Dr Dave Hitchcock

'History is a Human Craft'. In piece about ethics, our classrooms and AI, I suppose I've put up my barricades and drawn my lines. I suggest 8 'considerations' before we do any teaching with AI. This is part of a new @royalhistsoc.org short series on 'AI and History Teaching' in Transactions.

Commonplacing, lameness, disability, printing, massacres, the Tower, the church, landscape and more! #EarlyModern lightning talks for @ihrscb.bsky.social on Nov 12th at the @ihr.bsky.social, with @joesaunders1.bsky.social, @maybeitwasutah.bsky.social and more. Registration link to follow soon.

And credit to him, it worked. A sort of digital levee en masse, literally raising an army to counteract the forces that artificially amplify far-right messaging. He did that through organizing and messaging, both on the streets and online, that was so relentless that he put himself in the hospital.

Immense relieved sigh this morning.

C'mon Lula.

Brazil going the way of South Korea. Basically around the world women are desperately trying to keep power out of the hands of incredibly stupid fascistic grifters while men keep trying to hand it over. Men are an embarrassing cringe gender.

Leaving aside the rampaging elephant in the room of the degradation of access to the Library's collections since the cyberattack, my main question on reading this is why historians are still posting on X, a platform that incites violence against humans of many 'sorts' and monetises misogyny.

Trump's $5K checks have become a punchline because few think he will deliver. But he has given 1 million people a $500 check (mostly in swing states), and abt 20 million a $90 check (w propaganda letters). No-one applied. The process was automated, using administrative data to target payments.

"The short-termism of universities burning through their social licence neatly parallels the roll out of the resource-hungry, carbon intensive data centres on which AI depends. In both cases, the underlying philosophy might be rendered as après moi, le déluge (after me, the flood)"

"If university bots graded bots, you would no longer have a university. You’d have a tomb, an academic mausoleum in which digital phantoms murmured emptily" theconversation.com/friday-essay...

EXCLUSIVE: Pete Hegseth wanted Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s globe for his office. His staff broke it. The Pentagon denied us access to take photos, but we obtained some anyway. A story in global affairs: wapo.st/3WF2YQo

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

Preparing for Storm Austen by paying a beneficent social call on a gentlewoman of reduced circumstances

I'll be honest my first question on reading the piece was: "is this AI product placement in the LRB?"

Yesterday @ihr.bsky.social launched a wide range of funding opportunities for historians. They include, with @royalhistsoc.org, calls for 2x Applied History Fellowships, 2027 and 2x PhD Fellowships for 2027-28. Full details of these and other current RHS calls: bit.ly/4Bfjsic #Skystorians

Turns out the friction of having to learn photoshop was a crucial firewall protecting society from the terrible taste of small business owners

A strong example here in the torygraph of a person failing their degree (in the most basic sense of pedagogy), rather than their degree failing them.

RIP Chris Wickham. Unlike so many historians who emphasise particularities and contingencies, he was the master of constructing grand, coherent, beautifully rendered worlds out of his evidence. This, from his 2021 Past and Present essay, is a masterpiece of historical writing.

Yes, we have had briefings about exactly this and it's radically transforming the international recruitment posture across the sector, it's not just the Russell's etc that are looking at this and going, 'we can't risk it', and that is having huge consequences.

It works like this: 1. Home Office, without warning or explanation, begins refusing more visas from a particular country 2. This raises visa refusal rate for unis recruiting from that country 3. If overall refusal rate goes over 10%, uni loses visa licence = bankruptcy. Therefore…2/?

Hello computer, Decompile and distill Kafka's The Metamorphosis Make me transform into something cooler than a bug, like a dog or a WOLF! Make my name cool, like, Zak Wolf Make the main character me. When I'm not around, the other characters should be asking "Where's that cool wolf guy Zak Wolf?"

strong statement from the Association for Human Mathematicians. "Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding."

All the awful decisions around higher education and funding are downstream of the bleak reality that in this system students = money, and that's it. All the bad tweaks and pearl-clutching and making 20-something pay forever, it's all just feeble attempts to deal with that monumental stupidity.

The point of a system, Mr Johnson, is what it does. At present the higher education system is tearing itself to pieces.

Sewers are one of the most transformational interventions to human health in history, yet they are rarely understood or recognised for their impact. So we are holding an event about them next Tuesday. In person in London or watch online! www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/searc...

David Miller is a colossal jackass and everyone who knows, knows... as it were.

Basically, LLMs can be hacked and compromised by information espionage or disinformation tactics, and they have been, and several major models appear to be compromised. As if we didn't already have enough issues with these things.

da share z0ne strikes again.

I'm casting around a bit for a good focused piece on the value and purpose of historiography. There's always a chapter of Jordanova etc to fall back on, but does anyone use anything a bit more spicy?

This is why I've always disagreed with the idea that "art" is purely subjectively defined. Art is a communication. The listener/viewer completes that communication in recieving it, but it is the intentionality of the creator that makes it art. "AI music" is no more music than traffic noise is.

"AI has not rescued the humanities. What it has done is reveal, with unusual clarity, what happens when societies allow the institutions that cultivate judgement to erode."