Ben Williamson

@benpatrickwill.bsky.social

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Senior Lecturer | Co-director, Centre for Research in Digital Education | University of Edinburgh | Editor of Learning, Media and Technology | codeactsineducation.wordpress.com

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Ben Williamson

The people who want you to believe that a particular tech is inevitable inevitably have something to sell you.

MagicSchool thinks AI in the classroom is inevitable, so it's aiming to help teachers and students use it properly | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com These days, when you hear about students and generative AI, chances are that you’re getting a taste of the debate over the adoption of tools like ChatGPT.

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It’s so weird how the tech industry now will desperately devalue every aspect of human intelligence and life in order to assert the parity of increasingly sophisticated software which makes banal and catastrophic mistakes.

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Impact Factor is crap, I give you that, but but, hear me out: Journal Citation Relationships on the Clarivate website are fun to play with and learn about the love a journal receives from other journals, the love it gives, and - my favorite - "journal self-love" ❤️ Allow me to give you a tour 🧵

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so happy that these films I made are useful and still applicable!! also, I am always available to speak to your students, communities, groups, whoever! #screeningsurveillance

On Monday, I begin teaching a six-week program for high school students on AI in education, surveillance, and social media. Lots of ways to start our discussion, but the one I decided to go with is @savasavasava.bsky.social’s excellent short film #tresdancing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUiv...

#tresdancingwww.youtube.com #tresdancing, the fourth film in the Screening Surveillance series, speculates the effects of escalating surveillance and control through educational technol...

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One book on AI I'd recommend reading: www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.p... and one I'd recommend avoiding: www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.p...

Humans and machines | The Enlightened Economistwww.enlightenmenteconomics.com

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New version of chatbot reaches level of function where it responds to all queries by making a little twisty-wrist gesture with pinched fingers and saying “But isn’t it more *complicated* than that?”

Brilliantly written piece on the "arms race" between students, tech companies, educators and AI chatbots, and its effects on trust in education. I'm always going to call AI writing "commissioning a chatbot" now hedgehogreview.com/web-features...

A new behaviour genetics study has suggested genomically predicting school underachievement in early childhood. My (lengthier than intended) post on the potential dangers of the genetic "screen and intervene" model it proposes codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/p...

Polygenic scores as political technologies in educational genomicscodeactsineducation.wordpress.com Genomic technologies are being used to study the genetic basis of educational outcomes, and generate proposals for genetically-informed education policy. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash...

Couple of posts here ⬇️ about recent "educational genomics" developments - or dive into our long paper on the social, technical and scientific foundations of these efforts right here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Behaviour geneticists may have softened their ideas about genetically informed "precision education," but that just means they've moved on to ideas of mass genotyping children for "screen and intervene" programs targeting kids "underachieving genomically"

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Reply to

Dr. Damien P. Williams: The Birthday Beast

Look at me. Listen to me: If someone is selling you a "search" & "knowledge" "AI" product they claim is smarter & better & faster than you, but it literally cannot be guaranteed to give you simple true facts about consensus reality when asked, then that product DOES NOT WORK and SHOULD NOT BE USED.

First Sundar Pichai, now Tim Cook, both admitting that generative "AI," by dint of its very foundations (cf. "Bias Optimizers"), will not and cannot stop bullshitting (cf. "On Bullshit Engines"). futurism.com/the-byte/tim...

Tim Cook Admits Apple May Never Be Able to Make Its AI Stop Lyingfuturism.com In a new Washington Post interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that he's not "100 percent" sure the company's AI will stop lying.

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TFW your university is bad at being a university www.nottinghampost.com/news/notting...

500 job cuts and no cash for books or coffee at universitywww.nottinghampost.com The University of Nottingham has enacted a wide-ranging set of cutbacks after its leaders became aware it was hurtling towards a financial year end budget gap

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I am sorry, what? "...these reports indicate incremental movement towards a possible scenario where saliva samples could be used as the basis for social policy, particularly for early years screening and intervention"

The idea that genetic data could be used to inform education policy and interventions has grown in the last decade. It would take a major apparatus to get from saliva swabs to social policy, which is now in formation codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2024/02/03/s...

Saliva samples and social policycodeactsineducation.wordpress.com Genetic data and genomic technologies are used to produce new knowledge about the biological underpinnings of educational outcomes. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash Claims that genetic d...

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Software as a Service but the service is introducing errors into otherwise straightforward processes

“Remember that generative AI is not once and done…You’re going to continue to push compute, and build models that are larger, and so you will have to continue to upgrade devices in order to keep up with the pace of generative AI.” 😩 www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-...

Behavioral geneticists can’t stop disguising their odious neoliberal policy preferences as legitimate “objective” science, but it’s still bad science and even worse policy

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Behavioral geneticists can’t stop disguising their odious neoliberal policy preferences as legitimate “objective” science, but it’s still bad science and even worse policy

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"They're not inevitable; they're not insurmountable. They didn't have to be like this. But in order to actually change them, the main thing we have to do is understand the facts of what they are, what they do, how they work, & to theorize what they Could Be Differently." From "On Bullshit Engines"

If you missed my Sonoma State University Center for Ethics, Law, and Justice seminar series talk "On Bullshit Engines: The Socioethical and Epistemic Status of GPTs and other 'AI.'" (or if you just want to dig into it again), the youtube link is now up: youtu.be/9DpM_TXq2ws

On Bullshit Engines: The Socioethical and Epistemic Status of GPTs and other AI. Dr. Williams.youtu.be Forum for Law Ethics and Society (FiLES). Dr. Williams takes a deep dive into the propensity for GPT style AIs to not merely present falsehoods but to perpe...

