The roof timbers in Saint Mary’s Collegiate Church Youghal which have been carbon dated to 1170. Likely built by shipwrights so essentially an upside down boat. www.patrickcomerford.com/2021/08/sain... #speirgorm

"Large language models like ChatGPT have introduced into written culture a problem that resembles the problem of forgery in fine art—once you know that a convincing fake is possible, the status of every authentic work becomes precarious." jamescosullivan.substack.com/p/llms-are-m... #GenAI #LLMs

Seeing a lot of AI slop in newspapers lately, like this piece in the @theguardian.com. Editors need to do better. I’m conscious of being over suspicious, but it’s so painfully obvious when you see it. (Gold medal still goes to the Irish editor who ran an anti-AI article clearly written by ChatGPT.)

Book indexes feel like legacy matter. I never use them. With so many publishers now offering PDF editions (with glorious ctrl-f) or selling individual chapters (ie. no index), are their days numbered? I typically read print editions; do people really use indexes when reading a 300-page monograph?

From rare book (physical) to 3D scan (digital) to cleaned-up 3D model (digital) to 3D printed object (physical). This was a really fun process to think through texture and materiality of a tactile book object. This was a test, and I learned a lot from the process. More to come later this year!

There is a particular fantasy that recurs throughout the history of industrial capitalism, that the ideal worker is a person stripped of everything superfluous to the act of production... jamescosullivan.substack.com/p/silicon-va... #artificialintelligence #generativeAI #genAI #siliconvalley

Eh, who’s going to tell them? www.rte.ie/news/2026/02...

"the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants." 1965!!!

“The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect.” — @jamesosullivan.bsky.social

LLM disclosures are, in part, trigger warnings. Trigger warnings go at the top.

It's 2026 and the Microsoft Word desktop app still doesn't let me sync my Style Gallery. See you all in 2027!

How Algorithmic Systems Automate Inequality www.techpolicy.press/how-algorith... #genAI #AI #criticalAI @techpolicypress.bsky.social

"the danger is the flood of Automatenwissenschaft becomes a kind of scholarly dark matter that exists to pad CVs and satisfy bureaucratic metrics, but which no one actually reads or relies upon." It was already growing in pre-automation days, with the replacement of qual w/ quant tenure review.

www.ft.com/content/734a... The reinvention of America’s shopping malls

It's mad to me that the company making Visual Studio Code also makes Word and Teams.

I think about this famous passage from Orwell’s 1984 a lot these days: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’

Thanks to @martindoyle.bsky.social and Mary Miniham @irishtimes.com for taking my piece on heavy coats and ragged people for today’s paper - with a shoutout for new @universitypress.cambridge.org book on #IrishRomanticism #speirgorm

End the year with some great reading — take a look at our team's favorite pieces of 2025. www.noemamag.com/noemas-top-1...

In case you were wondering what it’s like to boot a free to play mobile game in 2025

HEA publishes national policy framework on Generative AI in Teaching and Learning The framework was led by Dr @jamesosullivan.bsky.social, UCC School of English and Digital Humanities.

The Higher Education Authority has published its policy framework for generative AI in higher education teaching and learning. hea.ie/2025/12/22/h... Policy framework: hub.teachingandlearning.ie/genai/policy... Resource portal: hub.teachingandlearning.ie/genai Thanks to everyone involved.

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

Thanks @michaelwaldron.bsky.social for a final tour of an empty and deserted @crawfordartgallery.bsky.social before it closes for several years for major renovations. It’ll be a major loss to Cork city while closed, but very excited to seeing it again in all its rejuvenated glory.

The President’s Garden @ucc.ie

Applications welcome by 9 January!

If you're interested in some speculation on how #blockchain might be used in the #arts and #humanities, give my new article in Future Humanities a read. Blockchain for the Arts and Humanities: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Environmental contradictions of large language models in higher education A short piece by Mark Kelly and myself has just been published in UNESCO's Ideas LAB. www.unesco.org/en/articles/... #largelanguagemodels #AI #genAI #highereducation #sustainability

New study reveals that AI cannot fully write like a human Led by Dr @jamesosullivan.bsky.social, the world-first study shows that AI-generated writing continues to display distinct stylistic patterns.

