Dr. Diane Tober
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dianetober.bsky.social
Dr. Diane Tober
@dianetober.bsky.social
3.3K followers 1.5K following 160 posts
Anthropologist, Professor, author, filmmaker, examining reproductive technologies and body commodification. Author of Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them.
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dianetober.bsky.social
It's very difficult to get students to read and write, and most profs do encourage reading. what would actually make universities better is reduced trainings, technology changes that require time to learn new systems, and less administrative bloat. There are too many tasks and no time to just think.
October 16, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Dr. Diane Tober
707kat.bsky.social
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
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
October 9, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Reposted by Dr. Diane Tober
culanth.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty
I’ve spoken to white nationalists in Tennessee and Black activists in Texas – and learned about what it takes to connect across difference
www.theguardian.com
August 9, 2025 at 9:50 PM
dianetober.bsky.social
Dreadful!
August 3, 2025 at 8:09 PM
dianetober.bsky.social
I completely agree! So dammed cumbersome. Now even my email has this "copilot" that i can't turn off. I can't turn off grammar check or spell check and 9xoutof10 the "corrections" are wrong!
June 18, 2025 at 1:57 AM
dianetober.bsky.social
Thanks for having me on! It was a pleasure sharing my research with you and your audience!
June 17, 2025 at 4:30 PM
dianetober.bsky.social
I think I'm up next! lol
June 10, 2025 at 9:20 PM
dianetober.bsky.social
The blatant cheating is destroying the classroom. I'm considering now having baseline hand written essay quizzes in class, requiring students to meet at least 3X/semester to discuss their term paper research, and in class exams where i used to have open book take home exams. Sucks!
May 24, 2025 at 10:53 PM
dianetober.bsky.social
You've got the dreaded comma splice in your sentence; I hope that was intentional.
May 19, 2025 at 3:32 AM