Dan Isbell

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Free access until September 9, 2026!

intelligibility is strongly associated with comprehensibility. We used archived test data representing a wide range of proficiency and diverse L1s (e.g., Spanish, Vietnamese) and large samples of listeners to obtain independent intelligibility measures (transcription) and comprehensibility ratings.

Very excited to have our new study examining the relationship between intelligibility and comprehensibility in L2 English speech published in BLC (@cambup-linguistics.cambridge.org). Our data suggest speech that is < 65% intelligible is largely incomprehensible and above that..

Done With Duolingo? Where to Go to Get Serious About Learning a Language To really speak and understand a new language, you need to interact with humans.

www.wired.com/story/done-w...

How it started // How it’s going

This is potentially quite disastrous for online panels. Chalking up one more in the column of "things that the availability of GenAI makes worse"

Opinion | The College Game Is Changing. It’s Still Rigged.

"Elite colleges have convinced us that scarcity equals quality, that a lower acceptance rate means a better education. But their own behavior shows that many of their decisions are more about manipulating the market than academic or any other kind of excellence." 🎁🔗
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

Is This the End of the Dictionary? Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer useful

Stefan Fatsis on the current state of American lexicography www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

People updating R and re-downloading all packages?

Assistant Professor (Second Language Corpus Linguistics) Title: Assistant Professor (Second Language Corpus Linguistics)Hiring Unit: College of Arts, Languages & Letters/Department of Second Language StudiesLocation: University of Hawaii at ManoaDate Posted...

*please share widely*

My department (Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is hiring a corpus linguist who conducts research on second languages. Great place to teach (2/2 load) and do research! See link for more details:

go.hawaii.edu/mGc

Pattern, Construction, System Cambridge Core - Grammar and Syntax - Pattern, Construction, System

Just discovered that Susan Hunston's new book "Pattern, Construction, System: A Unified Approach to Grammar and Lexis" is out in OPEN ACCESS! 🤩
www.cambridge.org/core/books/p...

#corpuslinguistics #appliedlinguistics #linguistics #patterngrammar

My data privacy on Facebook is apparently worth $38.36.

Will donate 100% of this lavish settlement to my department's student association.

In Korea, it's not uncommon to see older folks protesting or otherwise engaging in public political speech. But that demographic skews conservative and they're often waving US flags. I wonder how the Georgia incident will impact Korean domestic politics.

Opinion | Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either.

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend

New article on changes to South Korea's National English Curriculum and the growing global influence of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

My co-author, Kitaek Kim (Seoul Nat'l), was directly involved in the revisions, and lead author (and SLS PhD student) Joonhee Kim assisted.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

@langtestjournal.bsky.social has made our article "A survey of English language proficiency tests in international student admissions at US research-intensive universities" free to read/download for 1 year! Mahalo!

Expose on an alleged IELTS cheating scandal in Bangladesh. Two arrests related to selling exam content from the paper-based version of the test.

www.daily-sun.com/post/825063

We now get to commiserate with Bayesian statisticians and the use of "priors" among the pundit and tech bro classes.

Our study on academic outcomes for students admitted with different tests at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa:

www.altaanz.org/uploads/5/9/...

Are standards slipping on English language testing? Financial strains and the emergence of digital testing have led to concerns that anglophone universities are admitting students whose English is not good enough to allow them to succeed. But are tests...

New article on English language testing in admissions by @timeshighered.bsky.social. A study I recently published is linked

www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/are-st...

Abstract of the paper.

Title page of the paper.

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org

New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

a man in a suit and tie is saying that 60 % of the time it works everytime ALT: a man in a suit and tie is saying that 60 % of the time it works everytime

I also know many students are using GenAI not just for R code help but for *stats* help, which worries me. You've just got to read good books, google and read StackExchange, and talk to peers and mentors who can help you. We all make mistakes, but GenAI might be the Sex Panther of stats help. 4/4

I admit to having many gaps in my own stats knowledge, but this looks like absolute nonsense. t-tests assume homogeneity of variance (and we've got Welch's adjustment for that), not group n-size.

I don't know that the authors were guided by AI, but it's shocking that AI supported this approach. 3/

So I rephrased their reasoning in a question to Google Gemini (happens to be what my institution paid to give everyone access to...). Here's what I got: 2/

I'm getting very worried about GenAI stats help. An article I'm reviewing stated that after removing two cases for low-effort responses (uniform response pattern), they removed 2 more at random so that a t-test would have balanced group sizes and therefore better power.

This sounded wild to me. 1/

Straight to the @thelouvreof.bsky.social. What @dieworkwear.bsky.social does is art.

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

Hawaii insurers hold firm on COVID vaccine policies While public health advocates applaud the decision by Hawaii’s insurers, doctors and pharmacies are predicting a big drop in vaccinations.

Hawaii’s health insurers say they will cover COVID vaccinations for anyone older than six months, despite new FDA guidance that says children and healthy adults don’t need the shots.