I'm working on some new standup material, and I have this joke about how thanks to my sadistic constitutional law professor who used cold calling and the socratic method I know way too much about constitutional law, and now every day since January has been a bad day.

I made the mistake on commenting on a random video I saw where someone was asking for opinions. Anyway my opinion is that if parents choose to help their child pay for college, they are still not *entitled* to information about their *adult* child's grades. Apparently this is an unpopular opinion.

floating a thought for feedback: if the liar's dividend is the benefit bad actors can receive from a world in which there is so much doubt about what is real and what isn't, I was thinking about "the librarian's dividend" re: the value of the people and institutions who help us evaluate information

I’m spending today at a big staff development event (few hundred people) for Arapahoe Libraries, focused on AI. I’m running sessions about ethics. Am really eager to get a sense of the vibe and what kinds of questions people have… (I also just love hanging out with librarians.)

At any given time I am usually reading one audiobook, one physical book, and one book on my kindle. This is a pretty good representation of the variety of my tastes at the moment. :)

I had the random realization the other day that cold calling with the socratic method is basically the same as comedians doing crowd work.

This is a really interesting article about theologians' reactions to sensationalized AI-generated videos of Bible stories. www.npr.org/2025/09/07/n... Some of the debate here re: the power of the original text makes me think of LLMs turning complex scholarly works into pithy podcasts.

So when it comes to fiction skewering academia (re: Katabasis) I feel obligated to remind you that I once tweeted the plot for an entire first season of an academic murder mystery. Sometimes I think I should write this as a cozy(ish) mystery novel. :) www.tumblr.com/cfiesler/187...

Only 8 pages into Katabasis so not really a spoiler… But agreeing to give up 30 years of your life in exchange for a better shot at a tenure track job really puts the dark in dark academia. Or maybe it’s just peak regular academia.

I'm guessing this is news to most of you but I have a book coming out. :) I and three co-authors (all of whom are HCI researchers with law-adjacent degrees) wrote Human-Computer Interaction and U.S. Law, which will be out from Cambridge University Press in December. www.cambridge.org/core/books/h...

Some of you might remember that in 2017 I created a crowdsourced spreadsheet of tech ethics syllabi. It still exists! And there are presumably many more such classes now, so considering adding to it! cfiesler.medium.com/tech-ethics-...

“If something happens really bad, just blame AI.” - the President of the United States “liar’s dividend”: the benefit received by those spreading false information in an environment where it’s unclear what is true and what is not

It is absolutely wild to me that in an interview addressing criticism of AI use as "unfair," these executives disclosed that their own faces were deepfaked over actual human actors who were already unfairly uncredited in the original film. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

This is a masterpiece.

I've been experimenting with using NotebookLM to help turn 25ish hours of PhD admissions Q&A livestreams into a written FAQ. As a side effect there is basically a chatbot of me that can be queried. I'm testing it. Please give me questions a PhD applicant might ask. (The weirder the better.)

So it looks like (at least according to my own attempt to schedule a shot through a pharmacy) that even if you fall into one of the risk categories you still need a doctor’s prescription to get the updated covid vaccine. That will be a significant barrier for many. :-/ www.npr.org/sections/sho...

I just did a TV news interview about social media and parasocial relationships, and it turns out that what inspired the story was Taylor Swift's engagement, and I was like OH I actually have so much to say about the social media community around Taylor Swift! www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...

Has anyone heard anything about the status of the NSF GRFP? Typically the solicitation is posted earlier than this (e.g. last year's was in July www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...). Do we know for certain it's happening? (Was just thinking of emailing our students to remind them about it, but...)

Since I talk a lot about LLM inaccuracy, someone asked me recently what they're actually helpful for re: lit review sort of research. So here's a specific recent example where an LLM was actually helpful for me in locating a paper (with a caveat at the end):

AI companies: Don't worry, we're really not using that much energy after all! Also AI companies: Please give us more grid capacity!

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate. Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

Is this implying--and if so, do folks know if it's accurate--that these founders made a show of how Meta's glasses could be used to dox people *so that* Meta would add more privacy protections and therefore Halo would have a competitive advantage??? techcrunch.com/2025/08/20/h...

Ok just check out this realism on T1D Barbie’s CGM graph. Though according to her insulin pump she’s at 130 right now so way to go Barbie!!

Just saw a Reddit post where an academic made an observation about the prevalence, especially post-COVID, of people pecking away at laptops during talks, and asking why. Top responses were all versions of "we all have so much more to do now, we HAVE to multitask." Do you all think this is true?

