Dr. Casey Fiesler

information science prof at university of colorado boulder, social computing / tech ethics researcher, exceptionally minuscule tiktok star, fangirl / geek, she/her

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npub1lvdglyh5w7khvmsnj23v9qnw8772uya08anuh8lpdydd2dqwue8s7n6n7v

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cfiesler_at_hci.social@mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqs0kx50jt680ttkdcfe9gkzsfhrl09wzwhn7e7tnlskjxk4xs8wvncpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43q0k8vwe

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relay.mostr.pub

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npub1lvdglyh5w7khvmsnj23v9qnw8772uya08anuh8lpdydd2dqwue8s7n6n7v

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Last Notes

2024-09-18 13:59:15

I'm looking for/into work on older adults and AI literacy, in case folks know who is working in that area! It feels like something that may have gotten more recent attention and so is happening but not published yet. :)

2024-09-17 23:18:27

hey professor friends!
In your departments, do current graduate students ever help with graduate admissions? Does this raise concerns about applicant privacy?

2024-08-26 20:25:35

What tech ethics or policy books published in the past 2 years or so should I be adding to the list of books the students in my class can write a book review for?

2024-08-18 13:51:59

After hearing about Eric Schmidt's guest lecture in an AI class, I looked up the transcript, and yes he really did say that if a Silicon Valley entrepreneur were to "illegally steal everybody's music" they would just "hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up." Then I was curious and looked up the syllabus for the course and based on the topic schedule, the most explicit ethics topic seemed to be "opportunities and risks" for which the guest speaker was... Eric Schmidt. 😕

2024-07-03 18:21:53

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Specific example as a thought experiment: Does the fall of Chevron mean that e.g. in a copyright lawsuit, a judge could ignore the Copyright Office's guidance on human authorship and just decide that a 100% AI generated work is totally copyrightable based on their interpretation of the law?

2024-07-03 17:30:07

Law peeps, thoughts on how the fall of Chevron will impact IP? The USPTO didn’t get much deference on a lot of things already, right?

2024-06-24 14:45:39

If you think you saw me in an ad: yes, that was me. You were not hallucinating. I feel a bit awkward about the whole thing which is why I haven’t talked about it but I promise you that a gigantic electronics company did not steal my content. :) Also relatedly if you’re in the US you might spot me on local news soon.

2024-06-19 21:55:34

You would not BELIEVE the number of academia-related AI startups. I know this because I think every single one of them is emailing me to ask if I’ll do ads for them on TikTok or YouTube lol.

2024-06-14 21:05:57

okay, my favorite piece of feedback on my novel is that THREE OUT OF THREE computer scientists who have read it all caught the same mistake I made, which was making a comment about "all the semi colons" in the context of Python
I know, I know...

2024-06-05 19:41:43

In the continuing "other people think my email is their email" saga, after receiving the dozenth or so email from a vet in Pennsylvania about someone else's dog, I clicked on "unsubscribe" and it automatically just LOGGED ME INTO THIS PERSON'S ACCOUNT, showing me all of their account information, including e.g. address and phone number. All I could think of to do to "unsubscribe" was change their email address to idontknowmyownemail.

2024-05-21 12:22:44

re: Scarlett Johansson I think it's interesting that Mira Murati told NPR that they didn't pattern the ChatGPT voice off of anyone and that she doesn't even know what Johansson's voice sounds like. Because that could totally be true.
Anyone else think Sam Altman might have just asked for input into voice casting, and (after Johansson turned them down) chose the actress whose voice sounded most like hers? Which, you know... illegal? No. Creepy? Yes.

2024-05-20 16:31:33

I couldn't stop thinking about the Meta AI chatbot that made up a human experience in a parenting Facebook group - so I wrote about why online communities are for people, not chatbots. Decades of social computing research tells us that information seeking in online communities is as much about shared experiences and human connection as it is about getting an answer. Maybe generative AI shouldn't be *everywhere* doing *everything*. https://theconversation.com/ai-chatbots-are-intruding-into-online-communities-where-people-are-trying-to-connect-with-other-humans-229473

2024-04-29 17:04:58

The spreadsheet of AI ethics news isn't a research project and the categorization scheme is definitely flawed/not rigorous, but some obvious emergent categories finally bugged me enough that I did some re-mapping, especially out of the miscellaneous category. So the three new categories are Militarization, Sustainability, and Abuse. The last is essentially sexual abuse, e.g. nonconsensual intimate deepfakes and also child exploitation. I hope this continues to be useful! http://bit.ly/ai-ethics-news

2024-04-26 15:47:38

Law peeps again: I'm hearing that TikTok itself plans to sue on free speech grounds. Can someone explain to me how they would have standing? This is not my area of expertise, but I was expecting there to be 1A lawsuits with TikTok users as plaintiffs, and then TikTok itself suing on different (economic?) grounds.

