Gabriela Femenia
Law Library Director and Associate Professor at Temple Beasley School of Law. Former medievalist and fan of archaic information technologies. She/her/hers
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaOnce again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaAcademic publishing is currently experiencing a viral spread of “zombie citations.” I tried following one to see how these references are infecting academic knowledge systems codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/t...
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaNEW: A Texas county medical examiner found that Geraldo Lunas Campos was choked to death by a guard while he was held in ICE custody earlier this month. Geraldo is the sixth person to die in ICE detention this year.
- As previously noted, it's not all online and for what is, the books don't just magically ingest themselves
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaLooking for data that the government is pulling down? We may have it backed up for you. Check our portal: portal.datarescueproject.org Know of data being taken down or worried about a data source? Let us know: baserow.datarescueproject.org/form/r7V1c44...
- I went to go look for Census data this morning and.... y'all. #econsky
- If you oppose the integration of generative AI content on Libby, I was advised by my library when I registered my disapproval that you should also send a comment within Libby itself, so Overdrive can get the feedback directly mashable.com/article/how-...
- Paraphrasing this excellent rebuttal of the denialism/Luddite/FOMO peer pressure tactic: It is not my job to help tech companies "prove" how useful their systems are. It is my job to use what I know as a librarian to help people make better decisions about this technology.
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- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaIf you’re in Minneapolis and need a place to just BE right now, Big Hill Books and Birchbark Books & Native Arts are both open and ready to welcome you with open arms.
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaAnthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI". New from me & @nannainie.bsky.social on @techpolicypress.bsky.social -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI"
- My sole quibble with this great summary of the dangers of cognitive offloading of legal work is that the tools are not, actually, more reliable for the research step than for the drafting step or the synthesis step in between www.slaw.ca/2026/01/07/t...
- Many excellent points in this piece, including "The entire world is not legible to the Internet, and thus, the entire world is not legible to LLMs."
- little-flying-robots.ghost.io/rejecting-re... We live in an age where the Internet and LLMs are encouraging ever more people to reject reality entirely. Here's my thoughts on why this is happening, and why the Terminally Online turn amongst the powerful is so dangerous.
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaRegarding United States Action in Venezuela
- This is why I keep rolling my eyes at people who insist my profession will be obsolete in (insert number of choice) years. All that information doesn't ingest itself, you know.
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaClosing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
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- Reposted by Gabriela Femenia"universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry that exploits students+faculty as data mines frenzy w/o consulting their faculty, collecting empirical data on whether gen AI is pedagogically useful, or pausing to inquire about the long-term impact" www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaGrading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaFrom the Washington Post: All library grants reinstated at Institute of Museum and Library Services. Read more about the great news: www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/1... But the fight isn't over. We need to tell Congress to #FundLibraries: app.oneclickpolitics.com/campaign-pag... #ForOurLibraries
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaNEWS: The Institute of Museum & Library Services has restored ALL previously canceled federal grants to libraries, following a ruling by a federal judge in Rhode Island last month. This is a massive win for libraries & communities in every state & territory! Learn more: www.ala.org/news/2025/12...
- Really interesting take on what the AI overlords might actually be after, if they don't genuinely believe their techno-feudalist Dune Terminator fever dreams www.chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-r...
- Went down a rabbit trail yesterday wondering why a mashup of Silver Springs and Piano Man was all over social media and discovered fun facts like Stevie Nicks' having given her mother rights to the song to provide her income parade.com/news/lindsey...
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaSolange Knowles’ Saint Heron has launched a free digital archival library of literature by Black and brown authors, poets, and artists. Readers can borrow rare and out-of-print books for up to 45 days
- "It doesn't work but buy it anyway or we'll tank the global economy" is at least honest, I guess www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
- This had increasingly been my experience: students not knowing how to establish a thesis, locate and analyze relevant sources, and support that thesis through those sources. There's only so much librarians can remediate without a basic foundation ripslawlibrarian.wordpress.com/2025/10/23/g...
- Is it just me or are there Winchester Mystery House vibes around certain public works projects?
- LLMs are not search engines. LLMs are not search engines. Rinse, repeat.
- I'm glad my alma mater finally found its spine
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- In my ongoing efforts to detoxify my commute listening, this morning's episode of #pchh was both a fun listen and question. My nominees: Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, The Who's Baba O'Riley, and There She Goes (both The La's original and the Sixpence None the Richer cover). www.npr.org/2025/10/09/n...
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- This is the advice I consistently give people about trying AI: use something you know very well already, so you can actually determine the quality of the output for yourself, and get some idea of how the sausage is being made
- Shame clearly isn't enough; there should be more sanctions
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- Yesterday I had the singularly GenX satisfaction of playing one 80s song on Apple Music, and then correctly guessing what else the algorithm would supply based on shared characteristics. I may have to make a mix tape for old times' sake next.
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- Shocked, I tell you.
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- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaYou know what else is being affected by the tariffs on parcels worth less than $800? International interlibrary loan. I'm hearing reports of libraries overseas that won't lend to the US anymore. (That's in addition to the libraries here that have shut down their ILL b/c of lost IMLS funding.)
- The whole thread, and the cited Guardian article, is a must-read but this is the heart of everything.
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- It is one of the tragedies of my academic life that social media was not around when I was a medievalist grad student so I could be the one to go viral with the manuscript memes
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- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaHow many times, in how many contexts, from how many internal and external researchers, or from how many CEO's are people going to have to receive this message before they believe it: "Hallucinations" are an inherent part of the large language model architecture. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Do not use a spicy autocomplete tool to do a librarian's job.
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaAdam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
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- Leges sine moribus vanae share.inquirer.com/KRn8IY
- It is one of my GenXiest qualities to be suspicious of that tone and to immediately assume insincerity and ulterior motive.
- Spare a thought for whoever at LC suddenly became the Internet Person of the Day.
- It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.
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- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaZuckerberg farted out some nonsense today, and since most media outlets refuse to report critically any time a tech CEO offers them some a pseudoserious press release, I've decided to do it for them. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/7/30/how-to-read-an-ai-press-release
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- "Spicy autocomplete" is my new favorite
- "So many intelligent people don’t seem to remember how much text LLMs have absorbed, including thousands of sci-fi stories about conscious robots and such things." substack.com/home/post/p-...
- a) No b) If people are trying to use it that way, it's because Google search has been, as Cory Doctorow described, "enshittified" to the point of creating desperation for something that does what Google used to www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
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- Guess I’ll just be reposting this every term for the rest of my life
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- Call me crazy, but someone who has active contempt for the judiciary should probably not be elevated to it.
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- There were always signs I would be happier as a librarian than an academic historian, but the real nail in the coffin was how much more frustrated I am by not knowing everything about everything than I am about not knowing everything about a specific thing.
- An excellent defense of both historians and archivists in the age of LLM hype
- "Cognitive debt" is a useful concept arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
- Ya don't say www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
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- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaWhen billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus
- Having come of age in Pete Wilson's California, Gavin's better than that, but having also watched Gavin since his mayor days, I'm not shedding any tears for the rapid unscheduled disassembly of his national ambitions either
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- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaA tiny but wild snapshot of the current chaos
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaDid you know state constitutions can be even more protective of our rights than the US Constitution? We’ve asked an expert from each state to dive into their constitution, narrate its history, identify its quirks, and summarize its most essential components for our readers. Learn about yours here:
- Reposted by Gabriela FemeniaInternational students add $44 billion to the US economy, annually. www.aau.edu/newsroom/lea...
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- This is another great illustration of how you should use what you already know well to evaluate for yourself the usability of LLMs
