Tahneer Oksman

Demythologizing "AI" — Tahneer Oksman

I wrote a few words on that AI-companion piece:

Maximizing profits by exploiting our deepest vulnerabilities; or, some thoughts on AI so-called "companions"

www.tahneeroksman.com/the-future-o...

Through comics, 'Essex County' creator shows us the struggles, triumphs of his career Jeff Lemire explores his career arc, the road to successfully delivering Essex County and other comics to the public, in a new graphic memoir.

For @npr.org, I reviewed Jeff Lemire's "sort of memoir," 10,000 INK STAINS: www.npr.org/2025/07/14/n...

It was an absolute delight talking with @tahneeroksman.bsky.social about my book last night! Thanks to everyone who came out. (And if you'd still like to purchase a copy you can use code F24UIP for 30% off when you buy from @illinoispress.bsky.social 😉)

I’ll be talking about my book at NYC's The Coffee House next Wed 7/9 at 6:30 w/ the brilliant @tahneeroksman.bsky.social! Join us for a conversation about all things Elaine May. Plus there will be clips! RSVP here: www.eventbrite.com/e/1397126485...

Tahneer Oksman and a stack of books

Alumna @tahneeroksman.bsky.social, who created an Audible lecture series about memoirs, shares her book picks in time for summer www.gc.cuny.edu/news/these-m...

These Memoirs Show How Stories, and Lives, Are Shaped Alumna Tahneer Oksman, a scholar of memoir and creator of an Audible lecture series about the genre, shares book picks in time for summer.

Just in time for summer: I wrote a listicle of memoirs to read. Some of my all-time favorites!

www.gc.cuny.edu/news/these-m...

If you look up the most visited websites (obviously difficulty to gage, but this seems like a fair estimate), note the one that is a foundation (nonprofit). (Spoiler: it's wikipedia!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right.

One important issue seems to be that students have a distrust of Wikipedia (often stemming from their professors/teachers), despite changes in its usefulness over the years. Here's an article I love to share: www.wired.com/story/wikipe...

Fascinating study out about lateral reading practices among students and the dissociation between their knowledge of lateral reading strategies as the best ways of catching misinformation vs. their limited actual engagement with these practices: digitalcommons.uri.edu/jmle/vol17/i...

Sam Altman isn't keen on you reading my book. EMPIRE OF AI is based on 300+ interviews, 7 yrs covering AI, and my time as the first reporter who got extensive access to OpenAI. I sought OpenAI's perspective throughout. For months they said it was coming. It never did. Pre-order here: empireofai.com.

THE AI CON How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want

Pre-order alert, cover, and website reveal for our book, THE AI CON! (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

It's out for release on May 13, 2025!

thecon.ai

Yes, and it made the article even more confusing to read!

That is, the sense of satisfaction that comes from generating certain kinds of writing:

"I want to understand. And when others understand in the same sense as I understood, then it gives me satisfaction, like a sense of being at home [heimat]."

Hannah Arendt said something related to this point, in a 1964 interview with Günter Gaus. It's a quotation that has been taped to my wall, just beside my desk, for a few years now. It's part of the loss behind the question posed in the article headline--a loss nobody seems to want to acknowledge.

It is also, often, a pleasure to write, in and of itself, and then to feel like you have made into some shape the thing that was, before that, inside of you, without form.

I am uncertain about many things, but whether or not writing will survive A.I. is something I have no doubt about. Because thinking will survive A.I. and writing is, among other things, a way of thinking.

Maybe many recommendation letters are stale (are they closely read?; are they doing what we think they ought to be doing?; have they become possibly somewhat pointless?), and maybe there are new ways to think through both the reasoning behind them, the why, and alternatives to traditional methods.

If, as I have now heard anecdotally many times over, A.I. can generate a recommendation letter that rivals what professors typically write, then maybe the recommendation letter isn't doing the work that it once did.

and how to find ways for students to develop and expose what they learn without overemphasizing that moment of "handing in" a final product.

The same question--What kind of writing will survive A.I.?--might be applied to other areas as well.

Many people have been experimenting, for years, with new ways of thinking through how to teach critical thinking in the classroom--through stages, through reading, writing, and speaking, etc.--

One example: is the traditional seminar paper useful for student learning? The traditional paper emphasizes product over process, and I think many of us--especially those with backgrounds in writing pedagogy--have long resisted it for this reason.

If a bot can create something presumably equal to the human version of it, is that maybe because the human version of it is vapid or stale? Now seems like great time to build on the work of those--educators and others--who have been asking these questions for a long time.

A more compelling questiont: What kind of writing will survive A.I.? Because if there is one thing that A.I. generated content shows us, it is that not all writing is created equal.

A.I. is built on people's writing. You can continue to generate new content using deep learning, but if you're not continually refreshing that content with high quality up-to-date writing then you're going to end up stuck in a kind of stultifying time warp.

"Will Writing Survive A.I?" is one of the more terrible headlines I've read recently (NYT, "Will Writing Survive A.I.? The Media Startup Every Is Betting on It," May 21, 2025).

I love a good piece of media and/or tech history, and though it came out a few months too early to make the summer reading list I would recommend it paired with Guy Delisle’s Mubridge, a brilliant graphic biography.

17 new books our critics can't wait to read this summer We asked some of our trusted critics which upcoming books they are most looking forward to. Here are the fiction and nonfiction titles they picked.

For
@npr.org's summer book list, I recommended an upcoming graphic novel, The Age of Video Games: A Graphic History Gaming from Pong to VR and Beyond by Jean Zeid, illustrated by Emilie Rouge, translated by Jen Vaughn.

The full list is here: www.npr.org/2025/05/21/n...

Nothing is actually free (including the platform I'm posting this on, though better than most). Here we are, making money for people who are sitting back and trying to think of new ways to make more and more money by monetizing as much as they can of our day to day lives.

Inconvenience can actually be quite refreshing, if you're willing to sit through the initial discomfort.

There may be some inconvenience here--maybe you'll have to fill in some passwords from time to time, or it will take you a bit longer to look through and find useful search results. But it's worth it to take back even just a little bit of control over what you're looking at on screens.