2024-04-25 16:51:54

Law peeps, I know that some folks argue that Packingham isn't relevant for the TikTok ban because banning a platform instead of an individual is more like when the FCC banned a Chinese telecomm company, but like... do we really buy that? I think the holding in Packingham seems really relevant.

2024-04-05 20:37:15

On a post that has absolutely NOTHING to do with this, two people have been arguing in my comments for three days about whether spreadsheets are databases. The thread is now almost 50 comments.

2024-03-29 16:27:43

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And you know what? The other thing that just utterly floors me is that AI systems are being released without doing the kind of basic adversarial testing that JOURNALISTS would immediately think of and be fully capable of doing.

2024-03-28 22:40:46

We have a peer review crisis in computer science, and recent evidence of ChatGPT written peer reviews is just more evidence. Meanwhile, here are things I've been hearing re: benefits of gen AI:
(1) We can draft papers faster!
(2) We can do research faster for things like qualitative analysis of large data!
(3) We might not even need to run human subjects studies, since we can use AI to simulate participants!
Anyway, expect the "way too many papers being submitted" problem to get way worse.

2024-01-31 13:28:41

If I were “the most powerful person” in an industry where workers (e.g. editors) are already underpaid and concerned about their jobs and the product (i.e. writers) are very concerned about the impacts of a technology for different reasons, I probably would not tell the New York Times how excited I am about AI. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/books/penguin-random-house-nihar-malaviya.html
https://storage.googleapis.com/hci-social-storage/media_attachments/files/111/850/793/122/284/055/original/69bb03b52fd1e1d9.jpeg

2024-01-16 22:50:31

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@npub1y4n…25mf A lot of my copyright related work touches on non-commercial norms in fandom. Some of the emotional aspect I think is captured here: https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/gift-logic-labors-of-love-flourish-online-under-fandoms-social-norms

2024-01-01 14:37:54

Happy Public Domain Day! Disney's Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, is now officially in the public domain - a day many thought might never come. Because I can, I've shared the entirety of the short film on YouTube, with a voiceover of me explaining public domain in the context of our favorite corporate Mouse. :) #publicdomain #publicdomainday #steamboatwillie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnGL55VOj_4

2023-12-22 20:55:21

66% of people who work in Boulder don't live in Boulder. Me, it's me! I literally cannot afford to own a home in the city where I work. As a professor. Where the university is I'm guessing the largest employer in the city. https://bouldercolorado.gov/news/2022-boulder-valley-employee-survey-travel-findings-published

2023-12-19 20:51:47

I’m really starting to think that the Humane AI Pin is just elaborate satire. It’s not possible for a company to really be this bad at messaging is it??? I’ve seen so many ads/interviews and still have no idea what it is.

2023-12-11 20:19:14

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@npub1qag…9gyn Yeah frankly I don’t trust human judgment either.

2023-12-11 19:55:54

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@npub1qag…9gyn If it were true that it's easy tell with a certainty whether text is AI generated or not, then we would not have this problem with false positives.

2023-12-11 19:41:57

As a reminder, if you are a teacher, do not use AI detectors. This piece mirrors what I've heard from a LOT of students on social media (panicked students commenting on my AI videos, with no reason to lie). In my opinion, whatever utility you're getting out of a way to catch cheating is not worth the risk of even one false positive. Especially the potential for *systematically biased* false positives. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ai-written-homework-is-rising-so-are-false-accusations

2023-12-10 21:02:38

I looooove the amount of shock I've seen over Larian Studios announcing the top three romance choices in Baldur's Gate 3 and Astarion isn't on the list. I seriously think that we all forgot that straight men also play video games.

2023-12-05 14:47:15

George Santos doing a bunch of Cameos at $200 a pop was not on my 2023 bingo card but it probably should have been.

2023-11-29 19:17:52

Well this is fascinating. To try out my university access to DALL-E via Copilot, I decided to try the "make it more" meme (https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-make-it-more) with "CEO of an unethical tech company" (with the intention of "make them even more unethical!") but instead of an image of a hypothetical CEO of a hypothetical tech company I got this.
https://storage.googleapis.com/hci-social-storage/media_attachments/files/111/495/441/969/582/735/original/a4b3a2a7e65c4b39.png

2023-11-28 14:35:55

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Well the story about the conference organizer got even wilder. Not only did he make up fake women speakers, but seems to have also been posing as a woman programmer influencer for years...? https://www.404media.co/coding-unicorn-instagram-julia-kirsina-devternity/
In addition to how this is obviously gross in terms of outright deception, it is absolutely infuriating to know what the inevitable blowback to actual women coders on social media will be. UGH UGH UGH.
This guy deserves every ounce of blowback he gets.

