You know what doesn't wear an "I read banned books" shirt to work? A censorious computer program labeled "librarian". And that denial of agency is why fascists are so eager to displace librarians with a machine that does not do the same job and thereby poses no threat to power.

Oklo, the planned recipient of this weapons-grade plutonium, is not a nuclear energy company. It is a Sam Altman speculative financial vessel with a $20B valuation, no revenue, and no licensed reactor design. www.forbes.com/sites/greats...

“we will have strong grounds to sue any university potentially that signs on to this compact for undermining the First Amendment rights and constitutional rights of our members on that campus…Any university that accepts the compact must be made into a pariah in the academic community.” 👀 UT Austin

Again, this precise use case is why these systems exist-to proliferate people’s racist (transphobic, misogynistic…) imaginary at scale. This should not be seen as a “misuse” but rather the product being used exactly as intended.

Proud to have coauthored this statement with @boulderprogressives.org expressing concern about the use of Flock cameras and encrypted radios by @boulderpolice.bsky.social blog.boulderprogressives.org/concerning-b...

For advanced research methods, I'm including material on environmental impacts of data and research, such as data centers, in the section on research ethics. I'm teaching this video that @moreperfectunion.bsky.social created about data centers and electric bills. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN6B...

Please pay attention to what Grammarly actually is/does/tells writers before recommending it to your students.

Facial recognition software is notorious for racial and gender bias. Using this product in this way is like deciding whether to deny constitutional rights based on vibes of the most racist person you know. www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Tl;dr RCT shows we learn more from web link search than LLM synthesis "participants were randomly assigned to learn about a topic either from standard Google web links or LLM syntheses (e.g. ChatGPT) and were then asked to create advice on the subject based on what they learned."(n = 10,426)

Everyone should read The Two Victims of Plagiarism from @plagiarismtoday.com in the context of LLMs. LLMs provide plausible deniability unless we recognize what it means to choose to use the plagiarism machine: non-consensual ghost authorship in a blender. www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/08/01/t...

Universities track into administration those with the most banal centralized and hierarchical views of power. Imagine where we could be if they actually believed in shared governance and collective action as desirable pluralism, in a theory of change rooted in solidarity. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Alpha School is child abuse. Profiteering on adverse selection, surveillance, eugenics. PA's review of their charter school app is 🔥. www.pa.gov/content/dam/... > While a single deficiency would be grounds for denial, the Department has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria.

Ok so the thing happened where I forget that I now have 4x more followers than I used to and I need to explain things more. Tiny history lesson! Colonization of other people and exploitation of your own have always gone hand-in-hand. But usually in a way that (temporarily) looks good for your own.

The purpose of a system is what it does. "AI" surveillance is a system of stochastic racist violence.

I am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b... @apache.be you rule 🖤

This draft UCLA deal is full of terms no university should ever consider, negotiated in defiance of shared governance. It includes multiple pages detailing the ways UCLA would pledge to violate California state law regarding gender identity (+ many 1st Amendment issues, ...) ucop.edu/communicatio...

WE WON. Again. Think they’ll take it to the Supreme Court? www.latimes.com/california/s...

George Norlin was celebrated for having "the courage to make enemies" (with the KKK-run state gov and 1933 Nazis). What enemies do current administrators have the courage to make other than already-marginalized members of their own faculty, staff, and student bodies?

Is this ... viewpoint diversity? www.kut.org/education/20...

Enjoyed writing this short but sweet [altho not necessarily in message] piece for @projectsyndicate.bsky.social w @irisvanrooij.bsky.social: > While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype & stolen intellectual labor 🧵

The article is awfully credulous, criticizing the process more than the premise, but it's still a good account (and at least read Ben's short thread). “The [AI] textbooks worsen learning effectiveness and negatively affect students” ✅ And consider the politics after Yoon's attempted coup:

CA governor Gavin Newsom vetoed both of the major AI bills on his desk that Silicon Valley meaningfully opposed—one making it illegal for bosses to use AI to fire workers with no oversight, one requiring chatbot sellers to ensure their products do not harm children before marketing to them.

I was with a panel of people who were all making good arguments about why AI will never replace this or that skill or job, so maybe we'll be okay, and I finally said to one teacher: "you can just say no. you don't have to use it. it steals from people and teaches no skills. it's not a good tool."

