I really like this talk. It puts words to a feeling I've been struggling to articulate about why my cautious optimism about AI from ~2021 has transformed into a broad pessimism. I am still cautiously optimistic about the technology of AI, but only if we can stop the political project of AI.

I'm feeling very prescient that I did a phd about computational approaches to taste right before what seems like a decade of discourse about judging AI outputs

"We must avoid the 'Babel syndrome,' the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance."

we had studies unequivocally (empirically & conceptually) demonstrating the idea of “debiasing” training data/algorithms is akin to putting lipstick on a pig as far back as 2019. yet, the amount of papers that publish claiming to come up with “debiasing” techniques is astounding. our field is broken

Since everyone's talking about the atrocious research practices that arXiv encourages (and their new much-needed quality standards), I'm going to repost two passages from our 2024 paper on the attention economy of computer vision research. dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Some theses on #slop. A thread. Slop is automated ideology. It's content made of content, optimized for circulation, prompted, shaped, and refined through feedback loops of adaptation to platform conditions 1/

i’ve worked in tech more than 20 years. it has never been more ridiculous.

I've had several conversations recently with people asking "why should anyone bother studying computer science now that we have AI?" I decided to write out my full response to that question in a blog post: samgoree.github.io/2026/04/06/w...

If our classroom activities comprise teaching students how to use a commercial product then we are not teachers; we are salespeople.

Apparently there is a tension right now in industry between "tokenmaxxing" (where employees are evaluated by how many tokens they use) and non-corporate users who are paying for AI coding hitting their usage limits because problems are more complex than they expect. www.forbes.com/sites/ronsch...

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

Join @taylor-arnold.bsky.social and me for a postdoc to expand distant viewing! 2 years. Awesome liberal arts college. Great city. Option to teach 1-2 courses a year for extra pay. Thanks to Mellon for the opportunity! Happy to answer any questions. richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...

hearing microsoft is reorganizing its AI team under the banner of "the Copilot System." Also hearing that teams are under pressure to *reduce* AI token use, remit is that there needs to be "fiscal responsibility in AI ops" and that Claude Code usage is being reduced in favour of Copilot CLI.

It's funny to see users of AI coding agents adopt the deep learning grad student workflow, where most of the thinking is automated, but you are called into action whenever the code finishes running to review the results and set up the next experiment.

www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/i... RIP to the man behind the funniest bit of all time: the invention of the null pointer

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

A very good article on AI and coding from the NYT by @clivethompson.bsky.social Here's a gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

“A bill under consideration by the New York state legislature would prohibit artificial intelligence-powered chatbots from providing legal or medical advice, and it would allow users to sue chatbot owners who violate the ban.”

MicroGPT: a masterpiece "Minuet" by the Mozart of ML, @karpathy.bsky.social: karpathy.ai/microgpt.html 200-lines of *dependency-free* Python, yet still very readable.

So the whole Anthropic thing with Hegseth and Trump is some kind of publicity stunt, right? They've been spending a ton on advertising recently, especially through nontraditional means, and this kind of news incident gets them exactly the kind of publicity they want.

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

A preprint for a paper I've been contributing to on-and-off for over five years is now out! We look at model collapse, the phenomenon where AI models trained on their own output stop working, using the theory of Markov chains, and the music of Alvin Lucier arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19033

I had the opportunity this week to present a fun little poster at SIGCSE. We took data structures students on a field trip to the library to help them better understand how the library functions as a data structure, and the algorithms that librarians use to maintain it. The activity worked great!

Today I was proud to share my 2026 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium opening keynote, titled Love, Learning, and Computing Education. Here's a rehearsal, in case you weren't there. Thank you to the organizers for inviting me to speak and to our community for listening and learning. youtu.be/iaT_zvNN_zc

I'm very surprised at how AI-divided this conference is. I've heard everything from "my students started a luddite club with an no AI pact" to the view that skill using generative AI will be the main way software engineers are hired and promoted in the future.

Oh yeah, I'm at SIGCSE! If you follow me here and want to meet up, let me know.

It's worth adding to this conversation that the technologies behind genAI are fundamentally conservative -- they start from the assumption that the future will be similar to the past, that the kinds of sentences, actions, problem solving strategies, etc. that have existed will continue to exist.

I have this sort of crackpot theory that part of our problem is that popular imagination of robots continues to adhere to an expert systems model when in fact the paradigm shifted to ML some time ago. Think of Data from Star Trek. Data could reason beautifully but he struggled +

Amid the “higher-education hellscape,” there may be one place where college life persists in some semblance of its ideal form, @ibogost.com argues. Are small liberal-arts colleges the last, best hope for undergraduates?

Imagine a fugue that focuses on chord movement rather than voice leading. Imagine it has almost no non-chord tones. Now imagine it uses chromatic mediants at both large scale and small. Then realize it's actually by Shostakovich.

What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated" It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?

Have any of you ever taught game design (broadly construed) as part of a first course in human-computer interaction? I'm exploring an idea for a project assignment and looking for examples.

Happy holidays, Bluesky! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us. www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...

Something to keep your eye on. Popular discourse is starting to turn against AI, so new frameworks are being built to continue selling it. We are about to see a flood of media that qualifies AI: “Gen AI” is bad and overhyped but “predictive” or “analytic AI” is responsible and good. +

YES! Everyone wants us to teach “ai skills” but no one has ever been able to tell me what an “ai skills” even is

Every year in my class I show my students the gender shades project and they are like but it has been fixed now… right?

10000 Bowls of Oatmeal But One Of Them Killed My Father, is an ongoing murder investigation and I need your help to solve it? Read the progress here and submit your own descriptions of oatmeal to help me get my revenge. verbante.itch.io/10000-bowls

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

Honestly, Hating the Computer is a critical motivator in developing better software. I do not trust anyone who does not - at least a little bit - Hate the Computer.

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

This Data Through Design program looks really cool. You can submit a proposal to make an art exhibition with data from NYC's open data portal. They give $900 stipends. Proposals are due November 2. datathroughdesign.com/2026

This sort of thing drives home the point that objections to "AI" today are overwhelmingly objections to generative AI everything machines. Algorithms which solve specific problems and work, even if they use classical AI techniques, aren't really AI anymore.

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Any of you internet research people working on religion apps? (Thinking like the “pray with Gwen Stefani” Catholicism app.)

It's become increasingly clear that generative AI produces the appearance of intellectual labor without the substance. That means it increases productivity a ton for performative tasks that were already a little pointless, and does little for tasks that require substance backed by human expertise.

I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

I agree with much here & want to add a puzzling (to me) pattern: I asked my interdisciplinary class whether AI use should be allowed. The math/CS folk said only in socsci and humanities courses, and the SS/H folk said only in math/CS courses. This OP says yes in math/CS and no in humanities 🤔

telling that so many (good and correct) critiques of AI sound exactly like the main critiques of the media culture AI was born into