I love this.

cackling

"A refusal of AI in creative work begins with a refusal of that product’s ideological packaging. ... The way out of AI hell is not to regroup around our treasured flaws and beautiful frailties, but to launch a frontal assault. AI, not the human mind, is the weak, narrow, crude machine."

Love it when brilliant friends publish gorgeous, heartbreaking, life-affirming poems. <3

Love it when brilliant friends publish gorgeous, heartbreaking, life-affirming poems. <3

"We are again confronting a massive attack on the very foundations of democratic education + the stakes feel even higher. In the 50s the targets were individual teachers—communists progressives liberals +their leftwing unions. Now the target is the system itself" www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

I think it's good to keep getting mad about evil and unjust things, if only to remind yourself and everyone else that these things are in fact evil and unjust. I don't think it's naive. Nor is it wise and sophisticated to adopt a "You fool, nothing matters and nothing good can ever happen" posture

The second this Texas A & M story broke I said to a friend “we’re going to quickly learn that this student is the child of some county GOP chair.” I was close. Of course the entire episode was not spontaneous, but was part of a PR stunt that’s now ruined several people’s lives.

TODAY, we're launching The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, our report dedicated to exposing data center harms in the South and how our people are fighting back. Read the full report, including case studies from 5 southern states: bit.ly/nodatacenters

you say "i asked chatgpt" i hear "i asked [an improv comedy group]" an improv group wrote this report instead of a therapist i use an improv comedy group

was very surprised to find a tiny little article-let of mine in here!

Cynicism doesn't make you better than other people btw. I would much rather know and relate to people who are willing to experience disappointment because they tried, than people who shield themselves from disappointment by always assuming the worst, and therefore do NOTHING.

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Workers : so are u using AI to solve the mysteries of the universe CEO : kinda Workers : kinda? CEO : we're eliminating all customer service and first line tech support jobs and replacing them with a forked Claude agent Workers : what does that solve CEO : solves me having to pay ur asses lmao

LLM companies are beta testing experimental products our children, and educators are facilitating it.

"Share the longest period of time you’ve ever wept. Then, as a group, seat yourselves in order from shortest cry to longest cry."

Crystal clear.

Hope to see you soon!

Love this idea!

Syllabus q: amusingly, I have lots of great reading on "What is Media?" for the first "Poetry and Media" grad class, but nothing for "What is Poetry?"! I may just go all Aristotle, Sidney, Mill, Whitman etc. on them, but: do you know of a good essay / short book that tackles this question head on?

NFTs were a bubble, AI is a bubble, but small carvings of large hipped women have remained popular with unsettling lighthouse keepers for 200 years, invest with confidence

This is a little rambly thread about LLMs and their epistemic Deal. My spouse started training as an NLP researcher with an undergrad advisor who had been working in the area since the 70s. He watched ideas come and go under different names - trends.

GenAI cos have basically democratized the degenerative information environment that, to their c-suites, is normal. To them, it feels like they are giving everyone else a gift: a life like theirs. A life full of blithely incompetent, trend-chasing BS that people like my spouse loathe.

This is literally how I feel

wondering if the social fabric is irreparably damaged and society is crumbling beyond saving and the arts are a complete waste of my life or if it's just cloudy for the second day in a row

idk man pretty sure we all have a strong ethical responsibility to call bullshit on AI as it helps to burn our planet and deny actual resources and support to human workers!

Universities doubling down as public sentiment shifts away from dependence upon AI. This is the problem with the buy-in.

amazing that not a single mass-media outlet holds any core belief or set of convictions on this or any other issue, instead calibrating postures based on allegedly new revelations that are instead inherent in the phenomenon & have been obvious from the outset

Once you’ve decided that one minority groups rights are subject to debate you’ve legitimized the nazi position. It’s a domino effect and it’s rapidly accelerating. The cascade of horrific attacks on civil rights are a direct result from throwing trans people under the bus.

AI is theft. AI is environmental destruction. AI is anti-labor. AI concentrates power in tech capital. AI atrophies intellectual capacities. Here's something useful for struggling against its effects in education, courtesy of Anna Kornbluh, Eric Hayot, and Krista Muratore. against-a-i.com

Resharing my A.I. statement for the fall semester—I’ll be amending “hallucinatory” because hallucinations are actually interesting and original.

The road to hell is paved with people saying "That's not realistic."

everything we do should as teachers should be to throw sand in the gears of the neo-utilitarian machine that sees education in purely transactional terms. it really is the only thing —AI is a symptom not a cause

hey modernists (and not really modernists) if you're going to MSA in Boston, consider signing up to the seminar Brian and I are running on ✨relational uncertainty✨. It's about why people are messes and why that's productive for art and theorizing @glavey.bsky.social @moderniststudies.bsky.social

Thrilled to be included in this collection. Three cheers for Caroline and Lizzy for all their work to make this happen!

Excellent to see this resource, @annakornbluh.bsky.social—thank you. (I’ll be updating my syllabus statement from last spring: bsky.app/profile/hest...)

show us your best anti AI memes

Things i didn't go into education to be (presented in order of best rhetorical impact): 1) a shill for tech company marketing hype 2) a cop surveiling my students & trying to "catch" anyone who falls for the tech co. marketing hype permeating their entire sociocultural milieu So you see my dilemma

This is the way.

It’s no surprise that most of America’s issues can be traced back to capitalism, but it *is* surprising how many can be traced back to this specific thing

The desire to stay on here long enough to let you all know when my book is out (so soon! mere months away!) versus the desire to disappear from the internet entirely forever

Meanwhile, having an academic institution in your city or state means *literally* having a team of Ph. D. level experts at your disposal, and the whole country is racing to destroy those assets as quickly and thoroughly as possible

Every Silicon Valley innovation in the consumer space has been "what if this software was my mom" which explains why ChatGPT's primary use is as a therapist, relationship substitute for lonely boys, and "personal operating system" to organize their life

me in 2031, rebooting my gpt-12 after it tried to marry my smart fridge and declare itself a sovereign state: “ah yeah but gpt-13 is gonna be different”

what always kills me about this stuff is that most people won’t even know. they don’t know what happened today, and the direct line between it and their loss of healthcare or what have you. That the misery encroaching on their lives was intentional, and done by people staring them in the eye

They're building concentration camps with money they stole from medicare.

It's almost like there's actually really good, solid information, history, and expertise about transgender medicine, including youth health care, out there and the powers and pundits that be--from SCOTUS to The Atlantic--are willfully ignoring it just to push a horrifically cruel agenda.

People are thinking that as much of the pain from the MAGA bill falls on red states, they will blame MAGA. I doubt that will happen. They’ll blame on migrants and others sent to the new gulags. It’s foolish to pin hopes on such things. Organize now. It really is our last chance.

#PVDlocal / #RIlocal, here's your to-do list for this morning neighborlyactions.substack.com/p/neighborly...