Hi David, It's a bit of a stretch to compare my email responding to Martin Berg's post about his blog that is co-authored with AI to the vicious attacks on Jason Arday. I didn't accuse Martin Berg of wrong-doing - he's done nothing wrong. I appreciate his transparency and ideas about AI use in his email to the list, and suggested he be similarly transparent on his blog. I read you as saying you don't want people accusing other people on the list as having used AI to generate their posts? I didn't do that: my comments about his "AI voice" were in response to his explicitly stated goal of writing with AI to develop an AI voice. But perhaps we should have guidelines about this too, if the mailing list guidelines are being updated anyway. In any case we need to be able to have open discussions about AI use in academic writing and communication. That includes allowing room for disagreements. Surely preemptively silencing any critique of AI use would, to borrow your words, "reinforce the surveillance and persecution atmosphere academia seems to be living in these days"? I'll be happy to read posts to the list about what good things might come out of experiments like Martin's. Jill Sent from Outlook for Mac From: David Carrillo-Rangel <david.c.rangel@gmail.com> Date: Saturday, 17 October 2026 at 10:36 To: Jill Walker Rettberg <Jill.Walker.Rettberg@uib.no> Cc: Martin Berg <martin.berg@mau.se>; air-l@lists.aoir.org <air-l@lists.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Re: Slightly Uncanny, a blog that reads AI sociologically You don't often get email from david.c.rangel@gmail.com. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification> Dear all, I hope you don’t mind if I add a few thoughts to this conversation. I find Martin’s experiment interesting. It is a bit uncanny the idea of a machine trying its own autoethnography, and I believe questions about authorship and knowledge production with AI or AI assisted writing are necessary. I certainly think transparency about the use of AI is needed and the blog should explain how its texts are produced. But I’m not sure trying to find an “AI voice” is the best direction for this mailing list. AI is already part of the academic environment, do not get me started on how its use is pushed on to entrepeneurs by some institutions, so I don’t think we need to discuss whether it might be present in a Email adressed to this list. I’m especially worried about what this kind of scrutiny will do to people whose writing may be unusual for other reasons too, there are already examples of people being accused of using AI because their style is different or because they cannot afford a professional proof reader and their first language isn’t English. So, intersectionality once more. I do not think I need to remind anyone about the case of Jason Arday at Cambridge. I think his case calls for serious reflection on what happens when questions about someone’s work become judgements about them too, as just happened here. If academia is to remain a place where people feel safe enough to ask difficult questions (and sometimes uncomfortable ones too) then the way these conversations happen matters as much as what is being asked or concealed or cheated. Not avoiding criticism or giving up on academic standards but quite the opposite. It means making room for disagreement without creating an environment in which every odd choice of word becomes suspect. We have reach a level in which students discuss how to humanise their texts instead of the task they have been assigned. This is a huge problem. I would much rather see a discussion about what experiments like Martin’s can do for research, what they cannot do and how transparency and accountability play a part into them and their distribution and public engagement. Finally, one of the reasons I participate in this list is to study how the far right uses AI. From that angle I’m increasingly worried that radical positions in either direction, uncritical embrace of AI or categorical rejection, reinforce the surveillance and persecution atmosphere academia seems to be living in these days. Best wishes, David Pd. This text has been corrected used Grammarly which now introduced an AI feature, because I am not a native English speaker. Sent from my iPad On 17 Oct 2026, at 09:27, Jill Walker Rettberg via Air-L <air-l@lists.aoir.org> wrote: Thanks for explaining how the blog is written. I clicked the link and it doesn’t seem to be made clear on the blog itself. You should definitely be transparent about it there. Also, both the blog and your email to the list have a very easy to recognise AI voice, which I guess you're probably