2023-11-27 23:44:16

So this morning I was deep-diving into the dude who apparently added fake speaker profiles of women in tech who don't exist onto a conference website (presumably to make it seem more inclusive than it is) and now this. I mean this is basically a kind of catfishing and AI isn't necessary for creating fake people for all kinds of purposes, but I have a feeling it's still going to mean we'll see a lot more of them. https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

2023-11-09 13:48:42

A TikTok about Amazon's new $9/month medical service for Prime members has AMAZING comments (in a "laughing through your tears about the U.S. healthcare system" kind of way). A selection:
"I delayed my CPR by 3 days and got a $1 digital credit, can't wait to use it!"
"Got my liver on prime day. Even bought 'used, like new' and saved a bunch."
"I just dropped off my bloodwork at Kohl's."
"Baby came nine months early with same day delivery!"

2023-11-01 11:33:10

My department (Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder) is hiring for a tenure track Assistant Professor position, with a focus on applicants who conduct research on accessibility and design. https://jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDetail/Assistant-Professor-Information-Science/52624

2023-10-29 17:28:14

Hey AI folks! Thoughts on this? I think the details will be important… https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/27/white-house-ai-executive-order-00124067

2023-10-25 22:04:10

So you know those science communication publications that write accessible articles about research?
I got an email recently from one saying "We are interested in featuring your research in an upcoming issue of our magazine" and "Would you be available for a 10-minute exploratory phone call?"
I responded by asking what the publication's business model is.
And of COURSE the (very long) response boiled down to "we will charge you $2000 to publish this article."
What a grift.

2023-09-20 09:58:38

I was at an event yesterday with a bunch of like privacy officers and in house lawyers, and out of four or five people I happened to mention it to (in talking about my research) no one had heard of Mastodon or knew what federated social media was.
I didn’t actually find this *super* surprising but I think it’s a good reminder that this is still not a thing that most people understand or even know about.

2023-09-06 13:25:22

The comments on my women in computing videos just keep on coming, and today it was someone who says he's been in IT for 30 years and has "never, ever" met a woman who has shown any interest in computers.
I seriously didn't know how to respond except to say that it's okay, not everyone meets women. Because what other explanation could there possibly be?!

2023-09-03 16:53:04

This reminder of how many people are fooled by a photoshopped tweet screenshot (and believe some random X user without verifying) is really depressing given that we need to be convincing people that (thanks, generative AI!) if they are scrolling through social media and see an actual video of the CDC director at a press conference they absolutely cannot believe that it is real until verifying the original source of the video. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/09/02/no-theres-not-an-ebola-outbreak-at-burning-man/?sh=310308d65dd7

2023-08-29 19:41:59

Hi all! I don't know if I have any teacher friends on here (though if not maybe you know teachers!) but I'm trying to collect questions about AI (especially ethical/social implications) from kids and teenagers that I can answer. I have a feeling they will have very good questions that everyone can learn from. :) So help me out and share this with someone who might be talking to kids about this stuff? #ai #teachers https://forms.gle/61g8iSYswEZtZZGe9

2023-08-26 13:11:54

I keep thinking about how X Premium (#Twitter) has ✨MLM vibes✨ now because like:
Hey hun/bro! 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♂️🙋‍♂️ would you LOVE 💙💙💙 to make real 💰💰💰 just by doing what you’re already doing????? TWEETING!!! ✍️✍️✍️ All you have to do is get that ✅ - it will pay for itself 💵💵💵 AND MORE!!!!! Also remember only ✅ views count for that sweet revenue share 💰💰💰💰💙💙💙💙💵💰💰💰 so TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO SIGN UP!
(And yes, I know it’s not an actual pyramid scheme, but ✨vibes✨)

2023-08-16 21:14:38

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@npub1ulm…hweg just as hard to find though. google scholar always links to hein online. I end up having to google the title anyway, and often SSRN will come up but law review websites almost never do.

2023-08-16 14:04:06

Academics, I beg you. Please put copies of your published papers on your website, arxiv, whatever. Not only because it's great for the broader world beyond academia (who can't get behind paywalls at all) but it just took me 15 minutes to try to figure out how to log in to some particular database to get a copy of a paper. I don't even like the 3 minutes it takes to log into the ACM DL versus copying a title into google. Follow copyright rules but you can almost always post SOMETHING somewhere.

