Amanda Foster Kaufman

Never forget that a Democratic US Attorney’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz for downloading JSTOR PDFs contributed to his suicide but AI firms’ decision to download everything ever will be a justification for hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts and legal exemptions.

AI boosterism is still thriving in my neck of the woods, but all I can see is the Big Short 2.0 heading towards us like a freight train.

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The long read: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell

Dusting off this old gem for homework in Critical InfoLit. If you've never read it, it's a fascinating accounting of the growth of the academic publishing industry in the 60's and 70's. The twist is it's also about Ghislaine Maxwell's dad.

🧵It has been clear for years that a key difference between past instances of book banning and the present censorship cataclysm is that the banning happening now targets not only books, but librarianship as a profession and libraries as an institution. 1/4

I loved my UNC SILS experience (circa 2012~) so much, but even then most of the resources being directed to the "iSchool" side of the house. Here's to hoping this is a fruitful partnership for MLS program, but to say I'm concerned would be an understatement.

This episode is such a joy. Glad to see Reading Rainbow back! :)

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...

I dislike the title's framing around productivity, rather than destroying trust and reputation among colleagues, but I'm glad to see "workslop" reported on more.

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

'Really slimy': Texas A&M 'quietly' removes hundreds of LGBTQ+ books "It just felt really slimy on the university's part."

In 2022 Texas A&M reorganized their libraries (over faculty protests) and pulled all librarians out of faculty status.

Why ChatGPT Creates Scientific Citations — That Don’t Exist It looks convincing, even in White House reports, but it’s often a sign of shoddy backwards research.

Sometimes I worry that I'm telling students things they already know. But as of my class this morning, this is still brand new information to *many* undergraduates.

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet

New academic year, new articles for my students to read. Love this one from @economist.com on how AI is changing the business model of the internet.

www.economist.com/business/202...

If something is incorrect on Wikipedia, it can be sourced, traced, disputed, fixed.

If it's wrong in the LLM, it's just...wrong. It's not a fact explicitly stored somewhere, it's just a string of words generated by a probability map

I just appeared on a local AI podcast and the first question was how I use AI for fun I just said, "I don't. I don't use AI in my personal life at all. I find it alienating." And that's a preview for pretty much how the rest of the episode went. Oops. 🙊

CTRL-F Verification Skills 2024 - YouTube

new to me, but perhaps not new: CTRL+F has unlisted @mikecaulfield.bsky.social's Online Verification Skills videos and replaced them. You can still access the old ones (for now?) if you have the original links.

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

And this one on: "what I think about information literacy is that everybody owns it, so nobody’s accountable for it." 👏

On the near impossibility of teaching mis-info in a one-shot: "In fifty minutes, you can maybe have students do one thing... but something as sophisticated and charged as misinformation or
disinformation? No. The way to do it is not to do it in a one-shot."

Loved this finding that dispels the myth that librarians are still teaching the CRAAP Test with any regularity: "In contrast to the previous findings that CRAAP is ubiquitous in teaching evaluation... participants consistently derided the CRAAP Test as an out-dated method"

TBR pile recommendation from me. Banger upon banger of insights into the realities of teaching mis/disinfo in the library.
crl.acrl.org/index.php/cr...

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

We're in the final day of an emergency fundraising campaign at @wunc.org (due to the pulling of federal funding). We need the support of North Carolinians now more than ever. And that's why I'm asking Bill Belichick, once again, to become a sustaining member, at any level. www.wunc.org/donate

Reporter: The FDA has a new AI tool that's intended to speed up drug approvals. But several FDA employees say the new AI helper is making up studies that do not exist. One FDA employee telling us, 'Anything that you don't have time to double check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently'

We have decided to ban the use of GenAI for research, writing & creative work at our organization.

In fact, we make people sign an agreement saying that their research, analysis, writing, and creative work are *theirs* and not done by GenAI.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

weird, what could explain this

I've said this elsewhere, but I hate that we are more or less forced to be invested in capitalism's success because if our 401k/403bs fail, none of us ever get to retire (aka freedom from working for capital)

historically the bad faith stuff quickly moves into bedrock belief territory. the way all these reality breaks usually go is that once one of these groups is cornered and hitched to a disastrous idea, they double down and build a fantasy world around it bc it’s easier than admitting they were wrong

Extremists Are Using Lies to Undermine America’s Public Schools: We Need to Take a Stand The right wing is using lies about how American kids are being taught in order to undermine public schools, argues Randi Weingarten and Jonah Edelman

What is banning books about? Undermining public schools. Coming back to this article from a couple years ago that sums it up.

it did come out that way, didn't it? but that wasn't what I meant 🤣

this was definitely a thing, and also very few of them are archivists anymore... 😬

The Old-Fashioned Library at the Heart of the A.I. Boom OpenAI may be changing how the world interacts with language. But inside headquarters, there is a homage to the written word: a library.

There is something deeply disconcerting to me about this particular company cultivating the optimal aesthetic of a library at their HQ, and all that a library symbolizes (knowledge, learning, preservation) while also simultaneously working to dismantle traditional knowledge creation as we know it.