We are in fact faced with a challenge to devise methods of buying originality with plodding, now that we are in possession of slaves which are such persistent plodders.
Slop Slogging.
Skyscrapers we created on shaky ground.
This is the letter that I ...
I didn't write.
Linkin Park: Over Each Other
AIsbestos.
[T]he AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations [..]
The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).
Even when I close my eyes.
No, no matter how far we've come
I can't wait to see tomorrow
Linkin Park: With You
Prompting is the new Smoking.
We have been here before, both with entanglements of AI and statistics with industry corrupting our academic processes, and with so-called AI summers: hype cycles that pivot from funding booms to complete busts and cessation of research [...]
The foreseeable AI winter will take with it entire curricula, academic processes and practices, and educators’ and learners’ livelihoods. [...]
There is circular reasoning at play when we suggest and assume machines can think, reason, or argue like humans can, and therefore, treat them — and test them — like humans. [...]
The only argument from ignorance that science permits is caution, more research, and care as appropriate actions when something is truly unknown. [...]
Teaching about AI technologies should be just like how we teach ‘no smoking’ or the causal links between lung cancer and cigarette smoke; yet, we do not teach students how to roll cigarettes and smoke them. [...]
In thinking about implications for the design of learning environments and curriculum design, we first need to pause and think about what we really would like AI tools to do, or, put differently, what might be the added value of the use of AI tools in education — if any? [...]
AI users, on the other hand, are customers much more like the person buying the end product of woodwork than carpenters themselves. [...]
[W]ith the proliferation of AI products and their uncritical adoption in academia, we become unable to help younger generations of scholars in learning to uphold and to appreciate scientific integrity. As a result, we will be deskilling the whole academic profession, a direct threat to the ecosystem of human knowledge.
Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., van Meerkerk, E., Oude Groote Beverborg, A., de Haan, R., Reyes Elizondo, A., Blokpoel, M., Scharfenberg, N., Kleinherenbrink, A., Camerino, I., Woensdregt, M., Monett, D., Brown, J., Avraamidou, L., Alenda-Demoutiez, J., Hermans, F., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099