I just received a lovely email from Ricky Crano, who is a UC Irvine humanities lecturer and Gen AI critic.
Their academic profile is here:
https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/rickycrano
Ricky told me they learned about our group from Brian Merchant’s new blog post about us on his Blood In The Machine blog:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/hundreds-of-workers-mobilize-to-stop
https://web.archive.org/web/20250629120551/https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/hundreds-of-workers-mobilize-to-stop
I wanted to cover Brian’s blog about us as well. And I didn’t want to keep cluttering our homepage with more and more links. So this blog post here is killing two birds with one stone!
(We got lots of donations which were probably the result of Brian’s blog! Tomorrow I will try to muster up the spoons and personally thank each new donor via email. While I’m at it, here’s our PayPal link https://paypal.me/StopGenAI and here’s where you can get $10 USD per year webmail: https://stopgenai.com/get-your-stopgenai-com-email-account/)
With that out of the way, I’d like to cover a bit about Ricky’s work that they shared with me.
Here are two academic events that Ricky worked in recently:
The AI Paradigm: Between Personhood and Power, May 23–May 24, 2024
University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine
https://uchri.org/events/the-ai-paradigm-between-personhood-and-power
https://web.archive.org/web/20241112025858/https://uchri.org/events/the-ai-paradigm-between-personhood-and-power/
“In the commercial sector, artificial intelligence has acquired significant traction as a marketing device, an investment strategy, and a suite of tools for business process outsourcing. For scholars in the humanities and social sciences, artificial intelligence is, as Kate Crawford (2020) observes, ‘a two-word phrase onto which is mapped a complex set of expectations, ideologies, desires, and fears.’ This symposium invites explorations of AI as a cultural, discursive, and epistemic ‘paradigm’ which collects a loosely knit network of concepts and propositions, images and fantasies, methods and arguments, artifacts and techniques. Through ongoing advances in computational power and troublesome techniques of data harvesting and exploitation, the AI paradigm marks historically and culturally specific transformations in personhood, social relations, labor processes, environmental sensibilities, and resource extraction. In this crucial moment, when various industries are hyping the disruptive implications of AI, we must understand it as a social technology disseminating both new and old forms of power and domination.”
By using my human meat brain for analysis, it sounds like the event had a neutral to negative tone regarding Gen AI.
And here’s the other event…
DHX Conference: Network Ecologies Reimagined: Internets, Environments, and Cultures, May 16-17 2025
https://web.archive.org/web/20250517223352/https://humanities.uci.edu/events/dhx-conference-network-ecologies-reimagined-internets-environments-and-cultures
“In an age of omnipresent climate crisis and endless inflation of speculative technology—both culturally and financially—the need for a better co-understanding of networked computing and the environment could hardly be more pronounced. The internet has reshaped the ways in which we think about the environment, affording new opportunities for communicating both the ecological sublime and climate catastrophe seemingly in real time. At the same time, the internet is reshaping the material world through Big Tech firms’ ever growing resource and infrastructure requirements to continue their projected infinite growth. ‘Network Ecologies Reimagined’ will bring to campus a wide range of scholars working across, between, at the fringes of, or adjacent to humanities disciplines as they chart the planetary limits of computation and interrogate the complex environmental entanglements of everyday life in an age of constant digital connection. Co-sponsored by DHX, Film and Media Studies, and the Environmental Humanities Research Center.”
Again, I think that event probably had a neutral to negative tone.
I suppose I only say “neutral,” because like most academia related writing, the style is more objective and less emotional. That’s not really the fault of any of the academics involved, it’s just a part of the cultural expectations of academia.
I’m still for now a cybersecurity professor at the Open Institute of Technology, but if I was writing personally, my tone would be like this:
“The evil tech oligarchs are forcing the massive torment nexus Gen AI machine on us. It’s rotting people’s brains, destroying the planet, and eliminating hundreds of millions or billions of livelihoods. Fuck these assholes!”
