As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity. TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

aaaaaaaand it turns out the answer to "how TF did some guys with a ladder steal the French crown jewels" is "cuts to arts funding mean the Louvre is massively understaffed"

And I will tell you flat out, there is a HELL OF A LOT BETTER-QUALITY ACTUAL TEACHING involved in getting a good degree out of a student who came in with BCD than there is getting one from an A*A*A student.

We all know that the UK could have a well-funded university system without heaping debt on the heads of students, if politicians wanted it to. That's the only thing to say, really. Every dysfunction is a choice. A choice made by politicians, not by lecturers or students.

I remember once at an office job I had, I was really struggling with a big awkward box of files and paper up some stairs, and my boss came past me and said "oh let me help you" and took ONE SHEET OF A4 PAPER off the top. Anyway, in completely unrelated news.....

Apparently university finances have already been stabilised. So speedily some of us must have missed it. 2/x

You do realize that not adjusting for inflation has been unsustainable for over a decade? That cost of living applies to faculty and staff as well who don’t get pay rises in part because universities have been getting less money from fixed fees every year.

Pair with: "we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. ...realists of a larger reality." www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

When we refuse to hold people accountable for atrocious actions, we should not expect better behavior, or even just the same behavior. We should and arguably must expect worse after every time we make this same mistake.

Here's the thing: Everything is Gamergate because no one with any power to actually hold people accountable took this seriously. The same will be true if every time something atrocious happens like this and no one is held accountable. They are only further emboldened.

Well OneDrive has eaten my 1/3 done index. I wasn’t enjoying it THAT MUCH, universe. Fuck’s sake.

Reposting this to see if I reach anyone who knows what I’m referring to here. It’s driving me nuts.

Indexing is really the most chaotic thing. ‘These are the things I think are important and the way I see them connecting. If you don’t like it, tough bunnies.’ There’s legit no real rules. I weirdly enjoy it.

Proofs and proms today (yes, well after the fact; I just want something on in the background). I had not realised how the BBC had turned it into a sports event. The commentary is… no. Just no.

Goths! Academics! I have possibly made this up (irony), but I am reasonably sure I read something in the last few months that said LLMs are essentially gothic in nature. Sound familiar to anyone? Any idea what it might have been? Probs just a thread, but might have been a substack…

That sound you are hearing is my jet lagged brain slowly creaking back into teaching mode.

Major yn Englisshe: • focused readinge & writinge prepare you for anythinge • research, communicacioun, creativitye, and interpretacioun will be needed for careers not even invented yet • meaningful engagement wyth big ideas and textes that will staye wyth you forevir • it ys awesome • books!

There's lots more to say about @davidharvie.bsky.social and my findings. Please read the report to support union action & honour those who shared experiences. I'll finish with an eyeopening stat: the hidden, 'backdoor' redundancies affecting *11,500* people. 11,500 HIDDEN job cuts. This must end.

Queen

First morning back in Britain: cold*, wet. Trying to figure out how to get the washing to dry. Welcome home to me. ❤️ *it was well into the mid 20s and above in the US. 12 may as well be winter to me right now.

Also my cabbie from the station was a full on lefty and the sigh of relief I let out was incredible. The US was not, shall we say, comfortable over the last week and a bit. (NB not my family - just the overall vibe.)

Found out when using my brand spanking new British passport for the first time this morning that apparently you need to thwack them to get the chip to work correctly. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, as a friend put it.

More prosaically, as someone pointed out to me recently: LLMs are *always* hallucinating. its just that sometimes their hallucinations appear to map our experienced reality. But the map is never *of* our reality, just *like* it. So the words don’t describe it. 4/4

Haven’t had a single serving friend on a flight in… 15 years? 20? Nice to pass the time with someone way too happy to chatter for a change.

Me: *finishes book proofs while on holiday* Me: ah, I have three days left - I will reward myself with a Barnes and Noble trip and relax til my flight. Journal article proofs, 1am Saturday: the hell you will.

