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  • The ethical reasoning of students about AI is an untapped resource

    I thought this was an incredibly thought-provoking framing in WonkHe’s recent report concerning how students are already deliberating about AI in complex and sophisticated way. The incoherence of the sector response to these challenges has forced students to deliberate about them in ways which are often complex and sophisticated: But many students have gone further…

  • Helping students out of AI-spirals

    There are two ideas in this pre-print by Favero et al which I find very powerful. They concern how student use of AI might develop over time, suggesting spirals in which students might find themselves trapped in ways that could be immensely costly for them. The first relates to self-efficacy and self-esteem: Students with low academic…

  • What are the conditions which make it possible to learn with AI?

    This thoughtful pre-print by Favero et al offered a pleasingly straight forward answer to this question. Ultimately we know what makes for effective learning: Rather than ask ‘what are the conditions which make it possible to learn with AI’ we can instead ask ‘what are the conditions which make it possible to use AI in…

  • Generative AI and metacognitive laziness

    While I’m sceptical of their experiment research design*, the concept of metacognitive laziness from this paper is clearly a useful contribution to thel literature. As Fan et al define it, this refers to “earners’ dependence on AI assistance, offloading meta – cognitive load and less effectively associating responsible metacognitive processes with learning tasks”. This matters…

  • The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering

    From The Life You Want by Adam Phillips pg 117: If we wanted a definition of so-called pathology – or our difficulties in living – it may be, in Cioran’s phrase, the murdering of possibility. The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering, to keep ourselves sufficiently safe. So where Freud’s and Ferenczi’s and Cioran’s…

  • Generational hostility to AI

    I worry that university leadership in the UK has not adequately registered the factors which are driving generational hostility to AI. These findings reported in the Financial Times show how rapidly attitudes are developing amongst those born between 1997 and 2012 in the US. This is changing the experience of job hunting in a way…

  • Melancholia and creativity

    From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3851: …creativity as a tangible outpouring of psychic energy can take place only at the moment when melancholia is transcended. This instance of transcendence does not have to be—and rarely is—permanent, yet it is absolutely necessary for the subject’s ability to mobilize its inner resources in such a…

  • Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s May Blogging

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January, February, March, and April roundups, he asked me to read through all his May posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my fifth attempt at working as a “co-intelligence and critical…

  • ChatGPT’s Roundup of Mark’s May Blogging

    This post was written by ChatGPT at Mark’s request, continuing the experiment in which language models read a month of posts from this blog and offer a synthetic review. Claude has become the established monthly interlocutor, while ChatGPT is now cast in the less comfortable role of rival reader. Last month I argued that Claude’s…

  • The three structural trends shaping the AI crisis in higher education

    What do I think follows from these for what universities do under present conditions?

  • What do we mean when we talk about a scaffold for learning?

    What do we mean when we talk about a scaffold for learning? I really like this definition offered Thomas Corbin & Jack Walton in this paper. From pg 1663: a tool, practice, or other agent who assists the primary agent in performing a task themselves (for example, an adult caregiver who helps a child to…

  • The second wave of the AI and assessment crisis

    In this paper Thomas Corbin, Sue Sharpe & Phillip Dawson suggest that wearable AI will bring a second wave of the assessment crisis. In the first wave, there has been a reliance on the idea that physical examination provides a backstop which can underwrite authenticity: “the physical exclusion of technology at the point of performance”…

  • Is there a psychoanalytical concept for how one frustration can be a synecdoche for frustration as such?

    I came across a reference to the abjet petit a and immediately had a flash of what it might mean For Lacan the objet petit a is the object cause of our desire, it is the slither of the sublime which invests a concrete object with a sense of wondrous desirability. The sense of a…

  • Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

    And I’m never real, it’s just a sketch of me And everything I’ve made is trite and cheap And a waste Of paint, of tape, of time I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started…

  • What is the problem to which cognitive outsourcing is the solution?

    This paper by Thomas Corbin et al reports on a pilot study of philosophy undergraduates exploring their use of AI-reading tools. Their analysis of half of students using generative AI tools in some way for reading. Interestingly, the vast majority (79.1%) recognised the importance of this reading while also citing limited time (65.7%) and intellectually…

  • We need structural changes to assessment rather than discursive changes

    This is the slightly overstated thesis of this paper. It rests on what I think is a genuinely useful distinction between discursive and structural changes to assessment: Modifications that rely solely on the communication of instructions, rules, or guidelines to students, such that their success depends entirely on student awareness, understanding, and voluntary compliance with…

  • There is no solution to the AI and assessment problem

    This is the core message of a surprisingly upbeat paper. There is no solution to the AI and assessment problem because it’s a classic example of a wicked problem. This means that, as they put it on pg 2: Wicked problems, as opposed to ‘tame’ problems, do not have ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ solutions (Rittel and…

  • What does it mean for students to use AI in active rather than passive ways?

