May/June Reading

Musk and Bezos are the heirs to a quasi-religious belief in tech salvation. The rest of us are stuck in the real world

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT

ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

A Guest Post by Cosma Shalizi

The Never Trumpers on Substack are nearing 1 million subscriptions while beefing up original reporting and churning out YouTube clips. Business is good, but Tim Miller says he’d “gladly not be hitting this milestone” if it meant covering a Kamala Harris presidency.

How the “opinionated” chatbots destroyed AI’s potential, and how we can fix it

The Old North/South Split Lives on in the Urban/Rural Divide

Why we’re living in the consequences of broken instruction

AI study aid chatbots for teen users provided detailed recipes for drugs, dangerous dieting advice, and tips on “pickup artistry” in tests conducted by Forbes.

AI-generated outrage bait is the perfect artistic medium for a president who rules by trying to overwhelm the system.

Trump administration use of AI sparks fears that more automated systems will weigh in on public benefit decisions

AI threatens personalization & democratization of ed

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence challenges the credibility of assessment in higher education. This article advances a theoretical argument that universities must move beyond detection-based strategies towards ethically grounded, validity-driven assessment practices. Drawing on Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour, Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory, and situational crime prevention models, it analyses how AI exacerbates existing vulnerabilities within massified, commodified education systems. Technical countermeasures, including digital proctoring systems, are critically evaluated and found insufficient as standalone solutions. The case of Baird and Clare is used to illustrate how rehumanised, collaborative assessments can mitigate misconduct by enhancing student agency and ethical engagement. The article argues that safeguarding academic integrity in an AI-saturated era demands a fundamental pedagogical realignment, restoring the intrinsic purposes of higher education and resisting the instrumental rationalities that underpin surveillance-based governance.

A zoologist observed a Cooper’s hawk using a crosswalk signal as a cue to ambush its prey.

Democrats have to learn the beltway media aren’t their friends

This Is Not An Essay

AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs “have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching.”

The president believes that he has a free and unencumbered hand to overrule the federal judiciary. But the courts have been quietly checking him.

A free online humanities course about how to learn and work and thrive in an AI world.

A fresh tell-all interview is shining some light on just how drastically things have changed for Tesla in the past few months.

A new study by MIT researchers finds that relying on generative AI tools like ChatGPT during early stages of writing can weaken neural activity, memory, and originality, raising important questions about how students use AI in education.

“You can’t be a serious critic,” New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose wrote on Tuesday, on Bluesky, about artificial intelligence, “if you’re in denial about how useful it is.” Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You can’t be a serious critic of anything if you are in denial about any part of it, […]

Charles Sumner’s caning suggests that the answer is “no.”

Essays on generative AI that consider the inadequacy of generative AI technologies to embody or replicate the facets of human endeavour that make writing, language, communication and art as imperfect, complicated and human as they are.

Across the country, artificial intelligence tools are changing the teaching profession as educators use them to help write quizzes and worksheets, design lessons, assist with grading and reduce pap…

Is it an artificial lack of intelligence?

Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s Popular Front