“This article urges a fresh view on [AI large language model] hallucinations by arguing that, rather than being errors in any conventional sense, they are evidence of a probabilistic system incapable of dealing with questions of knowledge.”

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

Merry Christmas to all except this POS

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

AI is often sold as 'do something you already know how to do more efficiently' but is often bought as 'do something you don't know how to do with no idea if you are doing it efficiently at all'

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

This is why actual knowledge - not just Jeopardy-style recitation of flashcard facts - is collaborative. If I need to understand something so far outside of my realm of expertise that I can’t get far enough reading solo, I figure out who’d know more, and have *gasp* a conversation…with a human being

The “AI” has not read the book. Even if the book was in its training data, it has just absorbed it as a set of statistics. It will juggle you a “summary” that might or might not relate to the conclusions of the actual text. The only way you’ll know is to read it yourself.

So the “figure out how to use it lest you be left behind” replies about ‘AI’ that have been popping up here strike me as inauthentic but also kind of funny because they grant the point that rather than an automation panacea these technologies are quite difficult to figure out how to use effectively

The point is not to put more fact shaped things in your head than anyone else. It’s to understand the ones that are there on a deep and meaningful level.

The only semi-reasonable use-cases I have heard are for basically busy work, that people don't want to do and have to do for societal or work culture reasons, & those things should be abolished instead of finding these convoluted ways around doing it. But if you don't like research - don't do a phd?

get that either. Abstracts exist! Keywords exist! There's an entire field of library science to help us find what we need, and the things we don't know we need! not to mention the people that we are learning from, the apprenticeship of talking to advisors and other professors and other students!

The government should nationalise Benjamin Šeško

Bank of America did not allow women to open their own credit cards until 10 years after this photo was taken

Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron has launched a free digital archival library of literature by Black and brown authors, poets, and artists. Readers can borrow rare and out-of-print books for up to 45 days

What insights can feminists gain from revisiting the 1975 World Congress for International Women's Year? Natali Moreira explores this overlooked event using the Women of the Whole World journal archived at @fotwl.bsky.social 🗃️✊

One of the many reasons AI can't produce good writing is it can't hate its own writing. It can't think to itself "Maybe I'm illiterate" during the writing process. And that's essential

Book launch! www.linkedin.com/posts/jon-co... Not Just a Housewife: Women Strike for Peace and the Cold War Women’s Peace Movement, out now with @umasspress.bsky.social www.umasspress.com/978162534887...

So kid, in your heart you want to study humanities but you worry about your job prospects? Let’s play a game. On the latest data, who is more likely to be unemployed after 15 months after graduation. The English Lit grad or the Maths grad? WRONG!

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

Today is the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest. Six myths: 1) She wasn't old or tired. 42 years old that day, she had a "life history of being rebellious" & had spent two decades helping to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist branch alongside ED Nixon and Johnnie Carr.

“On the 70th anniversary of the Bus Boycott, Gray said the most important thing for people to do, aside from continuing to fight for civil rights, is for people to know their history, and use it to impact the future.” www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/l...

Wrote this before threads on here about how “students today don’t read anything” blew up, and I stand by it. It’s not only that every generation makes same complaint (I cant possibly know what other people’s students eg in US are like). It’s more: what have we tried to do to help students read?

The death of browsing is part of the reason art is the way it is now. Our opinions are largely fed to us by algorithms. Spending a spare 15 minutes wandering around a bookstore or comic shop or video rental place was how you found stuff you wouldn't ordinarily pick up and thereby expanded your taste

Participants recommended this @histassoc.bsky.social article: www.history.org.uk/publications...

But their vision of what 'really matters' to scholars seems to be a dematerialized, decontextualized, deinstitutionalized world of sans serif signifiers ready for (ugh) data viz. Meanwhile, paleographers are invited to stick around and refine the model to help ensure that their deskilling takes hold

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.”

“While it’s fascinating that X actually rolled this out, it should raise questions about those who have spent the past few years stewing in that cesspool of foreign rage-bait manipulation, insisting it was somehow an accurate portrayal of public opinion.”

The itinerary of this new wave of fascist deportations (Louisiana -> Barbados -> Equatorial Guinea) is the transatlantic slave trade in reverse, FYI

This is not the way, and @cnygren.bsky.social and I lay out in detail why it isn’t in this essay here. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...

I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me…

(5/7)

I wrote a few words about Mani for The Sunday Times - I didn’t know it would be behind a paywall, so here it is if you would like to read it: (1/7)

This Day in Labor History: November 22, 1909. Approximately 20,000 garment workers in New York City went on strike against the horrendous conditions of their sweatshops. This strike, known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was the largest strike led by women in American history to that time!!!

In Not Just a Housewife, Jon Coburn shares the story of the radical activist group, Women Strike for Peace, who fused militant protests and motherhood. If you're shopping for an activist, use code HOILDAY at https://twp.ai/4isobZ to save 40% Coburn's book now! #readUP #gift #activist #peace

Wow. There some big Country Joe McDonald energy going on here.

After 13 years, to have my book in my hands is surreal!! ‘Not Just a Housewife: Women Strike for Peace and the Cold War Women’s Peace Movement’ tells the story of Women Strike for Peace (WSP), a peace and antinuclear group that billed itself as a movement of “housewives and mothers”

Trump is a piece of shit and his supporters like him because they are pieces of shit.

US term, document based questions. Thinking of the US, have you seen this? www.inquirygroup.org/history-less...

It's the difference between centering the voices of enslaved and indigenous people and demonstrating how their inclusion shifts the traditional narrative and, as a result, forces viewers to rethink their own relationship to this story as opposed to utilizing them simply as window dressing.

"theft tech" is a term my pal @astra.bsky.social thought of just today when we were working on our book about these End Times Fascists. We were thinking about what should happen when this this bubble busts, as we all know it will. Remember: they have bunkers. We don't. 2/3

The impression given by a morning scroll is that the politics of Europe and North America has largely become a performative sideshow detached from real life (though not of course if you are one of the designated 'victims')

This is basically a Labour-Reform coalition government now. Not formally, obvs. But Reform have just as much influence on Labour policy as if they were in formal coalition government.

Rudy Bridges is younger than the Sitting President of the United States and 29 sitting United States Senators

Alan Dershowitz is one of those claiming Epstein was not a pedophile because he pleaded guilty to one count of having sex for money with a 17-year-and-10-month-old person. "That’s not a pedophile." See this important response from Julia Brown, the brave reporter who broke the news on this