Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Sam Goree

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 3d

telling that so many (good and correct) critiques of AI sound exactly like the main critiques of the media culture AI was born into

Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 3d

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

QuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 4d

have just come across a YouTube account that has been using Sora to upload reels of fake, AI-generated “90s sitcoms” every few hours

4 5 19

Reposted by Sam Goree

Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 9d

Once again, it is *faculty*—not administrators—who brought this case and won. Including UC Faculty Association chapters of the AAUP.

Court Rules in AAUP v Rubio: Trump Admin Violated First Amendment

The AAUP and partners sued to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members for ideological reasons.

www.aaup.org

4 270 880

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · 11d

I don't want to be a cop and chase after students for academic dishonesty, but I also really can't bring myself to allow students to use these tools to skip the actual work of their homework.

What are the rest of y'all doing out there?

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · 11d

My students and college admin are strongly pro-AI, but most of the smart people I follow online are against it, and I am generally convinced by their arguments (and I don't trust my admin or my students to tell me what to do in the classroom)

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · 11d

On the other hand, the CS ed research seems to recommend allowing and even teaching AI in students' first CS course.

This is a result that I literally can't believe. Am I wrong? Or is the research skewed in favor of big tech?

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · 11d

I'm totally at an impasse regarding AI in intro CS.

On the one hand, I am not a fan of generative AI. I don't find it particularly useful and hate the style of code that it tends to generate. My research agenda is generally critical of the claims AI researchers make.

1

Reposted by Sam Goree

David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 17d

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

1 74 77

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · 28d

I probably should have known that already, but it's never come up before.

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · 28d

TIL there is in fact a chi distribution that is used for something, and it is the distribution of the square root of a chi-squared-distributed random variable.

1 1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Sep 10

I thought "oh I'll just update it with my pfp from here" but that turns out to be from 2022. I should probably get a professional photo taken of me at some point.

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Sep 10

I think I'm beginning to understand how faculty end up with extremely out of date photos. I recently learned that my pfp on linkedin was last updated while I was an undergrad

1 1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Sep 9

We do some amount of pseudocode, but our current course design places a significant emphasis on weekly programming homeworks. ChatGPT can generate perfect solutions to most of them, and students will choose to skip the puzzling-through by generating both their pseudocode and final working code.

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Sep 9

For context, I have no interest in endorsing or teaching students how to use chatbots. But I also do not see banning generative AI as a long term solution, and am looking for examples of what that middle ground looks like.

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Sep 9

If you teach CS1 (or equivalent), have you revised any of your assignments due to generative AI?

There are a lot of research papers about custom CS1 chatbots, and assignments involving them, but I can't imagine that's the norm at most schools.

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Aug 31

That said, the idea that interdisciplinary projects which don't play by the rules of an existing discipline constitute "colonialism" is ridiculous. Your discipline is not an indigenous culture in need of protection. It is cut from the same cloth as every other academic pursuit

4

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Aug 31

IMO the best interdisciplinary projects involve borrowing ideas and methods from another field to enrich your own, not taking your field's ideas and imposing them on another field.

The problem is, it's much easier to "revolutionize" a field you don't know than it is to really learn something new.

Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · Aug 30

"Interdisciplinary" means collaborating across disciplinary boundaries--not swanning in without doing the reading or consulting existing experts.

1 1 4

Reposted by Sam Goree

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · Aug 24

We need to know what humans do before we argue that machines can do it just the same. There can’t be AI literacy without a literacy in being human: how we make meaning in work and life, distinguishing the artificial from the imaginary from the true. mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...

Human Literacy

Something I Can Tell Students Now That I Am Not Teaching You and I probably both keep hearing that students should be working toward AI literacy. They should know what to type into prompt windows, ...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

13 110 310

Reposted by Sam Goree

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · Aug 20

here's my controversial take: i’m finding some sensational predictions about when the AI bubble will burst as unhelpful and unrealistic as some of the AGI predictions. hear me out

1/

9 79 340

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Aug 18

The things that grades are based on, other than literal factuality and style, are generally not available to LLMs.

1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Aug 18

This is creepy and bad on a number of levels, but on top of all of that it likely also doesn't work. Personal preferences are not stable and predictable on an individual level.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Aug 18

What the actual fucking fuck. www.theverge.com/news/760508/...

One of the most notable tools is the AI grader agent, which Grammarly says can provide feedback based on uploaded course details and “publicly available” information about the instructor. The bot can give tailored writing recommendations and estimate what grade the paper will receive in its current state, helping students make improvements prior to submission.

1 1

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Aug 18

Honestly, copyright and tech is so interesting specifically because it doesn't fit nicely into left/right boxes. Copyright both protects authors' ownership of their work, as well as companies' exclusive rights to publish that work. It is somehow both essential to capitalism and a labor right.

aly @aly.ruffruff.party · Aug 18

I can’t believe we’re actually supposed to be pro copyright now. I am honestly flabbergasted this is being sold as a leftist opinion to have

feel like I’ve woken from a coma and everyone was turned into a temporarily embarrassed patent troll.

1 1 4

Reposted by Sam Goree

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Jul 29

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

title and abstract from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 1 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

7 71 220

Reposted by Sam Goree

Thiago Krause @thiagokrause.bsky.social · Aug 14

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview.
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

12 480 1.6K

Reposted by Sam Goree

Michel Estefan @mestefan.bsky.social · Aug 13

Cool job alert for sociologists of science! 📢

The University of San Diego is hiring a tenure-track assistant professor whose work takes a critical approach to science and technology studies—broadly defined. Great job in an awesome city!

#SociologyJobs #STSinSociology #TenureTrack #HigherEdJobs

Details - Assistant Professor, Sociology

jobs.sandiego.edu

14 23

Sam Goree @samgoree.bsky.social · Aug 11

And if this kind of thinking isn't something that computers can do, knowing why would be an enormously meaningful result, in both computer science and cognitive science.

3