Watching a video of a HS English teacher promoting Brisk, an "AI-powered teaching assistant." She cheerfully reveals that "she doesn't have time to write meaningful feedback that asks good questions" on student essays bc she's too busy correcting their grammar mistakes. What. Are. We. Doing.

I watched this woman's entire speech, not pictured in this clip is her declaring moments later, "AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands!" and then getting yet another round of booing from the students. Nice start to my Monday.

Seven people died from poisoned Tylenol in 1982, and for more than 4 decades every pill in America has been sold in tamper proof bottles.

The challenge is that we need to move faster than academia is used to moving. I called this study out as bullshit a mere two weeks after Nature published it (receipts below); one year and 500 citations later, only then is it retracted.

This is a pretty good summary of the growing backlash to AI intrusion. The label “AI Populism” is kinda weird though, if anything it’s Anti-AI Populism.

The author of this unhinged op-ed goes on to describe this daily practice of mass surveillance as "kind of creepy, but kind of useful too." Really? Is it really such a burden to...look at the pictures of other childrens' faces?

“Every evening as our children eat dinner [in China], my phone notifies me that our 3-year-old’s teacher has uploaded photos taken at school. An AI facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face, letting me know which photos to look at.” I cannot fathom writing these words.

Eventually the harms of educational malpractice do manifest.

“Technology will save teachers so much time.”

Not only is there no such evidence, just about everything we know from cognitive science about the importance of building knowledge, IN YOUR HEAD, suggests that we should prohibit AI usage in elementary school, and beyond. (Good thread from @janerosenzweig.bsky.social on all this nonsense)

“Our relationships both to major leading figures in public life and to our fellow Americans in general have degraded into strange brews: fandoms, obsessions, resentments, hatreds, jealousies, and pure fictions concocted from the performative, piecemeal way media allows us to experience one another.”

I just…what? What?

Forgive the boast, but this is feedback from educators -- both novice and veteran -- after a recent workshop I led on AI. This technology is not inevitable in schools, and a key line of defense is building a basic understanding of how they work. Knowledge is empowering.

“The school’s president, Linda G. Mills, is a professor of social work who for many years oversaw mental health and wellbeing at the university. She said she believes that students are missing ‘spontaneity, and the opportunity of the collisions that happen in college that are so fundamental.’”

Starmer took power vowing to “mainline AI into the veins” of all of England (actual quote). But as Adam Schiff is currently finding out, the base of the Left wants opposition to Big Tech, not celebration or appeasement. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/o...

This is the same "journal" that, just two weeks ago, retracted the bogus meta-analysis suggesting ChatGPT improves student learning. I am calling for a shutdown of Nature's Humanities and Social Science Communications until we know what the hell is going on with their peer-review process.

“AI tools have industrialised divisive content. The barrier to entry has collapsed. A creator no longer needs to be a graphic designer or even fluent in the language of the target country.”

The entire feed is worth your time as there appears to be a bit of a subculture of British county archivists talking trash on here. Delightful.

Continued quote: “It has major implications for how we think about society, identity, and inequality. We now live in a world where humans are speaking and interacting not only with other humans, but also with technological systems designed to give us the illusion of humanity.”

This is f’ing ridiculous. Zoom jn to see the pedagogical brilliance Google is suggesting to students: “explain ‘opportunity cost’ to me.” That’s in any Econ 101 textbook already! In detail! They literally can’t think of a single useful prompt for these roving bullshit-mobiles.

Yes. Everyone wants this.

Nature has retracted the meta-analysis that purported to show massive student learning gains from ChatGPT. That study came out on May 6 last year, and a mere two weeks later I explicitly identified it as hot garbage. Just sayin’. buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/something-...

Not only is @colin-fraser.net right about this, it warrants mentioning that all of the AI companies are focused on “agents” right now, not prompting. Which means even the monkey placing the coin in the word-gumball machine will be a robot if they have their druthers.

AI literacy is defined as "the knowledge and skills to use AI effectively and interpret outputs." For sake of argument only, sure, fine. The *only* way to get there is to build durable student knowledge -- in their heads -- through effortful thinking. The very thing that AI short circuits.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

It’s just remarkable how rare it is for these appeals to say, “This will be good. This will help. Things will be better.” Is it supposed to help? Or is it an unavoidable threat? Because you can advocate for preparing students for threats, but I feel like that calls for different rhetoric.

