Rene Beekman
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renebeekman.bsky.social
Rene Beekman
@renebeekman.bsky.social
65 followers 390 following 5 posts
Artist, gallerist, product manager, former teacher, perpetual student
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Reposted by Rene Beekman
lindsaybussau.bsky.social
“Constant lying is not about making people believe a lie, but about ensuring that no one believes anything. A people who no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between good and evil: a people deprived of the power to think,”
Hannah Arendt.

Are we there yet?
November 25, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
bcmerchant.bsky.social
So these two trends—AI as smokescreen for management's ulterior motives/misplaced belief in its hype, and AI as an automation system for producing cheap knockoff art and writing (at the expense of artists and writers)—are what I think are the biggest impacts of AI on jobs so far.

More in the piece:
What’s really going on with AI and jobs?
Record-breaking layoff reports, Amazon's mass firings, and a slump in entry level employment. Is AI behind it all?
www.bloodinthemachine.com
November 13, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
hagenblix.bsky.social
I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this
An LLM is an abstraction over the status quo (or rather, the text of the status quo) that has, at its core, no other aim than producing more text that is just like the text already in existence. One result is that the dominant ideas, the dominant textual patterns of our time, are recast as “intelligence” per se. We might call the complex mass of concepts and ideas, the channels into which ideas flow often and easily, or the boundaries of what is reasonable to debate in so-called “polite society”—the dominant ideology of an age. An age’s dominant ideology tends to presuppose that the power of that age is natural; the hallmark of ideology, in this sense, is that it is easy to recognize only when it’s past its time. We may no longer think that an almighty god appointed a king to rule us, that women are naturally unfit to vote, or that sex outside of a heterosexual marriage is immoral. But at various times, to think otherwise (to think of replacing the monarchy with a republic, to affirm that women are people, or being in favor of sexual or gay liberation) was the far more difficult, even dangerous thought—if not to have, then at the very least to put in writing. Ideology, of course, is never complete, other thoughts are always possible. But ideology is easy to think, it’s what our thoughts are already marinated in. And hence, ideology will be dominant in the textual patterns of an age. Seen in this light, what is called “intelligence” in a language model, is really that—ideology as a thing that can pretend to be a person.
November 11, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
olivia.science
really nice piece on this btw from @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer
The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...
sonjadrimmer.com
October 10, 2025 at 1:19 PM