readings around and about generative artificial intelligence (more)

A continuation of Readings on and around generative artificial intelligence (August 2025).

The first part of this reading report for the year is four shared albums of screenshots: images, imagery, memes, things that made me go hmmm (for whatever reason, or none, or that sat with me and made more sense later, or that changed sense but intrigued enough for me not to delete them) cartoons, text, tangents, commentary, pretty shiny things that caught my interest and made me giggle for a moment, etc. No guarantees of quality, level, depth, breadth, longevity, value, or Zeitgeistlich significance.

The second part is a curated collection of links to readings, mostly in reverse chronological order with a few temporal wiggles and hiccoughs because that was the order in which I read and saved items. Compiled as a simple browser reading list and retrieved 2026-06-01.

“Assessment for inclusion: rethinking contemporary strategies in assessment design.” Joanna Tai et al, Higher Education Research & Development 42.2 (2023): 483-497. An example of the kind of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and Educational Technology work that is of limited practical use for university undergraduate teaching in the arts and humanities. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07294360.2022.2057451

“Let’s save the Enlightenment baby from its muddied bathwater. Attacked by the Left and Right, the Enlightenment can only be saved through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique.” Eliane Glaser, Aeon Essays. 2026-05-28.
https://aeon.co/essays/lets-save-the-enlightenment-baby-from-its-muddied-bathwater

“Does your department have an AI policy? Here’s Edinburgh’s.” Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous. 2026-05-27. https://dailynous.com/2026/05/27/does-your-department-have-an-ai-policy-heres-edinburghs/

Artificial Intelligence Policy. UC Berkeley School of Law. Effective summer 2026.
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AI-Final-Policy-26.pdf

“Former Microsoft VP says Microsoft missed the AI wave like the internet and mobile, as Copilot scales back in Windows 11.” Reddit r/technology thread, 2026-05-17. An example of the kind of discussion that’s happening in an online discussion area that’s valiantly trying to remain an online discussion area.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1tg8uvr/former_microsoft_vp_says_microsoft_missed_the_ai/

“I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment.” Micah Nathan, The Guardian. 2026-05-10.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai

“AI will make language barriers disappear – and diminish our understanding of other cultures.” Diego Marani, The Guardian 2026-05-09.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/may/09/ai-interpretation-diego-marani

“AI data centers: big tech’s impact on electric bills, water, and more.” Nicole Greenfield, Consumer Reports. 2026-03-20.
https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers-impact-on-electric-bills-water-and-more-a1040338678/

“Unstoppable technology of the future still begging people to use it.” Luke Gordon Field, The Beaverton. 2026-04. Part of their ongoing series about AI (in general and generalised).
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2026/04/unstoppable-technology-of-the-future-still-begging-people-to-use-it/

“Frequently asked questions about our innovative new EdTech collaboration.” Richard Amesbury, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. 2026-04-20. Part of their ongoing series about AI (in general and generalised).
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/frequently-asked-questions-about-our-innovative-new-edtech-collaboration

“Cal State’s war on working-class education. The surprise rollout of ChatGPT Edu across the California Stste University system has provoked outrage and opposition.” Martha Lincoln and Martha Kennedy. Part of a series, “Organising Against the Machines.” AAUP (American Association of University Professors). In Academe Magazine 112.2, Spring 2026: AI in the Corporate University.
https://www.aaup.org/issue/spring-2026/cal-states-war-working-class-education

“You do not need an AI policy.” Sonja Drimmer, Sonja Drimmer Blog, 2026-04-17.
https://sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2026/4/17/you-do-not-need-an-ai-policy

“One cool trick to increase your workload: AI ‘literacy’ for faculty.” Sonja Drimmer, Sonja Drimmer Blog, 2026-03-17.
https://sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2026/3/17/one-cool-trick-to-increase-your-workload-ai-literacy-for-faculty