2023-08-13 16:34:33

This article on is an excellent deep dive on known AI harms, via profiles of women who should have been listened to long before everyone started talking about ChatGPT. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-warnings-ai-danger-risk-before-chatgpt-1234804367/

2023-08-04 15:54:40

It is August, which means that PhD admissions season is getting started! If you or someone you know is applying for #PhD programs (especially in the U.S. and especially in STEM or lab-based disciplines and double especially in computing fields), I have a whole YouTube playlist full of PhD admissions advice--because wow, is there some hidden curriculum. This post has an overview and links to the most of the videos: https://cfiesler.medium.com/phd-admissions-advice-b7a44f97417a

2023-08-04 13:50:58

As I think I've mentioned already, I'm considering starting a podcast this year. I'm well into the brainstorming stage, but I have two questions that I think if some people answered might help that stage!
(1) If you heard that I had a podcast, what would your expectation be re: what it would be about/like?
(2) What are some podcasts you like that are similar to what you might expect?
No promises yet, just curiosity and brainstorming. :)

2023-07-10 13:46:33

Ready for some social computing research with a beat you can dance to? 🪩I took this app rap from Mikey Angelo (mrgrandeofficial on TikTok) and mapped every app to a paper published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction as part of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing conference. NGL pretty proud of myself. :) And even more papers to come with #CSCW2023 in Minneapolis this October! cscw.acm.org @npub1d87…sj9t @npub17hv…hmxk @npub1px0…44n2
https://storage.googleapis.com/hci-social-storage/media_attachments/files/110/690/063/855/510/110/original/f0b040004ef58490.mp4

2023-07-06 18:00:48

Do you have a chronic health condition and post about it online? We are recruiting participants for a research study about privacy concerns and strategies. To learn more and to contact us about participating: https://internetruleslab.com/chronic-illness-study And please share with relevant communities!

2023-07-06 13:48:51

and then a 700 billion dollar company launched a social media app without the ability to add alt text to images

2023-07-01 14:25:57

Today is officially the first day of sabbatical, and no promises, but I just bought a podcast mic.

2023-05-30 22:21:47

Your weekly reminder that I'm compiling a running list of #AIEthicsNews - honestly my summary is just going to start being "more of the same." Though it's very interesting to think about how real problems are intersecting with hype.
http://bit.ly/ai-ethics-news

2023-05-25 13:31:02

peak AI hype is James Cameron thinking he needs to wait to see where real AI is going before making a new Terminator movie https://movieweb.com/james-cameron-working-on-new-terminator-movie/

2023-05-19 15:43:06

I assume this is new? ChatGPT now has a message below references that reads: "Please note that the above references are fictional and created for the purpose of this example. In a real academic paper, it is essential to use actual, relevant, and properly cited references from reputable sources in the field."

2023-05-01 14:41:30

So Mashable published a story a few days ago about Bluesky's TOS that is absolutely mind-blowing levels of wrong. Like, it cites this TOS provision and then say: "In plain English that means: we own everything you post." No it absolutely does not mean that. It says non-exclusive license right there! WTF? Like Bluesky's TOS might very well have issues, but this is not one of them. And then goes on to claim that DMCA safe harbor doesn't apply to Bluesky. ???? BAFFLED.
https://storage.googleapis.com/hci-social-storage/media_attachments/files/110/293/938/052/125/393/original/7a77261e597aff87.jpeg
https://storage.googleapis.com/hci-social-storage/media_attachments/files/110/293/944/183/452/463/original/7012d6fc76908673.png

2023-04-11 18:41:02

someone complimented my “save icon” earrings yesterday
https://storage.googleapis.com/hci-social-storage/media_attachments/files/110/181/640/770/802/130/original/f475a3f6925ddfc1.jpeg

2023-04-01 13:22:08

As someone who does work on ethical speculation, as a reminder, being future-thinking and imagining possible harms doesn't mean designing towards sentient AI or the robot wars. The point of e.g. the Black Mirror Writers Room teaching exercise is to practice speculation as a skill so that you can better think through the actual, immediate harms of your tech. Focusing too, um, long term, can really lose the plot. https://medium.com/cuinfoscience/the-black-mirror-writers-room-the-case-and-caution-for-ethical-speculation-in-cs-education-5c81d05d2c67

2023-03-31 20:46:39

Would you miss Twitter if it were gone? What would you say at Twitter’s funeral?
We are researchers at University of Colorado Boulder conducting a survey about how people think about the role of Twitter in their lives, given recent changes to the platform. If you are at least 18 years old and a current or former user of Twitter, we’d love to hear from you! (And feel free to share!) https://www.internetruleslab.com/twitter-eulogy-project