The most dangerous thing about AI is not that the machines might one day think. It is that we are being trained, by men with enormous financial gains riding on our acquiescence, to stop thinking for ourselves.

all of the existing scholarship on ML + GPT applications made it very clear that people in the space were well aware of ethical and legal obligations around consenting sources for training data governments failed us en masse. big tech took its cue from failure to prosecute & announced open season

This piece is another example of how evidentiary standards for covering young people basically don't exist. It's a take on the supposedly widespread and normal use of this language anchored around guesstimates from two (2) people about behavior at a single high school.

Interestingly, the intuition I felt and spoke from -- that embodied knowing -- is precisely the kind of thing AI, for all of its performative anthropomorphic gesturing at the simulacrum of personhood, can't do. Tech billionaires want us to believe that our embodied/human ways of knowing are useless!

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

I just learned that the term "carbon footprint" was developed by BP to offload responsibility for climate change onto individuals. Something like that's happening in higher ed with AI. Institutions capitulate or dodge; students are submitting; & they believe it's their individual failing. 7/

I know you lot aren’t the ones who need to hear this, but: all a ban does is make the banned thing less safe, ever. Kids are gonna keep going online and now they are going to meet a predator who’s going to be able to threaten them with “you’ll get in trouble if you tell anyone”

The AI rollout is an incredible test case for the power of capital to overrule everything in its way. An overwhelmingly stupid, obscenely polluting, and wildly dangerous set of technologies are being brute-forced into every part of our lives because money says so.

Stop listening to the manosphere listen to me the women folks want full bellies Open minds Working ears

1. One of the frustrating things about social media is having to repeat things that I thought were common knowledge. Tomatoes, potatoes, corn, most beans and squash, and chocolate originated in the Americas. Indigenous Religions weren't decriminalized until 1978 and not fully legalized until 1994.

They want us malnourished and stupid. That’s why I’m rebelling by being big and brilliant.

getting rid of grades entirely would be much more effective at curbing surreptitious use of genAI than any amount of surveillance, would do vastly less harm to the pedagogical relationship at the heart of education, and wouldn't be another massive economic windfall for the creepiest people you know

Strike averted! A tentative agreement has been reached with SoFi workers. "Notably, it includes an explicit right to strike if ICE or Border Patrol activity at the worksite threatens worker safety — a provision legal experts say is unprecedented in modern American labor history"

By the way: all environments affect & shape our nervous systems. We are very “porous” creatures, enmeshed with the dynamics of our surroundings. Even traditional search interfaces shape our behavior & understanding of info. But current LLM bots confound our defenses in new, bad (insidious) ways.

Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here –in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life...

You want more protests, more resistance, you don't focus on the mushroom. You can HOPE for the mushroom, you can cheer for the mushroom, you can delight in the existence of the mushroom. But the mushroom is the fruit. You don't cultivate the mushroom, anymore than you cultivate an apple.

Remember how you used to just know everyone’s phone number? Then cell phones came out and you could barely recite your own number? That’s what AI’s endgame is but for every aspect of your life.

If it were found that CliffsNotes gave, on average, more accurate 90-word summaries of novels than literature profs did, would it follow that literature profs should answer student questions using CliffsNotes?

For many years, there were allegations that ICE would “release” critically ill people in hospitals so that their deaths wouldn’t be recorded as in ICE custody. To fix this, in 2021 the Biden admin required ICE to report deaths occurring up to 30 days after release. Now that rule has been dropped.

I point this out to say that “AI” is most legible in the context of technological advancements in labor busting and the least legible as a productivity or efficiency tool.

Hilarious and deeply insightful writing by @brianphillips.lol.

People we admire are complex and it is impossible to align with them on everything because we are the products of our unique experiences and fallible.

I consider it a violation of my personal human rights to have to look at an ad at basically any time

I honestly hate the concept of debating. I'm not interested in adversarial communication with someone who has already decided they lose something if they learn something.

