Gabriela Femenia

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More - Consumer Reports AI features are crowding into Google search, Gmail, iPhones, Windows laptops, and other products. If you're suffering from AI overload, these settings can help.

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Authors, Time to Get That (Anthropic) Bag To begin, for those of you who do not follow such things with intense interest, a little context about the “AI” company Anthropic being sued for stealing authors’ works and reachi…

Some brief thoughts on the Anthropic settlement, and why I think most authors should claim their share of the settlement if they can, inadequate though I think it is:

whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/02/a...

This is the advice I consistently give people about trying AI: use something you know very well already, so you can actually determine the quality of the output for yourself, and get some idea of how the sausage is being made

I actually bought the shirt at ALA so I can!

Shame clearly isn't enough; there should be more sanctions

The legal market is a comparatively small part of TR's profits so I am not so sure pushback from firms would work, and law firms are very used to taking whatever "improvements" the vendors slap on anyway. We don't get a choice in academic libraries; they just turn the stuff on at will.

Some of us do, frequently, and get branded "Luddites" for our trouble.

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appea...

Stanford researchers found that AI-generated "workslop" is actually making people less productive, in part because workers have to correct errors or decode the useful information/intent buried in a flood of auto-generated garbage:

It was a whole spiral of blue-eyed soul started off by Steve Winwood. I may start regularly playing Song Algorithm Roulette on my commute instead of law and news podcasts because my mental health was much better the rest of the day.

Yesterday I had the singularly GenX satisfaction of playing one 80s song on Apple Music, and then correctly guessing what else the algorithm would supply based on shared characteristics. I may have to make a mix tape for old times' sake next.

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books It’s a trippy time to have a library card.

www.404media.co/librarians-a...

Shocked, I tell you.

article from today's daily journal

You know what else is being affected by the tariffs on parcels worth less than $800? International interlibrary loan. I'm hearing reports of libraries overseas that won't lend to the US anymore. (That's in addition to the libraries here that have shut down their ILL b/c of lost IMLS funding.)

The whole thread, and the cited Guardian article, is a must-read but this is the heart of everything.

Removing or editing Philly slavery exhibits is ‘un-American,’ 45 local historical groups tell Trump’s Interior secretary It's the first time a major coalition of Philadelphia's preservationist groups have coordinated a widespread opposition to President Trump and Secretary Doug Burgum's threats to Independence Park.

Forty-five local preservation and historical organizations have convened to send a message to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: Removing or editing Philly slavery exhibits is “ahistorical and un-American.” (1/3)

It is one of the tragedies of my academic life that social media was not around when I was a medievalist grad student so I could be the one to go viral with the manuscript memes

The Supreme Court Just Gave the OK to Racial Profiling The court’s ruling allowing ICE to resume its indiscriminate round-ups of LA’s Latino residents can only be described as one thing.

Here’s my write up on the most racist decision to come out of the Supreme Court in a while. The court approved of Trump’s racial profiling of Latinos with Brett Kavanaugh saying being harassed based on the color of your skin is “common sense.”
My latest in @thenation

Can researchers stop AI making up citations? OpenAI’s GPT-5 hallucinates less than previous models do, but cutting hallucination completely might prove impossible.

How many times, in how many contexts, from how many internal and external researchers, or from how many CEO's are people going to have to receive this message before they believe it:

"Hallucinations" are an inherent part of the large language model architecture.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Do not use a spicy autocomplete tool to do a librarian's job.

A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death.

Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

Turn Off Google AI Overview
Set "Web" as Default

👉🏼🔗: tenbluelinks.org

There is not yet wide evidence that "gen AI" actually enhances researchers' and developers' results. Some of the most headline-grabbing work that claimed it does is now actively disavowed by the institution under which auspices it was done. That is a MASSIVE ding on the reliability of that research.

Penn Carey Law’s decision to pause scholarship, close equal opportunity office draws fire: ‘A racial attack’ Critics included the daughter of Sadie Alexander, for whom the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander scholarship was named. It was given to students who wanted to focus on racial justice.

Leges sine moribus vanae
share.inquirer.com/KRn8IY

It is one of my GenXiest qualities to be suspicious of that tone and to immediately assume insincerity and ulterior motive.

Spare a thought for whoever at LC suddenly became the Internet Person of the Day.

The President's Physical Fitness Test Podcast Episode · Maintenance Phase · 10/20/2020 · 58m

Bring back the President's Physical Fitness Test?!? Clearly no one in the Trump Administration has listened to @michaelhobbes.bsky.social and @yrfatfriend.bsky.social absolutely DEMOLISH it in one of the first Maintenance Phase episodes.

That was still the assumption, and largely the reality, into the 90s. I just happened to randomly decide to take Latin as a college freshman, well before landing on medieval history.

How to Read an "AI" Press Release — Sonja Drimmer Every so often someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman will dribble out some unadorned text in Times New Roman font, announcing with stentorian certitude the advent of a new world that their latest...

Zuckerberg farted out some nonsense today, and since most media outlets refuse to report critically any time a tech CEO offers them some a pseudoserious press release, I've decided to do it for them.

sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/7/30/how-to-read-an-ai-press-release

New on ACRLog... “We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question”

"Uncritically adopting AI tools in discovery systems will perpetuate, if not exacerbate, existing biases and suppression of minoritized people."

bit.ly/4f18iCY