If I was writing for OPIT or SecureNation or any of the tech companies I’ve ever written for (see my portfolio at https://kimcrawley.com), I’d be expected to write more like this:
“Silicon Valley CEOs are enthusiastically promoting Gen AI and implementing it in a wide variety of client side and SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. Users complain that disabling new Gen AI features is very difficult or impossible. I have professionally founded concerns about people’s neurocognitive development, environmental sustainability, and the economic survival of hundreds of millions or billions of people. Read my findings here!”
Ricky also wrote an extensive and thoughtful review of “Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to A New Era of Human Learning” which can be read here: https://criticalai.org/2025/06/05/sneak-preview-review-jose-antonio-bowen-and-c-edward-watsons-teaching-with-ai-a-practical-guide-to-a-new-era-of-human-learning/
Anyway, Ricky obviously does really great work and gives me some optimism. Because my colleagues at OPIT are deeply poisoned by the Gen AI Kool-aid. Let’s just say, I don’t like them at all.
Canadian neoliberal trash paper that masquerades as being “left,” The Toronto Star, used to have a “Darts and Laurels” section on its editorial comment page. Ricky deserves a laurel. Now here comes my dart…
“I can’t make my own art, I’m disabled and trans!”
Jua van Nyl on Bluesky posted a comic that promotes environmentalism. What’s really ironic is Gen AI is massively environmentally destructive, and yet van Nyl used DALL E to “make” their comic.
I could very easily clock it as being “made” by Gen AI…
Text from my Bluesky post at https://bsky.app/profile/stopgenai.com/post/3lstsf45pws2y:
‘My bosses at OPIT think I need special AI software to determine if a student is using Gen AI.
Meanwhile, I can spot Gen AI “art” and English words a mile away. With my human meat brain.
Red flags:
Orangey colour palate
That particular cartoon “style”
The DALL E comic text “fonts”‘
Of course, van Nyl had to clap back. So I clapped back at their clap back…
https://bsky.app/profile/stopgenai.com/post/3lsttgsoyqk2y
“I’m disabled and trans, so I can’t make my own art! I must use the planet killing torment nexus and burn down an entire forest for my environmentalist message!” 🙃🙃🙃
I am disabled, I’m autistic and ADHD. Executive dysfunction cripples me sometimes, it sure is impacting my productivity in writing my book lately. Nonetheless, I’m actually writing my Digital Safety in a Dangerous World book, and I actually write these blog posts, and I actually do my own art when I have the spoons. When I lack the spoons to make art, I either use a public domain image, ask someone to make something, or give it a break and make my own art later. (For the featured image of this blog post, I went to DuckDuckGo image search with Duck.ai turned OFF, and searched for images of “school” that are public domain. Easy peasy!)
But I must attest, I’m cis.
Alas, my new friend Vicky Moto is trans. Here they are on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/vickybunbun.bsky.social
Here’s her GoFundMe to help her and her partner Liz move to a state that’s less hostile to trans people: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-liz-and-vicky-move-to-minneapolis
And Vicky Moto makes awesome very grassroots indie Bun Bun and Bloonky comics, like so:
I personally have a copy of Bloonky Saves The World. It’s awesome! A lot of very bad people get violently assaulted by Bloonky Gator! It’s very cathartic! But it’s not for children or adults who are easily offended by large gator genitalia or violence to bad people.
Please DM Vicky Moto to buy her work. Again, her Bluesky account is here: https://bsky.app/profile/vickybunbun.bsky.social
Anyway, this is what she wrote about Jua van Nyl’s apparent inability to make environmentalist art without ironically using the planet killing plagiarism machine:
“Anybody can make art, no matter what disability you have. Saying you’re disabled is a piss poor excuse for using ai. Ai is a soulless means to an end for people with no creativity or regard for the environment.”
https://bsky.app/profile/vickybunbun.bsky.social/post/3lstua5jkrs22
Don’t let the motherfuckers use your marginalized identity as being trans, gay, disabled, nonwhite, or anything else as an excuse for Gen AI. Be badass like Vicky Moto!