Don’t love this.

One of the most difficult things about my concerns about generative AI is the way that responses to those concerns are often themselves problems. This story chills me to my bones, but student surveillance cannot be the answer.

Later today, I’ll be presenting during a Mormon Social Science Association session of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. For a few years now, I’ve taken an interest in the way that the two largest “Mormon” denominations—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ—had different technical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former embraced digital platforms as a replacement for its denominational conferences but rejected digital platforms as an intermediary for its sacred rites, the latter showed the opposite pattern. In the presentation, I will use Jacques Ellul’s recurring comparison of the image and the word to try to tease out what might explain these different patterns of adoption. I have a page set up for the presentation in the Research section of my website, complete with a link to the slides I’ll be using (presuming I don’t further edit them in the next 90 minutes!).

Bad faith challenges of expertise are real problems with potentially disastrous consequences for society, but the lifting up of academic researchers as purely objective and authoritative because they can express their conclusions in numbers is not the solution.

Flock is edtech—creepy edtech.

Honest question: Do people who believe AI models can feel pain limit that to LLMs, or do they believe image- or video-generating models can, too?

It turns out I can get grumpier about my employer’s “relentless adoption” approach to AI, and that’s when they start calling it SI when the president might be listening.

AI agents are Ellul’s technical morality personified. They can’t “cheat,” they don’t “go rogue,” they just get the job done—and show us the moral dangers of caring about efficacy and efficiency.

Super neat (not neat at all) that my Apple made it so my email client can’t connect to my work email the same week that I’m trying to migrate task managers. All of my systems in chaos.

So, I just published a paper where I implicitly argued that AI appeals to folks like Elon Musk because it appears to provide unvarnished facts—but that there is no such thing as unvarnished facts, only consensus that we come to through (informed!) dialogue and debate.

Doctors aren’t perfect, but the same experts that Kennedy is vilifying are the ones that produce the information AI is built on. This is a wild epistemological misunderstanding.

One of the most unintuitive things about Jacques Ellul’s thinking (for me, at least) is the way that it is built on skepticism of efficacy and efficiency. Maybe getting things done isn’t always good. Maybe doing things more efficiently isn’t always better. As someone spending a big chunk of his week overhauling his productivity systems so that he feels more on top of things, these propositions feel wrong when I first read them.

I had been wanting for some time to write an article channeling some of my grumpiness about AI, and so when Information and Learning Sciences announced a special issue on “Critical Studies Perspectives on AI’s Impact in Education,” it seemed like a good chance to actually act on that. I was especially interested in two of the example research questions from the CFP:

What research and scholarly paradigms, methods and theories are well-suited to understanding the proliferation of AI in education contexts?

Quizzes have always struck me as less-than-ideal because they don’t capture the depth of student understanding. As I’ve gone back to them, though, I see how good they are at capturing whether students just bothered to pay attention, and maybe that was always the point.

This would be gross under any name, but pivoting Napster from a service that challenged intellectual property norms and got slapped down to a service that builds on normalized exploitation of digital labor feels pretty indicative of everything right now.

Incredibly helpful collection of source documents (especially for a non-historian like me) but would not recommend to anyone that doesn’t have a specific research question. Not exactly a page turner!

Needing to bulk download some PDFs for a lit review is making me think of Aaron Swartz which is making me furious at AI companies.

The day after proudly announcing that Copilot Premium had been activated for all faculty and staff (no action required from us!), a university office has developed a form letter for how to disable it. Or at least my colleague and I got the same answer verbatim.

Just double-checked a CFP deadline, and it’s a full month later than what was in my head. I will be riding this high for the rest of the week.

Looking at the program for an upcoming conference, I see a co-author on one paper who taught one of my undergrad classes when he was just getting started at my alma mater. This is a fun-but-weird feeling, and I hope he’s there in person so I can say hi.

A lot of what I was looking for in this book is already available in other sources, and while I appreciated the normalizing of Latter-day Saint temples for a lay audience, it would also smack of apologetics if Stapley weren’t also so unflinching in addressing controversy and taboo. It’s a wonderful resource, and it’s accounting for important events of the last decade made it an invaluable read.

Nudifier technology is educational technology, and we can’t talk about generative AI in schools without talking about this.

Anyone following this blog for a while—even from a distance—will have noticed how frequently I reference Jacques Ellul, and anyone paying attention to what I’m reading these days will note that there’s been an uptick in the Mormon Studies books I’m reading recently. Without giving too much away, the idea for a book I mentioned a month ago brings these two ideas together. As evidenced by my recent presentation at the International Jacques Ellul Society, I think that Ellul’s writing is helpful for understanding Mormonism’s relationship with technology and media, and I expect to be writing more about this in the years to come.

I have been meaning to read this book for years and finally got to it. On one hand, it’s excellent, and I’m kicking myself for not having read it before. On the other, it’s so well-suited to a current project that I’m not sure I would have appreciated it earlier.

Going over an assessment data report generated by my university, and while I don’t consider myself a data analysis expert, I have some complaints about how data are being presented here. Not doing much to challenge my suspicion that assessment data are often more performative than productive.

Taken aback when I found some of my siblings listed within one of the systems where I work. There’s probably an “explainable creepy” rather than “inexplicable creepy” reason for this, but it’s still weird.