Post

New preprint! So honoured to have worked with Ishani Ray on providing vital critique on "AI literacy" & correctives for those interested in understanding why "just use the newest version of an LLM" is nonsense Contra Literacy-Laundering: Mechanistic Critical AI Literacy doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 1/

Maybe many mid-career and above academics have my experience, and so can relate, but it never ever gets any less impressive, overwhelming, or old when a student appears our of nowhere (notice our geographic distance is big as are our official fields not that overlapping) and does amazing work! 🤩 2/

> We argue that both misdiagnose the problem as the issue is not whether or not LLMs work, but what kind of working is happening and at whose cost. Drawing on meta-theoretical frameworks of cognitive science, feminist labor analysis and critical pedagogy, we propose a conceptual reorientation. 4/

We analyse this through 1️⃣ the cognitive: what is forfeit when statistical pattern-matching substitutes our thinking 2️⃣ the pedagogical: AI literacy as currently deployed is a symptom 3️⃣ the political: AI's infrastructure inherently naturalizes labor displacement pdf: zenodo.org/records/2122... 5/

> The stochastic parrot [...] specifies what is forfeited when cognitive labor is delegated, who bears the cost, and why a literacy adequate to this moment must begin from the epistemology of those most harmed by the systems it describes. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 6/