Tess Bernhard

Both helpful tidbits to consider, ty! 2/3 reviews are some of the most positive I've ever gotten, one explicitly asked for only minor revisions. The negative review asks for v addressable nuance in a few spots. I'll likely keep my pride in tact & move on, but am tempted to politely nudge the editor

In all likelihood I will simply take the L and move on from this journal and to a new one, but my pride wants the editors to more carefully consider the extremely affirming feedback two of the reviewers provided that seem overlooked in the summary 🥲

A very 2025 quandry: I received a rejection from a journal & the editor's summary of the reviews contains various inaccuracies, misnaming theoretical constructs and misattributing feedback to the wrong reviewers. My worry is that I got decisioned by AI. Is it petty write a note to rebut the summary?

The answer to “how to use AI responsibly” is “don’t.”

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Join the Fight The issue is not whether you personally use Microsoft CoPilot to help with slogging through emails, and it’s not about punishing students. Rather, it is about the value of your work, being paid appropriately for it, the importance of learning and intellectual curiosity, being able to have control over your working conditions, and caring about the future of participation in a democratic society.

🔥 from @hellobrittparis.bsky.social Lindsey Weinberg, and Emma May around the weaponization of AI in higher ed.

academeblog.org/2025/07/22/f...

You know what emergent tech of the last decade actually works well, and was adopted by millions?

3D printing. It’s great! So many applications.

But also nobody is sneering at you for not having or utilizing 3D printing. Nobody is trying to sneak a 3D printer into your garage without your consent

🚨WE WON OUR UNION 🚨

Every "tech" guy is just a VC guy in a subculture that gets called "tech" for no particular reason. Most real "tech" - like, i dunno, cutting edge materials research - doesn't get called that while "a new pizza delivery app" does

Some Thoughts on Techno-Fascism From Socialism 2025 "This is the endgame of our isolation."

"Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines. They want techno feudal subjects who will believe and do what they’re told. We, as people, are being strategically simplified. This is a fascist process."

organizingmythoughts.org/some-thought...

SMH: news that the American Federation of Teachers is partnering with Open AI and Microsoft on an AI initiative is especially disappointing because teachers’ unions can and should fight back against Big Tech’s attempts to deprofessionalize and disempower educators.

No one is “replacing” teachers with AI. People are redistributing money to tech companies for AI and replacing permanent salaried workers with contingent, poorly paid ones whose labor is to patch together the system that is being broken by AI.

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

«The role of the university isn't to roll over in the face of tall tales about technological inevitability, but to model the forms of critical pedagogy that underpin the social defence against authoritarianism and which makes space to reimagine the other worlds that are still possible.»

I appreciate everyone wants AI used "responsibly" and "ethically" in education but schools have *always* been asked to compensate for society (which they can't) and requiring them to compensate for the AI industry's social irresponsibilities is just daft. Also it will colonize educators' time.

!!!

“Technological change is not an external force to which societies must simply adapt; it is a socially and politically mediated process…”

“The future remains open, contingent on whether we are willing to confront, contest, and redirect the pathways along which technology advances”

As I've been saying over and over on our book tour for The AI Con, the inevitability argument (including in the form of "AI is here to stay") is an attempt to steal our agency. We don't have to accept that and I encourage everyone to refuse it.

If you're using GPT to collect or analyze data from human subjects, this means that OpenAI might now be retaining your participants' data indefinitely.

Did your participants consent to this? Does your IRB protocol allow OpenAI to retain participant data? If not, then you might be in breach. 4/

Lots of folks failing to come to terms w this, assuming things will blow over, and giving me & peers the same old advice about optimizing for the academic job market. The work rn is to dig into community w those looking to build something else, not self-optimizing and gambling for the old to return

This is reminding me I owe you an email with come critical AI resources—I hope you’re well, Marta!!

Yes, totally!! If anything AI is used as an excuse to raise enrollment/class sizes and claim a teacher can do more with less

These are harrowing testimonials. Yet, I'm thrilled to see multiple Philly teachers' voices uplifted here, and that there is growing collective and active resistance coming from teachers against AI rather than passive acceptance encouraged by the "AI is inevitable" crowd

now is the time for universities to announce that they collectively will not disenroll any international student who has their visa revoked, and that they will ensure remote degree completion is possible

There’s a recent piece —maybe on wire cutter? About a journalist who wore one of the new AI enabled all day recorders. It records your every conversation & transcribes it all day. I just want you to know that once basic social trust is broken in this way? It’s over

Why ChatGPT is unlikely to solve climate change Critics say boosters conflating different types of AI.

I'm quoted in this SF Examiner article about why generative AI like ChatGPT isn't gonna solve climate change — but AI boosters love to say it will by conflating very different types of machine learning models with the form of ML they are invested in. www.sfexaminer.com/news/technol...

I cannot go two seconds in Google Docs without fucking Gemini butting in like “can I help you turn your careful and detailed writing that people pay you by the hour for into some hot garbage that doesn’t make sense??? no??? how about now? okay how about now? how about now? how about now? how about

Suddenly All Elon Musk's Grok Can Talk About Is 'White Genocide' in South Africa Elon Musk has spread false claims about 'white genocide' in South Africa, and now his chatbot Grok keeps bringing it up on X.

If AI really is the future to the degree many believe, then the owner of one of the few big publicly-accessible AIs manipulating it to fixate on a false conspiracy theory the owner likes, instead of responding according to the widespread data it trained on, should be considered a watershed moment.

Going to start calling Sam Altman "Sloppenheimer"