This is a thoughtful exploration of AI as study partner by teacher @marcusluther.bsky.social, trying to see things through the eyes of his students. But there's a subtle example of a pernicious pedagogical hazard buried in here that I want to call attention to, in this shortest of threads...

Well it starts off as a relatively friendly interview but oh man does @reckless.bsky.social start slicing and dicing the "Superhuman" nee Grammerly CEO about the company's "impersonation" feature that everyone discovered and quickly loathed. Delicious read. www.theverge.com/podcast/8987...

This is a sharp, solutions-oriented strategy for rebuilding America if — when! — we defeat the current fascism. The two-party system is not remotely suited to our era of epistemic chaos. It’s time for multiparty coalitions.

I am part of a wave of parents that is saying no to AI for their kids. One of my good friends and advocates got Gemini disabled from the chromebooks of the 1-3 graders in our town. It's a small win. My other friends are moving to schools with no chromebooks at all.

Someone told me recently that the most powerful applications of AI wouldn't be student facing. That's simply wrong -- the majority of ChatGPT users are students! And as this article astutely notes, this mass usage is doing real damage to their cognition. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

"There is a reason that so many in the artistic community are horrified by AI, and it’s not solely because of the misappropriation of human labor and creativity. It’s because they see AI as part of a continued technological erosion of the celebration of life that arises from poetic pursuits."

“In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organized the entire political conversation around the technology…The constitutional question of who authorized this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question.”

I just don’t know. I don’t think anything like this is presently happening. I’m aware that there is an enthusiastic hobbyist community of Suno users who like listening to their Suno generations. But I think if you look at what millions and millions of people are doing, it’s not this.

Here's my periodic reminder that ChatGPT's "study mode," billed as a way for students to "learn" using this tool, remains a complete joke. Even if children engage "study mode" -- and boy am I skeptical that's happening -- it's trivially easy to just override the system prompt.

"Your dedicated AI learning assistant is available every moment of every day, replacing mental inefficiencies with premium thought matter."

I see @himself.bsky.social joined those of us already on the small "LLMs are useful and we can acknowledge they are improving while still criticizing them for 650 different reasons" island here on BlueSky. Great thread.

Just incredible. I look forward to future pivots from Code.org, "an hour of agents" perhaps in 2027, and then of course "an hour of staring blankly at the wall due to the robots doing everything for us now." Truly glorious.

Can this be a solution?

“If we want students to use AI to be responsible, creative, problem solvers, every educator needs the knowledge and confidence to guide them.” — Richard Culatta, CEO, ISTE+ASCD Students:

Fascinating that the “leaders” of the current AI madness are making the argument for nationalization for us.

can this be a solution?

This is why I continue to maintain that AI is a tool of cognitive *automation* rather than mere offloading (after all, writing something down is offloading). It automates and thereby supplants the process of human thinking. AI is fundamentally antithetical to the purpose of education.

As concerns mount among parents and teachers about young children using screens, Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE+ASCD (umbrella ed-tech org and shill for Big Tech), continues his bullshit argument that we should worry about *depriving* kids of screentime. Embarassing as it is damaging.

What do you say to someone who believes their chatbot has unlocked the keys to the universe? I talked to mental health experts who are following the 'AI psychosis' issue closely to find out: www.404media.co/ai-psychosis...

If we can survive the current moment of American fascism, the hijacking of the political process by billionaires must be smashed to smithereens. I don't know if the Democratic party can break free of "the donor class." If it does not, the American left will need a new party.

Sometimes something—more accurately, someone—forces one to think, really *think*. Anne Sullivan played this role with Helen Keller, and last week, teacher and podcast host @dankearney.bsky.social did the same with me. Ngl (as the kids say), I’m proud of this one. Hope you’ll read & listen.

It’s a small but wondrous mercy that the Mike, the homeless handyman who lives in a tent in the empty lot that’s kitty-corner to my house in Austin, Texas, and who also plays music at loud volume at all hours of the day and night, has extraordinary taste. Current bop: youtu.be/Gz_HEtzYT1o?...

I would like to know how many of you are familiar with skijoring? "What if we did water skiing but like, on snow, and instead of boats we shall pull participants using...horses? And do this on the cramped mainstreets of small towns throughout the west?" (Obsessed, @dylanpkane.bsky.social)

I remain in awe of @eryk.bsky.social’s range of intellect. “The LLM, arguably, is not a model of language so much as it is a machine for turning language into more language…always needing to be called up and used. It transforms the user's language more so than it genuinely produces it.”

