Under no circumstances should we allow OpenAI to become the self-authorized educational research evidenve source that it is trying to be. Vendors must not be research authorities. openai.com/index/unders...
📢 New Publication 🎉
We are excited that our latest article has just been published with Wiley @futurehumanities.bsky.social:
“When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act”
👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
autonomous vehicles are an abject lesson about the impossibly complex challenge of trying to effectively navigate a dynamic natural world automatically. the entirety of the field's scholarly & engineering work might be most valuable as case studies in why uncritical automation is a fraught endeavor.
for the love of god, AI systems aren't "just tools that are neither good nor evil in and of themselves". AI systems *are* tools of capitalism. they exist as tools of capitalism. there is no AI system "in and of itself" outside of capitalism
"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."
- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.
Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!
The "evidence-based" policy model is being abandoned in favour getting AI into schools for "testing in the wild" and that's giving big tech and edtech freedom to pump private tech into public education even harder than before. The "evidence" will only come later, once they're embedded.
I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.
Yes! This also comes up in my recent contribution to CHE:
www.chronicle.com/article/how-...
Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
Turn off Gemini in Google!
It's been turned on by default.
Go to your Drive, click the gear icon, click settings, go to "manage apps" and uncheck that nasty "use by default" box.
www.zdnet.com/article/how-...
"Help you read faster" is so dishonest lol, like yeah if you consider "not doing the reading" as "reading faster"
"Too many people are busily promoting a version of "‘AI’ literacy” that is simply training students how to use and consume 'AI' 'properly' – whatever that means – and refusing to admit that there may be no ethical usage of a fundamentally unethical, abusive technology," writes Audrey Watters.
In a time when workers in higher ed need to be as organized and coordinated as ever to fight threats and build the institutions we deserve, I'm proud to announce I'll be working alongside this great crew on the newly formed RAPUP-UAW bargaining committee 🫡 pennpostdocunion.org/bargaining-c...
The @aaup.org beat Marco Rubio in court, with a Reagan-appointed judge ruling that ideological deportations obviously violate the first amendment.
These cases cost money. And we need millions of people moving together to make them stick. If you're faculty in the US, join AAUP and join the fight.
I have a theory - much like how if you live in New York City for long enough you become culturally Jewish in a way, if you hang out online for too long you end up culturally Philadelphian
This description of Alpha School really would make Foucault melt.
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
In this short piece, I lean on embodied cog sci to argue that we should refuse & resist llms in education (pp. 53-58) unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentV...
"the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care & humility are fostered & mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions"
![3.2 We do not have to ‘embrace the future’ & we can turn back the tide
It must be the sheer magnitude of [artificial neural networks’] incompetence that makes
them so popular.
Jerry A. Fodor (2000, p. 47)
Related to the rejection of expertise is the rejection of imagining a better future and the rejection
of self-determination free from industry forces (Hajer and Oomen 2025; Stengers 2018; van Rossum
2025). Not only AI enthusiasts, but even some scholars whose expertise concentrates on identifying
and critically interrogating ideologies and sociotechnical relationships — such as historians and gender scholars — unfortunately fall prey to the teleological belief that AI is an unstoppable force. They
embrace it because alternative responses seem too difficult, incompatible with industry developments,
or non-existent. Instead of falling for this, we should “refuse [AI] adoption in schools and colleges,
and reject the narrative of its inevitability.” (Reynoldson et al. 2025, n.p., also Benjamin 2016; Campolo and Crawford 2020; CDH Team and Ruddick 2025; Garcia et al. 2022; Kelly et al. 2025; Lysen
and Wyatt 2024; Sano-Franchini et al. 2024; Stengers 2018). Such rejection is possible and has historical precedent, to name just a few successful examples: Amsterdammers kicked out cars, rejecting
that cycling through the Dutch capital should be deadly. Organised workers died for the eight-hour
workday, the weekend and other workers’ rights, and governments banned chlorofluorocarbons from
fridges to mitigate ozone depletion in the atmosphere. And we know that even the tide itself famously
turns back. People can undo things; and we will (cf. Albanese 2025; Boztas 2025; Kohnstamm Instituut 2025; van Laarhoven and van Vugt 2025). Besides, there will be no future to embrace if we deskill
our students and selves, and allow the technology industry’s immense contributions to climate crisis](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreidzio5vcvzus3xjqxcpav64pwk2gwslwslogabl7b5dzhn6egf37i)
2. the strange but often repeated cultish mantra that we need to "embrace the future" — this is so bizarre given, e.g. how destructive industry forces have proven to be in science, from petroleum to tobacco to pharmaceutical companies.
(Section 3.2 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)
4/n
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Something I didn't get to say yesterday:
We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.
Since tomorrow is Labor Day and school is in session, I'd like to argue (again) that teaching about GenAI should include discussion of the extractive, exploitative labor conditions that make the technology possible. 🧵
This is an inevitable byproduct of automation. The AI boosters have been selling us that deskilling in some areas will result in upskilling in others, but we have no evidence of this. We don't even have a particularly good theory. We have salesmanship B.S.
we live in a world defined by replacing human labor (employees) with machines which then need human babysitting (independent contractors on slave wages)*
What frightens me isn’t just that people have stopped reading. It’s that they’ve replaced reading with mimicry. A quote here, a post there, stitched together to sound like wisdom. And sadly, in this world where books gather dust and posts go viral, it’s very easy to confuse loudness for wisdom.
Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.
"What's propping up 'AI' is not 'the people.' It's the police. And it's the petroleum industry.
As such, when I hear educators insist that 'AI' is the future that we need to be preparing students for, I wonder why they're so willing to build a world of prisons and climate collapse."
Kind of feel like it should be bigger national news that the poorest major city in the country is being forced to accept devastating service cuts to our public transit system because PA Republicans actively hate Philly and want to cause us pain
EFF has been saying this for years: School monitoring software sacrifices student privacy for unproven promises of safety.
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 🥲