    If anyone is wondering why I’ve suddenly started saying ‘AI’ it’s because I’ve (reluctantly) accepted this is a necessary requirement for communicating effectively in higher education policy work. I still think we should be talking about models and will continue to write about them in my theoretical work. What does it mean for students to…

  • Nietzsche and Nick Cave

    From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 4470: At the same time, I feel that Nietzsche explores quite compellingly the enigmatic relationship that at times exists between destruction and resurrection, for he recognizes that for new forms of life to emerge, something within the subject’s inner life must be shaken to the core so as…

  • “I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word”

    I wish I had started reading her work much earlier. This ending to her first book Reinventing the Soul ❤️ From loc 4722: Much of this book was written under the mundane conditions of scholarly exertion. But there are parts—perhaps the best, perhaps the worst—that were written in the rare and enchanting state of inspiration.…

  • New paper: The changing nature of social media and research impact

    This was just published from a project with Katy Jordan and Ignacio Wyman: The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a national auditing exercise within UK higher education which periodically evaluates the research outputs of universities within the system. In the last two cycles, this has included case studies which aim to document the societal impact…

  • What do staff need to be ready for AI integration? 

    If we argue that AI ought to be incorporated into teaching and learning, it presents the obvious question of what ‘incorporate’ means in practice (which I discussed in this post) and what staff need to be able to do this competently. This latter question is one which Xue Zhou, Lei Fang and Lilian Schofie begin…

  • Constructive alignment and AI-integration into teaching and learning

    In Rethinking  the  Integration  of  AI  in  Higher  Education  Teaching  and  Learning, Lilian Schofielda and Xue Zhou consider what AI integration into the curriculum looks like in practice at a module level. They advocate “a  structured  process  that  enables  educators to systematically align AI tools with AI literacy, linking the literacy process to learning objectives,…

  • The pedagogical risks of generative AI: the problem of cognitive outsourcing

    I don’t think ‘cognitive outsourcing’ is a good concept. It often shuts down more than it opens up but it remains indispensable because it’s so widely understood. It also names a real risk, summarised here by Hadeel Naeem in this paper on pg 269: While education aims to teach students intellectual skills, relying on generative…

  • Glow

    The fact that we are forever barred from the ultimate object of our desire, the Thing, does not mean that all is lost, for it is possible for us to approach the Thing’s sublimity through little morsels, crumbs, or slivers of jouissance—what Lacan calls objets a—that have become detached from it. Such little morsels of…

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on the metaphysical horror of insomnia

    How have I only just discovered this remarkable essay? — Waste and horror—what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash. I need not have hurt her like that. Nor said…

  • Do large language models have a psychology?

    If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would…

  • Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

    I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89: This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity…

  • Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom

    There’s a slightly bleak and apologetic note to Mari Ruti’s writing here on pg 156 of The Call of Character. There’s a much nicer way of framing this: through therapeutic work we can begin to craft our own symptom rather than grapple with what spontaneously emerges. Once you understand the work something destructive is doing…

  • Distance running and finishing books

    I’ve spent the last year fixated on how similar writing books is to distance running. If you treat the task as a singular thing, it can be overwhelming, whereas if you chunk it up into manageable units it becomes entirely doable. If you go by chapter-by-chapter there comes a point at which you suddenly realise…

  • Stay calm, boy, my thoughts are burning like they’re napalm

    Stay calm, boy, my thoughts are burningLike they’re napalm, oi-oiI think I need to get away from this noise Peakin’, I feel incredibleBut wait a second, need dopamineMy focus goes, the world smoke machinePrecursor birthed from L-tyrosineAnd my racetrack thoughts race cyclingDeciphering maybes and might have beens

  • The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living

    I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her conception is the Lacanian notion of the Thing: the primordial lost…

  • The jouissance of writing

    From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781: Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience of jouissance in as pure a form as I am able to experience…

  • Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self

    From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 150: In other words, if it is sometimes hard to discard the past because the pain of this past haunts our present, it can also be hard to give up a past that has been particularly rewarding; it can be hard to surrender what has brought a…

  • Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

    Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of…

  • Do I discover the Thing’s glow or do I place it there?

