The "evidence-based" policy model is being abandoned in favour getting AI into schools for "testing in the wild" and that's giving big tech and edtech freedom to pump private tech into public education even harder than before. The "evidence" will only come later, once they're embedded.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

Yes! This also comes up in my recent contribution to CHE: www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Turn off Gemini in Google! It's been turned on by default. Go to your Drive, click the gear icon, click settings, go to "manage apps" and uncheck that nasty "use by default" box. www.zdnet.com/article/how-...

"Help you read faster" is so dishonest lol, like yeah if you consider "not doing the reading" as "reading faster"

"Too many people are busily promoting a version of "‘AI’ literacy” that is simply training students how to use and consume 'AI' 'properly' – whatever that means – and refusing to admit that there may be no ethical usage of a fundamentally unethical, abusive technology," writes Audrey Watters.

In a time when workers in higher ed need to be as organized and coordinated as ever to fight threats and build the institutions we deserve, I'm proud to announce I'll be working alongside this great crew on the newly formed RAPUP-UAW bargaining committee 🫡 pennpostdocunion.org/bargaining-c...

The @aaup.org beat Marco Rubio in court, with a Reagan-appointed judge ruling that ideological deportations obviously violate the first amendment. These cases cost money. And we need millions of people moving together to make them stick. If you're faculty in the US, join AAUP and join the fight.

I have a theory - much like how if you live in New York City for long enough you become culturally Jewish in a way, if you hang out online for too long you end up culturally Philadelphian

This description of Alpha School really would make Foucault melt. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

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"

2. the strange but often repeated cultish mantra that we need to "embrace the future" — this is so bizarre given, e.g. how destructive industry forces have proven to be in science, from petroleum to tobacco to pharmaceutical companies. (Section 3.2 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...) 4/n

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

Since tomorrow is Labor Day and school is in session, I'd like to argue (again) that teaching about GenAI should include discussion of the extractive, exploitative labor conditions that make the technology possible. 🧵

This is an inevitable byproduct of automation. The AI boosters have been selling us that deskilling in some areas will result in upskilling in others, but we have no evidence of this. We don't even have a particularly good theory. We have salesmanship B.S.

we live in a world defined by replacing human labor (employees) with machines which then need human babysitting (independent contractors on slave wages)*

What frightens me isn’t just that people have stopped reading. It’s that they’ve replaced reading with mimicry. A quote here, a post there, stitched together to sound like wisdom. And sadly, in this world where books gather dust and posts go viral, it’s very easy to confuse loudness for wisdom.

Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.

"What's propping up 'AI' is not 'the people.' It's the police. And it's the petroleum industry. As such, when I hear educators insist that 'AI' is the future that we need to be preparing students for, I wonder why they're so willing to build a world of prisons and climate collapse."

Kind of feel like it should be bigger national news that the poorest major city in the country is being forced to accept devastating service cuts to our public transit system because PA Republicans actively hate Philly and want to cause us pain

EFF has been saying this for years: School monitoring software sacrifices student privacy for unproven promises of safety.

A very 2025 quandry: I received a rejection from a journal & the editor's summary of the reviews contains various inaccuracies, misnaming theoretical constructs and misattributing feedback to the wrong reviewers. My worry is that I got decisioned by AI. Is it petty write a note to rebut the summary?

The answer to “how to use AI responsibly” is “don’t.”

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

🔥 from @hellobrittparis.bsky.social Lindsey Weinberg, and Emma May around the weaponization of AI in higher ed. academeblog.org/2025/07/22/f...

You know what emergent tech of the last decade actually works well, and was adopted by millions? 3D printing. It’s great! So many applications. But also nobody is sneering at you for not having or utilizing 3D printing. Nobody is trying to sneak a 3D printer into your garage without your consent

🚨WE WON OUR UNION 🚨

Every "tech" guy is just a VC guy in a subculture that gets called "tech" for no particular reason. Most real "tech" - like, i dunno, cutting edge materials research - doesn't get called that while "a new pizza delivery app" does

"Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines. They want techno feudal subjects who will believe and do what they’re told. We, as people, are being strategically simplified. This is a fascist process." organizingmythoughts.org/some-thought...

SMH: news that the American Federation of Teachers is partnering with Open AI and Microsoft on an AI initiative is especially disappointing because teachers’ unions can and should fight back against Big Tech’s attempts to deprofessionalize and disempower educators.

No one is “replacing” teachers with AI. People are redistributing money to tech companies for AI and replacing permanent salaried workers with contingent, poorly paid ones whose labor is to patch together the system that is being broken by AI.

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

«The role of the university isn't to roll over in the face of tall tales about technological inevitability, but to model the forms of critical pedagogy that underpin the social defence against authoritarianism and which makes space to reimagine the other worlds that are still possible.»

I appreciate everyone wants AI used "responsibly" and "ethically" in education but schools have *always* been asked to compensate for society (which they can't) and requiring them to compensate for the AI industry's social irresponsibilities is just daft. Also it will colonize educators' time.

!!! “Technological change is not an external force to which societies must simply adapt; it is a socially and politically mediated process…” “The future remains open, contingent on whether we are willing to confront, contest, and redirect the pathways along which technology advances”

As I've been saying over and over on our book tour for The AI Con, the inevitability argument (including in the form of "AI is here to stay") is an attempt to steal our agency. We don't have to accept that and I encourage everyone to refuse it.

If you're using GPT to collect or analyze data from human subjects, this means that OpenAI might now be retaining your participants' data indefinitely. Did your participants consent to this? Does your IRB protocol allow OpenAI to retain participant data? If not, then you might be in breach. 4/

Lots of folks failing to come to terms w this, assuming things will blow over, and giving me & peers the same old advice about optimizing for the academic job market. The work rn is to dig into community w those looking to build something else, not self-optimizing and gambling for the old to return

These are harrowing testimonials. Yet, I'm thrilled to see multiple Philly teachers' voices uplifted here, and that there is growing collective and active resistance coming from teachers against AI rather than passive acceptance encouraged by the "AI is inevitable" crowd

Classroom decisions around technology implementation fully removed from the conversation around the economic, environmental, and socio-political impacts of the tools and actions of those who make them is not culturally responsive. You cannot be responsive to realities you are ignoring.

now is the time for universities to announce that they collectively will not disenroll any international student who has their visa revoked, and that they will ensure remote degree completion is possible

There’s a recent piece —maybe on wire cutter? About a journalist who wore one of the new AI enabled all day recorders. It records your every conversation & transcribes it all day. I just want you to know that once basic social trust is broken in this way? It’s over

I'm quoted in this SF Examiner article about why generative AI like ChatGPT isn't gonna solve climate change — but AI boosters love to say it will by conflating very different types of machine learning models with the form of ML they are invested in. www.sfexaminer.com/news/technol...

I cannot go two seconds in Google Docs without fucking Gemini butting in like “can I help you turn your careful and detailed writing that people pay you by the hour for into some hot garbage that doesn’t make sense??? no??? how about now? okay how about now? how about now? how about now? how about

If AI really is the future to the degree many believe, then the owner of one of the few big publicly-accessible AIs manipulating it to fixate on a false conspiracy theory the owner likes, instead of responding according to the widespread data it trained on, should be considered a watershed moment.

Going to start calling Sam Altman "Sloppenheimer"

We have been warned for years about AI becoming all-powerful and destroying the human race but of course the real danger is that these systems enable a lazy and reckless ruling class to offload decision-making and avoid accountability