“Alberta scraps environmental assessment for Kevin O’Leary’s ‘world’s largest’ data centre.” Marc Fawcett-Atkinson, Canada’s National Observer, 2026-04-03.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/04/03/news/alberta-scraps-environmental-assessment-kevin-olearys-worlds-largest-data-centre

“Syllabi and social justice.” Michael L. Frazer, The Review of Politics 2026:1-19.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/syllabi-and-social-justice/B1052047750B9898F3ADA89373831AFF

Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Audrey Watters, MIT Press (2021). How EdTech was born … with associated podcasts and other resources.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546065/teaching-machines/

“Four Frictions; or, how to resist AI in education.” Sonja Drimmer and Christopher J. Nygren. Public Books, 2025-12-16. Historically-important polemical call to action.
https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/

“What’s the point of school when AI can do your homework?” Matthew Gault, 404 Media, 2026-02-25. Remember the AI agent “Einstein …?”
https://www.404media.co/whats-the-point-of-school-when-ai-can-do-your-homework/

“Embracing the AI grouch.” Clare Forstie, Clareifications, 2026-03-28.
https://clareforstie.substack.com/p/embracing-the-ai-grouch

Lingonaut (Beta). “Learn languages without the greed. A community built and funded learning platform. No ads, no AI and no paywalls, all free of cost – built to teach, not to profit.” In preliminary stages of design and Patreon, blog updates on development. An example of one of the kinds of language-teaching-with-technology in existence at the moment.
https://lingonaut.app/

“Creative inclusion or regressive exclusion? AI and the arms race in teaching and learning.” Shoshanah Jacobs, Chris McCullough, Amanda Ball, M. Alex Smith, and Daniel Gillis; CAUT Bulletin, 2026-02-13.
https://www.caut.ca/bulletin/creative-inclusion-or-regressive-exclusion-ai-and-the-arms-race-in-teaching-and-learning/

Statement on AI and assessment. MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching, 2026-02.
https://www.mla.org/Resources/Advocacy/Executive-Council-Actions/2026/Statement-on-AI-and-Assessment

“How to use Apple’s live translation on your AirPods.” David Nield, Wired, 2026-03-24. An example of a thing that is cool and clever in one context (e.g. everyday communication), and not in another (e.g. language-learning).
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-live-translation-airpods/

“Please don’t say mean things about the AI that I just invested a billion dollars in.” Forest Abruzzo, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 2026-01-27.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-things-about-the-ai-that-i-just-invested-a-billion-dollars-in

“Questioning AI resources list.” Via online conversation, 2026-03, retrieved 2026-06-01.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DKpUUvKyH9Ql6_ubftYMiZloXizJU38YSjtP5i8MIx0/edit?tab=t.0

“An open letter to Georgetown students, in response to recent announcements by The University about ‘Generative AI.” Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, Medium. 2026-03-20.
https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef

“Thousands of authors publish ’empty’ book in protest over AI using their work.” Dan Milmo, The Guardian, 2026-03-10.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/thousands-authors-publish-empty-book-protest-ai-work-copyright

“‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI.” Alice Speri, The Guardian, 2026-03-10.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/10/ai-impact-professors-students-learning

Reddit discussions, 2026-03 to 2026-02:

“How AI impacts skill formation.” Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin. ArXiv, abs/2601.20245. 2026-01-28.
“TLDR: it is found that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without significant efficiency gains on average, which suggests that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation.”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

“Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism.” Rutger Bregman, The Guardian, 2026-03-04. “As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/04/quit-chatgpt-subscription-boycott-silicon-valley

“No, AI will not eliminate genuine expertise; rather it will make it more valuable.” Nescio13, Digressions Impressions’s Substack, 2026-02-28.
https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/no-ai-will-not-eliminate-genuine

“Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?” Maarten Paulusse, Eindhoven University of Technology – Information Literary and Education, 2026-02-24.
https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/library/library-news/24-02-2026-are-ai-generated-summaries-suitable-for-studying-and-research

February 2026, The Einstein Event:

