@brodiegal
South African journalist & academic. teach/research/publish on media, journalism, archives, public health, data & research methods. Strong sideline in homicide studies + forensic pathology. Writes books and sings songs. It’s not AI it’s automation
it really is annoying. I tried several versions of testing AI tools on this (because *that* is where they could actually help me) and even then I had to give up and make manual corrections across the work because the programme could not get it right.
thank you 🙏🏼. lovely words to start a new year of writing ahead ✍️
When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.
There's a cross-platform uniformity to how LLMs bullshit you.
Today I was designing an exercise for a responisble-use of-LLMs course we are designing for NIH trainees. I asked ChatGPT to complete one of Claude Shannon's original guessing games:
"There is no reverse on a __(10 letters)__"
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.
Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.
Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.
I always confidently thought a prime factor in the Xtian right endorsing Zionism was a deep hope that more Jews would move to Israel, and away from them.
All of these things, deeply underpinned by the most
ridiculously spun misnomer. We should stop calling it artificial intelligence and describe it as IA or ‘Intelligent’ Automation at best.
Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man
Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes
And from image events, we get POLYSEMIC images that carry multiple forms of ideology into the present. Here, we have the convergence of Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign with the frog icon from #NoKings. The is how you visually dismantle fascist iconography.
Welcome, new users. Posts on Bluesky are called skjörts. If someone re-skjörts you, that is a doppelskjört. If you respond to a doppelskjört, that is called a Trifect, and you cannot skjört again for nine hours. If you do anyway, that's a Time Clench. It's all very simple.
The knowledge was already free!! Open textbooks and libraries exist!! The benefit of a professor is having an expert teach it to you in a structured manner with assignments for practice and assessments to keep you accountable. Profs aren't keepers of secret knowledge. We are essentially tutors.
“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.
www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
zeldawilliams 20m From Create Mode •• Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't. If you're just trying to troll me, I've seen way worse, i'll restrict and move on. But please, if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want. To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough, , just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.
And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it 'the future. Al is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.
Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔
This was published the day after the Heaton Park terrorist attack. I find its grim combination of antisemitism, conspiracy fictions and agrarian populism deeply worrying, as this is how it all kicked off a century ago. 🧵
farmsnotfactories.org/articles/zio...
Just an occasional note that … the less you use social media, the less you need to use social media. 🕯️
it’s funny* when i consider that the wars and mass deaths nobody really gives a shit about are also in the regions that will be most adversely affected by climate change and how much that plays into our doing fuck all to reduce emissions.
*not actually funny
my teacher brain is exploding. so now in addition to marking i must generate an anonymised summary of work to prepare it for the AI so the AI can synthesise constructive feedback … based on the summary??? and then I still have to customise the AI feedback.
and yes on the turnaround window thing.
I see so much of this in academic funding calls ‘we are looking for projects that explore how AI can help to solve … hunger, violence against women and children, poverty, etc.’ But there’s no space in there to say: ‘um, what if AI is not the right tool for this’
There is so much real news, in so many countries, that there really is never any need to repost AI generated fakery (even if it hooks in to your personal rhetoric).
Repost journalism not algorithm.
also really ‘funny’ because these European capitals generally have pretty amazing public transport thus reducing private vehicles, etc.
some foreign western person in a faraway land (with, at best, a social media-based activism and education) telling other people in their own countries that what they are doing is ‘not good enough’ is … well, a far too common feature of this landscape.
AI evangelism is like being in a cult. you abandon any sense of reason and go out of your way to defend it even when it makes no sense
dark gary larson eh?
only someone who hates design could think that. 😢
Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities
In South Africa:
Remembering Marikana, 13 years on - still no justice for the massacre victims.
(An older article exploring the media’s failures at the time:
theconversation.com/marikana-mas...)
If someone asks a question about "AGI", the only reality-based response is to demand a definition of "AGI" before replying. #acl2025