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Rob Nelson

@ailogblog.bsky.social

writes at π€πˆ 𝐋𝐨𝐠 https://www.ailog.blog teaches at Penn speaks at technology and education conferences

1,218 Followers  |  887 Following  |  72 Posts  |  Joined: 12.11.2024  |  1.5832

Latest posts by ailogblog.bsky.social on Bluesky

Thanks, Andy. Glad it spoke to you!

07.12.2025 14:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Disanthropomorphize Chat Language without mind and the ends of OpenAI

Disanthropomorphize Chat
open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...

07.12.2025 11:49 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 1
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Language machines as educational technology Alternatives to language-as-a-service

When it comes to teaching, we don’t need intelligent tools; stupid ones might come in handy.

Language machines as educational technology
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...

23.11.2025 11:40 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Language machines as spiritual tools Alternatives to Language-as-a-Service

As Silicon Valley β€œpivots” from building God to upselling their office productivity suites, I wonder if there are better uses for language machines than writing faster emails and summarizing pointless meetings.

Language machines as spiritual tools
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...

17.11.2025 09:24 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Its an antimeme! It cannot be read unless you change your perspective.

09.11.2025 14:26 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Language Machines as Antimeme AI Log reviews Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

Large language models are language machines, and we need to think about what they do with language as more than just "mathy math."

Language Machines as Antimeme
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...

09.11.2025 11:34 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Trump offers carrots to nine universities And why Chad Orzel has me worried

@orzelc.bsky.social has become one of my favorite higher education writers of late. But he is importantly wrong when he disagrees with Timothy Burke’s description of β€œthe deal” offered to nine universities.

Trump offers carrots to nine universities
www.ailog.blog/p/trump-offe...

05.10.2025 11:55 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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It's not chickens all the way down Higher education leadership in this moment of crisis

Why were so many university presidents and boards quick to undermine the principles and practice of academic freedom this past week? The answer has to do with who runs institutions of higher education, and how they think and don’t think about their work.

www.ailog.blog/p/its-not-ch...

21.09.2025 10:59 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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What comes after the chatbot? Notes and image credits for my talk at the AAC&U AI Institute

This essay is better than the talk I gave at AC&U 2025-26 Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum on Friday because it reflects the collective intelligence of those who asked questions and made comments.

What comes after the chatbot?
www.ailog.blog/p/what-comes...

14.09.2025 11:20 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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A Revery Entertained by the Intellectual Class: Dewey and Lippmann Revisted AI Log Reviews Superbloom, Part Two

The Lippmann-Dewey debate is a meme created in the 1980s, and used ever since to talk about a question intellectuals find endlessly fascinating: wouldn’t it be better if intellectuals ran things?

Lippmann called this β€œas complete a delusion as perpetual motion.”

www.ailog.blog/p/a-revery-e...

07.09.2025 11:11 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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With a Certain Pathetic Moderation: AI as a New Social Medium AI Log reviews Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom brings to light our longstanding cultural habit of enthusiastically greeting each new social technology. You may be surprised to learn that this cycle goes back a ways.

With a Certain Pathetic Moderation: AI as a New Social Medium
www.ailog.blog/p/with-a-cer...

31.08.2025 11:21 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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The Banal Evil of AI Safety Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?

Ben Recht says it clearly and plainly. The way this technology is being commercialized matters. OpenAI is the worst. Courts should punish them. Consumers should boycott them. No educational institution should do business with them.

The Banal Evil of AI Safety
www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

29.08.2025 11:26 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Five things I have learned writing AI Log + Phase 2 begins AI Log turns two years old and I celebrate with a listicle and a public declaration about my next writing project

π€πˆ 𝐋𝐨𝐠 turns two years old tomorrow. To celebrate, I made a listicle and decided to reveal Phase 2 of my plan.

Five things I have learned writing AI Log + Phase 2 begins
www.ailog.blog/p/five-thing...

24.08.2025 10:54 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Get Me to the Funnery An introduction to the course I will be teaching this fall about How AI Is Changing Higher Education.

I will teach a class enrolling only first-year undergraduates this fall for the first time in years. We're going to have some fun reading, writing, and talking about AI.

Shakespeare helped me figure out how to start things off.

Get Me to the Funnery
www.ailog.blog/p/get-me-to-...

17.08.2025 10:27 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Caricature-style illustration of a humanoid robot resembling a man, wearing thick black glasses and a green quarter-zip sweater with β€œLPS” on the chest. The robot holds an orange pencil upright in its right hand and a wooden stick in its left. Overlaid white text reads: β€œβ€¦give ourselves permission to experiment…” followed by β€œPart 2 of an interview with Rob Nelson.

Caricature-style illustration of a humanoid robot resembling a man, wearing thick black glasses and a green quarter-zip sweater with β€œLPS” on the chest. The robot holds an orange pencil upright in its right hand and a wooden stick in its left. Overlaid white text reads: β€œβ€¦give ourselves permission to experiment…” followed by β€œPart 2 of an interview with Rob Nelson.

here's part 2 of the conversation with @ailogblog.bsky.social & the conversations he's looking to have with #highereducation institutions about #GenAI

aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/give-ourse...

#AIEdu #EdTech

14.08.2025 09:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A man wearing glasses and a dark green quarter-zip shirt with the yellow letters "LPS" gestures with his right hand raised. Overlaid text reads: '"...In the mode of 'we don't know'" Part 1 of an interview with Rob Nelson.'