“Student use of digital devices in your classroom: a guide to shaping classroom culture through suggested syllabus language.” NYU Center for Teaching and Learning, retrieved 2026-06-01.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t2HpS0y-WLDfhmtAP0Zp8CB_tDvut5TGitNgTGFSpxg/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0#heading=h.hh36lbac97cg

Dead Reference: a slow AI game. Ten citations. Some are real. Some were invented by AI. Can you tell which ones actually exist? Sam Illingworth, The Slow AI Substack. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
https://samillingworth.itch.io/dead-reference

“The misuses of the university.” François Furstenberg, Public Books, 2026-02-19.
https://www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-of-the-university/

“Universities can’t be politically neutral, but they can be pluralistic.” Enzo Rossi, Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis 4.3 (December 2025): art. 7; first published in Dutch 2024-10-05.
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&context=emancipations

“What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem.” Carlo Iacono, Aeon Essays, 2026-02-19.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

“Neoliberalism, or the bureaucratization of the world.” David Graeber, ch. 4 of The Insecure American ed. Hugh Gusterson et al, 2009-11-24.
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/neoliberalism-or-the-bureaucratization-of-the-world/

“Can AI write a useful philosophical literature review?” A pair of philosophers have developed a new research tool that uses AI to provide comprehensive and reliable philosophical literature reviews, and they’d like you to give it a try … Daily Nous 2026-02-12. Guest post by Johannes Himmelreich and Marco Meyer about PhilLit (https://github.com/AI-4-Phi/PhilLit).
https://dailynous.com/2026/02/12/can-ai-write-a-useful-philosophical-literature-review-guest-post/

Also referred to in that article’s introduction: the Asta tool: “Can language models synthesize scientific literature? In a joint project between Ai2 [The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence] and the University of Washington, we train and release a fully open, retrieval-augmented language model that can synthesize 108m+ abstracts and 12M+ full-text papers to answer scientific questions. […] Check out our paper [ArXiv].”
https://openscilm.allen.ai

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. The Friends of Attention. Penguin Books, 2026-01-20.
[For information – I have not yet read it.]
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/782387/attensity-by-the-friends-of-attention/

“AI reflections: perpetuation of bias.” Emily Bridge & Carissa Block, UBC CTLT Indigenous Initiatives, 2026-01-15.
https://indigenousinitiatives.ctlt.ubc.ca/2026/01/15/ai-reflections-perpetuation-of-bias/

“Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence and data in teaching and learning for educators.” Intended for primary and secondary teachers. European Commission, 2022-10-25.
https://education.ec.europa.eu/news/ethical-guidelines-on-the-use-of-artificial-intelligence-and-data-in-teaching-and-learning-for-educators

“Who uses AI in Europe – and where it’s still taboo.” Egle Markeviciute, Euronews, 2026-01-25.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/01/25/who-uses-ai-in-europe-and-where-its-still-taboo

“Why university students can’t read anymore. Functional illiteracy, the canon wars, and the quiet collapse of literary education” Mahinder Järleberg, Mahinder Järleberg Substack, 2026-01-20.
https://maninderjarleberg.substack.com/p/why-university-students-cant-read

“AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage.” Cory Doctorow, The Guardian, 2026-01-18.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

“Sorry, eh.” Cory Doctorow. Pluralistic: daily links from Cory Doctorow. 2026-01-13.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/

Matthew Kirschenbaum, review of Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025. Critical Inquiry, 2025-12-24.
https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/matthew_kirschenbaum_reviews_language_machines/

AI in teaching and learning. UBC CTLT. First retrieved 2025-12.
https://ai.ctlt.ubc.ca/

“Feeds, feelings, and focus: a systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use.” Lan Nguyen et al, Psychological Bulletin 151(9): 1125-1146, 2025-09.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-89350-001.html

“When ChatGPT broke an entire field: an oral history.” [Natural language processing] John Pavlus, Quanta Magazine, 2025-04-30.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-field-an-oral-history-20250430/

“An ode to laziness: thinking beyond productivity.” Matthew Qvortrup, IAI News (Institute of Art and Ideas), 2024-01-05.
https://iai.tv/articles/an-ode-to-laziness-auid-2706

