What does an academic do when people publish something that basically says exactly what you have said over two books and never even cite you? delibdemjournal.org/article/id/9...

Reposting this because, hilariously, someone running an AI news aggregator just plagiarized the hell out of it and got shared 3x as much as the original post. So you know, here's the actual piece. Where I talk about LLMs making copies of copies of copies of copies and how that drives disinformation.

This is awesome

I tell my students that one of the main reasons not to over-rely on AI for research/writing is because--at some point in the future--you're going to have a face-to-face conversation with someone who matters, and if you don't actually know some things, that interaction will not go well for you.

yes, absolutely: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...

This is really good, especially the idea to stop somewhere and let them catch up: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I wrote several books and spent the better part of my career writing about why this matters for democracy and how to do it. I'm skeptical such a movement will happen. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Oh look, a Harvard person discovered the field of communication. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/o...

So many years of using war rhetoric against the US has turned into war against the US. It's a natural progression, which is why we asked people to notice the war rhetoric when it started. You don't use war rhetoric to prepare a nation for war unless you plan to do it 🥹

This is excellent: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Wow. Hey @uwaterloo.ca people in needles hall ought to read this. We need a campus wide ban on AI in classes.

this is great news

This is just funny: www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

I had some stuff to say for this story: www.chch.com/chch-news/th...

The other thing about normalizing gAI use in higher ed is that we are teaching our students that they cannot trust their own creativity, their own thoughts and brains, their own skills without having it reshaped/shellacked/transmogrified by LLMs. We’re setting them up for failure and dependence.

The decision to recognize the indigenous claim to Canadian land is a misstep, @davidfrum writes. “Just when Canada most urgently needs to jump-start the country’s economic growth, the country’s courts are inventing new obstacles to development”:

Slop has got to be the word of the year.

As I grade my interpersonal communication final exams, I can say that all of this is terrible advice. Sports and movie stars don't make you a sparkling conversationalist: www.thestar.com/life/convers...

What an absolute moron.

Remember when the internet wasn't awful? We can go back to that. Some friends and I have released the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call to bring back such a time, to see if we can bring back a world where technology works for us, rather than against us. resonantcomputing.org

This gets a lot about AI right too. Good to see so much clear-eyed analysis coming out. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

This feels a bit more extreme compared to my experience at UWaterloo, but only a bit more. There’s much truth here

There’s a reason Caesar was forbidden to cross the Rubicon and return to Rome with his army. It’s what separates a relatively free society from a fascist one.

This was lovely to read and reinforces a lot of what I'm trying lately: Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/m...

After over 25 years of teaching humanities courses at universities and reading thousands of pages of student writing, the idea that I can't immediately tell when something was written by AI is ridiculous. I know because I've spent countless hours of my life reading student work.

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that one of the main impacts of LLMs is to disrupt thinking: to make it so that far too many people never properly learn how to do it, and then to control the output so there are thoughts that people never learn how to think.

💥 New publication out on the alignment of AI & authoritarianism 💥 We argue that AI is not simply extending, but actively modulating, key dynamics of authoritarianism, and present a flexible analytical framework to account for these changes. rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

This is thoughtful and sensible: www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

This is incredibly stupid. The enshitification of the new york times continues: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/o...

We deserve a better democracy than this! If you agree, pre-order my new book On Mindful Democracy from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Parallax Press. Here, I forward a radical vision of democracy grounded in everyday acts of #mindfulness, #community, and mutual care. 20% off discount code: MINDFUL20

So the tech bros and computer nerds who probably didn't have any friends growing up and struggle to talk to people made stuff that causes the rest of us to have fewer friends and struggle to talk to other people. Great. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Apparently, one of the main uses of AI is advice about difficult conversations. As I head off to campus to teach my basic 100-level interpersonal communication class, which I've taught for 25 years, I've been wondering why I keep making it easier, more simple each year.

There's so much truth here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

This is Jon Stewart at his best: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

"The collapse of the institutions where young people learn to make and critique art stands to greatly benefit companies like OpenAI, which, in the absence of human artists and critics, can both make the stuff and tell us it’s good." lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

People spend way more time rationalizing than reasoning. We’d all be better if it were the reverse. Social media seems designed to make sure we keep up the rationalizing and don’t engage in reasoning.

If I were a pediatrician, I’d prescribe books. They’re the best medicine.

this is the way: www.offmessage.net/p/defiant-re...

This is not getting the attention it deserves, but Beutler is absolutely right. We need politicians to go directly after the social media algorithms and curb the rot that has driven us here

Moreover, they are the biggest plagiarism machines in the history of the world. They can not get answers correct without one of us having done it for them in the past, and then getting our work stolen by the corporation that designed the plagiarism machine and got all the money for it

You spend more time on social media than you intend to, because time flows faster on these platforms, causing you to lose hours in what feels like minutes. This is no accident; it’s a result of a decades-long plot to steal your time. My new essay. www.gurwinder.blog/p/how-social...

This is excellent. I would love it if some senior admin people from @uwaterloo.ca would read this and think seriously about it: defector.com/higher-eds-r...

Yes, this is absolutely right.

Graduate seminar did a deep dive on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense yesterday. At the line, “in America the law is king,” they (14 students from 6 countries) burst out laughing. I've been doing this for 35 years and this is the first time that was a laugh line.

Can the Manhattan Project avoid building the nuclear bomb?

Sober, thoughtful take: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This is quite a hed/subhed. 1) Start with Vance. Use strong action verb. Accept the autocratic premise that the “Marines’ Might” are Vance’s to flex. 2) Mention the protest second and absurdly describe them as in the thousands 3) Treat Trump’s strong man use of the military as a partisan scuffle.

The scenario in which there are oligarchs powerful enough to succeed at their AI con and force LLMs onto the rest of society is the outright fascist and dystopian scenario. That higher ed has largely capitulated to the scam means it had already been deskilled. We need to understand how and why.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.