“You have to be more surgical about it than with a lot of other problems,” she said, “unless you’re going to, like, take the computers and chuck them into the sea.” But why not? I thought back to what Sinha had asked me: “What do you want from this?” What if the answer is nothing?"

"AI Drafting My Stories? Over My Dead Body: AI-assisted writing is creeping into newsrooms under the guise of efficiency. But the trade-off may be more profound than publishers are willing to admit." www.wired.com/story/backch...

“Inside one of the mummies, the team discovered a rare papyrus containing a passage from Book II of the Iliad by Homer. The text includes part of the “Catalogue of Ships,” which lists Greek forces involved in the campaign against Troy.” greekreporter.com/2026/04/19/h...

William Butler Yeats, “Where My Books Go”

Jesus Christ this is literally what some of their professors (including me) have been yelling about for years, I DIDNT WANT TO BE RIGHT ABOUT THIS

Look how Norway is fighting back at screens. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

"Correlation does not imply cognition."

"Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds

Audrey Watters on Mary Oliver, poetry, and AI technologies: "At what point can you no longer even plan to do things with your one wild and precious life because these technologies have obliterated your ability to even imagine something outside their dictates, their designs for you?"

This sounds awful, right administrators?

An unaccounted for part of the economy is how much young people virulently hate AI, despite how aggressively it's being forced on them. They realize it's making their friends dumber and ruining the world and they want nothing to do with it. From the Penn student paper: www.thedp.com/article/2026...

Pleased to be quoted here. This is the first request for a conversation I've accepted from a journalist who emailed me abt AI bc the journalist, Kathryn Palmer, didn't approach me as a stenographer for industry but instead to provide visibility for a movement.We had a great substantive conversation

I started writing a BlueSky post about that Nature essay and kept going until it turned into a whole piece in Tech Policy Press www.techpolicy.press/the-illusion...

"Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence” W. S. Merwin

Grammarly's AI-fueled edits -- using my name - suggested making up sources and writing vague insinuations. In my latest for @nytopinion.nytimes.com (gift link) I describe Grammarly's terrible edits in my name -- and call for a federal right of publicity. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...

Grammarly’s A.I. version of me suggested replacing the first sentence of a news article with an anecdotal opening describing a fictional person named Laura. The bot offered an imagined story about Laura and a button allowing the user to paste that fiction straight into the article.

“The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.” Edward Albee, born on this day in 1928

The Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) setting a good precedent, affirming the right to refuse AI for both instructors AND students. The whole "Resolution 2" in the linked document below is worth reading. h/t @evenannaliese.bsky.social cccc.ncte.org/wp-content/u...

Result! Just received from Grammarly: "Hi, Thank you for reaching out. After careful consideration, we have decided to deactivate Expert Review while we reimagine how to make it more useful for customers and more respectful of the experts whose work it surfaces." 1/ 🧪💙📚 🗃 #academicsky

Almost the 400th anniversary of the Cambridge bookfish!

“What are we pretending not to know today?” —Toni Cade Bambara

When discussing AI and the labor force, we fixate on one question: Will it replace workers? For the performing arts, that’s incomplete, argues James Paisley. The deeper risk isn’t just job loss, but the erosion of creative agency and the transformation of artists into executors of AI outputs.

"Want to feel good about yourself? Use a chatbot. Want to find the truth? Go elsewhere."

Absolutely too busy to lead something for this, but this call for papers looks great... > CfP: Topical Collection on AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation and Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” Victor Hugo, born on this day in 1802

what even is the fucking point

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” W. E. B. Du Bois, born on this day in 1868

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

"To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life." ~ T.S. Eliot Belle Tout Lighthouse (1939) 🎨 Eric Ravilious

“AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. Today, you don’t see AI in the employment data, productivity data, or inflation data.” AI is TechGrift. Can we say ‘Theranos’, everybody?

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.” You can’t trust chatbots.

“If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than AI. Authoritarian leaders & tech oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity.”

The study points to using libraries and visiting museums as bringing these enormous brain health benefits ... who would have thought? Well, librarians and museum folk for a start ... www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

stupid strategy,, when university administrators are doing it for free!

So disappointed with the New Yorker Anthropic piece. No critical probing or context, just gullible parroting of a self-serving corporate marketing pitch. This needed a hard Chotinering

"Assetization of academic content (and assetization in HE more broadly) constructs students and staff as a new kind of economic actor – an ‘assetizen’...with diminished educational and social rights as assetization becomes a governance principle in higher education.”

A compelling answer to the question of what we can do with our study of Shakespeare and the humanities.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Grief has a point, even as gut wrenching and consuming as it feels. I cannot think of anything unhealthier for me right now, as I grapple with my mother's loss, than engaging with a chabot of her--neither human nor real in any meaningful way. Not to mention, she would haunt me if I tried this.

Artists have always loved to sketch! Sketch of a sparrow from Egypt dated c. 1479–1458 BC. Some 3,500 years ago in Egypt, artists used flakes of limestone as sketchpads! MMA excavations 1922-23, Deir el-Bahri. 📷 The Met www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti... #Archaeology

Important education message: "independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it." A few profit and the most vulnerable pay www.economist.com/united-state...

taps sign

"Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life." John Galsworthy, who died on this day in 1933

“A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sure, it was the model that was ‘reckless.’

This was an absolutely fascinating piece to research. Do not trust the answers AI chatbots glibly offer you -- they're not necessarily lies, but they *can* and *are* being manipulated.

With news today about a surge in gas-fired power generation for data centers and AI, here's an occasional reminder that I maintain Against AI and Its Environmental Harms, an open library with journalism, peer-reviewed research, and other media for teaching: pad.riseup.net/p/Against_AI...

Oh...

Many have asked what we should do and it's hard to know. But this approach is not the way out of this.