Jeff Sharlet

Yes.

If I asked AI to write a short story about a reporter who embraced her paper’s replacement of human writers with AI slop and it made up a character named “Hannah Drown,” I’d say, “Nice try, AI, but way too Dickensian.” Alas, this is real, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Me, I have no use for either of them.

I don’t think so. I think he is, more or less, a red-brown type who thinks he’s left but is also aware that trolling antisemitism is working for him. I doubt he’s a committed Jew hater; I think he’s a just a very damaged opportunist.

Just made mistake of responding to a follower who said they’d “roll the dice” on Platner despite his ever-growing Nazi file. Pointless, so I deleted & blocked. If you’ve admit the problem but say it’s not a deal breaker, we’re not having a “debate” any more than I would with Stephen Miller.

Why does that have to be assessment? I write extensive notes and often have meetings to discuss every assignment. How would a a grade help that? I’d argue it obscures dialogue.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

It’s on pod save America. On Epstein.

I know more than enough but not about his defense of other Nazi tattoos. Send me in the right direction?

Why do we need assessment?

No! I’m called a neolib. And worse. By some who think they’re being radical by falling back on aristocratic norms. A common mistake, to my mind, conflates ignoring the current reality of rent—and the necessity of resources to pursue artistic practice—with resisting capitalism.

A little bit of a tangent, because I don’t much care about cheating. Were it up to me I’d slash the amount of cheating massively by getting rid of the pedagogically useless incentive to cheat: grades.

Earnest q: if the surveys haven’t been good, how can the evidence be “enough”? Do they actually have access to the test keys maintained by some Greek orgs? What incentive does one who has cheated have to be truthful? How can they trust confidentiality?

A colleague once called me a “neoliberal pimp” for helping my students publish & get journalism jobs. I work hard at that. At the same time, I make clear in my courses that creative writing isn’t vocational education, as valuable as such education is.

Keep an eye out for a theater

I interviewed the director, if you're interested. www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2026...

Oh very! Thanks

Natchez | 2025 Documentary From Suzannah Herbert After generations of showcasing its antebellum homes and hoop-skirted docents, Natchez, Mississippi, is now reckoning with romanticized past, an uncertain future and the debt it owes to the descendant...

There's a list of theatre screenings here:

www.natchezfilm.com

I just saw Natchez, a new doc I’ll recommend again once I figure out how to speak to the deep intelligence of its structure, the way it moves from a cloying world you know is actually horrific into a realer world in which the horror, courage, witness, and humanness are all made visible.

Do we have any evidence that there is more cheating now? How would one study the ubiquity of cheating? Do we decontextualize it from structural corruption?

Which is reductive. But not nearly as much as the AI debate would have us believe. This is why I agree with @kylesaunders.bsky.social that AI is an accelerant, not a cause. Gas on a tire fire that’s been cooking so long some didn’t realize it really could burn the whole thing down.

I’d say the “us” there is messy. When I applied for my job, I made clear what, why, and how I teach. That’s my contract. But I don’t run admissions, or marketing, or the decisions higher up. Colleges can decide whether they want to be learning institutions or class reproduction machines.

Oh we agree about that! I didn’t take it amiss. Thanks for writing!

Heck, how about we ditch competition.

And that’s the very story on which Lapham taught me that lesson! I had written what’s basically the first chapter. But what to do about it?! I didn’t know. How could I publish without a solution?! Lapham said doing so was the point. So he was right about that.

I definitely agree, tho, that it’s an “accelerant not a cause.” I don’t think his description of the pre-existing crisis goes broad enough.

Fair, but I think my argument is w/ his account of the university. Terms such as “mastery” “debate” & thus the “certification” which he critiques describes to me one idea of what it is & shld be, but does so as if that’s a fact. Then there’s the conflation of AI w/ “idea,” & the absence of “labor.”

We may disagree — as a describer by trade (a journalist) — I think it’s never of more than limited use. In this instance, I know of many “middle grounders,” against whom
I’m arguing, that I know also to be brilliant in their spheres, progressive or even liberationist in politics, & in good faith.

Then I think of the many students who know classmates are raising hands with AI-produced comments. Nobody wants to be a rat. So they’re coerced into complicity. Some, meanwhile, came for the discussion; they’re robbed. This isn’t a problem of certification, it’s one of community.

I’m thinking of a student who used AI for a test, because other students were; this student knew they could do well on their own, but knew their classmates, with AI, were going to do better. The problem I see there is competition and its metaphor, grades. AI is just an acceleration of that problem.