Sonja Drimmer

Yep!

thethingswellmake.com/paleo-vegan-...

www.youtube.com/shorts/1I8qy...

“The mashed potato was just … spread mashed potato on like butter - make sure to fill in all the holes in the bread, and fry it crispy like any other fried bread. “

👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿

It was BONKERS. Unreal.

I asked for grilled cheese and tomato soup for dinner after a hard day of work today and my husband made vegan cheese and “bacon” jam from scratch then coated the sandwiches in mashed potato before frying them, because my my man doesn’t just understand the assignment; he does extra credit.

Or better yet: make GenAI about an assault on civics. Because if you are selling a product that necessarily attempts to con one person into believing they are engaging with another person when they are not, you’re not just ruining education. You’re dismantling society’s foundations in social trust.

So the next time someone tries to draw you into a conversation about that piece they saw on 60 Minutes or read in the NYT about how educators are coping with/ combatting/whatever students using GenAI, don’t accept that framing. Make it about the industry that is impoverishing their education.

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

Any they want to further erode relationships between individuals so that, eventually, we simply decide it’s just easier to cede decision-making to models, which they can sell us.

A disrespect for me as an educator means that a basic piece of sociality and trust has been broken and so I don’t owe anyone generous feedback. But I don’t need to be punitive either. That’s what those who are selling these products want. They want to exhaust us into resignation.

It is a waste of educators’ labor to worry about policing students’ work or jury rigging AI-proof assignments.There are desultory ways of going about responding to such papers. But that doesn’t mean acquiescence. That means working towards and demanding structural changes at our institutions.

I’ve been thinking about the intellectual and affective labor involved in reading AI Generated student papers. I’m forecasting a little of the proposal that @cnygren.bsky.social and I advance in a piece that’ll be out soon but here’s where I’ve personally landed (o speak for myself not for us both):

I should be so honored!

Yes. I can see this, absolutely.

Johns ia too stringent is his disagreement, certainly. And Pettegree is a nice medium between EE + Johns. But you cannot, for just one, stack the court of opinion on the early press with the evidence of colophons. I’d blurb my own inventions too if I could!

Wow that must have been a talk to get to see. I’m tired of reading that anyone who *actually* reads Eisenstein will see that her arguments have been caricatured by those who haven’t. It’s a new shibboleth. I mean, fair enough. That’s what happens to classics. But reading her reveals stuff like this.

It is possible to write history without making claims about earlier periods one has not studied.

Occasionally Eisenstein is entirely wrong about responses to the printing press: it is false that "the art of artificial writing was one of the first (perhaps the very first?) of the new technologies developed in the post-classical world where contemporary reactions are documented") ibid, 10. This claim feels like shooting fish in a barrel but here is a Dominican in 1306: "It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help one to see well, an art which is one of the best and most necessary in the world."

So this is ending up on the cutting room floor for reasons of my not wanting to *publish* as a jerk, but for reasons of catharsis I post.

A labradoodle lying down in the snow with snow on his muzzle. He is doing a big lick of the snow on his nose.

Mlm.

MACHINE YEARNING Sonja Drimmer critically examines art historians’ recent embrace of generative AI as a tool for humanities research.

From @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social in @artforum.com: “Computer vision doesn’t hallucinate because of an inscrutable deus inside the machina. It “hallucinates”—such a groovy word for being wrong with confidence—because that is the ideology with which it was encoded.” www.artforum.com/features/gen...

This is a great 🧵 and I’m happy to be in such good company!

I have indeed! bsky.app/profile/sonj...

Oh my GOD. Where has this instrument been ll my life?!

That’s fair!

What other instrument TWINKLES?

You cannot convince me that there is a musical instrument better than a glockenspiel.

Once again, ILL remains the purest representation of scholarly community. I use it so much I often write little notes back and forth with the librarians when I’ve borrowed a lot from their library. It’s the closest you can get to those old penpal schemes and I love it.

It's the survey version of a London walk-signal button. It will have no impact on the programmed pattern of traffic lights, but it will make you feel like you might have some agency.

"What are YOUR thoughts about what we are planning to implement regardless of what YOUR thoughts are about whether or not to implement it in the first place, Professor Zucker?"

Re-upping this today, citing the concluding paragraph we wrote as I just responded to a frustrating survey about integrating GenAI into humanities education at my institution.

I distinctly recall a study on these replicas but I’ll have to check my computer. There’s a wonderful piece by Kathryn Brush on the exchange between Lübeck and those responsible for the Busch Reisinger museum and their plaster casts, which I’m pretty sure I cite in my Hildegard article.