Don’t feel stupid if you fell for fake video. It can be really hard to tell these days. But we do have to try and be careful with what we share because there’s so much AI video out there. It’s just the world we live in now.

4PM Today (Friday, Sept 26): Protest at the Neil Smith Federal Building in downtown Des Moines in support of Dr Ian Roberts. Dr Roberts was detained by ICE in Des Moines and, apparently, driven to an ICE facility in Council Bluffs.

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This gets to something that as a former stand-up I recognized but couldn’t name. A 31 year old professional content creator baiting 19 year old amateurs into the format of his choice isn’t debate, it’s crowd work. It’s debate-shaped crowd work farmed for content.

Charlie Kirk may have been good at showing up at college campuses and talking to anyone who would listen etc. But the org he headed built a database of professors to target with harassment campaigns in the hopes of drumming them out of academia. Is that practicing politics the right way?

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"In Iowa, which by some measures has the most polluted water in the US, people who advocate for the environment are widely scorned as enemies of farming. "Outside the cities and universities, few dare criticize the state’s $50 billion agricultural industry..."

this is an interesting part of the anthropic copyright settlement! I'm glad training is recognized as fair use, even if the means they acquired the training data was illegal

it is truly shocking to me how all, literally all, of the replies and quotes of this skeet seem unaware of libgen, assuming that its just some database for Meta and Anthropic. libgen got me through my masters.

Anyway libgen is one of the few means of the vast majority of researchers, who do not in fact work at universities and do not have institutional subscriptions, and especially researchers in the global majority, have to access scientific research. Going after libgen b/c AI companies abused it sucks

We've created impoverished ways of interacting with computers and now we're surprised that when you give people a "do anything" textbox that sorta works sometimes, they are using it a lot, sometimes very inappropriately!

Men read mpreg to figure out what women want challenge 2025.

Man looks at feminism and says “I can do this better” totally unironically

part of what makes this interesting is its relation to the "ai is making us dumber" arguments. in that the reddit OP clearly states in this thread he didn't get AI to write the book for him, just edit and add pictures. and just about everyone in the comments here are replying as if AI wrote it all

Like it or not, a lot of cis women use BL to explore their own gender and relationship to sex. I think that's good even if they never transition or aren't queer. There's this annoying hostility to fujoshi that imo is very conservative and reactionary. If you must read porn it can only be cishet

I fully believe that they were the English dept equivalent of Silicon Valley STEM dipshits. It’s what happens when you give big budgets to dorks that think they’re world changing geniuses.

I think key here is training vs output. Is "reading" or "copying" in this case fair use? this ruling appears to say yes, which i agree with. training tech has enough similarity with otherwise uncontroversial research or consumer behavior (scraping, data analysis, "reading" and "influences")

you know it’s pride month when everyone online is watching 2 high agency males going at it

my point was they are cops, just cops, this is what cops are and have been

This point is not made enough. The US has an embarrassment of riches of great colleges and universities. There are strong institutions in every state. It’s as if those places don’t count.

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There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university. University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

(drafting a research proposal) no questions per se but here’s my research vibe

one of the all-time favorites, for sure!

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ok i'll bite. what's "ai"

just saw this band in iowa city!! they were fantastic and well worth a listen 🥰

Blue books present their own significant obstacles -- we actually want to encourage students to do research, cite texts, use our library's online resources, check the CMOS, when they write! I agree it's necessary but losing the networked aspect of writing to combat LLM use is a real loss.

I am increasingly convinced that this -- finding true things from bullshit via the intellectual infrastructure of citation - is a rarer and more necessary skill in our age than "can you structure a paragraph with some clarity and elegance." And actual researchers do all this with the internet.

"The plaintiffs are represented by University of Iowa law student practitioners under the direct supervision of Katherine Melloy Goettel, clinical associate professor at the university’s College of Law." Kudos to our students for supporting our students!

Reminded me of this Onion Classic

this is a really concerning case of academic ethics colliding with real world ethics. there are right ways and wrong ways to do research with online communities, as fan studies as dealt with painfully multiple times. this was qualitative research, which imo needs to center CONSENT

what’s next, david french calls for turning the white house rose garden into a public sex forest

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Great 🧵 about the bonkers supreme court case about whether elementary school teachers are allowed to have children's books with gay animals in them

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this specific fact was confusing and frustrating in my undergrad wgs classes. lots of "female phallus," lesbian (un)gender, and even bell hooksian masculinity studies. but I had to find and read classics like whipping girl and performing transgender rage by myself.

Only Iowa college president signing is Grinnell’s. My hunch scrolling and looking at places is that even what should be uncontroversial opposition to “undue government intrusion” is too much for red state public uni presidents.

all we want is tv

I would say esp in non-STEM fields modern AND old school conservatives are fundamentally incompatible with research. They don't believe in structural poverty or racism. They aren't concerned w/ homophobia and transphobia. How are you supposed to do rigorous and ethical social research like that?

Also interesting to ask why “generating code” is among the set of tasks that people find genAI to be actually useful at when its categorical companions are stuff like “therapy/companionship” and “finding purpose”. What is similar about how ppl use AI as a dev tool to these other activities?

Look, I love these sites & I get how politics works & why they're doing it, but every single one makes exactly the same error universities have been making for years: Research DOES NOT JUST MEAN STEM. Look around. If you think we also don't need social science & humanities research, look harder.

Not-a-lawyer-but The immensely frustrating thing here is that this opinion hinges on the immutability of sex (to tie all trans people to our "birth sex") while also acknowledging the mutability of sex to justify the exclusion of transitioned men from single-sex spaces. Degendering for everyone!

"I wanted to write a book about how institutions that think of themselves as being liberal contribute to the mythologies that underlie the authoritarian turn in our society."