The recent AI marketing blitz is selling a future that many reject. I collected quite a few examples in this post and left ample room for others to analyze the marketing tactics being used, including the Friend AI campaign and the backlash it caused. marcwatkins.substack.com/p/selling-ge...

I was on Tophat talking about AI. I believe faculty should be leading conversations about AI on campuses and students and administration should likewise be involved. We should all be considering the purpose of education and how our values shape our views of this technology tophat.com/teaching-res...

Many young people will start asking what’s the point of going to college, taking out debt, spending years of their life learning skills if they cannot secure a job afterwards. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I’ve enjoyed using Perplexity, but directly marketing their new Comet browser to students and showing them how it can be used to cheat crosses the line. I won't be supporting a product that targets students and encourages academic misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

AI is now browser based. You can view a video of Perplexity's Comet completing an online assignment from Josh Brake. Don't panic. The speed is the giveaway. It is good practice to start checking LMS timestamps for how long students access and complete assignments youtu.be/opOx3Msw5tI?...

Beyond the many moral and ethical objections I raised about using AI to grade, here's a concrete one: AI grading will never be secure because of prompt injection. Simply hiding a phrase within an assignment is all it takes to bypass even the most advanced AI models.

Some teachers are using AI to grade and few are talking about it. Scantrons are one thing, but automating grading, feedback, and assessing written work with AI poses massive ethical challenges and should not become the default or go to choice in education. 👇 in comments

I was on NPR Morning Edition to talk about the deeply troubling ethical issue of faculty using AI to grade student assignments. I'm glad this issue is getting more attention, but it is also one I don't see clear a path forward. www.npr.org/2025/10/07/n...

Our relationship with new technologies has always been fraught and AI isn’t new in that regard. After 3 years of ChatGPT, over a decade with social media, and screens in our pockets, are we able to chart a path forward or helplessly lost in hype and doom? marcwatkins.substack.com/p/the-halluc...

Popping in via VPN to share how age verification is actively limiting access to services like Bluesky. I think AV will eventually impact access to AI. I don't think AV effectivly protects children and don't believe this is the future any of us wants. marcwatkins.substack.com/p/age-verifi...

It’s been real, but this is likely the end for me on this platform. I have to use a VPN to post or read contact because of the state I live in. This is chilling and should be a wake up call for what’s coming.

I guess I won’t be posting here much longer. Being in a state that’s instituted age verification laws causing social media companies like Bluesky to restrict access isn’t an isolated event—it’s where the internet is headed. I’ll use a VPN for now, but that’s not going to be sustainable.

Faculty guidelines and frameworks for using generative AI with their students are often unclear and vague. The institutional silence around faculty AI usage risks sending a message of indifference instead of charting a clear path forward. I created a VALUES framework for faculty to consider.

I hope people dunking on OpenAI for how crappy GPT-5 is and how hyped AGI has been take a step back and consider how the LLMs we have today will take society years to fully absorb. This technology is impact our world in ways we can barely comprehend. AI isn't going away even if the hype does.

A little over a year from now, the first generation of ChatGPT students will graduate college with no guidance about how to use or resist AI in their careers. A college freshmen will arrive on campus having 4 years of access to a chatbot and we think bluebooks are an answer?

Another semester approaches and faculty face a super charged version of ChatGPT. I want to talk about value and meaning with my students, not necessarily AI. Here are some ideas to do just that. I also have a session submitted to SXSW Edu about AI aware teaching that I’d love for you to vote for. 👇

Will Microsoft update the education version of Copilot with GPT-5? This was formerly known as Bing Chat Enterprise and hasn't been updated with a new model since GPT-4 launched in 2023. That would give data protection w/ GPT-5 to a lot of schools.

RIP ChatGPT's Study Mode. It lasted ten days as a feature before GPT-5's launch removed it. Now students will need to ask the model to not complete tasks for them manually. The point was a ⏹️ button students could use to create a socratic tutor, a space where the model wouldn't offload learning.

Giving oos 20b a second look with LM Studio, which is much better at running it. You can toggle the reasoning settings and this does improve the output. Medium setting seems to be the sweet spot, but on high you have to raise the context limit to get the best output to count Rs in strawberry. 1/4

I have a Macbook Pro/ M4 48 gbs and ran GPT-oss 20b via ollama and these were the results on three tests for reasoning and search. My overall impression is the usefulness of the model is very limited on a personal device. 1️⃣ Fail: the strawberry test 1/3

The new GPT-oss open weights models are technically impressive, but are they practical? Both suffer from higher hallucination rates compared to proprietary models, don't ground results to improve errors through search, and you need 80 gigs of memory on your device to run the largest model locally.

A time when you should maybe not use AI: My daughter starts back to school tomorrow in the 6th grade and the school used an AI voice over video with slides likely generated as well to talk about how her school was all about relationships. Welcome back?

The new “Study Mode” for ChatGPT turns it into a Socratic tutor and is just a prompt. The implication is OpenAI could have released this years ago—a version of ChatGPT that wouldn’t complete your homework for you. Let that sink in. OAI could have nerfed ChatGPT with a few well organized phrases.

As the fall semester approaches, we’re bound to hear more talk about AI policies, what new skills students will need, and how to curb AI misuse. We’re also likely to hear renewed calls for faculty to redesign assessments. A year ago I wrote a series about how AI impacted learning and revisited it.