The reaction on TikTok to the new official White House account has been, ummmm... Well it's good to know at least that TikTok users don't seem to be worried about trolling Donald Trump so hard that he changes his mind about trying to save the app in the U.S. :)

So @hankgreen.bsky.social’s ADHD-friendly focus timer where you help a lil bean to knit by staying off your phone is #1 on the App Store, beating ChatGPT. :)

the horrified expression on my therapist's face when she asked me what work things are on my plate right now (Not about the substance of the things. Just the quantity. :) )

So I’ve been thinking a lot about AI use by students re: the importance of learning how to do a thing before you let AI help you with that thing. And then I came across this new paper about de-skilling in a medical context. :-/

An author friend recently expressed to me how upsetting it was to see an LLM mimic her style. Even outside of the context of creative writing this does feel… icky. As does how it leads with a fake anecdote about a nonexistent student.

The fact that my insurance forces me to use CVS for prescriptions and the only CVS’s (in a college town) are inside Targets is cruel and unusual during student move-in week.

Happened to notice this very round number this morning. :) My YouTube subscribers are now about 1/5 people interested in tech ethics and 4/5 people who have applied to PhD programs in the past five years. :)

The frequency with which I have to raise this issue while just like agreeing to give a talk for a small honorarium really makes me worry how often y'all are signing contracts with copyright transfers.

So I've found out from TikTok that, despite have < 100 citations, my student law review note about fanfiction is apparently very popular in like... video essays and undergraduate student papers. Someone even commented and said their lawyer dad gave it to them to read in high school. 🤣

A lawyer in my social media comments is telling me that it's "cruel" to suggest that lawyers should be ethically accountable for mistakes introduced by AI because the weight of technology's flaws shouldn't be on burned out lawyers. And like, all sympathy to junior associates, but also...

sobbing while going through copyedits to the book chapter on AI and law we turned in in early January and having to make some updates

I've decided not to ban AI use in classes for various reasons, but will be discouraging it. I plan to assign this essay from @patricklin1.bsky.social and talk through these issues in class in hopes that students will come to good conclusions themselves. emergingethics.substack.com/p/why-were-n...

“Altman has said it’s better to talk about levels of progress toward this state of general intelligence rather than asking if something is AGI or not.” 2022: AGI in a year 2023: AGI in a year 2024: AGI in a year 2025: stop asking about AGI!

The giant spreadsheet of AI ethics & policy news has officially hit 2,000 entries! bit.ly/ai-ethics-news I have teaching plans & ideas for this so have been writing up curriculum in case it's useful for others--I know a few folks have told me they use this in their classes, can you tell me how? :)

I had a feeling this TikTok situation was going to hit the media pretty soon. www.thecut.com/article/kend... But one interesting side effect is that it has resulted in a LOT more people realizing some of the dangers of LLMs (in this case both ChatGPT and Claude) with respect to validation.

This reminded me of the mention of "significant public benefits" in the Google books ruling. Just looked and it's not part of the fair use analysis, but with a note that the factors should be weighed "along with any other relevant considerations in light of the purposes of the copyright laws."

Having seen much of the discourse around the new ChatGPT release, I think that a huge part of the problem is the idea that big commercial LLMs should be all-purpose. It is absolutely absurd that the exact same technology would be used as a companion chatbot AND as an enterprise productivity tool.

I've seen a handful of comments noting that the new ChatGPT model seems to have a different "personality"--less emotion, less glazing. I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is... what does that mean for people who have become emotionally attached to ChatGPT?

Throughout my entire career, I have never done a survey without realizing after the data was collected that I made some kind of mistake or at the very least should have done something slightly differently. Surveys are HARD.

Ugh I just popped over to Threads for the first time in a while and the first post I saw was someone asking "Why is everyone on medication instead of trying to fix the source of the problem?" I really thought them nerfing monetization over there would decrease the rage bait but apparently not.

I might have lost funding but at least I can do what I want. :) And I want to teach people about AI ethics in 90 second increments! bit.ly/ai-ethics-sy...

He’s been writing a song a day for 500+ days. Gen AI could never be this good. There were bunnies that were jumping on a trampoline And I just learned that they weren’t real If a bot can inhabit an unknowing rabbit It might manufacture the way you make me feel youtube.com/shorts/IJfCr...

This paper about science communication on TikTok found that videos summarizing research papers got the most engagement, "potentially reflecting high demand from lay audiences who are traditionally unable to access scientific literature." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... To me this suggests...

There is some serious Discourse right now on TikTok about AI + art + accessibility. A big creator made a video about AI being a way for people with disabilities to create art, and folks are really coming for him. I’m curious if there is HCI research on this topic especially re: attitudes!

I genuinely have no idea if this is supposed to be a compliment or an insult. 😂

I was trying to think of something a professor/researcher could use ChatGPT agent mode for, and the first thing that came to mind was finding paper reviewers. Scan paper. Search literature. Find email address. Log into manuscript system. Send invite. But without oversight I find this horrifying. :-\