"AI Drafting My Stories? Over My Dead Body: AI-assisted writing is creeping into newsrooms under the guise of efficiency. But the trade-off may be more profound than publishers are willing to admit."
www.wired.com/story/backch...
“Inside one of the mummies, the team discovered a rare papyrus containing a passage from Book II of the Iliad by Homer. The text includes part of the “Catalogue of Ships,” which lists Greek forces involved in the campaign against Troy.”
greekreporter.com/2026/04/19/h...
William Butler Yeats, “Where My Books Go”
Jesus Christ this is literally what some of their professors (including me) have been yelling about for years, I DIDNT WANT TO BE RIGHT ABOUT THIS
"Correlation does not imply cognition."
Exactly. I was told by an admin at my uni that anything we post on Canvas or any other LMS, including syllabi, become university property as well. And given that Instructure, which owns Canvas, is poised to use that content for training LLMs, that becomes even more problematic.
Audrey Watters on Mary Oliver, poetry, and AI technologies: "At what point can you no longer even plan to do things with your one wild and precious life because these technologies have obliterated your ability to even imagine something outside their dictates, their designs for you?"
This sounds awful, right administrators?
Goldman Sachs reports that 300 million full-time jobs could be replaced by AI by 2030. Labor turnover is high and hiring has slowed. 71% of Americans worry that AI will cause permanent job loss. As young people about to enter the workforce for the first time, the fear of unemployment is understandable, but we cannot save ourselves with the very tool that is putting us at risk. The irony is that as Penn pours endless money and energy into AI advancement in its attempt to get ahead, the University is only quickening its own demise. AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship. Editorials represent the majority view of members of The Daily Pennsylvanian Editorial Board who meet regularly to discuss issues relevant to the Penn community. This body is led by Editorial Board Chair Jack Lakis and is entirely separate from the newsroom. Questions or comments should be directed to letters@thedp.com.
An unaccounted for part of the economy is how much young people virulently hate AI, despite how aggressively it's being forced on them. They realize it's making their friends dumber and ruining the world and they want nothing to do with it.
From the Penn student paper:
www.thedp.com/article/2026...
So attribution not of what one actually said but a kind of "vibe coding" of what one's purported to have said, but didn't? That's not attribution. More akin to non-consensual AI pornographic videos - appropriation of the mind vs the body, but both with reputational damage and identity theft.
Pleased to be quoted here. This is the first request for a conversation I've accepted from a journalist who emailed me abt AI bc the journalist, Kathryn Palmer, didn't approach me as a stenographer for industry but instead to provide visibility for a movement.We had a great substantive conversation
Yes (agrees in Shakespeare scholar), or Marcus Aurelius . . .
"Toxic mediocracy" -- fabulous phrase, and sadly, so widely applicable. . .
I started writing a BlueSky post about that Nature essay and kept going until it turned into a whole piece in Tech Policy Press www.techpolicy.press/the-illusion...
"Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”
W. S. Merwin
Grammarly's AI-fueled edits -- using my name - suggested making up sources and writing vague insinuations.
In my latest for @nytopinion.nytimes.com (gift link) I describe Grammarly's terrible edits in my name -- and call for a federal right of publicity.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...
Even worse was the suggestion by Grammarly’s A.I. version of me to replace the first sentence of the news article with an anecdotal opening describing a fictional person named Laura whose privacy had been violated. “Laura, a patient searching for relief from a chronic condition, clicks through her hospital’s website to schedule an appointment. In just a few moments, her most private medical details — her reason for visiting, her doctor’s name and even the treatment she seeks — are quietly sent to Facebook, without her knowledge,” the bot suggested with a button allowing the user to paste that excerpt straight into the article. Replacing a factual sentence with an imagined story about a person who doesn’t exist is not only bad editing. It’s a deception that could end my career as a journalist (or the career of any journalist who took that terrible advice).
Grammarly’s A.I. version of me suggested replacing the first sentence of a news article with an anecdotal opening describing a fictional person named Laura.
The bot offered an imagined story about Laura and a button allowing the user to paste that fiction straight into the article.
“The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.”
Edward Albee, born on this day in 1928
The Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) setting a good precedent, affirming the right to refuse AI for both instructors AND students.
The whole "Resolution 2" in the linked document below is worth reading.
h/t @evenannaliese.bsky.social
cccc.ncte.org/wp-content/u...
Email screenshot: "Hi, Thank you for reaching out. After careful consideration, we have decided to deactivate Expert Review while we reimagine how to make it more useful for customers and more respectful of the experts whose work it surfaces. The feature will be deactivated starting March 12, 2026. We're sorry, and we appreciate you holding us to a higher standard."
Result! Just received from Grammarly:
"Hi,
Thank you for reaching out.
After careful consideration, we have decided to deactivate Expert Review while we reimagine how to make it more useful for customers and more respectful of the experts whose work it surfaces."
1/
🧪💙📚 🗃 #academicsky
Almost the 400th anniversary of the Cambridge bookfish!
“What are we pretending not to know today?”
—Toni Cade Bambara
When discussing AI and the labor force, we fixate on one question: Will it replace workers? For the performing arts, that’s incomplete, argues James Paisley. The deeper risk isn’t just job loss, but the erosion of creative agency and the transformation of artists into executors of AI outputs.
"Want to feel good about yourself? Use a chatbot. Want to find the truth? Go elsewhere."
Absolutely too busy to lead something for this, but this call for papers looks great...
> CfP: Topical Collection on AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation and Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
Victor Hugo, born on this day in 1802
what even is the fucking point
