Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1h

A fiercely disappointing piece. One reason why is that it’s not simply that Meek doesn’t cite a single woman (which would rankle, but isn’t inherently disqualifying); it’s that he just cites the same tired voices who frankly all have the same boring things to say. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

James Meek · Computers that want things

For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember...

www.lrb.co.uk

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

The soft opening for this was telling teachers to necromance chatbots out of Anne Frank. There’s a historical parallel to this I’ve been chewing on, a bit of gristle stuck in my teeth since I wrote this footnote about a public debate in Weimar Germany on the educative potential of replicas. 🧵

The use of copies to fill lacunae in collections was by no means always hitched to a progressive cause, as it was in this debate. For example, the Nazi-sponsored traveling exhibition Deutsche Größe of the early 1940s comprised replicas entirely. See Diebold
2015•

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 6h

I accidentally stumbled upon an AI video of a ring camera catching MLK Jr. playing a doorbell prank at a suburban home. Like, what are we doing here?

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

The soft opening for this was telling teachers to necromance chatbots out of Anne Frank. There’s a historical parallel to this I’ve been chewing on, a bit of gristle stuck in my teeth since I wrote this footnote about a public debate in Weimar Germany on the educative potential of replicas. 🧵

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 5h

I haven’t seen that! But an important touchstone in this convo is www.ucpress.edu/books/resurr...

Resurrecting the Black Body by Tonia Sutherland - Paper

Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

www.ucpress.edu

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 5h

Like a piece of shit eating itself.

University Using AI to Falsely Accuse Students of Cheating With AI

Australian Catholic University used an AI tool to falsely accuse students of cheating us an AI, taking months to clear their name.

futurism.com

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

No, resurrecting the corpse of Anne Frank so 12-year-olds can gossip with her is not how you “make history come alive.” It’s how you destroy history so that someone can come in, rewrite it, and then author a future to their liking.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

So my point is that we need to get better at understanding when the language of progressivism is co-opted by bad actors to hustle into the public sphere (“too innovative for regulation”) technologies that threaten the basic foundations of trust necessary to a functioning society.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

My colleague and quondam coauthor William Diebold wrote about that Nazi exhibition of replicas in a brilliant article everyone should read. www.academia.edu/33845067/_A_...

"A living source of our civilization." The Exhibition Deutsche Groesse/Grandeur de l’Allemagne/Duitsche Grootheid in Brussels, 1942

www.academia.edu

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

appropriated this nice-sounding principle to sell a fabricated vision of history by doing things like creating a massive Nazi-sponsored traveling exhibition of art that used replicas only, the better to make a coherent vision of a Great German Past made of a clean succession of empires.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

This makes sense: the latter were interested in what we would now call accessibility and inclusivity. Sounds great: make art accessible to more people by producing copies and distributing them. But, in a process that Naomi Klein, drawing on Phillip Roth, would possibly call “pippicking,” the right

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

Anyway. A perpetual irritant to me as I read this debate from 1929/30 was that all the arguments against replicas were voiced by arch conservatives (a couple of whom became actual Nazis) while those in favor of replicas were of a more progressive political cast.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

It’s a great debate to read and unfortunate for anglophone readers that it’s never been translated fully into English (I did my own translation which I hope to publish one day). But it’s very feisty!

Such replicas threaten, by producing a "deceptive replacement" (täuschenden Ersatz) and a "vitamin-free surrogate" (vitaminfreien Surrogat), to dull the public's senses, a condition Sauerlandt attributes more generally to an age of synthetic gemstones, canned vegetables, nicotineless cigars, and decaf coffee. Mechanical reproduction is not really at issue for the contributors; all seem to agree that there is a place for photographs in art instruction, and some celebrate the possibility of "impersonal tech-nology" (Panofsky [1930] 1986: 115; 2010: 333) to achieve an immacu-lacy transcending human bias. The sticking point is in the promise or the threat of substitution. It turns out that such fears, or hopes, were not unfounded, if not for the reasons their proponents expected.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

So the background to the story is this. And you can read my whole article here (direct download of a pdf) static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...

between 1929 and 1930 a feud erupted in the pages of the culture periodical Der Kreis: Zeitschrift für künstlerische Kultur. The conflict, later dubbed the Hamburg Facsimile Debate, was instigated by Max Sauerlandt, director of the Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, who condemned as a fake a recent electroform reproduction of the thirteenth-century Bamberg Rider. The dispute attracted numerous responses and became a focal point for emerging ideas about authenticity and the educative impact of the replica in the Weimar Republic.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 6h

The soft opening for this was telling teachers to necromance chatbots out of Anne Frank. There’s a historical parallel to this I’ve been chewing on, a bit of gristle stuck in my teeth since I wrote this footnote about a public debate in Weimar Germany on the educative potential of replicas. 🧵

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Wendy Sparrow @wendysparrow.bsky.social · 16h

Not in all caps, but I have that shirt. I'd buy it again to give PBS money though, and I get comments every time I wear it.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 16h

OMG. 😍

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

I love this for you and want this for me.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

I would never have to talk to a not-nerd again.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

Then I’d put my little starship enterprise pin on it and only other nerds would talk to me and my life would be perfect.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

I would throw money at a t-shirt that says in all caps “TAKE A LOOK, IT’S IN A BOOK” over a rainbow.

Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 21h

I’m not trying to give @pbs.org ideas for raising money—but I am. I would buy women’s fit T-shirts of all my favorite childhood shows. Reading rainbow, 321 contact, square one, zoobiliee zoo. I feel like two generations will run to donate even more money for shirts with Levar Burton on them…

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

People think the first thing Gutenberg printed was the Bible. This is false. The first things he printed were a political prophecy, propaganda about the Turks’ threat to Christendom, & a popular school text. If you want a parallel to AI, that’s it: making $ from conspiracies, racism, & school slop.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 2d

really nice piece on this btw from @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer

The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...

sonjadrimmer.com

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

There’s no reason to respect any part of this process or behave like we need to usher our students toward an “enlightened” use of it. No one should waste their time lending respectability to something whose grounding principle is disrespect to basic human sociality.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 17h

A lot of educators behave w the mindset they had in 2022 when they were blown away by the magic of a machine that bleepbloops a grammatically coherent 2000-wrd essay, even though they understand now it’s just token prediction. As a result they teach like we have to respect it as part of the process.

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

LLM extruded essays are like being cornered by the most boring person at a party while they monotone monologue small talk at you, convinced that they’re pronouncing something profound.

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J.D. Sargan @jdsargan.bsky.social · 21h

Your challenge for this weekend is to put in an abstract for Queer Bibliography 2026. It's what all the cool kids are doing.

The theme is Space, Place, Community (widely understood, certainly not limited to the South). CFP: shorturl.at/XAVJ0; Submit: forms.gle/XD7FgrrStp3j...

Athens GA and online

Poster reads: March 12–14, 2026; Queer Bibliography in the South: Space, Place, Community; University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 22h

its like eating styrofoam.

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 1d

LLM extruded essays are like being cornered by the most boring person at a party while they monotone monologue small talk at you, convinced that they’re pronouncing something profound.

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