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NEW: Check out my conversation w/ @charleswlogan.bsky.social on the importance of a Luddite Pedagogy in the "Age of AI". What should be the relationship of education, automation & "artificial intelligence"? Should there be one at all? 🤔 www.humanrestorationproject.org/podcasts/tow...

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“The forced implementation of AI into applications is meant not to make them easier to use but to break our resistance; “AI” not only requires and rationalizes far more intensive surveillance of users, it takes users’ agency away on principle and tries to sell us that submission as convenience.”

Born sloppyrobhorning.substack.com There has been a push recently to christen unwanted generative content as “slop”: This New York Times piece by Benjamin Hoffman, for example, defines “slop” as “a broad term that has developed some tr...

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Move broken things fast.

Google’s Head of Search Tells Employees That AI Will Keep Making Absurd Mistakes, But They’re Gonna Keep Pushing It Outfuturism.com Google's search head doesn't want something as pesky as nonsense AI answers to keep the company from pushing out immature products.

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The final essay in my Beyond ChatGPT series is live. The focus is on instructional design. How can we avoid the trap of asking students to be honest and transparent each time they use an AI tool if we do not expect such transparency from our use of these tools?

AI Instructional Design Must Be More Than a Time Saveropen.substack.com This post is the seventh and final essay in the Beyond ChatGPT series about generative AI’s impact on learning. A recap and next steps is forthcoming. For this final post, I’m going to focus on modeli...

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The problem isn't that AI can do your job (it can't). The problem is management thinks AI can do your job.

The NYT laying off half it’s art dept as they ramp up the use of A.I. tools is 100% related to UArts closing due to a “steep drop in enrollment.” Regardless of A.I.’s actual capabilities the story being told to (and accepted by) business leaders is damaging the perceived value of the visual arts.

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Very funny reverse subversion. Photographer enters real photo to AI image category and wins! The human fightback starts here www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Photographer takes on the machines in AI competition – and winswww.theguardian.com Miles Astray subverts trend of artificial pictures muscling in on human photography, but is disqualified

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Can we just admire the title (and sentiment) of this new journal article for a minute link.springer.com/article/10.1...

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technologylink.springer.com Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...

Smartphone bans in schools and restrictions for teens are such crazy ideas when - as Will Davies argues here - the support infrastructures for children have been withdrawn. You can't techno-ban your way out of political responsibility for youth anxiety under austerity www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

William Davies · Anticipatory Anxiety: Generation Anxietywww.lrb.co.uk To be young today is to face the future – the planet’s as well as one’s own – at a time when social safety nets...

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“…I have heard faculty extol the ability of AI to develop syllabuses, craft PowerPoints, design exams and correct papers. Faculty are giving up “real estate” in their classrooms one metaphorical acre at a time. It’s time to pump the brakes on artificial intelligence in higher education.”

Memo to faculty: AI is not your friend (opinion)www.insidehighered.com The time to resist is now, Scott Latham writes.

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A preview of my conversation w/ @charleswlogan.bsky.social on a 21st Century Luddite Pedagogy for the @humrespro.bsky.social podcast! Full episode out tomorrow @ humanrestorationproject.org/podcast and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. 🚀 youtube.com/shorts/5CRSi...

Toward a 21st Century Luddite Pedagogy w/ Charles Loganyoutube.com Excerpted from episode 150 of the Human Restoration Project podcast, available at: www.humanrestorationproject.org/podcast#AI #chatbot #luddite--------------...

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"While 78% of administrators said AI tools wld have a positive impact on tchg in the next 5yrs, only 46% of faculty members felt that way.... Administrators... focused on the need to prepare students for an AI-infused workplace + said that it [cld] enhance learning through tools such as AI tutors"

Professors Ask: Are We Just Grading Robots?www.chronicle.com Some are riding the AI wave. Others feel like they’re drowning.

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imo, 'plagiarism' even misses the point of what is going on here. AI search is an information control project, where all available information online comes to the consumer through specifically controlled channels operated by black box technology that requires vast computational resources to operate

"In the AI-rendered future, publishing as it exists today makes no sense." nymag.com/intelligence...

The Other Big Problem With AI Searchnymag.com What if plagiarism is the whole product?

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Why & how do scholars study rankings? I've puzzled over this question and wrote a short piece, in which I try to make sense of divergent literatures. The boundary problem between #rankings research and practice is smth I'd like to explore more in the future. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/os...

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🫠

Some absolutely wild strings of sentences assembled in this piece.

For Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, machines are closer to humans than we thinkwww.theglobeandmail.com University of Toronto professor says chatbots experience emotions even though they don’t show them in the same way humans do