A man wearing glasses and a dark green quarter-zip shirt with the yellow letters "LPS" gestures with his right hand raised. Overlaid text reads: '"...In the mode of 'we don't know'" Part 1 of an interview with Rob Nelson.'

Part 1 of a conversation with the great, @ailogblog.bsky.social about what he's doing in the classroom around #GenAI

#HigherEd #AIEdu #EdTech #Teaching

aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/in-the-mod...

11.08.2025 09:45 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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To what problem is the modern American university a solution? AI Log reviews "Dartmouth College V. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good" by Adam R. Nelson

This is not the first time newly elected Republicans have interested themselves in the affairs of universities and colleges. In 1819, we got corporate personhood redefined. What will get we get this time?

To what problem is the modern American university a solution?
www.ailog.blog/p/to-what-pr...

10.08.2025 11:08 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Three bad ideas that are good for US higher education Logpodge #10 is all about strawberry statements. Columbia could use leaders like Herbert Deane today. At least he had the courage of his anti-democratic convictions and spoke the truth.

"A university is definitely not a democratic institution" is truer today than when Dean Herbert Deane said it in 1968, and more true of Columbia than it was a week ago.

Three bad ideas that are good for US higher education
www.ailog.blog/p/three-bad-...

27.07.2025 10:51 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Small matters Logpodge #9 When it comes to AI in education, models, teams, and ambitions should be small

Small matters
www.ailog.blog/p/small-matt...

13.07.2025 11:01 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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A Phaedrus Moment If Socrates was right, what do we make of Claude?

Socrates comes to mind when I am urged to teach AI literacy. There is a rumor, likely false, that Socrates himself was illiterate. Maybe he chose not to read and write, so great was his commitment to the kind of conversational back and forth we named after him.

www.ailog.blog/p/a-phaedrus...

06.07.2025 11:02 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Spreadsheet, Not Skynet: Microdoses, Not Microprocessors The modest power relative to the size of the economy of GPT LLM MAMLMs as linguistic artifacts. Of course, since the economy is super huge, a relatively modest effect on it is still huge one. But...

Brad DeLong posted a double shot of analysis of what he calls Modern Advanced Machine Learning Models (MAMLMs). An excellent overview of the economic and organizational impact of this new cultural technology.

Spreadsheet, Not Skynet: Microdoses, Not Microprocessors open.substack.com/pub/braddelo...

25.06.2025 12:52 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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After the AI bubble: ChatGPT as an off-modern educational technology What does generative AI teach us by being weird?

A defining characteristic of large AI models is to spiral or zigzag, introducing errors that no human would make. It is a better Clippy, a better tutor, and a better Eliza, except when it isn’t.

After the AI bubble: ChatGPT as an off-modern educational technology www.ailog.blog/p/after-the-...

22.06.2025 11:22 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Notes and image credits for "The Boring Revolution" My talk from Explorance World 2025

In my excitement to get to Q & A, I forgot to share the link to the references and image credits at a talk I gave earlier this week. Since several attendees started following me here, I’m sharing it now.

Notes and image credits for "The Boring Revolution" www.ailog.blog/p/notes-and-...

15.06.2025 10:58 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Seriously, Let's Stop Treating LLMs like People At least in the classroom and the workplace

Do large language models bring anything of value to the classroom or the workplace? If we stop pretending they are human, and instead, treat them as a new cultural technology, we might find out.

Seriously, Let's Stop Treating LLMs like People www.ailog.blog/p/seriously-...

25.05.2025 10:03 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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I got fooled by AI-for-science hypeβ€”here's what it taught me I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

Wonderful piece illustrating how AI is a "normal technology" that has been marketed and used in ways that imagine it as something much, much more.

I got fooled by AI-for-science hypeβ€”here's what it taught me www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fool...

19.05.2025 11:33 β€” πŸ‘ 30    πŸ” 8    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 2
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Teaching with AI Redux I was speaking at a conference this week in Kansas City and got a question about where higher ed faculty might start to get up to speed on AI.

Teaching with AI Redux
www.ailog.blog/p/teaching-w...

17.05.2025 14:05 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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On Beyond AGI: A reading list of sorts Read / Watch / Listen to fourteen writers on the social uses of large AI models. Gopnik / Farrell / Narayanan & Kapoor / Mitchell / Shalizi / Evans / Davies / Pickering Breen / Allen / Fourcade & Heal...

Instead of almost AGI or a cultural apocalypse, let's think of large AI models as:

a cultural and social technology

a normal technology

a technology to be used in the revival of management cybernetics.

Here is a list.

On Beyond AGI: A reading list of sorts www.ailog.blog/p/on-beyond-...

11.05.2025 10:20 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder Historians are finally having their AI debate

Does Ben Breen contradict himself?

I find this essay large, to borrow Whitman’s famous line, and it waits on the door slab for the rest of us.

AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder open.substack.com/pub/resobscu...

08.05.2025 10:55 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I like how you're thinking, Barry. I agree that some conventional explanations for the benefits of the liberal arts would be helpful for the conversation, but given the turmoil created by the attacks on higher ed by the federal government and several states, we may need some of the dust to settle.

07.05.2025 19:39 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Nobody here but us chickens How "trained incapacity" explains why leaders of NGOs are celebrating Trump's executive order on AI

On Monday, @benjaminjriley.bsky.social said mean things about NGO leaders and bureaucrats who celebrated Trump's executive order on AI in education. It made some people sad and confused.

Kenneth Burke helps explain what's going on.

Nobody here but us chickens www.ailog.blog/p/nobody-her...

04.05.2025 10:33 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 1

@ailogblog is following 18 prominent accounts