A look into how AI in the workplace is going, courtesy of Ask a Manager.

So which politician is calling for the dismantling of the probably illegal database that ice & this government is collecting biometric data of protesters?

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

You could actually structure your moral code around the idea that law enforcement doesn't exist to execute people. You don't have to create perfect victim narratives, you can just refuse to accept that the state gets to kill people.

they don’t and they never have. “family” is a key pillar of the ideology, but only in the sense of control. children and significant others are something to be owned and, crucially, abused by patriarchal men — an extension of their property and little more

When Big Tech tells you that they aren't keeping your data to sell you things, never, ever believe them.

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

Everything US politicians accused the app's Chinese owners of doing are things that Meta and X are doing (and, in the case of the former, have been doing for a long time). “My worry all along is that we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda”

YES THAT'S WHAT MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS AND THATS WHY WE DON'T USE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

wake up babe new one laptop per child dropped

"B-But if we don't use AI, how will we storyboard cutscenes--" MOTHERFUCKER MY WIFE LET ME USE HER CROCHET PLUSHIES, WHAT'S YOUR EXCUSE

Part of the struggle with the LLM discourse is that genuine (i.e. non-grifter) proponents talk exclusively about the possibilities of the transformer architecture in an ideal future with a rational business model. Whereas opponents largely talk about the world we live in today, and its constraints.

It's so hard--I think they are trying to adapt, as we all are. I just don't think that automating the classroom solves the problem of students automating their thinking.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention. The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.

mrbeast should be a position like president rather than a specific guy, and we should be able to impeach — or otherwise overthrow — the current one and replace him with someone else. it’s time for us to install leftist mutual aid mrbeast. he will heal our broken nation

Absolutely definitive video analysis of Renee Good killing here. Look at the image framed in red. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/v...

When doing permissions for Transparent Designs, I had a really great exchange with someone from IBM who not only gave me permission but went to THEIR archives and sent me a higher quality, cleaner scan than I would have been able to make myself.

I wrote about why we should understand the metaverse hype cycle as a dress rehearsal for the generative AI hype cycle www.fastcompany.com/91467599/met...

*posting on twitter* oh ho, I’ve made a wry observation. Better make sure a bunch of pedophiles see it

The people who mock gender studies are perversely the most compelling case for studying it

As someone who has reported on deepfakes for years now, I’ve had a few moments while reporting on Grok where I feel sick to my stomach thinking about the continued escalation of sexual abuse with this technology and where it’s going. We’re not ready for this. And it didn’t have to be this way.

New from @kattenbarge.bsky.social: X influencers are using Grok to unveil Muslim women in hijabs and show them being beaten by men. Women in sarees are also being stripped: www.wired.com/story/grok-i...

Remembering today that having your heart broken is a necessary step on the path to becoming fully human. Whichever heartbreak is your first, it’s probably critical that a state break your heart so that you can develop a political imagination. If this is your first, I’m sorry and also welcome.

if you need it on web: Settings > Content & Media > Autoplay media and GIFs (Off)

I got some pushback a couple of years ago for suggesting there's a lot of people with terrible politics who are big proponents of open source. I'm not saying there's a correlation (I like open source, and it does a lot good things!), but we should go back and take a closer look at their motivations.

Getting ready for #MLA26

keep thinking of a vocally anti-woke reporter who insisted that the term "environmental racism" was nonsense

Elon Musk is producing CSAM the right way. by Ezra Klein

As @jbakcoleman.bsky.social and I wrote, “Every time a scientist abdicates their work to an AI tool, that is a tacit admission that the work is not worth being done by the scientist.” Same goes for instructors.

Happening next week!! Get ready for the Spring semester with our third CCCC Reading Circle on Land, Labor, Water and Writing: The Costs of Generative AI in the Writing Classroom, Mon 1/12 at 4–5 PM Eastern. Register here: my.ncte.org/event-inform...

What X is allowing Grok to do is unlawful or regulatory-illegal in multiple jurisdictions, creates clear DSA violations, and continues despite regulator scrutiny. The images do not need to be pornographic, non-consensual sexualised or intimate depictions are enough.

Many critical AI resources are written for teachers, rather than students. I wrote this for undergrad students dealing with “AI literacy” in the humanities, hoping to raise more fundamental questions about what it means to write. People have added it to syllabi, so maybe you’ll find it useful, too.

#AI may indeed exacerbate our bad academic habits: #LLM science summaries were nearly five times more likely than human-authored science summaries to contain broad generalizations (95% CI [3.06, 7.70], p < 0.001). And newer models over-generalized more; not less! doi.org/10.1098/rsos... #philSci

The way the press is treating chatbots, like they have agency and they “know” things all of a sudden, crossed the line recently from dumb and obsequious to something else entirely. Treating them as alive and making conscious decisions is an almost religious belief. It won’t age well.

Grok is not a human representative of X, therefore should not be quoted as if they are a human representative of the company. The company’s AI chatbot generated CSAM of users bc human beings programmed the AI to allow such things What are we doing here

I wrote about Grok's CSAM problem and how journalists keep fumbling the story www.readtpa.com/p/grok-cant-...

For the last few days on X, people (mainly women, and sometimes children) have had nonconsensual images of them in swimsuits (or much worse) requested by users and created by Grok. Musk's only apparent response thus far has been to crack jokes about it.

Related to that last boost, a New Year's wish is for something like "computing degrowth" to be a common topic among those of us critical of / outright resisting so-called "AI". ie There's a strong thread of minimal computing w/ DH folks—and it's past time for that orientation to escape containment.

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

Stickers! I'll be bringing these to the #MLA26 panel @caramartamessina.com & I put together on Making Space for GenAI Refusal. Credit to @betterimagesofai.bsky.social (Jamillah Knowles & Digit / Clarote & AI4Media) for the two images, to Bonnie Lenore Kyburz for inspiring mansplAIning, +

If you think of "hiring in entry level positions" as "procuring labor to do the tasks entry level people do" then you probably do think AI is a magical headcount reduction machine. But the point of hiring in entry level positions is to produce mid-career employees.

Im profoundly committed to access as care, access as process. Some of you need to understand that since chatGPT etc have entered the fray, many profs are seeing truly detrimental effects on students' engagement, learning and community. Caring about that isn't ableist/being a cop/technophobic.

If its proponents took seriously either their own claims or their critics — that is to say, actual educators and subject-matter experts — they’d have to do better than this. If students are concerned with what their degrees *mean,* then they have a role other than passive consumers to play in that.

There’s no pitch for genAI in the classroom that doesn’t boil down to “it’s everywhere,” or that takes education as more than job training, or, consequently, that actually argues for genAI as a tool that has a distinct function in education. It’s not educators who have their heads in the sand here.

Public discourse on this subject has utterly failed to direct citizens' attention to the actual problem, which is that a commercial industry is assaulting education. So every week we get another thoughtless op-ed on blue books or the death of the college essay, etc etc.

Randi has a storied history of being on the wrong side of key political issues when big money is involved (see also: healthcare). Almost makes you wonder why this person has been president of one of the biggest labor unions in the U.S. for *seventeen* years now.

This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

is this good