Lisa Dush

"I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry Copywriters were one of the first to have their jobs targeted by AI firms. These are their stories, three years into the AI era.

Talking about this in class tomorrow. It is a sad and sobering read. open.substack.com/pub/bloodint...

Libraries can't afford e-books. D.C. lawmakers have a plan. The demand and price for e-books is up — and it’s busting the D.C. Public Library budget.

No surprise to librarians, but perhaps surprising to users, demands/prices for ebooks /audiobooks are killing public library budgets. David Szalay's book, Flesh,” costs DCPL:
$28.99 hardcopy
$59.99 ebook
$69.99 audiobook
DCPL owns hardcopy; rents & must repurchase ebook & audio book every 2 yrs.

Stumbled on this crowdsourced doc of GenAI syllabus statements for college courses, which includes many disciplines and institutions. Helpful--thanks @leaton01.bsky.social: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Happy to announce the publication of _Composing with AI_, a new open access online anthology on teaching writing with and in the age of AI. Co-edited with my colleague Nupoor Ranade (CMU), this collection’s authors look at a broad range of issues and applications:

ccdigitalpress.org/composing-wi...

Possibility Place is one of the coolest nurseries in Chicagoland, with tons of native plants and #trees. This story, on its co-owner and emotional-support trees, made me smile: wgntv.com/video/emotio...

Tree care expertise grows through Illinois Extension webinar series URBANA, Ill. — Tree care isn't always led just by certified arborists, so University of Illinois Extension is ensuring that everyone has access to research-backed

Nice combo of hands-on and bigger picture in this upcoming series of community tree webinars: extension.illinois.edu/news-release...

What kills me is that from the comms/ media end .

Everyone is complaining that copy ain’t hitting, adds don’t feel good . And there’s no “voice”

It’s not working practically, or strategically

It’s just destroying the planet in the interim

Want to learn the Latin names of the common trees of Northeastern IL? Spent an hour in Claude and Copilot trying to make an app: Copilot's was better out of the gate, but got worse as I tried to refine it. Here's v1: a few errors and a demon voice, but not bad ladush.github.io/latin-tree-t...

Here is an excellent description of a feeling: "aware of the fact that my body and mind exist in a tenuous zizz somewhere between life, death, and computers"

Honoured and hugely grateful to find my book, Terrestrial History, on the longlist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

www.ala.org/carnegie-med...

I liked your book! Thank you for writing it.

I’ve summed up and contextualized all of these critical AI pieces & more in one place — “From AGI to Workslop: What I Read About AI in 2025.” mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-i-read-...

YouTube video by Code.org AI: Training Data & Bias

CAPTCHAs are for training AI?! youtu.be/x2mRoFNm22g?...

Great piece, from a student journalist's perspective.

An Age of Hyperabundance | Laura Preston Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversa...

Trade show despair meets AI despair: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/ess...

Chapter 18 of Senna's Colored Television--the "Every show lives and dies on it premise" chapter--is a dialogue masterpiece.

What unpleasant and disorienting work it is to give feedback on student writing that might be AI-generated...

One task that Claude is great at: converting a pdf export of a handwritten notebook from the Remarkable tablet to text. The tablet's export function does a middling job, but Claude creates a nearly perfect conversion. Big workflow helper for us longhanders

Just seeing this: congratulations!!

YouTube video by Instrumentl Using AI to create a grant proposal draft in 5 minutes | Instrumentl Apply

I regularly teach #grantwriting, which seems like one of the most AI-able forms of writing there is. When I see tools like this, I have to wonder how professional writers will not have a much diminished or much altered role in the process: youtu.be/Y67An9VsOGw?...

Sonja K. Foss: Invitational Rhetoric as a Feminist Challenge to the... Sonja K. Foss is a professor emeritus in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research interests include contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist ...

Enjoyed reading this open-access interview with Sonja Foss about invitational rhetoric: journals.openedition.org/aad/7975?lan...

Thanks for sharing, John. It's a thought-provoking article.

Clarivate Unveils Transformative Subscription-Based Access Strategy for Academia | Clarivate New approach enables broad, simple and affordable access to trusted scholarly content for learning and research

As part of its new 'transformative' access model for libraries, "...Clarivate will also phase out one-time perpetual purchases of digital collections, print and digital books for libraries."
clarivate.com/news/clariva...

This is a good explanation of how data brokers and real-time ad bidding work.

NEH Announces New Funding Opportunity to Support Research on the State and Impact of the Humanities

A new grant program from NEH’s Office of Data & Evaluation will support data-grounded research studies investigating the state, impact, & value of the humanities in the US. 2 levels of funding (>$75,000 / >$150,000) will support either 1- or 2-yr projects. ow.ly/Kyiy50UKwu8

Feeding the Machine For readers of Naomi Klein and Nicole Perlroth, a myth-dissolving exposé of how artificial intelligence exploits human labor, and a resounding argument for a mo…

Recommended--well researched and considers more than the usual AI blah blah: www.bloomsbury.com/us/feeding-t...