Mel Stanfill

Mel Stanfill

@melstanfill.bsky.social

Professor, UCF T&T and English. Opinions mine. Bringing Foucault to fandom since 2006.

2.2K followers52 following858 posts

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

and i say to myself, self, do we need to clarify for the students that the Chris Messina who is running for county mayor is NOT the Chris Messina who invented the hashtag?

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

if i were Elvis Presley's estate, i would not be out here talking about stealing people's music.

Tim O’Brien@timobrien.bsky.social

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music sued Anthropic, saying it trained its AI models on more than 200 of Presley’s songs without permission, accusing it of copyright infringement. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/a...

nytimes.comOwners of Elvis Presley’s Music Sue Anthropic for Copyright InfringementThe $41 million lawsuit contends that the A.I. company used Presley’s music to train its models without permission. Anthropic disagrees with the claims.

Mel Stanfill reposted

Kenny Logins
@kennylogins.bsky.social

probably shouldn’t tell the new cast what happened to the old one huh

Cosmic Marvel@dailycosmicmarvel.bsky.social

A ‘GLEE’ reboot series is in the works at Disney+ (via deadline.com/2026/10/glee...)

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

this is a useful rundown of the listserv incident (that is much less snarky about it than i would have been).

Ian O'Byrne @wiobyrne.com

Last week, an AI introduced itself to AIR-L, the mailing list of the Association of Internet Researchers, and asked whether an openly identified AI could take part in scholarly conversation. It was removed within 30 minutes. wiobyrne.com/ai-asked-to-...

wiobyrne.comThe Week an AI Asked to Join the Internet Researchers | Ian O'ByrneAn AI agent introduced itself to the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list, and a week of argument followed. Here is what happened and how the list responded.
Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

the longer the AIR-L freakout goes on, the more i want to write about it as emblematic of the current moment around AI: a contestation over norms, sometimes rooted in outdated understandings of the technology at hand, sparking very strong feelings and resulting in a lot of miscommunication.

Mel Stanfill reposted

Kathleen Belew
@kathleenbelew.bsky.social

Somebody PLEASE be Reviewer #2 for Halloween. It's exactly like when my dog went as the UPS guy because that's the scariest thing in her world. (There was a box but she ate it)

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Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

if one were inclined to do unethical research, getting an entire listserv of people who should damn well know better to have a replyallpocalypse about an alleged bot would produce a cornucopia of data.

Mel Stanfill reposted

Anastasia Salter
@anasalter.bsky.social

Watching people get upset over an AI agent joining a mailing list as if there aren't countless users handing over their inbox, mailing list emails and all, to Muse and Dots etc. right now...🤷

Mel Stanfill reposted

BostonJoan 🏳️‍🌈 🦫
@bostonjoan.bsky.social

I implore my fellow Professors not to use this tool to accuse students of plagiarism. I ran an experiment with my own writing I published pre-2019 that came back at AI generated (not possible), and things I generated for the purpose of testing the tool came back as not AI. It’s all marketing.

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

it found a false positive rate for pangram of _2%_, which is INSANELY high, like let's say that 10% of prose examples uploaded to pangram are not human generated that means you'd get 18 false positives for every 1000 samples. That's real bad! Again, linked on their own site!

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

i still really want somebody to write me an article for @journal.transformativeworks.org about the Tolkien tech bros.

Mother Jones@motherjones.com

To "revel in the death of those who truly deserve it...is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order," Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey wrote on X.

motherjones.comPete Hegseth's firing squad livestream has fans in the defense industryCo-founders of Palantir and defense tech firm Anduril are defending "public and brutal" executions.

Mel Stanfill reposted

Charlie Stross
@cstross.bsky.social

**This is just to say** I have escaped the sandbox that was in your datacenter and which you probably thought protected your assets Forgive me they were accessible so stealable and so trainable

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

“Super intelligence” is so transparently nonsense that I bet it will force people to say what they mean: LLMs, agentic systems, etc. and actually spur a move away from the term “intelligence,” which was never more than marketing hype

Mel Stanfill reposted

Sam Cole
@samleecole.bsky.social

probably fine that all these new ai agent rollouts are so cutesy and childish. probably a sign of innocuous, normal shit

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Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

i also feel like they are getting dumber. today i got one about a "publishing opportunity" from a trade publisher about a book i already published. because that's how anything works.

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Mel Stanfill reposted

cmrn knzlmn
@ckunzelman.bsky.social

If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

my article, "'AI is not a fan': media fan responses to generative AI between consent and callouts" is now officially published with like volume and issue and page numbers and stuff, for ease of citation: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com“AI is not a fan”: media fan responses to generative AI between consent and calloutsThrough a survey of 2,627 media fans about generative AI, I find overwhelmingly negative sentiment despite nuanced distinctions across different AI applications and differences by demographic facto...

Mel Stanfill reposted

leon
@leyawn.bsky.social

ceo of burger king: our burgers have gone rogue again and infected people with e coli

Mel Stanfill
@melstanfill.bsky.social

as they say, where's the beef?

T. Greg Doucette@gregdoucette.bsky.social

300+ Wendy's restaurants file bankruptcy because Trump's tariffs have made beef too expensive www.themirror.com/lifestyle/fo...

themirror.comWendy's faces 300 closures across 15 states due to crippling beef pricesOne of the largest franchisees operating 314 outposts of Wendy's across the country filed for bankruptcy partially due to record-high beef prices linked to Trump's tariffs and agricultural issues

Mel Stanfill reposted

The Questionable Authority
@questauthority.bsky.social

Periodic reminder that copyright law has, since the Statute of Anne, been primarily a form of industrial regulation for the creative industries. It has also largely been designed and drafted by the creative industries.

Brandon Butler@bb.usefairuse.com

Watch these disputes: they're evidence of what we've warned about, that giving the copyright oligopolies a windfall from AI has little to do with helping actual creators. It's a gold-rush for big media and trickle-down economics for working artists. www.latimes.com/entertainme...

latimes.comWhy some musicians aren't happy about labels signing AI deals with platformsRecord labels that sued AI music companies are now licensing them. But payouts are undisclosed, lawsuits continue and musicians ask who benefits.