Jeremy Dibbell

People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much.

A note to provosts, deans, university presidents, etc.:

Most people think AI sucks-- not just in its current iteration, but conceptually. People are smart enough to realize this will not bring human liberation, but will move us in the opposition direction. Stop being so gullible.

Exclusive | OpenAI Employees Raised Alarms About Canada Shooting Suspect Months Ago The ChatGPT maker opted against informing Canadian authorities about Jesse Van Rootselaar’s descriptions of violence last June.

Last summer, OpenAI employees debated alerting law enforcement about Jesse Van Rootselaar's interactions with ChatGPT

In February, Van Rootselaar became the suspect in the mass shooting that devastated a rural town in British Columbia

www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

Yikes. Just tried to get several of the latest open and corporate general-purpose language models to transcribe/translate a 19th century scrap of paper with yiddish & hebrew, and they all failed extensively, comically, and with the confidence of a physicist publishing their first sociology article.

“Labelling generative AI, which includes tools such as ChatGPT and X’s Grok, as a “social disaster”, Birhane said they are a “major threat to truth, democratic processes, information ecosystems, knowledge production and the entire social fabric itself”.

Tell me again we should push AI into schools.

Oh good job Simmons! I found my notes last night, but not the syllabus.

I will also look! I might well have kept that ... somewhere ...

A graph of database connections, showing a massive spike at around 18.30.

This is what AI scrapers are doing to our platform. Our database capacity is just being ruined every time they initiate a fresh scrape and our tech team has to scramble, taking radical measures, to keep the platform up.

YES! Exactly!!

Yeah. It's bad.

Never a bad day to say that!

Or perhaps "Le Diable Amoureux" (1772 novel by Cazotte)? Printer's name doesn't seem to turn much up though.

Reminds me of proposals that, in order to counter the deluge of AI-generated submissions full of made-up citations to academic journals, the (mostly volunteer, already depleted) editorial staff — or their grad students — should just confirm all refs before sending things out for peer review.

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Resist narratives of inevitability.

Including mine on developing software to build structural models of medieval manuscripts! Much DEI. Another reason for me to hate ChatGPT.

Call for papers!

INSCRIPTION 7 (out 2027) will be all about BLANKS. It will be (as ever) a BEAUTIFUL and MAXIMAL object.

Send us your ideas!

Historical / theoretical / creative / creative-critical -- or some strange blend.

First step: 400-word proposal + brief CV by 1 April 2026.

CFP attached.

The new issue of Half Sheets is out - really enjoyed @sibyllacumae.bsky.social's smartness on curiosity, and her Latin motto reference! Read here, share, and subscribe if you haven't already - it's free! 📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks

Ooh yes that one's also on my list, but I've not read it yet

Have you read Woody Holton's biography of Abigail Adams? It's excellent, as I remember (though I read it in 2009 apparently), and is a nice complement to McCullough's of John.

1/ Important new article by Dr. Tara Inniss that discusses the "chronic underfunding, aging infrastructure, and climatic threats" of Caribbean archives, compounded by vulnerabilities and policy gaps.

Thread w recent examples of destruction of collections by fire:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Attn nerds: our annual history sale started yesterday and runs through 2/20. 25% off, free shipping over $50, code is HIST26. www.press.jhu.edu/books/histor...

If we're expecting faculty to start teaching specific consumer AI tools, then I'm pretty sure we've already lost the plot and should just start over.

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

NEW ESSAY — Christine Jacobson’s “Typing for Love or Money”, on the neglected efforts of women like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot, who — through their work as typists and editors — had a profound impact on modern literature: publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing...

Thanks for Typing

It's hard to believe good things can still be happening, but if you are in the Boston area between now and May 1st, there is an free-to-the-public exhibition on women's type labor in literature and the arts (co-curated by me and the great Dale Stinchcomb).

library.harvard.edu/exhibits/tha...

Here we go….

I like Vaguely Threatening Marmot! One of the chipmunks in there is terrifying too :-)

We will be awash in sloppy nostalgic representations of the American Revolution this year. That’s why sharp careful analyses of the distance between those representations and evidence-based history is so important.

Also I really appreciate @ageofrevolutions.bsky.social !

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning.

Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test

Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)

Good tech.

Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)

Bad tech.