Michael Black

This is another way of saying the only working part of Trump's economy is hype-based services and even then, AI is only "booming" because investors are lighting billions of dollars on fire hoping to be the last standing; there's no positive revenue anywhere in it. An economy of the 1% for the 1%.

Remeber folks: lecture capture COULD have been an equitable solution to the problems faced by students w jobs & caretaker responsibilities & chronic illness. It could have been, had our institutions devised systems for distributing these recordings responsibly & ensuring the protection of our speech

also, and it's a remarkably hard point for some people to digest: there is no interdisciplinary work without disciplinary training

The AI age is the "age of no consent" "Inevitability" means design decisions are no longer informed by user needs; now they are unilaterally imposed. The users are the ones being designed.

Users hate AI. So tech made it mandatory. Even if you don't use it, it pollutes what you read and how systems make decisions. The computer's hallucinated word is final.

And it needs all of your data to do it.

In the age of no consent, UX exists to normalized complete acquiescence to surveillance:

A friend told me this isn’t a compelling argument, but these systems have to be understood in the context of the fact that many of them are developed by the most predatory and exploitative companies in existence. The literal worst people alive want you to think an ai should be your girlfriend.

Listen, we totally get it — salons serve as a social oasis in our community. However, for many, it has become a source of stress. AI plans to offer a different kind of freedom — not just from lost time, aggravation, and inconsistent service — but also from unreliable appointments, surprise fees, and salon drama. Imagine a future where you can get your hair done as easily as ordering coffee, simply by selecting an option on a touchscreen. This is more than just offering convenience; it’s reclaiming Black women’s time with an innovative solution that meets their hair needs.

Video games still can’t render Black hair properly, but ok.

Again: Marginalized people are disproportionately harmed by the spread of "AI" because the people who use it are essentially being trained to think the machine is "like us" & can speak "for us," even as it simultaneously pressures you to disbelieve *Actual Us* when we tell you "it's not & it cant."

In the past decade, there's been some incredible work exploring about how tech is never neutral (Noble, Benjamin, etc). The one thing I keep coming back to is recognizing that all tech is always designed/built towards a purpose and that purpose is often NOT reflected in how they're marketed.

I wrote a book about tech marketing around usability in the 1980s was about cultivating a new kind of user-consumer. In later drafts, I kept thinking about how the narratives they were promoting them were so similar to today's discourse.

Important reminder, this has been a long term project for social control through "democratization" of tech: early visions of "connect[ing] every computer to every other computer and this would create social benefit and economic benefit, looks strikingly similar to the promises being made today."

I Used AI to Make a Video That Sucks I used AI to make a video that sucks. It is bad. It is boring. But I made it in under an hour. And now it is my entire personality. To some, my AI-...

"Videos that suck are the future. If I could make a video that sucks this much in one hour, imagine how hard I could make something suck in two hours, or even three."

LRT: Interesting post, but I'm disappointed that it ends on a note of inevitability ("its the next generation of search, etc.").

I do think many library databases are clunky, but the silent filtering that AI search introduces to them is not something we should welcome even if held "accountable."

Those who have not turned on these AI assistants made a smart choice. Great breakdown of how library vendor databases / discovery tools are blocking results for controversial topics

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.

“Starting in July 2024, AI was suddenly everywhere all at once in Latin America after Meta Platforms started incorporating chatbots in its apps across the region. Whether users wanted them or not, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram became homes for a variety of AI bots.”

Expressive Processing From the complex city-planning game SimCity to the virtual therapist Eliza: how computational processes open possibilities for understanding and creating digital media.What matters in understanding di...

There's a good book by Noah Wardrip-Fruin looking at the various ways that game developers have exploited the "ELIZA Effect" to make computer controlled behaviors in games seem intelligent and lifelike. I've been thinking about it a lot lately given some of the recent discourse around chatbots.

Almost all (maybe all) of these behaviors are complex decision trees. For games that allow them to be modded, you can even look at the scripts yourself! If we were going to try to place them within the field of AI, they'd be somewhere on the symbolic side and have little in common with LLMs, etc.

A good example of someone seeing "AI" mentioned and thinking it refers to GenAI. It's been pretty common in gaming spaces for decades to use "AI" to refer to any algorithmically defined entity that players interact with (behaviors related to pathing, building/targeting priorities, etc.).

one of the reasons so many productivity-enabling tech solutions suck is because they don't address the problem, they paper over it. yes! plenty of administrative writing is dull and bad, and not fun to compose or receive. but the fix is not to automate it and flood the world with more of it!

Screaming this at the top of my lungs every chance I get this semester

Current Issue | Spring 2025, 53.1 Editorial Introduction: Charting Our Course Here and Forwardby Jacob Babb and Zachary Beare At a Glance Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday New Methodologies for Researching Reflection: Reflection-in-Motion in …

In this article, I surveyed and interviewed 6 students about their experience working on a collaborative, multimodal podcast project where they were graded using a labor-based grading contract from Asao Inoue. #teamrhetoric compstudiesjournal.com/current-issu...

Johns Hopkins Press will license its books to train AI models Authors at the Johns Hopkins University Press will be able to opt out of the AI licensing agreement until the end of August; if they do not, their work will be used to train AI models.

It strikes me that this week brings us two examples of academic institutions trying to cut deals with fascist counterparties who will 1) not honor any contract or agreement and 2) actively seek to destroy the mission & the personnel of of the academic institutions w/ whom their dealing

Congrats!

Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an Al summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than use 's who don't encounter an Al summary. To be precise, only [my emphasis] 1 percent of users who encountered an Al summary clicked the link to the page Google is summarizing.

Hey is it bad if google AI search results stop people from leaving google dot com 99% of the time? All our news and information creators can survive just fine with one percent of their previous search traffic right? I’m sure it’s fine. www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...

Trump’s Anti-Bias AI Order Is Just More Bias The Trump administration says it wants AI models free from ideological bias, as it pressures their developers to reflect the president’s worldview.

A big part of understanding the moment is coming to grips w/ the fact that big ai companies are not going to in any way defend “free speech” or resist fascism because they are completely aligned w/ the authoritarian project. They aren’t going to “fight back” because they aren’t on our side.

"There is a simpler explanation for these behaviors. They are most likely a result of two factors: AI models’ pretraining, which induces them to “role-play,” and the special posttraining that these models receive from human feedback."

So, if humanities produce good job outcomes, humanities have a secure ROI that bring in more than they cost, and STEM now has an even lower ROI due to grant cuts…. shouldn’t we invest more in humanities where less $$ goes a longer way? Apparently not. We should ask why not. /9

“Univ. of Illinois report shows that a large humanities department like English produces substantial net profit; units like engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.” /7 thi.ucsc.edu/the-humaniti...

Just attended AFT’s AI Symposium. Trying to get handle on how it’s being addressed in bargaining.

Unsurprisingly, none of the speakers evidenced awareness of the critical scholarship on AI. Or any scholarship. Weingarten multiple times said “AI can now generate knowledge.”

Consent: manufactured.