Asia, M.G. (2025). “The Quiet Cost of Emotional Labor.” In: M.Miceli, A. Dinika, K. Kauffman, C. Salim Wagner, and L. Sachenbacher (eds.). Data Workers’ Inquiry. Creative Commons BY 4.0.
“The emotional labor behind AI intimacy. My name is Michael Geoffrey Asia, and I wrote this testimony to tell the story of workers like me who found ourselves trapped in the hidden corners of the AI industry, where human emotion becomes data.”
https://data-workers.org/michael/

“The Tyee has a new policy. Long story short: we’re mostly taking a pass on the robots.” Jeannette Ageson and David Beers, The Tyee, 2025-12-05.
https://thetyee.ca/Tyeenews/2025/12/05/The-Tyee-New-AI-Policy

“Ethics announces AI policy.” With links to Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy and to further discussion online. Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2025-12-03.
https://dailynous.com/2025/12/03/ethics-announces-ai-policy/

“AI is destroying the university and learning itself.” Ronal Purser, Current Affairs, 2025-12-01.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-destroying-the-university-and-learning-itself

“On the rise of ChatGPT and the industrialization of the post-meaning world.” Matt Greene, Literary Hub, 2025-12-02.
https://lithub.com/on-the-rise-of-chatgpt-and-the-industrialization-of-the-post-meaning-world/

“Fascism is distracting: some crowdsourced thoughts on dealing with distracted students.” Ed. The Professor Is In, Facebook discussion, 2025-11-20.
https://www.facebook.com/TheProfessorIsIn/posts/question-from-a-reader-pls-respondi-am-seeing-a-high-level-of-distraction-in-the/1343146220608990/

“AI killed the take-home essay. COVID killed attendance. Now what? Reclaiming learning in an age of distraction and artificial intelligence” Steven Mintz, Steven Mintz Substack, 2025-11-20.
https://stevenmintz.substack.com/p/ai-killed-the-take-home-essay-covid

“Victorian diary-writers kicked off our age of self-optimisation. ‘I awoke at ½ past 7: our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame.” Elena Mary, Aeon Essays, 2025-11-17.
https://aeon.co/essays/victorian-diary-writers-kicked-off-our-age-of-self-optimisation

“Amazon strategized about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows.” Luke Barratt and Rosa Furneaux, The Guardian, 2025-10-25.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/25/amazon-datacentres-water-use-disclosure

“The grand AGI delusion and what it has cost us.” Gary Marcus, Marcus on AI Substack, 2025-10-12.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-grand-agi-delusion

— “25 minute talk about this, delivered at the Royal Society on October 2, on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of [the] Turing Test can be found here. [Time stamp: 1:39.37.]

— “Game over for pure LLMs. Even Turing Award winner Rich Sutton has got off the bus.” Marcus on AI, 2025-09-25.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/game-over-for-pure-llms-even-turing

“Liner note 40. AI’s two pathways: 2025 has discredited booster assumptions of 2024.” Christopher Newfield, Remaking II: Long Revolution, 2025-10-03.
https://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/10/liner-note-40-ais-two-pathways-2025-has.html

AI in education. “A resource for students, built by students, to provide ways you can use generative artificial intelligence productively and responsibly as part of your learning journey in university.” University of Sydney, 2025-09
https://canvas.sydney.edu.au/courses/51655

AI for educators. “A resource designed for educators by educators, to provide ways you can use generative artificial intelligence productively and responsibly in teaching and learning at the University of Sydney and beyound” University of Sydney, 2025-09.
[Caveat lector: “educator” does not necessarily mean “university faculty, with subject expertise ad working in an actual area of knowledge, who actively teach.”]
https://canvas.sydney.edu.au/courses/63765

AI and assessment in arts: we’re only human. UBC Artificial Intelligence, Academic Integrity, and Writing. 2025-09.
https://woh.arts.ubc.ca/ai-and-assessment-in-arts/

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