My thoughts on the closing of Hampshire College
"If we cease being mysteries to one another, we cease regarding ourselves and the other as a liberal subject — we parrot the principles, but we don’t defend violations of them"
machineliberalism.substack.com/p/the-closin...
The root of the problem? A 'publish or perish' academic culture that incentivizes quantity over quality, witnesses testified.
This pressure has fueled a booming market for fraudulent 'paper mills', which are now using generative AI to mass-produce fake science, they said.
At its core, the political economy of scholarship was never supposed to rely on ~$50k from a smelting fortune. Institutions have hollowed out their support, the feds have done the same, and all that's left is inadequate private funding.
First truly warm day up north this spring
Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.
![For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.”
Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.”
Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.”
“He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:fhnih5ovyd5w5pch254ordo2/bafkreidy34if6qaoxglmgyuqzd45qrtblapduetgu6y3m4vwuto6etcmem)
For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”
Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”
A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)
This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):
Victor Ray is not pulling punches here. 🎯
These type of institutions are mushrooming across public institutions in GOP-controlled states. None has an academic need. Few have student interest. They are symbols of political conquest and sites of clientelism.
"Thug," "Classless," and the policing of Black womanhood in sports. (New article title in Communication & Sport
Excited to share my most recent co-authored publication! An article on Angel Reese and social media discourse, in Communication & Sport--led by two wonderful graduate students!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
I think a lot of people here are way underestimating how difficult it is to break a sexual abuse story *even when everybody kind of knows it* unless you can get victims on record. it is very, very hard.
Students were told for a decade about how incredibly important free speech on campus was. And then it wasn't. What lessons did we teach students over the last year? If you are a student today, do you feel confident that the government, media and university will support your speech rights?
Once again, the national average pay for adjunct professors with PhDs is a flat fee of $3900 per course.
Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught. www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/b...
2) Being apolitical IS political. Staying out of politics doesn’t keep you “above the fray” but instead endorses the status quo. (Which right now, is bad for both science and democracy.)
🚨NEW DISINFO PAPER🚨 TLDR; disinformation circulates as narratives, not false facts. This paper took five years (!!!) and a rotating cast of collaborators and GRAs. Our case studies include the pee tape, and we have an entire appendix justifying that. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
“The fact that someone would need to make such a drastic life change driven by student debt is, itself, an indictment of a broken system.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/b...
The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...
Breaking: Among members of the “dogs should bite strangers” club, support for dog-biting was driven less by canine liberty than by hostility toward strangers.
Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. We are basically the only country in the world in which medical bankruptcy is a thing.
Congratulations!!
Had an absolutely lovely time at my first MSS annual meeting! If you're working in the Midwest (or anywhere Midwest-adjacent!), it's a fantastic opportunity to receive constructive criticism on research and to network with scholars in your area (substantively & geographically!).
Grant terminations had deep impacts on all early career scientists, running counter to Bhattacharya’s stated interest in supporting them.
The terminations disproportionately harmed early career women.
www.fiercebiotech.com/research/nih...
the human body was not designed to know what the worst person in the world is doing every fifteen minutes
When these dudes suggest teachers stick to the script, teach to the test, and in other ways assert control over classrooms they spend no time in, well, let's just say it's part of a large program of control.
This doesn't have to keep happening. It is possible to craft worlds where women and children are safe, rather than objects to be either dominated or protected from the domination of others.
It is possible to create a world where people can just be safe in their bodies.
An excellent analysis of the war on Black studies that also includes a deeply perceptive critique of the neoliberal logic of valuing disciplines based on # of undergrad majors: www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
I'm deeply disappointed in @asanews.bsky.social today. Here's the petition they refused: drive.google.com/file/d/1XW8T...
Extremely blatant example of how the right wing media (all of media) reflexively runs cover for republicans even when they don't want it.
Picture of a Daily Mail story with a headline “long hair over 44 is aging and try-hard - THIS is the only length middle-aged women should consider.”
Or, STFU. Miss me with this ageist, sexist nonsense.
No matter what age you are, society keeps trying to make women feel as if beauty is the most important thing. It’s tiresome.
Perhaps one way to think about AI is to look at the not-so-distant past when male academics used secretaries and spouses as ghostwriters