My latest for the Chronicle -- how to navigate the AI already present on your campus. Now that ChatGPT will be directly integrated into Canvas, I think it is time we have a much deeper conversation about how quickly AI has been integrated into existing applications www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

Posted without coment www.axios.com/2025/07/23/o...

Time dictates so much of our engagement with students in higher education. Here are some practical ways you can talk to them about AI that don't feel overwhelming to you. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

This isn't a challenge. The videos may appear realistic, but the audio filter Google uses for dialogue in Veo 3 is stunted compared to human speech. It's like listening to someone talk on an airplane. It is an easy tell . . . for now. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I have many snarky things to say about this philanthrocapitalist propaganda sponsored by the family that brought you food deserts. But let’s keep it simple. Corporations have always used tech bubbles to disrupt labor solidarity & smuggle labor intensification under the veil of efficiency.

The words “returns,” “savings,” “gains,” and “impact” appear repeatedly throughout the Walton Foundation's Unlocking Six Weeks a Year With AI report. It sounds like a technology ad promising an amazing return on investment, not an educational report about pedagogy. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

The Walton foundation report about AI usage among K12 teachers confirms most teachers who use AI do so to save time, saving some teachers 6 weeks a year. Your kid may not be allowed to use AI in school, but his teacher is becoming a power user. www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/the-ai-divid...

I spent two days with university leadership from across the country and expected university presidents to tell me why they're going all in on AI. Instead, they asked: How do we preserve our institution's values now that AI is here? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Faculty in higher education who are fundamentally opposed to using generative AI should be aware how quickly AI is being integrated into databases. Unless your research is analog, you will not be given the option to opt-out of using digital research tools that read/synthesize results for you.

Come hear my thoughts about the AI already present on your campus and what this means for risk, access, and opportunity for education. bit.ly/3ZdqEtO

The story of how generative AI arrived on college campuses is far more complicated and troubling than purchasing a single app, like ChatGPT. Updates in existing contacts don’t require a clearly defined decision making processes or go through shared governance marcwatkins.substack.com/p/your-campu...

We held our fourth university-wide AI institute for faculty over two days. There's a growing realization that the technology isn’t going to be policed away, fizzle out, or go the way of MOOCs. Faculty and students want to talk about how AI impacts learning. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

The more I read about people experimenting with process tracking to curb AI misuse, the more I’m convinced we’re headed down a dark path where we cede more of our agency to machines with the promise that they will ensure our words are human. open.substack.com/pub/emilypit...

Google Labs has an AI detector they are rolling out called SynthID. Big caveat that it only works with Google generated text, video, audio, etc. It makes you wonder why all the other AI platforms haven't adopted watermarking. It's almost like Google is trying to send a message 🤏

The AI crisis in education isn't simply that it enables cheating—it's that we're failing to develop a nuanced understanding of how this emerging technology intersects with long-standing educational challenges. marcwatkins.substack.com/p/the-storie...

The NYTs piece about faculty using AI undisclosed with students fails to connect this troubling behavior with the exploitation of contingent faculty. People inevitably seek shortcuts when their working conditions are untenable. GenAI didn't create that problem.

At some point in the ChatGPT in schools discourse, the irony of all this will hit fully. AI use is beyond cheating. Students will use AI to take assessments, while faculty will use AI to create tests and have AI grade for them. Who gains what in that scenario? arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

ChatGPT didn't create a crisis in education-it simply revealed what was brewing for decades. Students need to see the purpose and value in what they do. That means we need to speak to students beyond AI about why learning matters. open.substack.com/pub/emilypit...

My latest piece for the Chronicle about how hard it is just keeping up with AI developments. The framework I suggest: each week spend 1️⃣ 30 mins reading 2️⃣ 30 mins exploring 3️⃣ 30 mins reflecting on AI's impact. 💡 That's 90 minutes a week to keep informed about AI www.chronicle.com/article/your...

My brother resigned from his job at USCIS. The toll this administration is taking on government workers and families must end!

The recent sycophancy update in ChatGPT should be an opportunity to talk about LLMs impact on human interaction. The real danger isn’t one bad update—it’s the industry-wide pattern of prioritizing scale over caution. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

The general public does not grasp how dangerous this is. Nearly half a billion people use ChatGPT each week. Releasing an update that caused sycophancy should not have happened and raises questions about safety and trust. 🔴 Should AI be deployed as a public experiment? openai.com/index/expand...

Latest dispatch from me. Students now have free access to premium AI through Google Gemini, ChatGPT Plus, and xAI's Super Grok and were not talking about it Burnett:[E]veryone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening

Google's AI Studio released an interesting and I think useful feature called apps that anyone can access for free using an Gmail account. Apps allow users to build and use the full multimodal features found in Gemini. Some of these playable demos are really impressive:

The war AI firms wage over students is intensifying. Anthropic and OpenAI offer free versions for a few months of access to their AI tools, but Google has stolen the show. Google is giving away a year of free access to Google One AI Premium to all college students. $240 worth of access for free.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of the first of a three-issue special volume from Thresholds in Education about generative AI’s impact on teaching and learning coedited with Stephen Monroe. We have amazing essays from educators. Please give them a read! open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...