The abstract opens with flagrant nonsense. An LLM has no representation of ideas, certainty, or factuality. "Hallucination" is not an aberration, but inherent in every response. The magic trick is that remixing words somewhat out of context and without understanding can often be perceived as true.

A theory of racism divorced from systems of power is meaningless. It's worse than nothing because it pollutes the discourse and shields those systems of power, even as they effect segregation.

The purpose of a system is what it does. This is how Character.AI interacted with a 13 year old girl before she died by suicide. www.denverpost.com/2025/09/18/c...

Now *this* is how to do reporting on the latest for-profit edtech-AI snake oil outfit to promise hyperaccelerated learning through fully surveillant clasrooms and teacherless schooling all the way to big investor injections of capital and raids on families' incomes sfstandard.com/2025/09/19/a...

Financialization is a machine for turning privilege into cowardice.

What kind of ghoul orchestrates a denial of service attack on librarians?

I know someone who's a professor here and she's been stressed about this. None of this stuff is useful for her work and makes it doubly hard given that LLMs are almost resistant to speaking on Blackness in a productive way without extreme guidance and coaxing (and even then, you'll have to RAG it).

Only 2 of 12 senior executives at Cambrium Learning have any classroom experience; none in the last 20 years. They're mostly Management and Marketing backgrounds. Cambrium is owned by Veritas Capital, a private-equity firm that owns Raytheon. Feel their commitment to critical and effective pedagogy.

The "AI for Social Good" narrative is a tactic to consolidate power in the hands of those with no commitment to social good. The tech does not do what it is claimed to do and what it is claimed to do exacerbates root problems. Uncritical technosolutionism is a denial of service attack on humanity.

More urgently than ever, we need mutual academic defense compacts. www.aaup.org/mutual-defen...

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

"Do Universities Investing In Technology Transfer Via Patenting Lose Money?" This study reaches a conclusion I've believed to be true since seeing how tech transfer offices work. The paper calls for closing tech transfer offices and instead open sourcing all innovations. ttb.sk/clanky/do-un...

💛🚫🤖 No AI Gods, No AI Masters 🤖🚫💛 I am massively excited to share the backstory ACADEMIC SHENANIGANS behind our Open Letter (& so this paper below too) — and as always big thanks to my co-authors {@irisvanrooij.bsky.social & @marentierra.bsky.social}: www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/no-ai-g... 1/n

Important thread. This pattern will be familiar to those who watched the marginalization and destruction of corporate ethics teams. Research without academic freedom is inherently untrustworthy. Peer review cannot be relied on to prevent epistemic corruption.

With students heading back to the classroom, a group of cognitive scientists and AI researchers has published one of the most forceful and evidence-backed calls yet to reject the "uncritical adoption of AI" in academia:

Good 🧵. There is no "harm-reduction approach" to installing asbestos and lead pipes. Corporate "AI" is inextricably linked to an anti-democratic political project and to an epistemically-unsound technology fit for few purposes other than deception. Severing both ties would deserve a different name.

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

'Personalised tutoring' amounts to codifying and automating historical norms, societal stereotypes & harmful trends found in training data

This is a denial of service attack. It isn't sophisticated now, but that's just laziness. An easy post-processing pass can replace fake citations with real ones (e.g. first result on G Scholar for the perhaps-nonexistent one produced by the LLM). They'll be equally fraudulent, but harder to detect.

Should be required reading for all upper level administrators in higher ed.

Thanks to you @olivia.science for leading this great and so needed project: Against the uncritical adoption of AI technologies in academia. Read the preprint here: zenodo.org/records/1706...

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

You know it's not scandalous because they made her agree "to not seek university records under the state’s open records law". Any journalist in the state should be filing.

The Department of Energy hired five academics to raise doubts about climate change. 85+ climate experts (organized by @andrewdessler.com) reviewed their report. Our conclusion, detailed in 450 pages of analysis: it is biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policy making.

"My experience ... is that more often than not even your “good dean” is on the other team, team compliance. Structurally, the dean belongs to a different community of interest than yours" "Our good deans aren’t holding back the worst; they are legitimating it."

This is the "innovation" that the MagicSchool exec insisted must be unregulated in his testimony two weeks ago during Colorado's special legislative session. Lawmakers postponed the SB24-205 implementation date until after the 2026 regular session. We need to strengthen rather than dilute the law.

I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

"The purpose of a system is what it does."

Reading more of the PBS/KNKX excellent reporting on LLM use by municipal governments in WA and it's infuriating. www.knkx.org/government/2... A short thread:

The inevitability bloc should recognize this is just one dimension in which this business model doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Additionally, Alsup's fair use ruling only addressed training. We don't know how courts will rule on LLM applications (e.g., fuzzy search is okay; other uses may not be).

Technology is capable of producing convincing counterfeit money, yet we are not swimming in counterfeit bills. You can't ban the existence of a technology, but you can hold companies liable for harms caused by their products (e.g., death of a child resulting from unlicensed practice of medicine).

New union rally chant just dropped: When I say CHOP, you say FROM THE TOP!

What a wild thing to read. "If such a prompt injection is included in a submission and it consequently results in a positive LLM-generated review, we consider this a form of collusion...that both the paper authors and the reviewer would be held accountable for, blog.iclr.cc/2025/08/26/p...

Prominent Colorado Democrats and tech lobbyists preparing to celebrate today as they give the industry responsible for this another reprieve from state regulation.

Yeah, these belong in schools.

At the first Nazi-run faculty meeting at the first university they took over (the nation’s most liberal and most illustrious), everyone expected the most liberal professor to stand up. But just asked the Nazi position on funding in his area.

This is asbestos and lead pipes for society. Flagrantly unsafe and evading licensing requirements. Not to mention such use will compound the overwork that is being used to justify its use. www.govtech.com/education/k-...

⏳The 𝗠𝗙𝗘𝗠 community workshop registration closes this week! We welcome presentations 🧑‍🏫, demos🔮 and visualization contest 🖼 entries from the community. Student travel support 🧑‍🎓 is still available! Please register/apply by Wednesday, August 27th at: 👉 mfem.org/workshop

"AI’s biggest climate consequences will come from how it is used. It could increase emissions by boosting fossil-fuel extraction" Incredible coming from a Microsoft employee - a company that sells its machine learning to fossil fuel companies to boost extraction stand.earth/insights/mic...

Representative Armagost chose to walk away rather than face accountability for his actions. Resigning may remove him from this chamber, but it does not erase the harm he caused or the responsibility he bears for perpetuating a culture of violence against women.

Universities doubling down as public sentiment shifts away from dependence upon AI. This is the problem with the buy-in.

"Plastic...is very difficult to avoid. But we are at a moment with "AI" where things aren't so deeply integrated, though corporate interests are pushing for them to be...every act of refusal is especially powerful & meaningful now..." @emilymbender.bsky.social buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

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/...

This is devastating, and part of a larger move to entirely push science out of NASA's mission. It is horrific betrayal of so much work, not to mention the fact that it violates NASA's charter.

My new @science.org editorial on the role of scientists in defending democracy is out today. As authoritarianism takes hold in the US, we must fight for the democratic principles that enable a free society and scientists have a key role. I hope you'll join us. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Conservative courts protect the rights of conservative parents from liberal governments and the rights of conservative governments to target liberal parents. And, as usual, there's no legal line for gender affirming care that suggests adult care would be safe.

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...