"Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”

WHEREAS, Tom Waits said, “There’s a sucker born every minute. You just happened to come along at the right time.” Listen, pal, if you’re going to bang your drum about books, maybe do some reading yourself—instead of asking ChatBLT to collect quotes about reading for you. eppc.org/publication/...

The lines that are being drawn here are around a binary in which the future of education is either: a.) Christian nationalist indoctrination with books or b.) Christian nationalist indoctrination with chatbots There is no third way coming from the conservatives or establishment liberals.

Daily reminder that calling ai dead labor and stolen labor is literal.

The joys and wonders of legal personhood (sarcasm).

they’re repealing the right to culture, fight for your right to culture hyperallergic.com/how-to-prote...

Wish I could say I was shocked. (says rhetoric and composition scholar whose 25+ years of teaching first-year writing flash before his eyes…)😬

“How many times do compositionists have to point out that there’s never BEEN a literacy crisis—oh, oh, sorry, silly me, that’s right, I’ll just let myself out…”

Confirmation from the coding world re the problem writing instructors face with (forced) adoption of AI in their courses. It’s not JUST a problem. It’s DANGEROUS to offload to bots vital writing processes like the critical, cognitive tasks of ideation, source-vetting, and audience analysis. 1/

“If the centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its leaders would promptly seek to modify the decentralized educational system.” - C. Wright Mills

This is fire 🔥 🔥 🔥

If you would like to know what @balloonleap.bsky.social and I think about the relationship between generative AI chatbots and the teaching of writing, we have an article for you to read! 1/ #writingstudies #genai+writing #teamrhetoric cjsdw.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/dw...

Solidarity.

The kid who built this Einstein homework agent has Young Zuck energy about him. Appears to have crashed out of Y-combo-backed AI tutor start-up either just after or BEFORE he registered CompanionAI. He's about to have access to metric fuckton of SSO creds for campuses all over. From his substack:

I spent the weekend with one of my oldest and dearest friends and last night we did the thing where you just sit around and talk and listen to music and people: it appears that shit is not gonna wear out.

At a more structural level, institutions represent the repeated actions (including decisions) of the individuals who participate most in them. When that participation is gatekept or denied to others (and algorithmic suppression is denial) that institution ceases to reflect the whole society.

“For every aspect of a student’s life, there’s a tech company trying to digitize it.“

Wow

💯 Lazy, populist understandings of, and attitudes toward, reading are the problem. From Jenae Cohn’s great book, Skim, Dive, Surface: “In fact, neuroscientist Stanislaus Dehaene (2009) explains that we cannot separate cultural uptake of reading knowledge from brain science of reading at all.”

Hate to break it to you, Academia, but your AI Is fucking stupid. Ironic, given the title of my article (which uses a pull quote from watermelon-smashing comedian Gallagher) is “It’s a hideous, hideous stupidity”: Gallagher’s comedy of contempt. That joke just wrote itself, didn’t it? Thanks AI!

Finally got around to this. Concerning language and consciousness, my initial reaction is that an AI company (and a credulous writer) have discovered Structuralism without necessarily knowing it.

This is painfully hilarious.

A particularly urgent episode of @llassabe.bsky.social’s reliably good pod, featuring @profferguson.bsky.social.

I really like this essay because it’s explicit that the neighborhood envisioned by people like Simonoff is truly dystopian. They lack a vision of anything that doesn’t involve racialized anxiety and fear, and that’s what they are trying to sell us.

if consciousness ever emerges in silico, it won't be a user-friendly app that recreates itself anew in response to prompts. that is antithetical to what consciousness is.

I had an email exchange with a guy yesterday who insisted I was making a mistake not outsourcing my writing to an LLM. He said, "It knows more than you do." He couldn't understand that this was impossible because the work of writing is figuring out what "I" think.

Yep. The market problem writ large is exceptionally true in highered. But it won’t matter — and doesn’t matter — to those in charge right now because the point is to strip the institution.

Faculty have a role to play, but I'm convinced the most recent drive to automate education will fail, just as it has in every decade since the 1950s, because tuition-paying students hate it. That said, each new iteration of this drive chips away at budgets, at public trust, at institutions, etc.

Joy of the text. Joy of the writing. One of my favorite things is reading something I wrote months or even years ago and being surprised by how good it is—like, “Damn! I wrote that?! Yes. I WROTE that!”

“Without coming to terms with the anthropocentric humanism that underwrites legal persons, we risk authorising disembodiment of the law and the (continued) exclusion of non-normative bodies and intelligences from fair legal agency. Recent advancements in artificial intelligences (AI)…”

I have been pleasantly surprised to hear people openly talking about the end of institutional life as we know it (it’s been over. We’ve been living and working in zombie institutions for three decades now) and instead of collapsing at the thought they’re like okay let’s rebuild but better. More.

We’re way past 1950s-era McCarthyism.

Between Ring using doggies to sell the surveillance state and Microsoft low-key showing us how Copilot can be used for eugenics—er, I mean sports management—Mike Tyson shilling for public health might not have been the worst thing I saw Sunday night.

The Donovan Scholars program is one of the very best things Kentucky does and eliminating it would make the state a worse place to live and retire.

This is Smartwashing AI. Many know that the econ & political conditions that enable the tech industry to infiltrate every sector of public & private life are unsustainable & dangerous. But bc resistance is cast as emotional or archaic a cottage industry of wishful thinking from the left has emerged.

I tell you what, Ring figured out exactly how to weaponize white people’s empathy in service to a corporately controlled surveillance state. Tell them it will find your dog.

Super Bowl commercials. Tell me AI is shit without telling me AI is shit. Good game though.

Truth. It’s a heady mix of comfort food, self-actualization, and hoarding. Though, it’s also “Ew! Why would you EAT that?!” (Leave me alone and let me eat my dry ass pork roll sandwich that’s just a hamburger bun and microwaved Taylor pork roll!)

... A script that automates her prompt and lets you tweak it a bit. Also, quite easy to replicate. What this makes me realize, though, is we are absolutely 100% going to end up having an intellectual property fight over whether or not someone can own a prompt...

Betsy DeVos didn’t just weaken campus sexual misconduct protections as Education Secretary, she earned Jeffrey Epstein’s approval for it. Newly released emails show exactly who benefited when victims were silenced. It’s vile and the predators noticed.👇

👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

Floored by this story. A man wrote a pollite email to a federal prosecutor objecting to the deportation of an Afghan seeking asylum. DHS responded with an administrative warrant to get the man's info from Google, then visited his home to intimidate him.

Thank you, Victor. I spent a few weeks on this. As usual, it’s always a negotiation with length. So a few other bon mots: 1. The admin has issued DOJ guidance to challenge state laws that would regulate AI www.wired.com/story/ai-sup...

the Epstein files are really devastating because they remind me of how many girls and women miss out on professional opportunities, mentorship and careers because of how many powerful, rich and influential men only view girls and women — and interactions with them — through the lens of sex

Feb. 1, 1960, 4 NC A&T students sat-in at the “whites only” counter at Woolworths in Greensboro. Their defiance ignited a movement led to the birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Young people fuel movements. It is inspiring to see that today they still do. #BlackHistoryMonth