Prof. Dr Beth Singler
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bvlsingler.bsky.social
Prof. Dr Beth Singler
@bvlsingler.bsky.social
8.2K followers 3.8K following 1K posts
Anthropologist/Geek thinking about how you think about AI & robots. Assistant Professor in Digital Religions at UZH. Bvlsingler.com. She/her. 🌈 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003256113/religion-artificial-intelligence-beth-singler
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I will never stop banging this drum! 🥁 There 🥁 is 🥁 no 🥁 AI 🥁 in 🥁 the 🥁 predictive 🥁 policing 🥁 in 🥁 Minority 🥁 Report!

Its three psychics in a paddling pool!!
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
Not a terrible spot for a bit of light reading...
I have a book chapter coming out on some of this: “AI, Religion, and Neoliberalism: From ‘Thin Pagan Religion’ to ‘Appifying’ Jesus”, in Guest, M. and Bielo, J. (eds), The Handbook of Religion and Neoliberalism, Bloomsbury
Excited to speak about religion and AI this morning at Faith Angle Europe 2025. There's a preview of my comments if you zoom in lol!
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
Authors, Beware! There's a firm called "ClaimsHero" doing aggressive social media outreach claiming to
"help" you file to get $ in the Anthropic class action. In fact, it's a bait-and-switch, they are luring authors to sign up with them, then OPTING THEM OUT of the class action so they'll get zilch.
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
It really bothers me that even though people keep dying, AI companies will not stop offering AI therapy or “friends”. You simply do not have to have your office product have mental counseling and emotional support as a function. When I buy a stapler I don’t expect it to love me.
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
In between #4 and #5 I would add-

4a: Does the world REALLY need another book?

4b: Huh, there are some interesting things here. Someone should write a book about this.

4c: Terror

4d: seemingly endless loop between 4a-4c.
Note from my notebook (2018). Still relevant.
As a discussion starter really. It also came out of a particular scheme to get arts researchers and science researchers to work together on public engagement projects at Cambridge. And I met this cool pain expert through the networking for it so we combined interests :)
We made a film on "could and should robots feel pain" back in 2017 (ugh I'm old...). Not to answer it, but to discuss different approaches. But ofc this was prior to llms being able to make such unverifiable claims tbh youtu.be/ODw5Eu6VbGc?...
Pain in the machine
YouTube video by Cambridge University
youtu.be
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
The discovery of DNA seems to have been a collaborative effort from a mixed gender group, by any reasonable account. But it has been forced into the Great Man narrative, where it doesn’t fit at all. Like Bletchley Park and so many other stories.
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
Six people died from tampered Tylenol and the company pulled 30 million bottles off the market. ChatGPT is accused of urging seven people towards suicide, and OpenAI just assures us they’re still working out the kinks. Billions in investment, zero accountability.
OpenAI faces 7 lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide, delusions
OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues.
apnews.com
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
We really are living in the timeline that spawns Weyland-Yutani and not the one that creates Starfleet.
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
OVER A MILLION USERS

DISCUSS SUICIDE WITH CHATGPT

EVERY *WEEK*

what the fuck are we DOING here
Panera’s moderately caffeinated lemonade was loosely associated with 2 deaths before it was taken off market.

This article alone has 4 examples of ChatGPT encouraging young people to commit suicide, and OpenAI’s own public stats estimate over a million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT each week.
I fully believe in the corporate death penalty and believe we would be a better world if OpenAI lost its corporate charter and was forcibly dissolved.

www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
The diagram for what Palantir does is like if Richard Scarry got super paranoid and did an Apocalypse picture book
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?

students: no AI

I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
this is the craziest thing I've read in a long time???? Meta projected that 10% of its revenue last year, $16 billion, came from scams. Meta intentionally charges the scammers MORE and knows that people who click on scams are more likely to see more of them www.reuters.com/investigatio...
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
You (a fool): The LLM is an all-knowing oracle, on its way to godlike intelligence

Me (dumber): The LLM is Indra’s Net, each fundamentally empty token a multifaceted jewel in whose surfaces the reflections of every other jewel arise in mutual interdependence

The LLM: You can eat that rock
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
Reposted by Prof. Dr Beth Singler
There are no words for how evil this is