AI in the classroom, as prophesied in 1985 www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X...

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

It is not "attribution and sourcing" to generate post-hoc citations that have not been read and did not inform the student's writing. Those should be regarded as fraudulent: artifacts testifying to human actions and thought that did not occur. www.theverge.com/news/760508/...

It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans. 🧵 1 of 9

Really enjoyed this fantastic piece by @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social and @cnygren.bsky.social Here are few favorite pull quotes of mine + one little quibble at the end:

And what @mjcrockett.bsky.social says here about studies in cognitive science missing a lot (specifically, in their case around thick empathy, but it applies in education too) by focusing on empathy (resp. education) as something that happens in individual minds. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... >>

I'm really glad to see mainstream news attention to the problem of chatbots using "I/me" pronouns (there is no "I" there), but also frustrated to see Askell's flat out lie just platformed here. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t... by @kashhill.bsky.social >>

“Hello, it's me, The Dean of Yale. I read your thesis, I think it could be a bestseller. Now you must decide between Yale and marrying the hometown barista guy.” It's the highest of high art. If you're an academic you need to watch it ASAP.

Oh damn — I hadn’t thought about the fake citations to Google scholar profile pipeline 🫣

But let's turn that around: Anyone who wants to call what they are doing "AI" should be accountable for making clear why their product (or research) isn't in fact slop. That's on them. The rest of us do not need to hold space for that. >>

A Tufted Titmouse waits on a nearby branch for sunflower seeds and peanuts to be offered.

An analysis of X posts from the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology suggests it is overwhelmingly pro-AI. I analysed the sentiment of every X post from DSIT that mentioned "AI" this year. Of 122 posts, 110 were positive about AI, and only 7 mentioned its downsides. 🧵 1/2

I don't know how many times this needs to be said, but apparently a lot: If you are not in a position to verify the accuracy of some synthetic text, the synthetic text is not useful/has a high potential to be misleading. This is one of those cases.

Very important piece. "Whether or not OpenAI leaders intend to muddy the waters of science, grantwashing hinders technology safety ... It adds uncertainty and debate in areas where companies want to avoid liability and that uncertainty gives the appearance of science."

This is a great piece and I think the logic inside applies to critical analysis of technology & "AI" as well.

I wrote 1200 fun words today! Here's how they end: "For those of us concerned with the rise of technofascism, there is critical potential in short circuiting the pathways by which authority is seized via proximity to scientific thought."

I have been emailing with a student offering advice about navigating the post-PhD job market and it struck me that the advice was general enough that more people might benefit. So here you go! tl;dr: Figure out what you want your contribution to be, and make choices that can make that happen.

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

are you disgruntled by the current safety evaluation landscape? curious about what conceptual clarity, methodological soundness and rigour in AI evaluation might look like? if so, consider coming to dublin and doing a phd with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

“replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige” yes please

The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.

Climate denialism, empowered by nihilists and know-nothings, undermining science & destroying the evidence that they previously just rejected. Meanwhile, out here in WA, roads are sliding into rivers (an unprecedented weather event) b/c it’s too damn warm to be raining this hard for this long.

This is my cyclical reminder that there's really only one consistently reliable source of info in the public record that isn't owned by right wing billionaires, who really want to put an end to it. Please give at least the $2.75 minimum they request if you can. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

i know this is hardly a new take but isn’t it WILD that wikimedia has to ask for donations to keep itself afloat when every LLM in the world has been trained on wikipedia data?

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Sorry, doing research with humans is hard! There isn't going to be a magical technology that makes it easier. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I recently published about the risks of AI Surrogates, and why they are so appealing... See thread on the paper: bsky.app/profile/lmes...

Here we go! @lmesseri.bsky.social & I wrote about epistemic risks of synthetic participants ('AI Surrogates') in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (see 🧵 here) bsky.app/profile/mjcr...

Many discussions about the tech industry these days bring this piece by Nathan Pyle to mind:

Joseph Weizenbaum: “The myth of technological ... inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But in fact there are actors.” theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/manufactur...

This piece by @benjaminjriley.bsky.social, exploring @mjcrockett.bsky.social's research, offers an important window into the nuances of human empathy and the appeal of seemingly empathetic AI companions. I'm going to be thinking about the need for "thick empathy."

A recurring theme: Fire sci and tech experts, including some on public service leave from the private sector. Announce policy goals requiring expertise. Realize you don't have the institutional capacity to govern. Create a new program to recruit those same experts back into government.

I always learn so much from @mariaa.bsky.social. She's really helped me think more deeply about AI models and privacy, which sometimes doesn't get enough attention. It's like social media all over again, but now the data is even more sensitive. This clip is worth a listen!

This is so, so important. @mariaa.bsky.social nails it, states the risks so clearly.

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

This idea of "thin empathy" and "thick empathy" from @mjcrockett.bsky.social is lighting up my brain this morning. It's an intriguing model. We've built a world where chances for thin empathy abound, but thick empathy remains hard to come by. I need to read that preprint today.

So delighted that one of my favorite thinkers & writers engaged with my new preprint on empathy 🥰 By far one of the best parts of being an academic is putting ideas out into the world and seeing them refracted through other minds, who help you see things more richly than you did before.

1. In Hamburg there is a "fully autonomous train" that for some reason has a human operator to press the ON switch first thing in the morning and the OFF switch at the end of the night. In a recent talk about AI in science, I asked the audience to consider whether they want to be like that operator.

Today in "Don't Trust AI to Tell You Facts": How several different "AI" programs messed up the simple fact of to whom I dedicated a book, and what that means for how much you should trust "AI" to tell you the truth about things (spoiler: not much at all): whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/a...

I wrote about the ad for this AI app in this week's note. Something important that I think is missing from a lot of coverage of this ad is the way the marketing story leverages a child. It's not just about AI short circuiting adult grief. It is also about creating a fictitious reality for a child.

Having now read the paper in its entirety ...it's a delight! Very accessible, very human, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social writes in prose I wish many more academics would follow. And don't sleep on the footnotes, she sneaks some fun stuff in there -- gotta love a citation to Buddha.

This is an amazing essay on empathy and/against AI.

Wow. This is an absolutely terrifying read. We now live in an age when a single company can, through what appears to be plain old bureaucracy, can more or less brick your entire digital life.

This is one hell of a Claire Danes impression www.instagram.com/reel/DSDXKlt...

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

New from me - how AI-generated political videos have become just another part of social media, used to entertain, outrage and monitize attention theconversation.com/ai-generated...

Trying to (hate) read TIME's person of the year article and there is this "Ask the AI" window that does not have any visible dismiss button that just stays on top of the text as you scroll.

If you’re in higher ed and trying to think through how to teach humanities in the current AI hype environment, the linked post is *highly* recommended (linked below the picture of the Tweet)