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.

All of these things, deeply underpinned by the most ridiculously spun misnomer. We should stop calling it artificial intelligence and describe it as IA or ‘Intelligent’ Automation at best.

Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes

And from image events, we get POLYSEMIC images that carry multiple forms of ideology into the present. Here, we have the convergence of Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign with the frog icon from #NoKings. The is how you visually dismantle fascist iconography.

Welcome, new users. Posts on Bluesky are called skjörts. If someone re-skjörts you, that is a doppelskjört. If you respond to a doppelskjört, that is called a Trifect, and you cannot skjört again for nine hours. If you do anyway, that's a Time Clench. It's all very simple.

The knowledge was already free!! Open textbooks and libraries exist!! The benefit of a professor is having an expert teach it to you in a structured manner with assignments for practice and assessments to keep you accountable. Profs aren't keepers of secret knowledge. We are essentially tutors.

“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers. www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔

This was published the day after the Heaton Park terrorist attack. I find its grim combination of antisemitism, conspiracy fictions and agrarian populism deeply worrying, as this is how it all kicked off a century ago. 🧵 farmsnotfactories.org/articles/zio...

Just an occasional note that … the less you use social media, the less you need to use social media. 🕯️

it’s funny* when i consider that the wars and mass deaths nobody really gives a shit about are also in the regions that will be most adversely affected by climate change and how much that plays into our doing fuck all to reduce emissions. *not actually funny

my teacher brain is exploding. so now in addition to marking i must generate an anonymised summary of work to prepare it for the AI so the AI can synthesise constructive feedback … based on the summary??? and then I still have to customise the AI feedback. and yes on the turnaround window thing.

I see so much of this in academic funding calls ‘we are looking for projects that explore how AI can help to solve … hunger, violence against women and children, poverty, etc.’ But there’s no space in there to say: ‘um, what if AI is not the right tool for this’

There is so much real news, in so many countries, that there really is never any need to repost AI generated fakery (even if it hooks in to your personal rhetoric). Repost journalism not algorithm.

some foreign western person in a faraway land (with, at best, a social media-based activism and education) telling other people in their own countries that what they are doing is ‘not good enough’ is … well, a far too common feature of this landscape.

AI evangelism is like being in a cult. you abandon any sense of reason and go out of your way to defend it even when it makes no sense

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

In South Africa: Remembering Marikana, 13 years on - still no justice for the massacre victims. (An older article exploring the media’s failures at the time: theconversation.com/marikana-mas...)

If someone asks a question about "AGI", the only reality-based response is to demand a definition of "AGI" before replying. #acl2025

GIVE THE MONEY TO TEACHERS NOT SAM ALTMAN

Really this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to write contemporary dystopian fiction.

Bari’s key insight as an entrepreneur is that there is a bottomless demand for rich people to have their existing opinions sold back to them as forbidden knowledge

Worrying news coming out of the #WestBank where the #IDF have arrested Dr. Nasser Laham, editor-in-chief of the Palestinian Ma'an news agency. This continues a troubling pattern of suppressing press freedom in the region: www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Support independent media, support local media - you can also do this in countries where you don’t live but follow the news. Particularly countries where you complain about ‘the media’ not covering stories. The stories often are being covered - just not in the media you know about. 🌍

you've heard about the college kids who can't do anything without ChatGPT's help—but what about the students who oppose generative A.I. for myriad reasons and refuse to rely on it as a shortcut? well, I found and spoke with a few of them here: slate.com/life/2025/07...

Looking for (new, academic or pracademic) class reading suggestions for Ai, ethics and journalism - postgrad class.

Social media (even this one) positions every issue as binary, with the only available discussion limited to x-characters or maybe threaded posts. Let’s remind ourselves that ‘blurts’ are often devoid of context or mitigation, and that polarisation is an algorithmic goal.

The news cycle loves drama. Rather: Support local journalism across the Levant - not just the syndicated centralised names or platforms sending in correspondents. Support the journalism that’s breaking stories, taking daily risks in their own homes. Subscribe, share, amplify.

I know the world is a flaming shitstorm but … starting off the day with a positive peer review response is quite nice ☕️😎📝

I kind of like that everyone arriving at or attending Bezos’ wedding looks … ordinary to awful. Like the light was bad, and the paparazzi ungenerous. Nobody’s outfit looks good, nobody’s skin or hair or makeup looks immaculate.

‘… we must not fall into the trap of mistaking the outputs of writing (which are increasingly substitutable through technology) from the value of the cognitive process of writing (which hones mental development and cannot be substituted by a machine’

Yes. I am right. I am seeing how Chat GPT is ruining students critical thinking and writing skills in real time. It is not the future. It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

Also, constantly describing Netanyahu’s (and others) warmongering as merely ‘Zionist’ simply obscures how they exploit Zionist nationalism to pursue *personal* power and money objectives. Call it what it is. Say: The Israeli government, or Netanyahu, or Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, etc etc.

War is abhorrent but rushing in to suddenly argue the case of why the Islamic Republic should be defended is an unrequired level of short-circuitry.

This foolish throwaway that ‘well nothing works as a deterrent anyway except having nuclear weapons’ is positively stupid in the same way as arming more people with guns will not reduce gun violence. Why let yourself be tricked into a rhetoric trap? Honestly.

this is actually good advice for quite a lot of things.

The US has denied the visas of all 12 members of the Senegalese women’s basketball team who were scheduled to travel to the country as part of their preparation for the Afrobasket tournament that begins in August. Afrobasket is also the African qualifiers for the Olympics. #wnba

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? Most of us know that LLMs, VLMs, foundation models etc. are just statistical language models trained in big data and that they neither have emerged capabilities nor are they able to really reason.

Notably universities and most faculty will ignore the *entire group of people* already charged with teaching information literacy on their campuses. I bet you have at least one librarian who has a lesson plan ready to go.

From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science https://go.nature.com/4kIRR01

Big tech is here to derail and destroy education GenAI is a problem and not a solution to anything

I know there’s a lot going on in the world but an Air Tag literally just saved my luggage - someone waltzed off with my suitcase (which looked like his *except without the ID sticker & overweight tag on HIS bag 🙄*) and was 15km away from the airport when the airline called him back 😅

Here's something I post from time to time. My answer to a reader who asked me: what could journalists do NOW to break with some of their more corrosive habits.

this just started and i'm already losing my mind and screaming Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan” just fucking shoot me

I’m lost for words here… what really is the point of asking a bot “if she and her children have eaten” or rather “when they last ate”

Very funny day to post this.

the AI industry is built on extraction, fraud, deception, and lies