The devil doesn't need any more advocates, but also: do you see the dehumanization in the move you made there?

We don't "sample", we interact. Language is fundamentally social and reducing people to their "output" is the basic problematic move of the AI boosters.

I hope you question how he characterizes language use. As someone with advanced degrees in the teaching and researching of writing practices who works with linguists, I know he is wrong. Noam Chomsky has made that argument as a respected specialist and should be listened to, at the very least.

Can confirm. The food pantry my folks run through a collaboration of churches in PA has been short for months, but the distribution last week was especially poor in what they could offer. The churches are trying to make up the difference, but that can only last so long.

Records obtained by ProPublica indicate that food banks across the country were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 60 million eggs that never arrived.

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

I'd love to see someone try to estimate just how much time and money has gone into research that is either fully undermined by reliance on LLMs or fully pointless --- because obvious if you start from an understanding of what LLMs actually are.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Tell that to the people running our food banks (my folks help run one and hear that it is the same across their county) who are looking at huge deficits in what they are able to offer their fellow citizens. This administration is literally starving Americans.

2/ This is unsettling not just for all the reasons the research has been pointing out, but also because it affectively is just... strange. Slightly off kilter. And fundamentally soulless.

1/ I think I have figured out the why of my obsessive reading on AI over the past year. As a someone who researches writing and cognition, AI exists in a linguistic uncanny valley. It can approximate sounding like us - but it absolutely isn't us. It cannot have rhetorical understanding or action.

AAUP has a good statement that we are using as a foundation to do some pushback - www.aaup.org/reports-publ...

Yet is is being forced on some of us through course shells and other initiatives that we're given little recourse to fully opt out of. As a professor of writing studies who believes our research showing our own thoughts into words is key to learning and understanding, I'm very deeply concerned.

In short -- educators should not be carrying water for the AI bros. It's more than just a bad look.

>>

This is a great piece full of clever responses to the mindless AI boosterism/fatalism that seems to have infected academia. As @bcmerchant.bsky.social says, hammers up comrades!

2. To be clear, those entry level tasks are part of a the bigger project of training new people into an organizational culture from which they'll be promoted. Students are literally feeding the AI in ways that will allow it to be used to shut them out of the entry level jobs they need.

1. What struck me most after reading AICon and listening to Gary's interview was that students at my university (and many others) are being conned. They are told AI is the wave of the future and they MUST use it. All the while, they are training AI to take over some basic entry level tasks.

"Power has really gone to the tech companies, who have enormous influence over the government. And unless people get out of their apathy, that’s ... certainly where the U.S. is likely to stay."

@garymarcus.bsky.social discussed what we need to do to prevent AI tools from undermining democracy:

And now Trump administration is cutting TRIO harming lower income students most. If anyone thinks this isn't a war on the lower class, they are missing the big picture. Reich is right -- this is serious gilded age work.

bsky.app/profile/rbre...

buttondown.com/maiht3k