Zenodo is often unbearably slow. Civic research infrastructures are all well and good in theory but they need to consistently work properly.

“These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. There is more to watch, read, click & react to than ever before — an endless buffet of stimulation." — @jamesosullivan.bsky.social

Check out our best longform journalism & essays of the year, with stories covering everything from the last days of social media to the unseen fury of solar storms. #reading #longform

Sometimes, I think, fine, it’s the internet, but do people stop and think these are actual human beings, good people trying to do their best under super crappy circumstances? Trying to be advocates? Trying to help? Not trying to destroy disciplines but to make the people who don’t get it understand?

I agree that we don’t already know how to teach “AI literacy” well. But I also think literacy is too modest a goal. College students should graduate knowing how ML works; it’s liberal knowledge analogous to RNA or trig, not search-engine skills or Excel. And we do know how to teach it in that way.

"Superintelligence discourse functions as an apparatus of power, transforming immediate questions about corporate accountability, worker displacement, algorithmic bias & democratic governance into abstract philosophical puzzles." @jamesosullivan.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/the-politics...

A good day‘s work presenting on ‘Local Leadership, National Collaboration: Shaping Generative AI Practice through SETU and GenAI:N3‘ at the Higher Education Authority conference in Dublin #ai #highereducation @kenmccarthy.ie @setuireland @jamesosullivan.bsky.social

The Higher Education Authority’s Dr Ross Woods and HEA Student Engagement committee chair Prof. Marie Clarke launching the HEA’s annual Teaching & Learning Conference 2025, ‘Leading Change Together: Building the Future of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’.

Who wrote Els quaderns d’en Marc? A stylometric inquiry into twentieth-century Catalan popular literature A new paper by @pnilsson.bsky.social for those of you interested in stylometry: doi.org/10.1093/llc/... #digitalhumanities #stylometry

“The superintelligence narrative undermines democratic possibilities by presenting concentrated power as a tragic necessity. If extinction is at stake, then public deliberation becomes a luxury we cannot afford.” — @jamesosullivan.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/the-politics...

I just presented my podcast dataset at #CHR2025. Interested in analysing 412 days worth of podcast episodes? You can find the fully transcribed dataset here: zenodo.org/records/1746... 🎙️

New article in #JCLS 4(1)! 📢 We’re excited to announce “Do Large Language Models Understand Literature? Case Studies and Probing Experiments on German Poetry” by @fotisjannidis.bsky.social, Kleymann, @julianschroeter.bsky.social & Zinsmeister. doi.org/10.48694/jcls.4225 #JCLS #CLS #LLM #Poetry

“AI companies use the future to justify the present, as though speculative benefits should outweigh actual, ongoing damages. This temporal shell game, destroying the world to save it, would be comedic if the consequences weren’t so severe.” — @jamesosullivan.bsky.social #agi #superintelligence #ai

Very excited to welcome Alan Butler (@alanbutler.info) as the first Arts Council Digital Artist in Residence here at Digital Humanities in @ucc.ie and delighted that he has chosen to share some of his practice with us: www.ucc.ie/en/dah/news/... @uccresearch.bsky.social

My latest essay, 'The Politics of Superintelligence', has just been published by @noemamag.com. Read it here: www.noemamag.com/the-politics... #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #GenerativeAI #politics #Superintelligence

We could not be more thrilled at UCC @radhumslab.bsky.social that our brilliant colleague, Dr Eugene Costello, has been awarded a €2m European Research Council Consolidator Grant for his project, "DeepCattle." www.ucc.ie/en/news/2025...

I'm just realising, as I attempt to share out the call for our upcoming Book and Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland (w/Sample Studios) that notable exceptions aside (Beta, Concept Null etc.). We're seriously lacking the mechanisms to discuss and share digital art in Ireland. But here's the links:

We generate more text than ever, but we read less. Has the post-literacy age begun? open.substack.com/pub/jamescos... #reading #closereading #postliteracy #literacy #artificialintelligence, #attention #reading #writing #genAI #generativeAI

Cork stealing the show again. #LateLateToyShow