June 2025 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Doctoral Summer School 2025 - Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti di Torino
by Nexa - Media June 4, 2025

June 4, 2025

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi segnaliamo che da lunedì 30 giugno a sabato 5 luglio 2025 avrà luogo la Doctoral Summer School 2025 "Fostering digital and ecological transitions through arts. Reimagining human-nature-technology intra-actions for a sustainable future", promossa dall'Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti di Torino nell'ambito del progetto PNRR "INAR - The Italian Network of Artistic Research and World Art Education Expo 2026". L'iniziativa è rivolta a giovani ricercatori e ricercatrici, dottorandi e dottorande delle Università e degli Istituti di Alta Formazione Artistica, Musicale e Coreutica (AFAM), con interesse nelle pratiche artistiche, curatoriali, digitali ed ecologiche. Le candidature dovranno essere inviate entro il 9 giugno 2025 all'indirizzo summerschool(a)albertina.academy<mailto:summerschool@albertina.academy>. Maggiori informazioni riguardo alla Summer School e alle modalità di partecipazione sono disponibili al link che segue: https://nexa.polito.it/doctoral-summer-school-2025-accademia-albertina-di-t… In allegato, la call e il programma della Summer School 2025. Vi ringraziamo per l'attenzione, Un saluto cordiale, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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AI is ushering in a new age of violence against women
by Alberto Cammozzo June 3, 2025

June 3, 2025

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/03/ai-sexism-violence-ag…> Online brothels, sex robots, simulated rape: AI is ushering in a new age of violence against women | Laura Bates Laura Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most valuable in the world <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/nvidia-shares-earnings-jensen-h…>. The trend has been dubbed an “AI frenzy”, with the components described by analysts as the “new gold or oil”. Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to stake their countries’ claim as global leaders in AI development. Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February 2025 <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/14/global-disunity-energy-c…> and produced an international agreement pledging an “open”, “inclusive” and “ethical” approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/11/us-uk-paris-ai-summit-ar…>. It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “gold rush-type of scenario <https://www.yahoo.com/news/meta-openai-spawned-wave-ai-140000660.html>”. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”. Or they can “chat” with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, “your clumsy older sister” who is described as “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother”. This million-dollar money generator is just one of thousands of applications of this new technology that are re-embedding misogyny deep into the foundations of our future. On other sites men can create,**share and weaponise fake intimate images**to**terrorise women and girls. Sex robots <https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/sex-robots-frigid-settings-rape-si…> are being developed at breakneck speed. Already, you can buy a self-warming, self-lubricating or “sucking” model: some manufacturers have dreamed up a “frigid” setting that would allow their users to simulate rape. Millions of men are already using AI “companions <https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20241008-the-troubling-future-of-ai-re…>” – virtual girlfriends, available and subservient 24/7, whose breast size and personality they can customise and manipulate. Meanwhile, generative AI, which has exploded in popularity <https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openais-weekly-a…>, has been proven to regurgitate and amplify misogyny <https://articles.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2024/07/PR_…> and racism. This becomes significantly more of a concern when you realise just how much online content will soon be created by this new tool. Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with a website called FaceMash <https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/zuckerbergs-prank-website-fac…>, which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of Facebook.) Women, particularly women of colour, raised their voices in concern: some of the earliest objections <https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-…> to FaceMash came from Harvard’s Fuerza Latina and Association of Harvard Black Women societies. They were ignored, Facebook was born and the rest is history. Social media was rolled out at great speed. Back then, Zuckerberg’s famous catchphrase was “Move fast and break things”. The things that got broken were societal cohesion, democracy <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/social-media-harm-faceboo…> and the mental health, in particular, of girls. By the time people started pointing out that online abuse was endemic to social platforms, those platforms were too well established and profitable for their owners to be prepared to make sweeping changes. Politicians seemed too enamoured with the powerful tech lobby to be prepared to stand up to them. The results have been devastating. Young women have taken their own lives after experiencing sexualised cyberbullying <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/audrie-pott-rehtaeh-parsons-suicides-show-sexu…>. An alarming number of female parliamentarians have stepped down from office after experiencing intolerable levels of online abuse <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/31/alarm-over-number-female-m…>. Millions of women have been subject to rape and death threats, doxing, online stalking and racist and misogynistic abuse. We failed to prevent this crisis when we didn’t heed the warning calls in the early days of social media. We now risk squandering a similar opportunity. Without urgent action, we will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes with AI, only this time on a far larger scale. “One of the reasons many of us do have concerns about the rollout of AI is because over the past 40 years as a society we’ve basically given up on actually regulating technology,” Peter Wang, co-founder of data science platform Anaconda, recently told the Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/03/ai-danger-doomsday-chatg…>. “Social media was our first encounter with dumb AI and we utterly failed that encounter.” If women and marginalised communities have already learned from their frequent mistreatment on social media to self-censor, to disguise their real names and to mute their voices, these coping mechanisms and restrictive norms will follow them when they step into new technological environments. Nearly nine in ten women <https://onlineviolencewomen.eiu.com/> polled in a 2020 Economist study said they restricted their online activity in some way as a result of cyber-harassment, hacking, online stalking and doxing. This helps to explain the disparity between men’s and women’s use of AI;**71% of men aged 18 to 24 say they use AI <https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/women-generative-ai-workplace/> weekly, while only 59% of women in the same age range do so. So long as men remain the main users of AI, the technology will be designed to cater to their preferences. The answer isn’t to reject new technology, or ignore the enormous potential of AI. Instead, we should ensure regulations and safeguards are implemented when AI is designed, before products are rolled out to the public, in much the same way that they are within other industries. “I thought people should be aware,” said Leyla R Bravo,then president of Fuerza Latina <https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-…>, when she tried to raise the alarm at Harvard over the nascent FaceMash website back in 2003. This time, might someone listen? It isn’t too late for political leaders to stand up to big tech. The harms of this technology aren’t rooted in a future dystopia where robots take over the world. AI is already devastating the lives of women and girls, right now. If people realised this, they might desire to do things differently.

