TFW you realize some people enjoy science fiction for VERY DIFFERENT reasons than you do…

You know, maybe someone should do some research on digital reading? Oh wait… Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading share.google/qdejZeaOKBWZ...

Whatever happened to Johnny? Did he ever learn to write?

This reveal and the news yesterday— about Meta having shipped the code for facial recognition in their glasses—should be understood as very deeply intertwined.

Analogies between Twain’s speculative fiction & our present are tempting, but I don’t give too much credence to any part of them but this: The durability of a totalitarian state depends upon systemic assaults on mass literacy followed by continuous suppression of conditions for its reemergence.

Having said all of this, this gross mischaracterization of Dewey is necessary for that fuckstain to make his hateful, anti-diversity screed because Dewey’s view of democracy, of education, requires diversity. It requires us to integrate diverse experiences into our lives in a meaningful way.

…def going to write them up somewhere, but in short we need to consider this LLM-weaponized epistemic warfare (as theorized by @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social & Seb Franklin). GenAI is not disinterested. This is a precondition to “fine-tuning” faculty voices to say what institutions want them to say.

Bluesky really doesn't like to hear this, but if you're using AI image detectors, you are getting inaccurate results 25% of the time. As much as 70% for some popular detectors. False positives & false negatives. So, you are actually, in practice, using AI to trivialize labor of digital artists.

This story is absolutely critical for understanding the world we live in and bowled me over when I first read it.

“Rather than serving as safe confidants, the researchers said, chatbots can introduce serious risks that outweigh their benefits, potentially resulting in what Freed called ‘technology-facilitated harm…’”

“What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science, because it’s baked into this technology”

Peter Thiel—who played a key role in JD Vance's conversion to Catholicism—just cannot stop talking about the Antichrist. He just took his Antichrist circus to Rome, where an advisor to the Pope exposed the true meaning of Thiel’s bizarre religious delusions. www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels...

Matthew Josephson’s muckraking term of art - Robber Baron - was drummed to death in the 20th century, which is a shame, because it so captures men like Andreessen, as it did Cooke & Gould. They know nothing but taking, & therefore cannot understand why their aptitude at it doesn’t make them beloved

‘Power to the People, Y’all’ will premiere in Winston-Salem, NC, at the RiverRun International Film Festival on April 18th.  Producer: Tressie McMillan Cottom Director, Cinematographer & Editor: Holland Gallagher Cinematographer: Patrick Lebby Producer:Johnica Rivers Key Art: Shefon N. Taylor

Sign up for updates: linktr.ee/powertothepe...

This 1,000%

"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.