Jenny Howlet

Dont obey

[Exit King.]

Nobody cares about your Myers-Briggs or Enneagram type. You might as well tell me your astrological symbol.

JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.” Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner Kiddo: that’s AI Sep 24, 2025, 07:36 AM

They've lost the 9yos

My first years are impressive. They're doing the work, trying new things, and giving me hope.

TYLENOL Nice try. Release the Epstein files.

A statement from Tylenol

I for one am not at all worried that the most powerful people on earth have optimized my society and my brain to be ultra-reliant on the misery machine we keep in our pockets.

I, then 5, DIDN'T leave, but only because my mother did her best to soothe me by scooping me into her lap, saying "look, he's niiiice! See, he likes candy, too!"

I started getting books and audiobooks through Libby some weeks ago, and reading those instead of doom scrolling. 15/10.

I think it is blatantly unfair that I am going through perimenopause and fascism at the same time

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

...is the Antifa in the room with us now?

Taub’s Law: Big money aligns with fascists early and often.

making children compatible with robots is not, has not been, has proven not to be, a sound educational aim

Way to go, UK! 🇬🇧 Channel 4 is airing a one-hour marathon of Trump’s lies to mark his arrival.

I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo?” Years Old I am “why do I need Venmo?” years old. - - - I am “hurt myself putting on my pants” years old. - - - I am “1.5 glasses of wine” years old. - - - I...

"I am 'excited about composting' years old."

Use of the word "evil" in official congressional e-newsletters, over time, by party

My current orange boy is Alfred Gary Butterscotch.

THEY DO?👀

LIFE. CHANGING. I've read / heard half a dozen books in the last month!

Philly's mascots put all others to shame.

My partner, a Yankees fan from the cradle, is livid.

This was the first thing I read this morning, and I plan to ask my first years to do some free-writing what and how they read. (Fingers crossed that they DO read.)

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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

As a FT administrator who also teaches: amen.

100% It's barbaric, and I dread it every year.

If you're 60, 69.1% of all job growth since your birth occurred under Democratic administrations.

If you're 45, that number is 74.7%.

If you're under 28, the number is 100%.

Happy Labor Day.