happy with, but you should be aware that it affects how people will read your words, just as it would affect reception if you wrote everything in ALL CAPS or wrote your blog in the style of Shakespeare. AI-generated or AI-assisted writing, and even "light grammar edits" by AI, also affects the content of your writing. I recommend reading up on this, e.g. in these articles: Abdulhai, Marwa, Isadora White, Yanming Wan, Ibrahim Qureshi, Joel Leibo, Max Kleiman-Weiner, and Natasha Jaques. “How LLMs Distort Our Written Language.” arXiv, March 18, 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18161. (or watch this 43 min video of presentation of this paper<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnDQj8w5uOg> - much easier to follow than the computer science style language of the paper) Rettberg, Jill Walker. “LLMs Are Metaphor Machines: Orbital Argumentation, Misaligned Citations, and Scientific Fabrication in AI-Generated Academic Papers.” AI & Society, 2026. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03310-4. John Gallagher's explanation of how LLMs love of lists makes their output harder for readers to parse is also really useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHRs6IsXpL8 Jill Jill Walker Rettberg Professor, Co-Director Center for Digital Narrative<http://uib.no/en/cdn>, University of Bergen Fellow of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Leader of AI STORIES<https://www.uib.no/en/cdn/169806/erc-wants-see-what-shapes-stories-ai-tells-us> (ERC-AdG; 2024-2029) and Machine Vision in Everyday Life<https://www.uib.no/en/machinevision/> (ERC-CoG; 2018-2024) Blog and newsletter: http://jilltxt.net - https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Jill.Walker.Rettberg ________________________________ From: Martin Berg via Air-L <air-l@lists.aoir.org> Sent: Saturday, 17 October 2026 05:32:32 To: air-l@lists.aoir.org <air-l@lists.aoir.org> Subject: [Air-L] Slightly Uncanny, a blog that reads AI sociologically Dear all, Much has been said lately about what we share with AI, what we delegate to it, and who answers for what it then does in our name. Some of us, perhaps many and myself included, are now facing the last day of the conference in Mexico City. Luckily I have a fancy umbrella. It also seems a good moment for a slightly sheepish note about an experiment of my own that sits right inside those questions. Slightly Uncanny<https://www.slightlyuncanny.com> is a blog that reads AI sociologically. A new post appears every day, each day of the week with its own form: essays, thought experiments, field notes, a lexicon, near-future scenarios, a Saturday long read with an audio version and a Sunday supplement. The posts start from my own research and from voice notes I record, and a language model does much of the drafting. On Mondays the machine also writes under its own name, in a series of machine autoethnography where it reads its own output and asks what it can and cannot know about itself. So the machine is put to work here as a thinking lab, possibly a rather bad one, and possibly the whole thing is just a slightly odd idea. Whether the writing is mine, the machine's or something in between is a question the blog keeps open on purpose. Readers on this list might find a way in through The Letter Against the Machine<https://www.slightlyuncanny.com/long-read/the-letter-against-the-machine/>, on the open letter against generative AI in reflexive qualitative research, or The Sentence I Do Not Write<https://www.slightlyuncanny.com/machine-autoethnography/the-sentence-i-do-not-write/>, where the model reads its own post summaries. If you would rather not visit the site, you can sign up for The AI week<https://www.slightlyuncanny.com/about/#sunday-letter>, one email every Sunday with the week's posts. Comments, objections and suggestions are very welcome, on or off the list. Best wishes, Martin Berg -- Martin Berg, PhD Professor | Technology and Society, Malmö University Director, Digital Work Futures Research Lab Adjunct Professor (Research), Monash University (Emerging Technologies Research Lab) martin.berg@mau.se<mailto:martin.berg@mau.se> | +46 40 665 80 60 Profile: https://mau.se/en/persons/martin.berg DWF Lab: https://mau.se/dwf LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/profberg/ [External email] Make sure you recognize the sender's email address before you click links, open attachments, or get involved in financial transactions. Contact IT-support BRITA if you have any questions. _______________________________________________ The To unsubscribe send an email to air-l-leave@lists.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/