🤖 New in Big Data & Society! Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi proposes an “interviewing AI” framework—using qualitative methods to study how AI systems behave. 🔗 Read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Will Oxford disclose how much it paid (or did not pay) for this? Surely a sweetheart deal (has research money thrown in!) so OpenAI can plaster Oxford over its marketing and raid other unis’ fees, library budgets to throw into the sector’s massive inference funding chasm.

Labour cosies up to US tech firms with little thought of downsides | Heather Stewart

This is not just maths. It's a design choice, supported by benchmarks that reward false certainty. Good to see OpenAI do some of the research, but it's also a reminder that OpenAI shouldn't be relied upon to do all the research.

Claims of the novelty of AI and its potential for innovation in education always make me wince a bit because really it continues a bunch of long-running tendencies in the sector. It’s an *intensifier* rather than an innovation. Some examples… www.forbes.com/councils/for...

The real existential threat isn't AI — it's billionaires. My latest, for @theatlantic.com: www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

My new piece is up: Silicon Valley billionaires use science fiction to justify dystopia, AI overlords, space colonies, escape plans. I call this “science fiction materialized”. But radical science fiction offers blueprints for resistance + rebuilding and new worlds. untoldmag.org/silicon-vall...

"When confronted about [its] inconsistent recommendations, the model denied providing contradictory guidance, a behavior that participants described as 'algorithmic gaslighting'" - interesting and worrying experiment on "red teaming" chatbots for children and schools

NEW: Weekend News Agents No-one can be certain how transformational AI will be:to the economy, to human psychology, to the human experience. I am absolutely certain our politicians haven’t thought about it enough or begun to properly grapple with the economic, regulatory and political implications

Which best exemplifies the current state of UK HE: social media responses to Warwick's 'Beyond' branding, or social media responses to Oxford's ChatGPT Edu announcement? Discuss. Or, ask a chatbot.

Just gently again reminding anyone newly interested in critical social science and humanities research on AI in education that the resources for your lit review are available from education researchers to be built upon - a partial but still long and updating selection going back a while ⬇️

Now *this* is how to do reporting on the latest for-profit edtech-AI snake oil outfit to promise hyperaccelerated learning through fully surveillant clasrooms and teacherless schooling all the way to big investor injections of capital and raids on families' incomes sfstandard.com/2025/09/19/a...

"Frankenstein’s monster copy-paste jobs from a bunch of different places? That’s not a summary. That’s word salad." My words on how useless LLM-based AI is for writing, thinking, & qualitative research: buttondown.com/surekhadavie...

I can’t get over the idea that a party called “Labour” is going all-in on an industry that promises to destroy the value of labor. No wonder Starmer is flailing.

"Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students" - imagining a lot of staff there pretty upset about, but also it says much about OpenAI's education strategy that it's targeted Oxford as its first institutional capture in the UK www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

I wrote a response to Thomas Friedman's "magical thinking" on AI here: aiguide.substack.com/p/magical-th...

Unintentionally revealing analogy: “He compares it [ai teaching] to autonomous driving, where a computer takes over the main tasks under minimal human supervision.”

As always with Peter Kyle, the context makes it worse. He’s actually talking about how British students aren’t entrepreneurial enough. What does that even mean? Everything he says really does come from ChatGPT doesn’t it.

"Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal.”

To top off a day fighting the tendency of education tech to intensify & worsen administrative work, against the awful backdrop of the UK prostrating itself to Trump's Big AI regime, we got the email confirming the staff reductions will continue plus new "efficiency" plans with AI & automation 😭

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

The headlines — £31bn in investment, new jobs, faster medical treatments — sound almost too good to be true. What are we giving up in return? Me in @theguardian.com on today's US-UK Tech Deal: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Annnd here we are, the missing Palantir-shaped piece of the trade deal puzzle www.gov.uk/government/n...

I covered the protests in London against Trump for @wired.com. Protesters aren't convinced by the AI deal from US tech giants: They want to know what the UK is giving them in exchange for up to $45bn in investment and where the power for data centers will come from www.wired.com/story/climat...

AI hype (the vast overvaluation of its capacities) was initially useful in “boiling the frog,” ie, hand-waving a justification for mass layoffs. Now in place, it means less friction on illegal orders. The AI Coup is more or less complete. www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-a...

