@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Critical tech and literary/cultural AI. Also cats, letterpress printing, and tabletop gaming. Commonwealth Professor of AI and English at the University of Virginia— —but speaking for myself and in my own capacity here. Rudeness will get you blocked.
See, the great thing about this website is the essay is still four or five months away and I already have my first reader.
Tell me about it
Well, that abstract is a pretty good tell.
This is forthcoming this summer in a special issue of Social Research on writing. I really need it out so I can stop ad hoc explaining my views on writing and AI.
Will be out in Social Research this summer!
It’s not just higher ed though. It’s <waves hands> everything. This *is* modernity. Abstract of an essay now on my desk in copy edits:
Brute.
“it’s literally a fucking book!” is t-shirt material (it’s literally fucking t-shirt material).
Terry Belanger used to scandalize his Rare Book School classes by physically destroying (the better to dissect it) a book on day one.
Would that I had a couple of thousand spare words every couple of days.
And your title is awesome too.
It’s crystal clear now that Trump has lost control of this war. He badly misjudged Iran’s ability to retaliate. The region is on fire.
1/ I’m going to explain to you in this🧵what I’ve learned - in part from closed door briefings - about the four biggest current crises.
When we published this 18 months ago, we forced them to add the qualifier www.chronicle.com/article/ai-m...
Sigh. (And that's not a FERPA violation?)
What a colossal fucking waste of everyone's time.
My vendor saga continues. My latest reply:
"I have now been told my DocuSign agreement does not exist (it is attached and signed March 2), my account (without consulting me first) has been reset, and I have been sent a link (which does not work) to redo the process from step one."
Happy Saturday.
Tell me you don’t understand asymmetric warfare without telling me you don’t understand asymmetric warfare.
Indeed.
👀
“reputational damage”
It’s yours
The bot without organs.
Also, does anyone know anything about Obvio, the company that’s marketing this genius solution? There is currently a robust discussion on my neighborhood listserv.
The truly hilarious aspect of this is not the pathetic attempt to extract surplus revenue out of drivers, but the branding as “AI” when in fact, per the article, there are two layers of human review. dbknews.com/2026/03/05/c...
You don’t say.
Am at the point where I may literally have to drop out of a foundation review process because we cannot sort the problems with the vendor platform. Please make it stop.
Not for a general audience.
Much the same could be said of our supreme leader.
😂 Will suggest.
Something super annoying about academic style, courtesy of a copy edited essay I just received: every individual name must be preceded by a field-specific and usually cartoonish epithet. Not "Derrida," or even "Jacques Derrida," but "the philosopher Jacques Derrida." Why god, why??
