"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

Last night I met a guy who said everyone in his office uses ChatGPT "because you just type in two lines and it generates a whole email for you!" And I *very correctly* replied that "no one wants that 'whole email' they just want the two lines - and they all hate you"

When an AI tool tries to identify cancer cells in Black patients, it often fumbles because it will only compare test results with those of other Black patients. Medical racism lives on in our algorithms.

It matters for all of us scientists, but particularly for ECRs, because developing good writing (and thus good thinking and reflecting) is hard. It takes time, and it is supposed to be filled with friction. Generative AI takes away the friction, and thus the opportunity to learn

I’m really concerned about early career scientists using generative AI in writing, because writing is how we think and reflect. There’s almost nothing *more* human than that, and to give that gift away to a machine is almost unconscionable to me

Writing is hard, and it’s supposed to be. Hard is good. Hard is the point. Don’t let gen AI take that from you. Don’t let the tech bros make you less human and take away your chance to learn through struggle and failure.

"The thing is, even if you're just thinking in terms of fiscal value, having gone through a degree program and being able to put it on your resumé/CV isn't the most significant return on your investment: the way you have further developed your mind is."

“The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free.“ www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

Locally, there are private schools wholesale adopting AI. Can't wait for my dentist to be a fraud cause he used AI for everything in school.

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

🫜

PLEASE this. And also to scientists writing press releases, too - calling something "AI" when it was actually your student spending 12 months fitting and validating a model is disingenuous

It's the weekend, baby

People learn through practice and challenge; not by receiving answers. But a deeper problem is that an essential aspect of teaching is helping someone organize their thinking in new ways. LLMs — systems which cannot think or appreciate thinking — are incapable of doing this in a meaningful way.

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

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

can’t say what’s going through my head right now But something about US history, Black women, Native women, and Nazis

Key Findings: Exposure to a field-specific faculty sexual misconduct incident decreases degree completion in that field by 3.4 percent four years after the incident. This decline is driven by incidents occurring after 2015, among which we observe a 7 percent decline in in-field degree completion.

New York Times killed Weinstein and Epstein stories but just asked Ms Rachel if she was funded by Hamas.

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

"knowledge is humanity's spiritual birthright. Making it, playing with it, revising it, sifting through it, making sense of it -- it is baked into who we are as a species. [...] Every generation is responsible for protecting this legacy for the next generation." Printing this to hand to my 13yo:

This week's Citified features a guest post from Ray Angod where he shares concerns about losing natural spaces in the city, especially wetland areas in and around the Huron Natural Area.

I don't know how many times this needs to be posted, but clearly it is MANY TIMES. Sigh.

We need professors to point out that dipshits like this are clueless about what goes on in a university: www.forbes.com/sites/shanno...

Neurologically speaking, there's no such thing as 'useless' subjects or 'rip-off' degrees Insisting we should only teach useful subjects is like saying science should only do research that gives positive results If you honestly believe that's how anything works, *your* education was the wasted one

“People who dislike Gen AI are just stuffy bores” Bitch one of us actually knows how many fingers humans have and evidently it’s not ChatGPT

"... which isn't even particularily excessive" It's 34% over the speed limit. It's the difference between 6/10 pedestrians surviving a collision vs 1-2/10. Car brain is a hell of a thing.

Still remember one study where they had "AI" look at photos to diagnose cancer and it had like a 98% or 99% accuracy... ...except all the photos of actual tumors had a ruler next to them for scale. And the algorithm just got really good at spotting rulers in a photograph.

Abandoning the vision of liberal arts education is at the heart of how fascism has come knocking. Scientists speaking of abandoning humanities have not learned the core lessons of our history - and by our history I even mean THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE. Science is never separated from society.

Academia has now spent several decades trying to drape itself in capitalism - focusing on "job-oriented" majors, talking big about connections to industry, and conversion of student loan $s to income down the lane.

I keep seeing this circulating, and I'm disappointed in my colleagues in the natural sciences who think if they can "shed" enough of their humanity they will some how be protected from fascism. Scientists who are bending to jingoism to try and protect funding aren't asking the right questions.

This from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social hit me over the head like a mallet of truth. This is the thing. This is what I’ve been trying to warn people about perfectly crystallized. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

Using AI is bad scholarship; passing it off as your own work is academic misconduct.

Cannot emphasize enough that, if you dislike doing the things academics do (reading, writing, developing and expressing opinions about things you've read) enough to try to make a chatbot do them for you, there are lots of actual humans who would be happy to take that unpleasant job off your hands

If a human told you things that were correct 80% of the time but claimed, flat out, with absolute confidence, that they were correct 100% of the time, you would dislike them & never trust a word they say. All I'm really suggesting is for people to treat chatbots with that same distrust & antagonism.

If a colleague had the reliability rate of an LLM, they would be fired. If ordinary* software did, it would be uninstalled. LLMs require the chat format, because chat makes us party to the conversation. We insert the meaning ourselves - and hold it to a different standard. It's the mirror effect.

A very cool model for developing a standard data management policy for an entire department, team, or organization! geo-data-support.sites.uu.nl/faculty-rdm-...

AI doesn’t help you work less or get paid more, but does destroy the environment and climate.

More to say on burnout and I'm probably going to boost it a few times because folks need to hear it: Burnout is a form of brain damage. It happens when stress conditions persist until they damage our brains. It's an injury that needs to heal, not a weakness that needs to be pushed through.

I knew it wasn’t for me when a colleague said “wow I can’t imagine taking a weekend off” during career week and there were nods around the room. Idk if they were just posturing, but the fact that such sentiments are encouraged and normalized gave me the ick.

I would love to see more research teams employ data managers. While roles like data scientists and research analysts are crucial for analyzing data, those roles often don't have the time to develop standardized and documented processes that lead to better data. #databs cghlewis.com/blog/hire_da...

VERY valuable thread for geoscientists, and all scientists who are looking for the right questions to ask their professional societies. Even after they walked back some of the advance compliance, it was still extremely troubling to see AGU damage the trust they'd built with their diverse membership.

I want to see the American Geophysical Union (AGU) continue its awesome work on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. This thread is a call to AGU and AGU members. 1/

It's the eighth anniversary of the shooting attack inside the Great Mosque in Quebec City. We will never forget Ibrahima Barry, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzedine Soufiane and Aboubaker Thabti. Here's a video of the commemoration, held on Saturday.

My occasional reminder to folks on tenure and promotion committees that there will be a cohort of people whose early careers were defined entirely by the pandemic and *waves vaguely* this nonsense, and it *will* impact their productivity. It can't not.