Thoguhts Of Life—Ive replaced evero screen in my goon cave w/ a diff. translation of the Epic Of Gilgamesh. My mind has become rather Honed

In case anyone was wondering how these tools are being used, now AI companies are directly advertising AI detectors to students as a tool for making sure their AI-written paper doesn't get flagged by AI detectors.

The latest iteration of the "global antiquity" conversation. Lots of enthusiasm and lots of questions, both substantive (what *is* "global antiquity") and programmatic (how do we do it?). I find all of it energizing!

Once again, Kanan Makiya's "The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein's Iraq" remains a key text for understanding the aesthetics of the Trump era.

Has anyone investigated the relationship between college costs, the proliferation of scholarships with high GPA requirements, and grade inflation? (Also relevant: student reluctance to challenge themselves or take classes in unfamiliar topics)

All repositories of digital text will eventually be sold as AI training data. Every gatekeeper has their price and AI companies are willing to pay ridiculous sums. They're also going to start buying up books. The only way for your words to not be used to train LLMs is to never write anything down.

Even Neo-Babylonian Uruk had that one person feeding stray cats.

As someone who routinely marks over 100 essays in a two-week window while also teaching four classes, doing service and committee work, and working on publications, I don't see why doing this requires an AI assistant.

if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities

Today was (not) a good day to be teaching about the Gracchi.

Seeing a lot of discourse again about the decline of the academic discipline of religious studies. I suspect an underdiscussed cause of this decline is to be found in this chart:

I've peer reviewed three journal articles this calendar year and two of them were written at least in part by AI.

In case there's any doubt that my 2.5 year old is a professor's son, after visiting my workplace this week he later said that he saw "Gilgamesh and the Minotaur"going out of my office.

If you believe Anthropic may have downloaded your book(s) from LibGen or PiLiMi, please visit www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com to provide your contact information to Class Counsel.

I forgot how much fun it is to teach a course about Rome!

Add to the "jobs I interviewed for and am now glad I didn't get hired for" pile. But also, OLLU, a Catholic, Hispanic-serving institution in San Antonio, TX, is cutting the Spanish major? Hard times indeed...

YouTube history is now full of channels posting AI-generated videos and automated comments on each others' channels to drive up ad revenue. At some point, we're going to have to re-institute gatekeepers over publishing & film, right? Surely advertisers and consumers will demand it. Web 2.0 is done.

My main professional organization, @medievalacademy.bsky.social, has just pub'd a statement about the use of AI in its journal. Basically, DON'T! "AI tools cannot take ethical or legal responsibility for their output or enter into legal agreements." www.medievalacademy.org/page/AIPolicy #MedievalSky

We're reading Hobsbawm's classic "The Machine Breakers" in my historiography seminar today and this seems like an especially timely reminder in the age of AI:

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

My prediction that UNC would spent $10 million/year on Bill Belichick and get the same 6 or 7 wins that they could have gotten with a coach who cost 1/8th of that amount is looking pretty good at the moment.

Fascinating new paper on botanical remains recovered from a Philistine shrine at Tell es-Safi/Gath, which shows the Philistines were using the chaste tree, crown daisy, scabious, and poison darnell, all known from ritual use in later Greek temples. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It sure feels difficult right now to hold to the view that "decline" isn't real and that ancient polities merely "transformed," doesn't it?

Shocking piece of local news today as the TBI announced that west TN folk hero Sherriff Buford Pusser (of "Walking Tall" fame likely murdered his wife Pauline in 1967. Pusser blamed organized crime, and the killing was a big part of his self-mythology. share.google/XbLQg350nRFr...

A whole lot of foreign policy with regards to Palestine, as well as domestic policy in Israel, seems to be predicated on the assumption that Mahmoud Abbas, who turns 90 in November, will live forever.

This is excellent on the risk of permanent knowledge loss from the failure to maintain institutions. I've had an essay on the 21st century desire to forget the past floating around partially formed in my head for a while. Maybe this will inspire me to finish it.

I've spent a lot of time lately uninstalling AI widgets that mysteriously installed themselves into my PC, browser, etc.

In Today's Adventures in Print-on-Demand, my copy of Eckstein's Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome turned out to be a biography of Walter Benjamin on the inside? ???

Ando's work has highlighted how bad we are at defending the humanities. Eg, "humanities classes are cheap to offer and more than pay for themselves." Bro, THEY KNOW. That's why they want to double your classes and cut half your faculty. So they can take even more of that money for other stuff.

Universities are bad at being VC/hedge funds, exhibit #234: "From 2013 to 2023, UChicago’s endowment returned just 7.48% annualized, versus 12.8% for the stock market and 10.8% for Ivy League schools." Apparently in part due to losing tens of millions in crypto. stanfordreview.org/uchicago-los...

My students' textbooks look like they were printed on a $50 early 00s inkjet printer. (2019 print run on the left, recent print-on-demand run on the right)

We really need to complain louder about how the quality of printed books has declined and the ubiquity of low-quality print-on-demand copies that publishers are selling at the same price as the original print run. Doesn't seem like most consumers have figured it out yet.

Cicero on Cato: "He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato's Republic rather than Romulus' cesspool." The shade, my dude. The shade.

How much of college administrators' rush to embrace AI is driven by the legal office advising them that they won't be able to cost-effectively defend the university against students & their parents suing after they're academically disciplined for using AI?

In case anyone finds it a useful example, here's my AI policy this semester:

Universities do marginal revenue analysis all the time to inform decisions about what to cut. Dept brings in lots of grants? + Dept has lots of students on scholarship? (very common for humanities departments) - Small class sizes? (foreign lang) - Not just about FTE, faculty salaries & facilities.

Lots of people are reading the Ando article and saying "See? The humanities are cheap to offer!" But that's not the point. The problem in the eyes of admins isn't that the humanities don't cost a lot of money. The problem is that the humanities don't *make* a lot of money.

Study confirms what I teach my World Civ 1 students in the first few weeks of class.

I'm not going to do it because I don't have tenure, but someone could write a biting Czesław Miłosz-inspired typology of faculty responses to AI.

This Ando article makes one wonder if the modern research university has run its course - so much has moved in a direction which is at odds with the educational mission of higher education. Maybe it's time to separate universities from tech research institutes? www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

Yesterday's UChicago email was so enraging that I feared I was being trolled. But nope, it is all fleshed out in this excellent piece published by Clifford Ando. The University of Chicago should be ashamed. Many thanks to Prof. Ando for his willingness to speak up. www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

I found a human skull. Fully articulated lower mandible, no postcranial remains.

Watching this happen in real time for a technology with few use cases, no clear road to profitability, and fundamental structural limitations that mean it will never be able to do the things its creators claim as their goal has been absolutely insane.

BTW in this class for 2nd year history majors we read Engels, Hobsbawm, Butterfield, Ibn Khaldun, Turchin, Laurel Ulrich, Pierre Nora, Braudel, Voegelin, and Lyotard. Challenge your students and they'll rise to the occasion!

Going hard with the aesthetics for the sophomore historiography seminar this year:

Foreign languages are the bellwether of the humanities because they're hard and they don't scale. Their difficulty puts off anxiety-ridden students who think struggle is something to be avoided or who believe a high GPA is everything. And technology claims to make the need to know them obsolete.

"Is there language teaching we can do via ChatGPT?" is not a question that any university that charges north of $50k/yr should be asking.

Perhaps the biggest faulty assumption underlying the quest for AGI is that all knowledge can be reduced to information, and can therefore be represented as a string of 1s and 0s.