The internet is fast becoming so choked with this, it'll be unusable. We'll all be boats chugging blindly through the gloom and the muck, finding nothing, barely each other, uncertain what's true or even real anymore.

why do this in the first place www.semafor.com/article/12/1...

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

I wrote a bit for McSweeney's about Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus. Just a little something for the holiday season. Enjoy!

"I’ve concluded that instead of teaching students to read and write, I should be teaching them how to prompt AI better. If only I’d had a better education in AI prompt writing, I’d be able to get AI to create more AI-proof teaching materials for me."

What do we think writing IS? What is an author? Why bother, if you don't want to write, if you are not challenged and exhausted and exhilarated and electrocuted in the doing of it?

Will continue to bang this drum: this is the system university admins are cramming into every aspect of education. This is the system we are told “isn’t going anywhere” so we all have to adjust to it.

Regret to report that there has been another good linkedin post

I don’t see what’s so bizarre, for *decades* people have been waking up and reading the newspaper. the only difference for me is that the newspaper is a billionaire-curated never-ending stream of obviously fake videos designed to make me angry and push my politics rightward.

As many have been saying for a while, sure seems like the “who could AI replace” question has the opposite answer to what the bosses expect

The purpose of a system of is what it does.

It’s infuriating to me that I need to evaluate media to determine whether it’s AI generated now. The great “time saver” technology wastes incalculable time and energy for people who want to retain their grasp on reality

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

No contract? No coffee! ✊☕ Our members are out supporting Starbucks Workers United in their strike as they fight for a fair contract.

"I myself have publicly advocated the use of direct action, including property sabotage, in the cause of climate justice. It stands to reason that I should support the same range of tactics in the effort to prevent genocide."

This is why OpenAI is selling so aggressively to education at all levels—they want to create entire generations of users incapable of reading, writing and thinking without ChatGPT to hold their hands And teachers and professors should call this out for what it actually is

It's not this platform. It's all of society that hates AI

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates on.ft.com/4ij0yh8

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

This feels like one of those stories you're going to look at a year from now and say to yourself, "Why didn't I move more of my portfolio into cash?" ** ** (This post is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial or any other advice.) 🎁 www.wsj.com/tech/meta-ai...

Beautifully written & reasoned 3 min read. “To my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.” Commentary from a cool prof in 🧵 www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

The value of knowledge is in having done the work. The value of research is in having done the research. The value of a summary is in having summarized the information. The value of writing is in having done the writing.

Discussion on here this morning about 1)whether Gemini is good at "creative writing" and 2)a study showing people preferred AI imitations of writers to the writers themselves. I come back to my trusty all-purpose question: What problem are we solving when we outsource "creative writing"?

i don't say things like this often, as i find them hyperbolic to the point of extreme dilution, so please believe me when I say this is the most severe, graceful dissection of Musk I've seen. Swift, effortlessly deep, like piano wire through tofu. If someone spoke of me like this I’d be abed a week

So fun that I can’t believe anything I see on the internet is real anymore. What a great future. Good job rich guys.

I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide. And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft. What does OpenAI offer the world?

Did you wake up irrationally angry at how much energy is being used - and CO2 is being emitted - to foist upon us AI technology that most of don't even want?

AI is intellectual asbestos. Building it into all of our information systems and relying on it to produce academic, scientific and legal knowledge is layering toxic waste into infrastructure that we won’t ever be able to fully abate.

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...

Since I heard the idea that "surveillance used to be a side-effect; now it is the product" in @techwontsave.us with @hypervisible.blacksky.app, I cannot help finding it everywhere I read. For instance, this is the new "Claude Memory" by Anthropic.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

What HE managers fail to understand is that in the context of the Humanities, ‘employability’ isn’t teaching coding or carpentry, but skills around writing, presenting, reasoning, evaluation, analysis, research etc. In an 80% service economy, these are the skills that fundamentally matter.

Everyone agrees that we're currently in a dotcom era-like AI bubble. People disagree what sort of bubble it is. There are 3 stories one can tell about the dotcom crash: a startup story, a telecom story, and an accounting fraud story. My take: it's giving Enron open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

AI in education amplifies and intensifies educational systems of product-centredness AI in education reproduces the idea of de-skilled, casualized pedagogy where the computer is the primary reader of the curriculum/syllabus and the tutor plays a subsidiary role

The basic structure of so much commentary, some in the guise of academic study, reduces to: (1) generative AI products are detrimental to the goals of education (2) therefore, the goals of education must change. Without the tacit axiom that AI has authority behind it, that just doesn’t follow.

Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

"In 2012, 60 trans-related articles were published by Britain’s media. By 2022, it was more than 7,500, according to figures from Trans Media Watch. The media is not responding to public rage against vulnerable minorities; it is helping to create it." www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/709...

If you make and show me a Sora 2 video I want you to know I think of you as infinitely less important than a worm, whose movements and excrement nuture the soil, whereas a Sora 2 user is a creature that asks robots to despoil the world out of boredom.

In his wonderful newsletter, @joshgondelman.bsky.social wrote something about AI that is going to rattle around in my head forever: “AI cannot take a happy person and make them happier, but it can take a lonely person and turn them delusional.“ www.thatsmarvelousnewsletter.com/151-ai-frien...

...I mean that even with careful prompts I would not be confident LLMs could perform the function I'd want. How do I know that any bland AI summary of a paper is going to extract what might be of value to *me* in it? I don't even know that myself before I read it...

And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.

i have to say, as a trans journalist who has covered the "trans debate" for about a decade now, there is no daylight between how the trump administration and conservatives lie about tylenol and autism and how they've lied about youth trans care.

“The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the ‘fear of missing out,’ few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better.”

Yes, excellent point. The most durable lessons may not feel great in the moment of learning, but that friction is necessary. For me, it relates to how education has taken on a transactional structure. If the transaction is satisfied more quickly, that's better. Students get a lot of signals that way