The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.

Update: Einstein cheatbot is "real" in that you can download an agent, but v. expensive, and it is a wrapper for openclaw so likely a massive, scary, data scrape/phish. With apols for substack link, couldn't find anyone elsewhere who'd done the test michellekassorla.substack.com/p/the-first-...

Yep. It was so rubbish they had to put a human layer in, which means reading the assignment AND the AI feedback. I can't see how that saves anyone time, and the perverse incentives to skip the review phase when our workloads are so heavy are very obvious

💥New | The growing market for student academic misconduct services ✍️ @gengyantang.bsky.social, @saraheaton.bsky.social & Wei Cai #HigherEducation #StudentAcademicMisconduct #EdTech

So, I fired off some bullet point style thoughts about Einstein, the alleged agentic AI that can handle a Canvas course. For me, it changes nothing in terms of the big picture response to generative AI. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

The speed with which unis got into exploitative contracts with external providers who ALL designed their courses in the same, microassignment, asynchronous copy-paste template way, rather than allowing staff to - you know - use their training to design actual proper online courses Chickens, roosting

I'm with Justin Reich, who said, "industry-sponsored professional development is, at its core, a 'customer acquisition' campaign." As Google attempts to strengthen its grip on teachers and students, here's a 🧵 with work that examines the Googlization of education...

about to see a lot of universities get much more committed to verifying 2FA for every single bloody interaction

There are many interesting and challenging questions about AI and education, but what to do about a student who makes use of this sort of service is really not one of them.

Is this bad

“Every few years, the tech industry introduces a new kind of product, then prods schools to teach millions of students how to use it.“ And we fall for it every time. #GiftLink #GiftArticle

The student-author of this piece is Grace Kaste, who should be widely applauded for writing it. www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of people mentioning their surprise at discovering, after probing, how much their students resent AI in education—even if students feel obligated to use it. We really shouldn’t assume we know what they think.

This excellent editorial by @lucipangrazio.bsky.social pulls together so many important threads in the "AI Literacy" conversation. A concise and valuable resource for anyone doing work in this area. doi.org/10.1080/1743...

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

What do the #edtech folks I know think of this story? I'm somewhat sceptical of Jean Twenge's views (cited in the story) but I'm also currently trying to make up my mind about a bizarrely expensive laptop programme being offered at my kid's school that feels suboptimal, at best

To acknowledge the ways AI systems are changing does not buy into hype, it sharpens the precision of critical thinking about their impacts. To make sense of what AI does to people, you also need to understand what it does for them, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

For all those outraged by their universities’ embrace of AI, NYU’s full-time contingent faculty are poised to strike over issues that include AI

"The schools like Alpha School, AltSchool, Summit, and Rocketship are all strikingly dystopian...there is no openness, no curiosity, no contemplation, no pause. There is no possibility for anything, other than what the algorithm predicts," writes Audrey Watters.

great if one can both point out the extent and breath of a given problem followed by actionable solutions. but if a paper only focuses on making a specific problem space visible, legible and understandable but does not propose solutions, it is not a failure 2/

If HE institutions are dropping their deals with publishers for access to journal content, then what's the market for a "research-grade AI workspace" platform designed to milk universities' budgets even harder? Unis won't subscribe just for the AI summaries, right? Right? researcher.elsevier.com

This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

When your academic labour becomes data for academic publishers to ingest into AI training data to turn into assets to sell back again to institutions as AI summaries 🤮

The inevitable next stage of academic publishers profiting from academics' work is here - scraping it for AI then charging subscriptions for access to the AI summaries, and then again for the citations. Academic content assetization as we called it in a recent paper. www.science.org/content/arti...

Turns out (says @jburnmurdoch.ft.com) it's not so much an oversupply of graduates in the UK (the same would be true of other similar countries but it's not) as an undersupply of the kind of jobs that a better-performing, more productive economy would supply.

Boring as the subject might first seem - a research reporting portal closing - this is actually a great piece about academic audit culture, platform business models, and infrastructure breakdown all in one.

