Don’t threaten us with a good time.

"Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o model by default...tests repeatedly showed that the AI toy dropped its guardrails the longer a conversation went on, until hitting rock bottom on incredibly disturbing topics."

"Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function. (...) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios."

What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history? sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

"95 per cent of generative AI initiatives produced zero return." But huge volumes of hype. This is #BigData, not intelligence www.ft.com/content/fca4...

Allowing for the refusal of AI in our educational institutions is simply the right thing to do. If we can's support those freedoms, what are we doing? Congratulations on a year of vital work.

Read Audrey Watters, always. "Technologies are often wielded in ways meant to imply that humans are weak, messy, slow, stupid, replaceable. We are strong, messy, awkward, flawed, irreplaceable. All of us. Our strength comes, in part, from this vulnerability, from our humanity."

There is still time to apply for one of our 50+ Visiting Fellowships @bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the 2026-27 academic year! A vibrant interdisciplinary research centre in the heart of one of the world’s great libraries!

Senior Librarian role in Oxford👇 www.asc.ox.ac.uk/fellow-libra...

Minds over AI: To tackle disinformation, look to education www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/minds-...

Currently doing some marking. A reminder to everyone involved in archives and collections: digitisation is not preservation. If I digitise a box of records and put the files on a USB stick I haven't preserved a thing. It's all about what you do with the files post-digitisation. #archives #digipres

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”

Happy 423 years of us! 🎉 📚 The Bodleian Libraries opened for the first time on 8 November 1602... This means, we're older than the refracting telescope (1608), the publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1623) and Sir Isaac Newton's apple (1666)! 😅

“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina

“what will happen when ai takes all the desk jobs” so, the recursive loops that form when the bots generate the content they subsequently feed on, having been deprived of the material that gave a sheen of quality to their counterfeit languagelike slop? that’s called “model collapse” and it’s ugly.

One can have an informed citizenry or a bunch of gullible marks with no knowledge or thinking skills with which to make sense of the world. The garbage and propaganda that AI crawlers swallow for their data sets are a gigantic thumb on the sales of the latter. Tell the offline people in your life.

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture, known for her self portraits and depictions of the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working classes #WomensArt

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures & people who wish to live as machines.” ― Wendell Berry, "Life is a Miracle"

This is evident in the language around these much-touted industry, academic, or even governmental “partnerships.” The MOUs usually state that they are trying to “identify opportunities,” not that they have any clear sense of the value LLMs will add. (Though it’s even worse when they claim they do).

The glory that is my hometown—Aberystwyth. Wales’s first UNESCO City of Literature. Y peth gorau! unesco.org.uk/news/wales-f...

I think we should still teach students writing, not AI-assisted document production. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

This just made me realize how all the hype on "AI literacy" is predicated on growing illiteracy with regard to substantive engagement with texts, lived experience, and meaning. That the rationale for AI depends on growing illiteracy.

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

👇👇👇With all my heart, dear lady. With all my heart.

Fascinating - Unesco has launched a Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, presented in a futuristic, dreamlike virtual exhibition. Worth exploring (although they don't tell much about how/where things were stolen, and its a very curious juxtaposition of items): museum.unesco.org

It's always a treat to find a gift book owned or given by a woman, and doubly so when the giver is none other than poet Katherine Phillips. #HerBook

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.” Dylan Thomas, born on this day in 1914

"The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought." Henry Steele Commager, born on this day in 1902

Mary Concepta Lynch, an Irish nun and skilled calligrapher, who spent 16 years (1920-1936) decorating the Oratory of the Domincan Convent, Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland #womensart

This hits a lot of the notes I've been shouting from the rooftops: the frictionlessness of both producing and consuming slop, and the value of labor as friction that lets us slow down and think. Rather than "unlocking creativity" it's rendering our collective creativity down into a big vat of slop.

Hi. I wrote an essay about AI slop: How it feels like an invasive species for the internet. How its boosters describe building a future that’s devoid of craft. How frictionlessness can be nihilistic & how this stuff seems to leach part of our shared humanity out of the world. I hope you'll read it.

"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.” Ursula K. Le Guin, born OTD in 1929

View from the studio window of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1960 by photographer Laura Gilpin #womensart

"This book is a reaction to frictionlessness AI, which operates in a space of pure wish fulfillment, outside of history and context.... Letterforms are all around us as we move through the world, providing a comforting and reliable index. And it’s easier to understand their history through play."

"Parking is such sweet sorrow"

On setting boundaries and defining refusal of AI, and the imagination of LLMs as wedding-crashers of the social sphere.

“…for an AI chatbot to generate an autopsy report, contract workers have to sift through thousands of gruesome crime scene images, a gig known as ‘data labeling.’”

This is an excellent essay, & I wholeheartedly support its description of the current situtation. I will add, however, that although the scenarios in question are dystopian to me, to the techbros they are utopian. We need to understand that in order to counter this trajectory.

Folks will be quick to ridicule people who do this, but it can’t be separated from the media hype and ai boosters telling us the tech is a magic answer wizard that knows all and sees all.

The Lovers (mid 20thc) bySurrealist painter Remedios Varo #WomensArt

If only OpenAI could have foreseen the entirely predictable hazards of irresponsibly releasing this tech. I guess the estate of every dead person will have to individually request a special dispensation to no longer have disgusting videos made by OpenAI’s tools.

What Tressie says below is essentially the point of my @insidehighered.com column today. We know what students need (and want) and it has nothing to do with the pivot to AI. In fact, it's more like the opposite. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Remembering the wonderful Brendan Kennelly

OPINION: "Not only did (Toni) Morrison write about the rural Black woman’s experience in communities much like J. Janice’s, but quilting was a popular theme in her writing," LaWanda Dickens writes.

New from me on productivity, AI, and the problems in how we measure it: “AI’s core function is completing goals as if they were a yes/no checkmark: having a text, rather than writing the text; having a numbered list of ideas rather than finding a good idea.” www.techpolicy.press/generative-a...

“Maybe the intelligence we most need is the capacity to see beyond the hierarchies that determine which knowledge counts. Without that foundation, regardless of the hundreds of billions we pour into developing superintelligence, we’ll keep erasing knowledge systems that took generations to develop.”

'Honeysuckle’ design, 1883 by May Morris, influential textile artist and designer of the Arts and Crafts movement #WomensArt

I don't see why the same argument shouldn't hold true for research in the humanities.

Fascinating historical context to current fears about mass misinformation: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I've been re-acquainting myself with NNs, transformers and LLMs this week, so these are early thoughts. But I am starting to think about language without the capacity to imagine language, i.e., an LLM unable to imagine itself participating in language. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-machine...