Reading your edited proofs as a pro copy editor yourself: yeah, like, I can see why you might think that, but WORLDS OF NO. In other news, I am glaring at my laptop.

Aw man I wish academics had headlines like this. “Stephen Aguilar (existential dread) is not expected to write today, per @mpolikoff.bsky.social”

Could UK HE please hold themselves together at least till I get back from holiday? FFS. (In all seriousness, I’m gutted and furious and terrified for colleagues at both institutions - and what this means for the rest of us…)

the word “sloppycat” just popped into my head for people who try to ape actual specific human work using slop generators please feel free to use it

Not sure whose fault it is primarily that most people don't seem to know that the president is basically a manager whose job is to carry out the will of Congress, and not The Country's Boss

Le Guin undefeated at "the fuck you say to me" as subtext

I’m going to say this louder this time: if you are lying about having a high-risk condition to get a Covid vaccine, all good, do what you want to do BUT show some actual goddamn respect for people who *actually* have that condition and start masking.

I also really appreciate this advice from @emilymbender.bsky.social and @karenhao.bsky.social, which tracks with my own experience teaching high school students and college students and talking with my own kids. Emphasize environmental costs and - once more - that GenAI is *not* inevitable.

Good lord, people! We can have sand batteries? We have so many real solutions…

What we don't talk about enough is that our central conception of governmental executive power remains essentially that of an absolute monarch - that they hold, as if by magic, the power and the right to do *anything they want* unless some fragile bonds of custom & law prevent them. But why?

dear everyone MOCKING PEOPLE'S APPEARANCE ISN'T HOW YOU BUILD A MORE JUST WORLD MOCKING ABILITY OR HEALTH MOST *CERTAINTLY* ISN'T how many times must we cover this yes this includes "chosen" things like self-tanner FFS it doesn't matter people's SPEECH & ACTIONS are what matter GO AFTER THAT

I am 90% sure this is going to be the death of the academic book review, too. No one wants academic ebooks and I hate pretending it’s anything like getting a physical copy. Now we won’t be able to send to the US from the UK - and much of the EU has been near-impossible since Brexit.

Favourite ways to check book proofs so you don’t miss anything: go! (I’m thinking backwards chapter by chapter/section by section?)

Something that I have been thinking about with attribution of "PhD level intelligence" or "PhD level expertise" to a machine is that it reflects an increasing trend among these AI bros and their sycophants to want the products of highly skilled training without actually doing any of the work.

What @drlindseyfitz.bsky.social is saying is true. I explained UKIP/Reform/EDL to my parents as British MAGA (and they were rightfully horrified). And it’s not an exaggeration, at all.

You do not get to claim you hate Trump and MAGA and then turn around and vote for Reform - a party that is literally funded by the MAGA movement. British people, please wake up before it's too late. I've seen what this is doing to my home country, and it is ... horrific. time.com/7281644/trum...

Anyone who doesn't think Britain is following the USA into the depths of hell isn't paying attention. The US flag was one of the first symbols co-opted by the far right in America, and now it's happening in the UK. Farage's Reform Party is British MAGA. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Oh, now the Spectator has joined the Telegraph in wringing its hands about the university crisis! Like it's nothing to do with them. Too late guys, you've already smashed it, maybe think twice before going in with the bull in a china shop tactics next time eh. www.spectator.co.uk/article/pick...

Business leaders are now very concerned about the state of the UK's universities. See below. If they knew how bad things really are they'd be even more worried. www.ncub.co.uk/insight/secu...

If you wouldn’t share it on social media, you shouldn’t put it into an LLM.

now google each of those six universities and “redundancies”

As OP has since realised, this is AI. it's fascinating to me how it messes up in basic ways - watch the timestamp top right, particularly the year. It doesn't, can't, know that's supposed to stay the same.

I really think universities underestimate how true this is for a lot of students and their parents. They don’t want us to try to pretend to be cool. They want us to be a bit dusty, and very serious. Enthusiastic, definitely! But also nerdy. We’re selling them ACADEMIA.

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate