Here’s a gift link. Jacques Ellul argued that you can’t separate the good aspects of technique from the bad. In that context, this paragraph stands out:

Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.

Embarrassed to say that this gender dynamic of AI had never really occurred to me before. Interesting read.

Shouldn’t be reading this before bed because it isn’t calming me down.

Long before I ever knew what generative AI was, I was grumpy about the idea of Grammarly because I was suspicious of deferring to a computer on what “good writing” looks like. I appreciate Koebler’s thoughts here for the way it shows how generative AI—including Grammarly now, apparently—is doing something similar on an even larger scale.

It’s digital labor all the way down. What a depressing read.

Ben’s perspective here is useful.

Some important observations by Ian Linkletter in this interview.

Definitely worth bookmarking this for semesters to come. I like Canvas as far as LMSs go, but the sheer scale of dependence here has me thinking about taking other approaches. This first paragraph is a doozy:

Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States.

Oh wait, this is worse.

I have tried not to think too much about AI bubbles, and Doctorow captures exactly why that is in this essay.

This is a good example of how thorny the AI problem is, and why I strongly prefer a digital labor critique to a copyright critique. Yes, I’m mad that Meta trained their models on my work, but I don’t think the answer is to strengthen Elsevier or Cengage’s copyright claims.

Wait, U.S. states are actually going after VPNs? What a terrible idea.

Well, this is certainly… something.

I wish I knew enough about photography to really appreciate the details here, but I’m bookmarking it anyway because it feels like a contemporary, unintentional echo of observations Ellul makes in The Humiliation of the Word.

You know, I wasn’t sure about the choice of Van Tatenhove as the next law school dean, but I figured that I didn’t know that much about the guy, and if the law faculty was on board, I ought to trust that rather than my gut reaction.

Finding out that faculty were not on board and that the university seems to have made the decision from above despite faculty concerns is more worrying than any concern I previously had.

Heartbreaking story, all the more so for the first-person reflective voice.

What a depressing read.

I don’t think I’ve ever read an interview as interesting as this one.

Some important observations in here.

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.

This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.

Look, I’m all for getting more cars off the road, but I’ve always been annoyed by people who use ebikes as motorcycles and not as bikes. This passage gets me thinking that I probably wouldn’t like the Olto sharing my local bike infrastructure:

I would say this is bad design, but really it is just abundantly clear that these are vestigial pedals. Legalese pedals. Pedals so you can say “but look, officer, it has pedals, it’s a bike!” They are not even remotely for pedaling. Because this is not really a bike.

Good line here:

“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”

Tim Cook is a coward.

Audrey Watters once compellingly argued that metal detectors are edtech. I think we now have a responsibility to treat AI nudifier apps as edtech, too.