I recently found the baby book my mother meticulously kept for the first years of my life, starting in 1976. Apparently, this was me at age three: "I've noticed ice is slippery like soap. Why is that?" My question still stands.

Is this like when we destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons program irreparably and yet Iran was also two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon? Asking for a citizen of Oceania who’s unsure if we are always at war with Eurasia or what.

I'm often asked to make the "steelman" case for LLMs, which I find tiresome. But lo, my friend @davekarpf.bsky.social just made the best argument for the positive impact LLMs will likely have on society: Destroying journal publications as the coin of the realm in academia. Let us secularly pray.

Yep, that’s what every parent wants right now, their infants staring at screens, waiting for their glorious AI-infused future. And surely what parents yearn for is measurement of the newly forming parental bond. Yep, that’s they want in “the future.”

My experience of AI is seeing stories such as this one and crying out, quite literally, "oh no god no," and then sobbing. What are we doing? Why is this not stirring moral outrage? These tools fuel delusions and suicidal ideation and we are just going to...watch it keep happening?

Interesting if harrowing read about the divergent military tactics unfolding in this war. Trying to think of a historical example of one side succeeding through air power alone. Serbia in early 1990s perhaps, but that was a small state with no economic power. Not so Iran. Horrific that we’re here.

"'If you teach that n--- (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.' These words stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." -- Frederick Douglass

Radical clerics in charge of the Revolutionary Guard declare jihad upon the enemies of the Supreme Orange Leader.

There's a lot to hate about Having a Dragon In Your House. But what if there was a way to Have a Dragon In Your House? Our new free course Dragons Can Be Couches will show you practical ways to work with dragons -- without being eaten, losing your family and home, or perishing in a huge fire.

I am re-reading Hellen Keller's autobiography and, once again, I am struck by the how the entirety of the human conscious experience, the independence of language from thought yet also the vital symbiotic relationship between them, is summed in her story. It moves me so deeply I can barely breathe.

Last week, I shared my daughter (age 9) casually dropped a Thomas Sowell reference in conversation. As I suspected, it’s because she’s watching Tuttle Twins, libertarian cartoons funded by (yep) the Koch network. Dad is now teaching her about “propaganda.” www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-tut...

I guess I’d be more confident in the pedagogy of this “newsletter course” on “mindfully” using AI if, within the first five minutes of reading, it did not quote Ethan Mollick saying exactly the same thing twice. @theguardian.com, I’m available for “mindful editing”! But I am a human, sorry.

"What durable knowledge and habits can teachers draw on as technologies change faster than curricula ever can? And how do we replace what can feel like cognitive anarchy with something closer to cognitive solidarity?" - @pipsanderson.bsky.social

"This is a crisis of epistemic infrastructure. If schools are to build positive cultures in this digital world, we have to start with how information actually functions in social groups: how identity, relationships, and status shape what young people trust and share." - @pipsanderson.bsky.social

It's hard not to read this story and conclude that every single person and entity involved is moronic. The US government is in the hands of facist morons, and the Big Tech companies producing AI tools are led by delusional or self-serving morons. We are in a very dangerous place.

"I’m remembering that everyone else is a person, not a symbol... I actually find that quite inspiring. We’re living through this really tumultuous epoch, and we can decide whether we fight for the civil public space, and how long our 'wars of reformation' will go on." - @naomialderman.bsky.social

The nightmarish combination of nuclear weapons and AI no longer feels like some far-fetched science fiction to me. Yesterday was the first day I truly contemplated the danger of nuclear holocaust in my lifetime. It will be hard to use AI to cultivate “co-intelligence” if we are all dead.

Only took a day

We don’t know, and perhaps may never know, what role “generative” AI played in identifying the targets of the military fury the US and Israel unleashed yesterday, and plan to continue. But do know one target was a primary school for young girls that’s left nearly 150 dead.

Kind of a side note to the geopolitical chaos we’ve just unleashed but yes, ban this shit.

We can’t share this enough.

It appears the shift to the “Department of War” was more than mere semantics, it was a harbinger of what was to come. My god what are we doing. What is my country doing.

It continues to be of great distress that society’s collective response to this horror is one giant shrug.

In correspondence with a reporter friend, I mention that the school district superintendent for Los Angeles Unified appears to be going down in scandalous flames related in part to his initiative to create a custom AI chatbot, “Ed.” Friend: “That story is bonkers.”

Pretty sure that the Financial Times, which has been surprisingly lucid on most things AI related, is as the Brits say “taking the piss” of both e/acc idiots and delusional doomers.

This is brilliant.