Reading all the analogies about how the feelings just before the Covid shutdown in 2020 are like the feelings people have about Claude Code sent me back to William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, and my favorite music video from the 1980s.
Language is a virus.
open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...
Carney's speech showed that reading all of Thucydides's Melian Dialogue gives new meaning to βthe strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.β
Similar wisdom is available to those who read all of Platoβs Phaedrus, and not just the famous bits.
open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...
Maybe itβs not so much about touching grass as it is about touching code. Cory Doctorow uses a bad word repeatedly to argue we need to clean the systems that have turned the internet into a cesspit.
Disenshittify U
open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...
My frustration at what feels like an increasing flow of LLM-generated words through my various feeds inspired me to write something. Not another hand-wringer about AI slop...This one celebrates my favorite discovery on Substack.
Appreciating Rotten and Good
open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...
Thanks, Andy. Glad it spoke to you!
Disanthropomorphize Chat
open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...
When it comes to teaching, we donβt need intelligent tools; stupid ones might come in handy.
Language machines as educational technology
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...
As Silicon Valley βpivotsβ from building God to upselling their office productivity suites, I wonder if there are better uses for language machines than writing faster emails and summarizing pointless meetings.
Language machines as spiritual tools
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...
Its an antimeme! It cannot be read unless you change your perspective.
Large language models are language machines, and we need to think about what they do with language as more than just "mathy math."
Language Machines as Antimeme
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...
@orzelc.bsky.social has become one of my favorite higher education writers of late. But he is importantly wrong when he disagrees with Timothy Burkeβs description of βthe dealβ offered to nine universities.
Trump offers carrots to nine universities
www.ailog.blog/p/trump-offe...
Why were so many university presidents and boards quick to undermine the principles and practice of academic freedom this past week? The answer has to do with who runs institutions of higher education, and how they think and donβt think about their work.
www.ailog.blog/p/its-not-ch...
This essay is better than the talk I gave at AC&U 2025-26 Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum on Friday because it reflects the collective intelligence of those who asked questions and made comments.
What comes after the chatbot?
www.ailog.blog/p/what-comes...
The Lippmann-Dewey debate is a meme created in the 1980s, and used ever since to talk about a question intellectuals find endlessly fascinating: wouldnβt it be better if intellectuals ran things?
Lippmann called this βas complete a delusion as perpetual motion.β
www.ailog.blog/p/a-revery-e...
Nicholas Carrβs Superbloom brings to light our longstanding cultural habit of enthusiastically greeting each new social technology. You may be surprised to learn that this cycle goes back a ways.
With a Certain Pathetic Moderation: AI as a New Social Medium
www.ailog.blog/p/with-a-cer...
Ben Recht says it clearly and plainly. The way this technology is being commercialized matters. OpenAI is the worst. Courts should punish them. Consumers should boycott them. No educational institution should do business with them.
The Banal Evil of AI Safety
www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...
ππ ππ¨π turns two years old tomorrow. To celebrate, I made a listicle and decided to reveal Phase 2 of my plan.
Five things I have learned writing AI Log + Phase 2 begins
www.ailog.blog/p/five-thing...
I will teach a class enrolling only first-year undergraduates this fall for the first time in years. We're going to have some fun reading, writing, and talking about AI.
Shakespeare helped me figure out how to start things off.
Get Me to the Funnery
www.ailog.blog/p/get-me-to-...
Caricature-style illustration of a humanoid robot resembling a man, wearing thick black glasses and a green quarter-zip sweater with βLPSβ on the chest. The robot holds an orange pencil upright in its right hand and a wooden stick in its left. Overlaid white text reads: ββ¦give ourselves permission to experimentβ¦β followed by βPart 2 of an interview with Rob Nelson.
here's part 2 of the conversation with @ailogblog.bsky.social & the conversations he's looking to have with #highereducation institutions about #GenAI
aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/give-ourse...
#AIEdu #EdTech
A man wearing glasses and a dark green quarter-zip shirt with the yellow letters "LPS" gestures with his right hand raised. Overlaid text reads: '"...In the mode of 'we don't know'" Part 1 of an interview with Rob Nelson.'
Part 1 of a conversation with the great, @ailogblog.bsky.social about what he's doing in the classroom around #GenAI
#HigherEd #AIEdu #EdTech #Teaching
aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/in-the-mod...
This is not the first time newly elected Republicans have interested themselves in the affairs of universities and colleges. In 1819, we got corporate personhood redefined. What will get we get this time?
To what problem is the modern American university a solution?
www.ailog.blog/p/to-what-pr...
"A university is definitely not a democratic institution" is truer today than when Dean Herbert Deane said it in 1968, and more true of Columbia than it was a week ago.
Three bad ideas that are good for US higher education
www.ailog.blog/p/three-bad-...
Socrates comes to mind when I am urged to teach AI literacy. There is a rumor, likely false, that Socrates himself was illiterate. Maybe he chose not to read and write, so great was his commitment to the kind of conversational back and forth we named after him.
www.ailog.blog/p/a-phaedrus...
Brad DeLong posted a double shot of analysis of what he calls Modern Advanced Machine Learning Models (MAMLMs). An excellent overview of the economic and organizational impact of this new cultural technology.
Spreadsheet, Not Skynet: Microdoses, Not Microprocessors open.substack.com/pub/braddelo...
A defining characteristic of large AI models is to spiral or zigzag, introducing errors that no human would make. It is a better Clippy, a better tutor, and a better Eliza, except when it isnβt.
After the AI bubble: ChatGPT as an off-modern educational technology www.ailog.blog/p/after-the-...
In my excitement to get to Q & A, I forgot to share the link to the references and image credits at a talk I gave earlier this week. Since several attendees started following me here, Iβm sharing it now.
Notes and image credits for "The Boring Revolution" www.ailog.blog/p/notes-and-...
Do large language models bring anything of value to the classroom or the workplace? If we stop pretending they are human, and instead, treat them as a new cultural technology, we might find out.
Seriously, Let's Stop Treating LLMs like People www.ailog.blog/p/seriously-...
Wonderful piece illustrating how AI is a "normal technology" that has been marketed and used in ways that imagine it as something much, much more.
I got fooled by AI-for-science hypeβhere's what it taught me www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fool...
