Matt Chalmers

Working through editorial feedback for a book review for a Classics journal (not something I do often) and golly

Classics is the only discipline I work with where comments about how a book helps redirect the field get read as an attack. *So* much defensive gatekeeping

The question that faculty in 2024 should be asking is not, “How do we stop our students from using AI?”

The much more urgent question should be, “How do we prevent our administrators from paying outrageous sums for AI, or trying to integrate it into any facet of institutional instruction?”

Oh, that's great to hear! Very happy to hear it being assigned

Compare news coverage. Spot media bias. Avoid algorithms. Try Ground News today and get 40% off your subscription by going to https://ground.news/religionfor... The Most Misunderstood Parable of Jesus

I once wrote an article about the parable of the Good Samaritan that people apparently read. So far, 80k people have watched this collab with Religion for Breakfast which breaks it down - so if you want to see how this all translates to public scholarship, have a peek www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Yy...

I did not realize that West Virginia University's plans to cut its entire world languages and literature department is yet another example of supposedly "data-driven" admins eliminating a humanities program that their own data shows is a profit center:

www.languagemagazine.com/2023/08/15/w...

This is 100% true in academia, too. So many of the things that administrators do work much worse than what was being done before but make sense when you realize administrators need stuff on their CVs

Business culture and American society in general needs less management and more leadership. That sounds kind of trite and dumb but management culture in my experience is really geared around *making the manager look good to their bosses* which is actually cancer to the overall organization.

University budgets are moral documents Universities are creating a(n intentional) recursive doom loop for the Humanities

“The second issue, but the more important one…is that RCM/ IBB has been a soft coup that steals power at the university away from the faculty.”

University budgets are bad and should feel bad

From me & @lollardfish.bsky.social

FREE TO READ & SHARE (but please subscribe)

The "butts in seats" budget model of universities contributes to, or at least doesn't help, many seemingly unrelated problems:
- administrative bloat
- grade inflation & dumbed-down courses
- adjunctification
- alienation & social isolation of students
- inter-unit competition vs. cooperation

More:

As we’re fighting for pay increases that even come close to the rate of inflation, our class sizes increase & assigned time for service work is clawed back. Our buying power is eroding, and it impacts conditions for student learning.

"Status between Law and Religion," our seminar issue of the Journal of Law and Religion is accessible w no paywall for a short while, so get it while it's hot! www.cambridge.org/core/journal... @mjchalmers.bsky.social #Mishnah #Samaritans #Hindu #gods #religiousminorities

But because budgets are allocated by number of students, fewer instructors would mean fewer students thus justifying more cuts thus meaning fewer instructors this meaning fewer students thus justifying more cuts thus meaning fewer instructors this meaning fewer students thus justifying more cuts /4

It is my pre-existing belief (so you might want to be wary of my analysis )that models of revenue sharing, shifting core curriculum requirements, and the establishment of undergraduate business majors lie at the heart of the destruction of the modern university. Today's case: U Chicago. /1

on reflection, I should not be surprised that an ethics centre headed by conservative senior faculty understands the avoidance of moral judgement as a general good

but depressing, nevertheless

70% of academic positions are now contingent, but this team of senior scholars recommends that you accept shitty colleagues and working conditions, be enthusiastic as fuck, don't hang in there longer than four years, and don't stop applying to job openings. www.chronicle.com/article/dos-...

I think the main reason we talk about these op eds so much is that a decent society requires consequences for antisocial behavior. It's not like that needs to be the media's job but they shouldn't work hard to insure the opposite, which is their thing

Q. What do a police officer, a victim of racism, a domestic violence survivor, and an NRA member have in common?

A. They are people who, according to a new initiative by the ethics centre(!) at one college I work at, we need to "unjudge". The horrid, moral emptiness of identity capitalism

tldr if your campus isn't talking about whether AI is ethical, and isn't talking about environment or labour, let's take anything they say about it with a hefty grain of salt

Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence Abstract. This book is a call to resist AI. The operations of deep learning cause collateral damage in ways that can’t be fixed, and its take-up by institutions

And we haven't even talked about the alignment of AI as currently developed with corporate authoritarianism, and some nasty political and social programs academic.oup.com/policy-press... +

Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order An MIT Technology Review series investigates how AI is enriching a powerful few by dispossessing communities that have been dispossessed before.

People have been trying to talk about this, including conceptualizing it as a sort of neo-colonialism. But a lot of the need for ethical attention is getting lost in the noise of shiny new tools and EdTech sensing profit www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1... +

Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AI's development Tech firms are relying on low-wage workers to power their AI models. That raises serious ethical questions about how the technology is being developed.

Finnish company Metroc, as reported in November 2023, turned to prison labour for their LLM training - a sort of labour not known for its positive workplace environment theconversation.com/long-hours-a... +

Exclusive: The $2 Per Hour Workers Who Made ChatGPT Safer A TIME investigation reveals the difficult conditions faced by the workers who made ChatGPT possible

Reliance on underpaid and precarious human work was highlighted in this TIME investigation of OpenAI, ChatGPT's creators, and their use of outsourced Kenyan workers to label data time.com/6247678/open... +

But it's not just environment - it's what AI does to people. Training AI has gone hand in hand with some devastating labour exploitation, often of historically exploited people www.noemamag.com/the-exploite...

TechScape: Turns out there’s another problem with AI – its environmental toll AI uses huge amounts of electricity and water to work, and the problem is only going to get worse – what can be done? Plus, the wider TechScape

More recently, last year, it was clear that the environmental impact of AI remained a huge problem, both in terms of carbon footprint and water consumption www.theguardian.com/technology/2... +

Back in 2020, people were already talking about AI training as resource-hungry. Corporate interests in the tech, especially as a replacement for specialist workers, already contributed to an exponentially expanding carbon footprint nature.com/articles/s42... +

As the semester kicks off, the inevitable emails about how cool AI is ooze down from management. Here's a thread about how, regardless of AI being a good tool or not, it's not clear it's *ethical* atm

Two main points: environmental strain and labour 1/n

I’m teaching an intro to religion class next term and have the chance to totally overhaul the syllabus, so, I’m not gonna ask y’all to do my work for me, but if you have a short reading in religious studies that rewired your brain/is worth sharing for you, drop it here.

I like both Religion in Five Minutes and Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Cliches (volume I and now II). Both helpful, and oriented around "common knowledge" claims

Statistically, you actually have a better chance of getting hired to TT as ABD than once you're a couple of years out (unless you are moving TT to TT). It's a lot about what people imagine you can do

Oh, then I've misunderstood you - I thought that was what you meant. What do you see as the importance of getting them with initial application?