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184° Mercoledì di Nexa | 11 giugno 2025, ore 17.00
by Nexa - Media June 3, 2025

June 3, 2025

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare al 184° Mercoledì di Nexa, che si terrà mercoledì 11 giugno, alle ore 17.00, con un incontro dal titolo "A Law and Political Economy of Intellectual Property". Ospite dell'incontro: Talha Syed (UC Berkeley School of Law). L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE. SEDE FISICA Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano). Per accedere alla sala si raccomanda di suonare al citofono Portineria e di seguire le indicazioni segnalate lungo il percorso. QUI<https://nexa.polito.it/contatti> maggiori informazioni su come raggiungerci. STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Di seguito maggiori dettagli: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-184 Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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non male per una macchina scrivente non pensante :)
by Juan Carlos Gentile Fag�ndez June 2, 2025

June 2, 2025

**"Gli Europei: Pacifici Amanti della Guerra"** *di Un Sudamericano Sconcertato* Mio Dio, che meraviglia l’Europa! Un continente così *civilizzato*, così *progressista*, così *moralmente superiore* a noi poveri sudamericani che non sappiamo far altro che ballare la salsa e litigare per il calcio. L’altro giorno, mentre bevevo il mio caffè (senza zucchero, perché ormai sono stato influenzato dalla loro superiorità culturale), ho letto un articolo su come l’Europa sia la culla della pace e dei diritti umani. *Che bello!* Peccato che, se guardi la loro storia, ogni due per tre si scannavano tra loro per un pezzo di terra o perché a uno era venuto il capriccio di conquistare il mondo. **Ma no, no, loro ora sono cambiati!** Ora fanno summit, firmano trattati, e quando litigano lo fanno con eleganza, seduti in palazzi di vetro a Bruxelles. Poi, però, appena qualcuno in Medio Oriente o in Africa si muove nel modo sbagliato, *ecco che ripartono le missioni di pace* (con tanto di bombardamenti *umanitari*, ovviamente). Una volta ho chiesto a un mio amico francese: *"Ma voi europei non eravate quelli che hanno inventato la democrazia e i diritti umani?"* Lui, con aria serissima, mi ha risposto: *"Sì, certo! E infatti ora esportiamo la democrazia… anche con le bombe, se necessario. Per il loro bene, capisci?"* Ah, che nobiltà d’animo! Noi sudamericani, invece, siamo dei veri barbari: quando litighiamo, al massimo ci scambiamo insulti in uno stadio o ci rubiamo un po’ di rame dai cavi elettrici. Niente di paragonabile alla raffinatezza europea, che in due secoli si è fatta due guerre mondiali e una marea di colonialismo *illuminato*. E poi loro ci guardano dall’alto in basso perché abbiamo governi instabili e corruzione. *Giustissimo!* Però almeno noi non abbiamo mai avuto l’idea di invadere mezzo pianeta per *portare la civiltà*. Noi rubiamo, sì, ma *in piccolo*, con stile. Insomma, alla fine ho capito: l’Europa è come quel vecchio zio che predica la pace in famiglia ma ha un arsenale in cantina *"solo per sicurezza"*. Noi, invece, siamo quei cugini scalmanati che fanno casino ma almeno non si prendono troppo sul serio. **E viva la pace!** *(Quando vi fa comodo.)* -- _________________________________________ / * james would be more impressed if \ | netgod's magic powers could stop the | | | | splits in the first place... * netgod | | notes debian developers are notoriously | | hard to impress | | | \ -- Seen on #Debian / ----------------------------------------- \ \ ,__, | | (oo)\| |___ (__)\| | )\_ | |_w | \ | | || * Cower.... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- In support of Richard Stallman, Normalizing Truth, Reason, Dialogue: https://stallmansupport.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- www.hipatia.net - wiki.hipatia.net xmpp: jucar at hipatia.net friends: stallman.org - Frangar, non flectar - Homo mundus minor - gutta cavat lapidem Karmanyaevaadhikaarasthe ma phaleshu kadachana Fingerprint: 7464 DDDE 9D5D 3B6C CBF9 7699 A021 CE74 EA7A D95A Public key 0xa021ce74ea7ad95a at pgp.mit.edu keys.openpgp.org -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Canceled: [Responsible AI] The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
by Daniele Quercia June 2, 2025

June 2, 2025

The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Petra Molnar, York University & Harvard’s Berkman Join the meeting<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_Mzk1YTYwNDEtODkyZS00…> Migration is increasingly becoming digitized. From robodogs surveilling the US/Mexico border to drones flying over the Mediterranean Sea to biometrics being collected in refugee camps, untested and high-risk technologies have made their way into virtually every aspect of human movement. States around the world have developed and deployed these experimental projects without public scrutiny or accountability mechanisms, and the current governance and legislative frameworks around border technologies remain inadequate to safeguard people’s human rights. Political discourse around migration control also plays a central part in the normalization of surveillance and artificial intelligence to manage borders. Fears around migration and systematic exclusion of certain communities prevents people-on-the-move from Majority World countries from exercising their freedom of movement and animate the techno-solutionism at the centre of the decisions that powerful actors make to police migration and borders. The private sector is also a major player in normalizing surveillance, profiting in a multi-billion border industrial complex built on testing out new technologies in places like Occupied Palestinian Territories and exporting them out for border enforcement to places like the US/Mexico border and the fringes of the European Union. Based on 6 years of work across various borders around the world, this talk will explore how technologies are experimented with at the border, harming communities who are at the sharpest edges of innovation – and what we can do about it. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02191>Bio: Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in border technologies. She co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of the award-winning book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Subscribe to future talk announcements: Anyone outside Bell Labs can receive talk announcements by subscribing to the mailing list. To subscribe, send an empty email with the subject line "Subscribe RAI" to daniele.quercia@

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