Stephen Francoeur

AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.

Great. Another way synthetic text can pollute Wikipedia. www.404media.co/ai-translati...

We have differentiated vocabulary for literacy: reading critically, reading for pleasure, reading for research. We don't have that yet for AI. That absence isn't neutral: laurenpressley.com/library/2026...

Same here, probably the same trigger, too (AI). www.stephenfrancoeur.com/beatingthebo...

Really appreciate this thoughtful post by @laurenpressley.bsky.social on what librarians are particularly ready to contribute to the conversations in higher ed about how to address AI. laurenpressley.com/library/2026...

Student AI Use Is a Demand-Side Problem What does it mean if AI can do all the schoolwork on its own?

I am the last thing from a Pollyanna, but I think it's fundamentally important to see things like this Einstein app that claims to automate (nearly all) schoolwork as an opportunity to reconceive our work around the experiences that are most meaningful. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence."

Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI.

Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...

Client Challenge

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How to stop the survey-taking AI chatbots that threaten to upend social science via Instapaper https://ift.tt/IsD2aQc

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February 10, 2026 at 04:17PM

AI, slavery, surveillance, and capitalism (or AI for The Labor Question & What is Silicon Valley?)

AI, slavery, surveillance, and capitalism

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February 10, 2026 at 12:46PM

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

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February 10, 2026 at 12:44PM

The Em Dash - 99% Invisible Last summer, Bryan Vance found himself in an argument with a stranger on Reddit. Vance, a Portland-based journalist who runs Stumptown Savings, a newsletter covering local grocery deals, had been accused of using ChatGPT to write his content. The evidence? His use of em dashes. “A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to

The Em Dash - 99% Invisible

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February 07, 2026 at 08:32AM

Reality is losing the deepfake war Why metadata standards like C2PA are not remotely equipped to handle the current AI deepfake crisis.

Reality is losing the deepfake war | The Verge

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February 07, 2026 at 08:32AM

Elevating voices: my keynote at UXLibs 10 — Ned Potter You are about to read a blog-post devoid of nonchalance or professional cool… Because this summer I am delivering a keynote speech at my favourite conference of all time, User Experience in Libraries, on its 10th anniversary, in my home City of York. I am completely thrilled about this! UX as a

Elevating voices: my keynote at UXLibs 10 — Ned Potter

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February 07, 2026 at 08:32AM

U.K. Universities Decline New Elsevier Deal Sheffield, Lancaster and Surrey join Essex, Kent and Sussex in walking away from a proposed three-year deal with world’s largest academic publisher.

U.K. Universities Decline New Elsevier Deal

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February 07, 2026 at 08:32AM

AI Bots Are Now a Significant Source of Web Traffic New data shows AI bots pushing deeper into the web, prompting publishers to roll out more aggressive defenses.

AI Bots Are Now a Significant Source of Web Traffic | WIRED

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Increase of AI bots on the Internet sparks arms race via Instapaper https://ift.tt/sTvXPh5

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February 05, 2026 at 06:07PM

Where Should Scholars Draw the Line on AI? Between the poles of Zero AI and AI For Everything lies a vast, poorly mapped middle ground

Where Should Scholars Draw the Line on AI?

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February 03, 2026 at 05:32PM

The Problem With Using AI in Your Personal Life Using LLMs to talk with your friends is efficient. It’s also bad etiquette.

The Problem With Using AI in Your Personal Life - The Atlantic

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February 03, 2026 at 01:54PM

It's Starting to Look Like AI Has Killed the Entire Model of College As AI appears to do much of the work of entry-level job seekers, the entire premise of a college education seems to be collapsing.

It's Starting to Look Like AI Has Killed the Entire Model of College

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February 01, 2026 at 09:34AM

Slower than expected progress on my part to update my course on AI that I'll be teaching again this spring. www.stephenfrancoeur.com/beatingthebo...

Hundreds of PSC members marched down Fifth Avenue today alongside labor workers, community members, and elected officials to demand NO WARS! NO KINGS! NO ICE! ✊❤️‍🔥

We demand the US OUT of Latin America, and ICE OUT of our communities!

"Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of violence. This has the effect that if even just one protestor damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests”, but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent." . - David Graeber

Don't forget too the role of FoxNews and other media platforms in all this.

I wrote a blog post about who I have been reading as I prepare to teach a course on AI again. www.stephenfrancoeur.com/beatingthebo...

Starting a series of posts on my blog about gearing up to teach a course again on AI. Here's the first one: www.stephenfrancoeur.com/beatingthebo...

A thing about AI in higher ed right now is that half of us are scrambling to deal with the implosion of our information environment that broke reading/writing/source verification, while the other half is trying to achieve a massive institutional buy-in of the very thing that's causing the implosion

The raw dynamism just leaps out of that image

“There’s a baby!”

Guns drawn. Windows smashed. With a 1 month old in the car. (They did this as he was coming home from an immigration court appointment— which is illegal in Colorado: coloradosun.com/2025/10/01/i...)

YouTube video by Merriam-Webster LLM

Here's a large language model I can root for!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvQn...

YouTube video by Or Rent I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

How too many react to the popular advent of text extruding tech in higher ed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcU...

AI startup Friend spent more than $1M on all those subway ads | TechCrunch If you’ve been on the New York subway recently, you’ve probably seen stark white ads promoting a wearable AI device called Friend.

Today in luxury surveillance.

If you're on #LinkedIn, this is the link for declining their use of your data for training their AI models:

www.linkedin.com/mypreference...

They All Signed the “Harper’s” Letter. Where Are They Now? Many of those who were loudest in denouncing cancel culture then are now curiously silent in the face of Donald Trump’s assaults on free speech.

“For the large majority [of the Harper’s Letter signatories,] Trump’s reign of terror has apparently been less objectionable than the irritating undergraduate and entry-level scolds of the 2010s.”