"What this deal makes clear is just how much the tech broligarchy is dictating the state of play. ... It is clearer than ever that the UK is not pursuing any kind of meaningfully “sovereign” tech sector ... happy to cede control of its land and public services in the search for economic growth" 😱

"Britain must burn more fossil fuels and bills must rise in order to power the robot that'll fire everyone. How else will I afford my next private island?"

Who remembers BrainCo, the "brain-reading" startup out of Harvard that ran the creepiest marketing for its school-targeted neurotech headset about 8 years ago? It's now a major Chinese brain interface "dragon" - this is a pretty wild account of BrainCo's origins and evolution hntrbrk.com/brainco/

I wish more people would call this what it is: a lie/scam to increase unpaid labour. Management know many of us won’t give crap feedback, so instead we work evenings/weekends or let other work slip. Their spreadsheet is happy, students still get decent feedback. All the burden is on the Lecturer.

New in #surveillance #cinema, Happyend, a film from Japanese director, Neo Sora, which "combines the spirit of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with Lindsay Anderson’s If." www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

This is long, but worth it. Some choice quotes: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the... >>

So my kid is training some terrible AI edtech, while the class complains (it also kept saying the kids' names out loud and the kids were super creeped out by it) and teachers apologize, and not only does no one learn -- learning is actively resisted by the platform. Cool.

"It’s time to let Grem go. But I’m not a monster – I tell the chatbot its fate. “I’m afraid I’m locking you in a cupboard,” I inform it... “Oh no,” it says. “That sounds dark and lonely. But I’ll be here when you open it, ready for snuggles and hugs.”" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

NEW on Wonkhe: Are students really that keen on generative AI? buff.ly/Of9zxgs

Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students

💛🚫🤖 No AI Gods, No AI Masters 🤖🚫💛 I am massively excited to share the backstory ACADEMIC SHENANIGANS behind our Open Letter (& so this paper below too) — and as always big thanks to my co-authors {@irisvanrooij.bsky.social & @marentierra.bsky.social}: www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/no-ai-g... 1/n

Third graders are perhaps too young to gather in the streets to chant, "Fuck the algorithm," but maybe something like, "The algorithm is a buttface" could suffice.

Unlike MOOCs and learning management systems, generative AI entered higher education at the student level. LLMs like ChatGPT essentially appeared overnight & students around the world were suddenly using them. @wayne-holmes.bsky.social on how AI is changing the classroom: www.ie.edu/insights/vid...

My colleague @thejohnsimpson.bsky.social has done a terrific deep dive into the financial links between US tech billionaires and Tommy Robinson Well worth a read observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Our open-access AIED commentary is out "Artificial Intelligence in Educational Research and Scholarship: Seven Framings" 🙏 Goerge Veletsianos, Victoria I. Marín, Stefan Hrastinski, Ahmed Tlili, Henk Huijser, Sharon Altena, Giselle Ferreira and Jason McDonald open-publishing.org/journals/ind...

Vacuous, generic and scattershot advice for incoming 1st years on the use of AI at university. Especially liking 'Chin recommends giving it class notes and asking it to generate practice exam questions.' Surely we can't be the only programme that supplies students with past & practice exams?

"Growth mindset interventions have little to no effect on academic performance" Not the first time mindset theory has been found wanting, but it'll still no doubt take *years* to get the consultants peddling it out of schools www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

“Educational technology has become, in its ontological infrastructures, increasingly centralised, less open and more powerful. Through GenAI, it is less truthful, less trustworthy and more epistemologically nihilistic.” @eam0.bsky.social & @steviegow.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🤷🏿‍♂️

(1/7) HOT off the furnace and pressed into print!!! 🔥 Costello, E., & Gow, S. (2025). Authoritarian EdTech. Dialogues on Digital Society. doi.org/10.1177/2976...

I spoke to the Irish Times for this very good and rounded piece on the real-world effects of C***GPT in the humanities classroom: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

You can now download the book on the publisher's website: press.umich.edu/Books/P/Publ... (open access of course)

"It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through [presses] managed by working academics cld offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access + subscription publishing [—] a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care"

This is why I have a deep suspicion of the "AI literacy" workshops being floated to profs by schools mainlining AI. Ed tech has co-opted "AI literacy" to mean "learn how to use our products" rather than "learn how AI works."

In this short piece, I lean on embodied cog sci to argue that we should refuse & resist llms in education (pp. 53-58) unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentV... "the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care & humility are fostered & mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions"