Oatmeal Enthusiast

🥕 + 😟

The supposed payoff for this shit is always this incredibly inane, trite bullshit. Who the fuck wants to be a passenger in their own life like this? How is this better than tech that doesn't claim your agency for its own? What kind of Jeff wouldn't just send a link to the song if it's streamable?

I have listened to and read lots and lots of What AI will Mean for College and the one big thing that gets skips all the time is TEACHING. Information provided is not teaching. 8/

We are soon going to have to come to grips with the fact that this shit is asbestos for the mind

If I built an AI lab and it went rogue and deleted all student loan information, I'm betting they'd suddenly figure out how to prosecute me.

This is one reason why you shouldn’t upload work into LLMs during the peer review and grading processes. That work is confidential, and you have no right to share it without permission. You are taking someone’s intellectual property and giving it to the entire world without their consent.

Took a scorched earth approach in one of my classes last semester and, to avoid grading AI “homework slop,” I didn’t grade a single thing produced outside of class. Far better for my mental health and relationship with my students, but far worse for students.

There’s no A.I. “literacy”. There is only power, to either rebuild or eradicate commonly shared knowledge production. They haz it. Remains to be seen if we haz some too.

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

Unfortunately it was impossible to predict that trying to get kids to completely turn their brains over to the computer would be bad for their brains

As an AI hater, I agree w this and my problem with the stochastic parrot folks is that it doesn’t help the fight against AI to talk about AI like it’s 2022, pretend it’s useless, or pedantically argue about whether or not it really “understands”

This is pretty much where I’m at: I’ve found a few uses for LLMs, particularly for coding and data analysis, but I’d give them up in a heartbeat to stop where we’re going (especially bc, context: I work in higher ed!)

The turn against Turnitin in UK HE is gaining momentum, with Cambridge U the latest to cancel its contract over its proposal to use student essays to train AI. I imagine more unis will now follow. TII will surely be going into crisis management now. Good piece on it here wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Agreed; they’re the ones with no respect for the craft of teaching and who see it as something to be “optimized” and made more “efficient” à la Silicon Valley

Alpha Schools are clearly a nightmare for a million reasons but it’s particularly telling that the Trump’s far-right secretary of education is boosting them 🙃

This is not something you say if you actually like education or children

‘We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.’ This is a CEO openly confessing to a level of acquired mental indolence that, were he not coddled 24/7 by an army of paid underlings, would make him incapable of living independently and feeding himself. He’s fine with it. Your kids won’t be.

It is breathtaking. Like many things these days it is hard, but necessary, to figure what is a continuity and what is a rupture. EdTech has always been a private sector parasite feeding off the public sector. The rupture is AI EdTech is experimenting on the rich instead of the poor.

It’s so cool that every American elite is desperate to stop having to think for themselves or learn anything

Agreed, and I also don’t think faculty should cheapen and offload their labor like this, especially at a time when higher ed is under attack and ppl are already questioning the value of a degree. Why make ourselves look expendable?

when ai leaves u behind

Important point and makes me think of @edwardongwesojr.com 's argument that aesthetic and moral opposition isn't to AI isn't enough, we need to "articulate an opposition that will survive improvements in the technology"

terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/w...

I used to love this time of year, hearing from students applying to work in my lab. No more. Every day a fresh batch of nearly identical emails with nonsensical remixes of the text on my lab website. It makes me so sad.

I still believe that AI will only kill us spiritually and intellectually. Not physically.

Man, we do not hate these AI companies enough.

[guy who can’t fully remember that Gramsci quote] it’s Monster Time

Who would like to guess why UK, US and European media outlets are not publishing 3,000 articles per minute about this www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke...

As a new Harry Potter trailer makes the rounds, it bears repeating that there’s no way to watch this show without supporting J.K. Rowling’s bigotry and the structural violence she’s inflicting on the trans community.

I'll add some nuance here — most local pushback against data centers is actually quite fluent, and not grounded in the more wild-eyed rhetoric you see on social media. Very often, the core premise is a simple, correct one: you can't trust what Big Tech says in its promises to a local community.

Trans👏symbol👏does👏not👏mean👏gender👏neutral👏 That👏says👏trans👏segregation👏

Agreed, and as a reviewer I’ve noticed AI can introduce integrity issues. Sometimes the study is fine, but the front end and discussion make assertions - in beautiful prose, sure! - that are not at all supported by the data

From journal editing experience, LLMs appear to be *undoing* the good research of non-English speaking scholars. You can see signs of a solid study in a manuscript that chat or claude et al - used for "editing only" - have otherwise *wrecked*. I keep suggesting they try again without AI "editing."

Correct but for the wrong reasons. AI won't go away but it has already made the internet (A seperate thing!) so much worse and has already caused significant amounts of physical destruction to both physical land and archives, databases etc. That legacy can't be undone

New: Target staff "pranked" for social media; a comedian filmed mid-set; a Sprouts worker whose boss started wearing Meta glasses; and a cashier worried customers are filming down her shirt. Meta glasses are in the workplace, and workers feel powerless to stop it. 🎁 www.theverge.com/report/98241...

[watching megacorps pulp truckloads of rare books to train the very bots that are tanking our collective literacy] so weird that academics hate this, must be some kind of echo chamber

This is it. Data centers have become a target not because of the specifics of their water usage or whatever but because they're the one visible, local leverage point for ordinary people to push back on the "turd mountain" of AI that's being foisted on them with little tangible benefit and no consent

An Israeli strike destroyed two major medicine warehouses in Deir al-Balah, the latest Israeli attack on Gaza's failing health system. Gaza’s Health Ministry says medicine shortages are now killing three cancer patients a day. mondoweiss.net/2026/08/sile...

We also know that AI is only helpful if you have the discipline specific skills and knowledge to understand when, how, and why the AI is giving you incorrect results. Therefore the most important thing we can do to prepare students to work with AI is double down on the fundamentals.

AI’s effect on academic publishing is devastating, as shown in these posts. Another depressing aspect: having to compete with a deluge of garbage as a junior scholar. The editors of journals in my field have said AI is making review times longer and making it harder to find reviewers. It sucks!!