Great take on "AI literacy" as it is currently being promoted as a catch-all solution to AI, and in many cases captured as an opportunity. "It is hard to imagine that any of the more critical or ethical questions associated with literacy would be included in an AI curriculum created by Google."

🟨 Volume 51, Issue 1 (2026) of LMT 🟪 In the editorial for our latest issue, @lucipangrazio.bsky.social questions the usefulness of #literacy as a response to #AI. Read all articles: tinyurl.com/mma35vah

It is a vile scandal that 2 of the biggest AI companies in the world attack children by inciting them to self-harm, and by generating sexually exploitative imagery of kids for profit. I wanted to document this so that people in tech will stop saying they don't know: www.anildash.com/2026/02/18/t...

New blog post: How I'm teaching about Generative AI. catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

Yeah, quite key: it's not £21 million that is going directly to those 6500 students... The only ones winning anything (other than maybe £2000 per student) are the firm raking in the £7 million and the people keen to crash universities. Grim day for #UKHE.

21 MILLION? Oh. 😱 That's the end of some universities then. It's as simple as that. I'm sorry, I tried. www.ft.com/content/a0cf...

Part of the reason this is all so tiresome is that what we're calling AI is a political project combining a bunch of preexisting sociotechical processes designed to shift power from the masses to the managerial class. A non-exhaustive list in no particular order:

It’s also worth pointing out that concerns about new ICT being cheating machines have been levied with every advancement since the 1980s. Turnitin (and grammarly, in its defence) quelled the concerns about “copy and paste plagiarism”. LLMs made surveillance impossible. The anxiety is back. 1/7

This (about the 'new' Grammarly AI toolset) is absolutely terrifying, not because the tool is good, but because it is an easy, all-in-one, way to avoid thinking any thoughts or doing any work at all *and 3000 universities say its OK to use*. www.carleton.edu/ai/blog/gram...

Profs, Grammarly is NOT the benign writing assistant you may have thought it is, but a powerful cheating machine that includes tools explicitly designed to help students hide the cheating done with it...

Leaked documents reveal the inner workings of Alpha School, which both the press and the Trump administration have applauded. The documents show Alpha School's AI is generating faulty lessons that sometimes do "more harm than good."

I purposefully don't centre the student experience here. Not because I don't care. I do*. But because in all these reports, whilst there are testimonies from students, the universities are presented as faceless institutions. Not once have I seen the staff experience centred or even considered.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

This is emblematic of the consumer culture that fees have engendered. What the hell did the students expect? It was a ONCE IN A CENTURY PANDEMIC. There were LAWS against congregating in public. Staff worked themselves to the bone to get online delivery working. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"There is a lot at stake here. We and our students shouldn’t be the lab rats for untested educational technologies with insufficient guardrails." theimportantwork.substack.com/p/what-to-as...

"But the Email Family Tool isn’t just clearing a teacher’s desk of onerous tasks to make room for meaningful connections. It’s effectively automating, at least partially, those connections [and] reconfigur[ing] what it means for teachers, students, and families to be in relation." - Brad Robinson.

There's much talk about universities buying expensive AI licenses, but will students even use them? Arguments about access, equity, and security are often part of the marketing used to sell AI, but these become meaningless if students don't stop using free AI open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Lots of govt tech policy has been somewhat inexplicable this last year. The role of TBI is well known and something we all took for granted, and while ofc Palantir's relationship with the UK public services pre-dates this administration, there are some big Qs to be answered about Global Counsel

The University of Pittsburgh signed an agreement with Anthropic. www.pittwire.pitt.edu/features-art... I learned about this the same day I received materials about the Anthropic lawsuit settlement regarding using my textbook and other copyrighted materials without permission.

1/ Finally wrote up “The Story of Mendeley”! Most people know the tool, few know about its rise and fall. The Mendeley story provides important clues for how to build self-sustaining AND non-extractive knowledge commons, which is why I think it deserves more attention 🧵

My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity www.axios.com/local/boulde...

The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...

Another story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out. www.nature.com/articles/d41...