What does it mean to use #genAI "responsibly" in research? In this post, @petertarras.bsky.social & I respond to a taxonomy which equates disclosure of use with transparency & responsibility. We object to this & call for more conversations about how & why it's used, who is harmed, & who benefits.

When they keep emailing you that the VIP tickets for a band you’ve never heard of are going fast

This is a sign of immense weakness. It’s like a mobster asking others if they’d be interested in a shakedown because their first targets didn’t cooperate.

important on LLMs for academics: 1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems 2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism 3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills 4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution 5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI 6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense

We have the timidity of countless corporate and university GCs to thank for the fact DEI is treated as though it were illegal.

“Deloitte “misused AI and used it very inappropriately: misquoted a judge, used references that are non-existent,” Pocock told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “I mean, the kinds of things that a first-year university student would be in deep trouble for.”” 👀 fortune.com/2025/10/07/d...

Does your university have a contract with Grammarly? Write to the decision-maker asking if they think the university should be paying for a tool that is fast integrating features that can only be used for academic misconduct and cognitive offloading and request they drop the contract.

One can interpret this brittleness as (a) an embarrassing property to be concealed by training/prompting, or (b) failure of the model to validate (benchmark score doesn't assess what is implied), and either restrict the application space or go back to the drawing board. Science demands the latter.

we wrote this over 5 yrs ago dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Just like the segregationists who filled community swimming pools with concrete.

New research from AWU/CWU/Techquity on AI data workers in North America. “[L]ow paid people who are not even treated as humans [are] making the 1 billion dollar, trillion dollar AI systems that are supposed to lead our entire society and civilization into the future.” cwa-union.org/ghost-worker...

TL; DR In the next 5 business days you should be able to go to Link's page on blacksky.community and see his posts and he'll be able to post but people using the bsky mobile apps won't see it. After that we'll get Blacksky-only posts up. After that we can talk about purging bsky mod tools fin/11

Yes, there is no reason to presume integrity of statements found between the detected fraud. The entire report should be considered fraud and Deloitte should repay the entire contract plus interest and damages. Also, the non-existent refs will soon be replaced with fraudulent citation of real refs.

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below. It's especially for journalists covering this story! Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

Just as judges need to to avoid inappropriately applying the presumption of regularity to the highly irregular actions of this government, universities need to openly, publicly explain that authoritarian attacks on free speech and academic freedom are not—except as a pretext—related to antisemitism.

I just migrated and the experience was very smooth. Restoring a custom domain after migrating doesn't even require a DNS update; the *.myatproto.social username was only momentarily visible. It feels liberating, and I love donating to people building open infrastructure with shared values. Thanks!

A moment that calls for collective action… to reject this transparent attack on academic freedom.

✴️For the first time since 1945, UT does not have a representative faculty council. Our press release on the replacement of an elected Faculty Council with faculty advisory bodies composed entirely of appointees of President Davis. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

"We've got a captured population. There are only two of those, BTW, students and prisoners. And frankly, the student data is richer, more diverse, [..] in ways that make it more valuable." -- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

Sorry to say most of the "glorious, magnificent abilities" are on the spectrum between wildly oversold and outright scams. Beyond that, Herzog's instincts are 🎯

Let’s say, hypothetically, you appreciated our position paper and @olivia.science and I would be recording answers to questions about it. What questions would you have?

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

Criticism about AI in schools mostly focuses on how it allows students to get away with something (by using OpenAI to write their essays). But shouldn't we be talking more about its detrimental effects on teaching and learning than on how it impedes our ability to evaluate students? is.gd/acOSmQ

Corrolary: researchers who do not intend to hitch their work to this culture would be advised to use more informative language to describe their work. Focus on the specific problem being solved and well-defined methods and verification and validation techniques being used.

OpenAI is desperate to reach $100B/y profit (their definition of AGI 🤡 and contractual freedom from Microsoft), which would require 10x revenue while cutting expenses. But their product isn't good enough to do that with consensual customers so they need to extract it from a captured population. 🧵👇

I signed. I was supported by a GRFP during my thesis research and its award reinforced that I was a scientist during my training.

Yes! We also need one of these for instructors and administrators. Remember that the artifact is not the goal, but a medium for critiquing and challenging understanding. In all cases, critical thinking and intentionality in communication are power you can claim or forfeit.