froggleston

interesting how some tech bros claim college is overrated and people should drop out but “Ph.D level” is a marker of expertise

When you frame "prompt engineer" as "overfitted question asker" then the allure starts to diminish somewhat.

Goddamn. What a sobering and poignant piece of conceptual art. What an amazing artist.

Some personal reflections on this post.
1. I expect some @carpentries.carpentries.org community members will not like the idea of workshops teaching the use of genAI. To them, teaching any usage of megacorp LLMs at all is equivalent to endorsement. This is not far from how I felt until recently.

This sounds true to me

I would imagine Google and Amazon would survive. Probably Microsoft if they manage to rein in their AI spending - their gaming sector layoffs to prepare for AI generated games is a big mistake. Meta? They're done.

I don't think anyone is really prepared for what will happen when this bubble bursts. And when it does, because it will, it'll be a binfire of epic proportions. This is the hype cycle to dwarf all other hype cycles.

Post from "The Rundown" July 18 at 5:30 PM · DuckDuckGo has introduced a new feature allowing users to filter out AI-generated images from search results, addressing growing concerns over synthetic content overwhelming authentic visuals online. The filter can be activated through a dropdown in the Images tab, search settings, or by using a dedicated AI-free domain: noai.duckduckgo.com. The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin’s Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress AI-generated imagery. While not perfect, it significantly reduces synthetic content visibility. This move sets DuckDuckGo apart from competitors like Google and Bing by giving users direct control over their exposure to AI-generated material. Source: TechCrunch

DuckDuckGo has added a feature to filter out AI images from search results.

Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it’s getting in the way.

the enshittification of education is underway

restofworld.org/2025/colombi...

Safe to say "witness exploitation by shitty legislation and shitty companies" was every box on my 2025 bingo card.

Buy physical music.

We are gonna have charts for AI slop exposure by generation like we do lead

OpenAI insists cheating at universities is something ‘holistic’ for (people other than them)
solve while refusing to implement text watermarking because a survey showed people would use competitors if they did. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/chatgpt...

table 2 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 3 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 4 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

I split AI into 3 non-mutually exclusive types (see Table 1 above): displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. More later possibly, but see Tables 2 to 4 (attached or here: arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960) for the worked through examples. 2/n

UK high court hears Wikipedia suit against Online Safety Act category rules | Biometric Update The legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorization Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is suing over the Online Safety Act, saying that the UK's identity verification mandate would endanger the safety its editors — and is resonant of the demands of an authoritarian government.

www.biometricupdate.com/202507/uk-hi...

I imagined the Chatsubo in 1984. 41 years later I opened its door. Neuromancer is in production.

Until Labour is prepared to fight, the far‑right will keep taking ground Plus: Farage has "no idea", a whistleblower's account from inside Blackpool's Metropole Hotel, and our recommendations for what to read and listen to this week.

As the threat of escalating far-right protests ripples across the UK, We know what drives disorder, @Zoegrunewald.bsky.social argues that the government needs to take a stand.

theleaduk.substack.com/p/until-labo...

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a ...

Newsletter: This is the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: genAI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable genAI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

this is the very technology orgs like the UN is adopting to "solve" gender inequity

You've managed to sum up everything that's terrible about genAI, publishing, and social media, all in one post. And did AI make that advert image for you, because it sucks.

It's almost as if the decades of the richest taking from the pot, exploiting workers, buying up housing stock to rent out at market inflating prices, and gaming the system has crippled the actual value of pensions.

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

The better you are at a thing, the more "AI" will be a drag on your time, because it's operating at a lower level of skill than you are, and you have to fix what it does, rather than just do what you already know how to do.

The Sentence That I'm Very Tired Of Hearing as a Teacher and my case for nuance with the term "efficiency" in education

Also why I'm very much tired of hearing the phrase, "This can save you time as a teacher."

I don't need to "save time."

I need to be given the time to do what matters for my students and classroom.

thebrokencopier.substack.com/p/the-senten...

This has increasingly been my experience. Students are becoming very suspicious of AI technology, in part because the very real problems with it are being publicly aired and explained by experts like yourself. Most students want to learn rather than cheat, so we need to set expectations accordingly.

At no point in this study did I use AI. This includes the literature review, logical organization, writing, analysis, and proofreading. I do not cite any studies that use AI, to the extent that it is possible to know.

Yesterday I used this "AI -Free Statement" in a conference talk for the first time. Still trying to figure out the exact language.

Feel free to borrow, modify, etc.

When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind. One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…

Can't believe that in the year of our lord 2025 I am STILL hearing people say "oh but LLMs are useful for summarizing"

They are not useful for summarizing, because summarizing is not what they are doing.

In the last five years, we've gone from "employees will never have to go into an office" to "employees need to be in the office because creative and innovative work can only be done face-to-face between humans" to "lol we don't need humans"

This is it. This is why the alarm about AI mostly ought to be a much much deeper and more urgent alarm about the completely broken social and cultural environment many of us live in now.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We refuse to reinforce systems of oppression and exclusion.

If you agree, take my grandmother’s advice. Put your money where your mouth is 🫶🏾

Donate: www.zeffy.com/en-US/donati...

The worrying guidance still remains that any org undertaking any DEI activities (even if not funded by NSF grants) can have their funds rescinded in full at any time or, presumably, be taken to court.