AI; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; ANN; technology; cognition; human-centred AI

Link to the paper on arXiv: lnkd.in/e9nHGkMK 1/n
Abstract: 

While it seems sensible that human-centred artificial intelligence (AI) means centring “human behaviour and experience,” it cannot be any other way. AI, I argue, is usefully seen as a relationship between technology and humans where it appears that artifacts can perform, to a greater or lesser extent, human cognitive labour. This is evinced using examples that juxtapose technology with cognition, inter alia: abacus versus mental arithmetic; alarm clock versus knocker- upper; camera versus vision; and sweatshop versus tailor. Using novel definitions and analyses, sociotechnical relationships can be analysed into varying types of: displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. Ultimately, all AI implicates human cognition; no mat- ter what. Obfuscation of cognition in the AI context — from clocks to artificial neural networks — results in distortion, in slowing critical engagement, pervert- ing cognitive science, and indeed in limiting our ability to truly centre humans and humanity in the engineering of AI systems. To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive science; sociotechnical relationship; cognitive labour; artificial neural network; technology; cognition; human-centred AI