It is, far and away, the most challenging thing I’ve encountered since entering the academy. And that is saying a lot. I might be working on this but I keep putting it aside because I’m not medicated enough to describe how demoralizing it all is.

the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly

BREAKING: The FBI has fired agents photographed kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest that followed the death of George Floyd, AP sources say.

Camden had zero homicides this summer. City and county leaders credit the 2013 disbandment of its police department. Violent crime is at a 50-year low. This is amazing. www.inquirer.com/news/camden-...

This video is really important. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/o... It connects the dots between A.I. and climate disasters and is just a perfectly crafted piece of investigation and exposition. @katecrawford.bsky.social

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

To have my book mentioned in the same breath as Karen Hao's magnificent Empire of AI is a career highlight. Thank you to Jennifer Sano-Franchini for organizing a CCCC Virtual Reading Circle on Labor, Land, Water, and Writing: The Costs of Generative AI in the Writing Classroom.

oh I'm HYPERVENTILATING !!

Announcing a three-part CCCC Reading Circle Series: Oct 16—Discussion of Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social! Dec 10—Discussion of Enduring Digital Damage by @dustinedwards.bsky.social! Jan 12—Teaching Session on bringing these ideas to the writing classroom! cccc.ncte.org/cccc/cccc-fa...

I wrote a little something about generative AI, plagiarism, and why detection and surveillance are not the answers.

A new blog from @rcmeg.bsky.social on Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies about refusing plagiarism detection. refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/r...

Check out the guest post I did for @dhandlib.bsky.social on what I read this summer, practicing the @disconetwork.bsky.social method of "technoskepticism" vis-a-vis critical AI and platformization. dhandlib.org/recommended-... #TeamRhetoric #Academicsky #CriticalAI

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

OK, I started this related critical AI list too here: olivia.science/ai#allies with allies & resources — @jsanofranchini.bsky.social @annakornbluh.bsky.social @ehayot.bsky.social (let me know if I failed to tag anybody) and importantly, feel free to contact me to add more! 🤍

I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai "CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"

Japan has a wrestling camp for kids where at the end they have a show match in front of their parents to show off what they learned. Thought you'd enjoy this.

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

"In a lot of ways, this zero-sum conflict becomes a distraction from what we should arguably really be paying to—the diverse affordances, material conditions, flows of capital, and concrete harms that result from these technologies with disparate impacts for different groups of people."

New blog post: Beyond “Two Sides” and the “Middle Ground” in GenAI Discourse: The Affordances and Limits of Linear Reasoning Models refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/09/17/b... #RefusingGenAI

So many of the half-baked AI implementations are happening in professional arenas that have been hollowed out by extraction and divestment. No journalist needs a writing aid unless they’re being paid too little to write too much, no teacher needs a commenting tool unless they’re overextended.

Unreal.

this is a story of great importance and I hope everybody will read it. www.bbc.com/news/article...

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

millennials are band directors now and I think that’s terrific

President Trump temporarily suspended the repatriation of more than 300 South Korean workers home after the Hyundai-LG raid in Georgia to explore whether they could stay in the U.S. to educate and train American workers, South Korean officials said Thursday. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Getting lots of stories of every kind here, some of them infuriating, some of them heartbreaking, some of them darkly funny. Keep them coming. Did clients or bosses using AI change, degrade, or kill your job? Artists, illustrators, animators, actors, designers, please share: [email protected]

I don't think a lot of people realize or know people who were on the receiving end of death threats for over a decade because of Turning Point USA. They made a watch list of professors that made them targets for not only hate mail but death threats. That's Charlie Kirk's legacy.

I always feel my class based differences really strongly when something like this happens. I share zero of my professional colleagues’ impulses.

After heavy corporate lobbying, RFK Jr.'s new MAHA report takes a hands-off approach to Big Ag and "forever chemicals" — despite their connection to rising cancer rates and drinking water contamination. Tell me how this is supposed to make America healthy again?

feminist analysis requires that you understand power relations and harms to marginalized communities, and fight to destroy those forces. to use AI is one of the most anti-feminist things you can do on many levels, and that’s why tech bros and AI boosters love it.

New today in The Important Work: high school teacher Clayton Kistner draws inspiration from @bcmerchant.bsky.social's Blood in the Machine and argues that in the classroom, there is no middle ground when it comes to AI. theimportantwork.substack.com/p/i-am-a-pro...

I HATE when people compare AI to the printing press, it's so disingenuous. The printing press was opposed by the elites because it put power in the hands of everyday people, and popularized a vernacular. AI does the opposite, by allowing elites to bypass artists and laborers.

How many times, in how many contexts, from how many internal and external researchers, or from how many CEO's are people going to have to receive this message before they believe it: "Hallucinations" are an inherent part of the large language model architecture. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

To put this another way: you can't stop it from making things up because *literally all it does is make things up* It just generates likely text. Sometimes what's likely is also true. Sometimes it's not. This means it has the same relationship to truth as a magic 8-ball. Literally.

The idea that we have to "encourage responsible AI usage" is a core part of the inevitability narrative driving the institutional adoption that makes people think it's worth trying out. it contributes to the very problem it supposedly tries to solve. we can't let it go unchallenged.

If you're interested in GenAI in education, or you're making decisions about it, you really need to read this piece by @olivia.science, @irisvanrooij.bsky.social, & others - right now. They strongly argue against GenAI's insertion in education. I'll admit... #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

They’re trying to retrofit AI with the same gender panic that has worked so well for them in demonizing trans people. They’re also trying to link it to humanities and gender studies boogeyman. I don’t engage it seriously at all. Only mock it, if anything.

I just wanted y’all to know that “abstinence-only AI” is an agitprop term. That’s all.

It's a shitty analogy, plain and simple. It's frankly absurd and manipulative to compare using LLM chatbots to having sex, something that's existed since the dawn of time and is necessary for life itself.

It is wildly disrespectful and sexist to colleagues to liken the decision to discourage LLM use to abstinence education. It diminishes the harms caused by abstinence-only sex ed while also conveniently ignoring the wealth of scholarship about LLM harms.

This is a startling illustration of how generative AI LLM chatbots quickly become a way to slow down and deteriorate trust in academic and scientific knowledge production

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

More than 85 scientists say that a recent U.S. Department of Energy report is full of errors and misrepresents climate science.

When I see people online, even in jest, suggest that people living in Republican-controlled states should be abandoned because of their politicians, I feel a deep heartache. New York CREATED Donald Trump and none of y’all are ever talk about it the way you disparage Alabama or Mississippi.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

This is big news. www.ft.com/content/96b5...

At this point, saying "'A.i.' is here to stay; we have to learn how to work with it" is the same as saying "Facism is here to stay; we have to learn to work with it." No. We have to FIGHT it.

A great piece from TCD colleagues advocating resistance to AI. The beauty of learning comes in the process of thinking, the unexpected connections, time spent reading closely; all things that GenAI prevents.

TIL that Moms for America, Moms for Liberty, and Parents Defending Education have signed the White House's pledge to America's youth to invest in AI education, which further clarifies how this AI education initiative is a political project and whose vision of education is being prioritized.

NJ students in grades 6-12 will now learn about “the history of organized labor, notable strikes throughout history, unionization drives, and the collective bargaining process and existing legal protections in the workplace.” This is genuinely so important, and so good to see. Jersey strong, baby!!