So I read the article: 1. This happened in 1965 (for context, Henrietta Lacks cells were taken in 1950) 2. There were 31 children apart of this unethical trial, of which almost all were low income and Black. 3. The families didn't find out until 2023 when a magazine investigated the RSV vaccine

ICE transferred the leaders of a hunger strike at Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center to unknown locations just hours after the strike began, according to immigrant-rights group La Resistencia, which says the moves were retaliatory.⁠

the ways that government is *actually* inefficient are completely different than what conservatives think. they think we're handing out free money to [racial slurs], we're actually handing out free money to contractors to do things the gov should be figuring out how to do

i was such an avid reader of stuff i did not even get CLOSE to understanding as a kid and all it did was make me read more, and ask more questions about the world. there's a concerted effort from almost every consolidated power on this planet to make people less curious!!!!

Can we just admit that there’s a lot of professors who need to work on their pedagogy? Many don’t know how to teach their subject except to advanced or highly interested students.

I hate to have an “old man yells at cloud” moment, but remember when companies strived to make products that like…worked? And now the mentality is “oh, our product is unusable? Boo hoo, poor baby. Here’s some AI instead? It also doesn’t work. That’ll be $30/month.”

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

Teaching students to avoid "bothering" their teachers stops learning in its tracks, undercuts essential social development, and trains kids not to seek help (from people) when they need it. Its sole function is to enable higher student-teacher ratios. @aft.org promoting this is sick and sickening.

"The most effective strategy at all times and in all places—in court, in politics, and in life—is centering your heart with the most vulnerable people and animals and ecosystems, joining together with others, and then relentlessly telling the truth about what you see."

The whole reason you cite a source is that you consulted a source and want to integrate it into your research. How do I put this delicately: If you are using LLMs for your scholarship, fuck you

this article was written intentionally this way to attempt to get you to be so mad at Gen Z that you don't read the rest of the extremely worrying numbers from these studies. don't fall for it

Striped cuckoo (Tapera naevia) chicks utilize specialized, cryptic plumage that mimics the texture and color of pinecones for camouflage. #birds

propaganda works really well

People trying to be hot shot intellectuals love ableism. Oh I'll just call em a moron, tell em they're psychotic for some spice. They think that shows off their intellectual superiority & prowess. It's actually hate in their minds they've left unexamined.

It's not that controversial, in pretty mainstream circles, to say that American democracy began in 1965 This would seem to have: Implications

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

“To put this in perspective, the homicide rate for all Black officeholders Reconstruction was 2.3 percent. This would make the homicide rate among Black officials more than 20 times greater than *any* demographic in the USA as of 2020, where the highest homicide rate is less than 0.2 percent.”

It makes heavy references to the Bible and Christianity and refers to a U.S. tradition of “progressive imperialism” that is “destined to uplift barbarous peoples and help them develop into functioning civilizations.”

seems like a good day to repost @randomwalker.bsky.social's thread on Blackboard, Canvas, etc and why they all suck big time

This is blowing my mind

College seminars most places are an awful lot of explaining terms for undergrads who have no background knowledge so they can understand the reading and participate fully in the discussion. We need more of that, not less, but our politicians all finished at the same 5 schools and apparently sucked.

faculty and students need more of a say in edutech adoptions and admin need less to none

I think that "...people have more feelings than they know what to do with" is 1 million percent the answer. We're enduring so much and being told to act like it's normal, and when art that touches our feelings arrives, it pops a huge messy bubble.

If you're thinking about using gen-AI to "write" books, this 🧵 is for you. I’m a highly experienced editor who’s been in the biz a long time. Recently I’ve had manuscripts come to me where the author has used gen-AI – not for writing, I’ve been assured, but for “structuring” or "organising"

"Is plastic surgery feminist?" boring/shallow/narrow "How do we get to a world with radical body autonomy? " wayyy more useful

Black voter participation soared right after the VRA passed in 1965. But not until 1992, after Congress strengthened the VRA to require majority-minority districts, did we start getting closer to proportional Black representation in Congress. Because Black votes finally counted more in the South.