Teachers: "Please help us get AI out of schools, it's ruining education!" Students: "Please don't make us use AI, it's ruining our lives!" Politicians: "We hear you and we want to help you harness the power of AI." #NihilismAndTechnology

RIP to OpenAI's Study Mode. "It was always a ruse, a PR exercise masquerading as pedagogical safeguard, but something bigger is happening at OpenAI. Their focus now is on enterprises, startups, and venture firms—but no mention of students, who still comprise the majority of ChatGPT users."

A friend of mine lost his dog recently and posted this: “They’re not just dogs. They’re chapters of our lives….Diesel wasn’t just along for it; he got why we go. Most of the time, he was the reason we went.” I can’t even express sympathy bc of the obvious AI use. What a grotesque technology.

Slightly diminish a book No Country for Gen Xers

“Everything we think is based on our own somatic experiences within externality, knowledge that no other human can ever duplicate. [LLMs] have nothing like this. They don’t exist within the world. They don’t even exist within time. Until you type something to them, they do nothing at all.”

Yes, 100+ years of science fiction has prepared humanity to eagerly embrace a future of “machinic government,” we have long yearned for this.

Of course Dawkins’ first move is to feminize his AI companion as “Claudia.” It gets more embarrassing from there.

Been thinking about moving to New Mexico and this might just tip the scales.

I sometime wonder if half or more of all of cognitive science would be rendered moot if we'd just used "imagination" in place of "mental representation." (Anyway this skewering of Andy Clark by Jerry Fodor is a fun if philosophically wonky read.) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

It’s not just that Mollick blocked me on here, but that @davekarpf.bsky.social keeps reminding me of his vacuous AI hyping. Every post irritates me, but honestly? I don’t need to delve any deeper. We are all in deep enough.

What is particularly fantastic about this story is (a) it prominently elevates teacher voice and (b) it puts the lie to the claim that AI is inevitable in education. It's really not, and while resisting AI is taxing, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.

“But she and many other educators who have moved writing into the classroom described relief at being able to abandon the highly imperfect science of A.I. detection. Student reliance on chatbots had gotten ‘worse and worse’ as the technology gained sophistication, Ms. Binney said.” Fantastic story.

“Speaking as an elder millennial, I approach Zoomers who use these tools with a bit more empathy.” - @alexhanna.bsky.social Amazing quote. And the article is rife with data related to the growing anti-AI revolt. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

"Original Sin features a series of anecdotes about Harden’s [life], and becoming a geneticist only to realize she was still obsessed with the same questions of sin and redemption she had learned in church....The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting." - @jonothingeb.bsky.social

A welcome development, and it’s interesting that the backlash is really coming from outside the education establishment (for now, anyway).

A gutwrenching thread but one that compels radical political action.

This accords with what I’m hearing from parent advocates such as @jcarreo22.bsky.social, membership ranks are swelling by the week. Parents don’t like what they see happening to their kids because of technology!

The frontline for reclaiming society from the influence of Big Tech can be found in our schools. And we are starting to win.

While we all pour one out for Sora, OpenAI appears to also have quietly killed off its ludicrous “study mode,” wherein ChatGPT would allegedly not give you the answer to your question. Turns out students would like the answer! Who could have guessed. openai.com/index/chatgp...

"What if we just delegated all economic decisions to Claude?" - Matt Levine, today, joking The future "could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them)...to humans based on what the AI systems think makes sense." - Dario Amodei, Oct '24, not joking

Sometimes I read something that is so f’ing funny and insightful and well-written that I seethe with jealousy after only a few paragraphs. Which is my way of saying, you gotta read this.

Very strange to have started following @vermontgmg.bsky.social recently bc of his excellent book (an oral history of Manhattan Project) and now he’s become go-to reading for what happened at the WHCD. Versatile!

I have no words for the unrelenting cruelty of this Administration, at war with the most vulnerable of its citizens.

"We're not in an AI bubble." Meanwhile, OpenAI's CFO has "expressed reservations about OpenAI’s plans to go public by the end of this year...cautioning that the company isn’t yet ready to meet the rigorous reporting standards required of a public company." Giving Enron vibes.