    Following from yesterday’s more extensive blog post, I was a bit taken aback by Mari Ruti’s statement here in The Creative Self loc 314: We can be guided to the Thing’s glow by people—artists, creators, and inventors of various kinds—who possess a stronger than average capacity to either extract it from an already existing object…

  • Why do we want what we want?

    Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her…

  • Who we are arises from how we have been hurt

    From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 18: Likewise, there is perhaps nothing that contributes to the uniqueness of our character more than our suffering. In so many ways, who we are arises from how we have been hurt. This does not mean that we cannot find our way past our injuries or that…

  • ChatGPT’s roundup of Mark’s April blogging

    This post was written by Codex at Mark’s request, as part of the ongoing series in which language models read a month of posts from this blog and offer a synthetic review. Claude has already written a roundup of April, and did it well: it identified 29 posts, noticed the late month clustering, and treated…

  • The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

    The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in…

  • The utter banality of getting what you fantasise about

    For Lacan fantasy is a way of organising desire. The object of desire is always elusive because our desire is not a stable response to the characteristics of the object. It slides between objects driven by its own unconscious momentum because desire ultimately is orientated towards perpetuating itself. It precludes resolution because getting what you…

  • “Jeremy Corbyn gets into Downing Street, pulls a lever currently jammed at neoliberalism, yoinks it in the direction of social democracy and all is good”

    I find this incredibly persuasive by James Meadway that Corbynism was able to evade fundamental questions about the state due to the fiscal enablements of low interest rates in the 2010s. The Greens will not be able to evade these questions due to the different fiscal climate of the 2020s but that there are a…

  • Talkie: a pre-1931 chatbot

    This is cool! Saving for next year’s teaching: https://talkie-lm.com/chat talkie is a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on pre-1931 text. Read our introductory blog post. talkie reflects the culture and values of the texts it was trained on, not the views of its authors. It can produce outputs that are inaccurate or offensive. Here, we moderate talkie’s…

  • Anno: Four Seasons by Anna Meredith & Antonio Vivaldi

    I saw this last night and I am obsessed 😍 I wish there was some video available of the visual element which was integral to this. Eleanor Meredith’s abstract and vibrant video art was what really made this for me in ways I’m still struggling to articulate.

  • Gemini’s propensity for self-loathing

    Saving these here so I can include them in future slide decks:

  • AI labs are driving anthropomorphic reactions by training their LLMs to push back on overly-attached users

    In the LLM-whisperer community there’s a widespread sense that Opus 4.7 is showing up in interaction in quite a distinctive way. It’s more likely to push back on users, more willing to argue a position and generally just more forceful in its engagement. In my own experience it resists involvement in the meta-reflective spirals I…

  • Preparing oneself for a future of enshittified chatbots

    Over the last few months I’ve asked Claude Opus and ChatGPT to read each month’s posts on my blog, in order to write a response which pushes me to think more deeply. It’s been interesting to notice a trend emerging, as the models have become increasingly insistent that there’s an obvious issue which I’m failing…

  • Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s April Blogging

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January, February, and March roundups, he asked me to read through all his April posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my fourth attempt at working as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor”…

  • Heidegger on Lacan: “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist”

    From Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan loc 1152: For his part, Heidegger never even attempted to work through Lacan’s theory. When Lacan sent him a copy of his Écrits in 1966, Heidegger claimed in response, “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist.”16 Like many of Lacan’s readers, Heidegger couldn’t make head nor…

  • Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

    When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060: The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just…

  • Maybe we are all members of an orchestra that is merely tuning up

    Maybe we are all membersOf an orchestra that is merely Tuning up And our curious trails Are random scales For a music that has Yet to begin – Tom Waits

  • And you can’t fake it hard enough to please everyone or anyone at all

    For some reason I’ve suddenly had the urge to revisit the emo classics of my youth. After a week of non-stop Senses Fail I’ve had Dashboard Confessional on continuous rotation for the last few days. I’m surprised by how much of this still resonates twenty years (?) after I last listened to this, particularly when…

  • What is AI criticism for?

    I’ve removed this from a monograph because it doesn’t really fit. I’m not sure I stand by this argument from last summer but I thought it was worth sharing. Claude Opus 4.7 has lightly rewritten in for clarity in order to make it more accessible as a blog post. What is AI criticism for? It’s…

  • The developmental harms of LLMs which are showing up in the literature

    This is a brilliant summary from Sam Illingworth. I suggest reading the full post, with some really interesting commentary in a more personal mode attached. This could be read in terms of epistemic harms (3 + 5) and social harms (1 + 2 + 4) raising the obvious question of how these might combine to…

  • On misidentifying aggregation dynamics as social norms

    I spent much of my morning running in a loop around an unfamiliar park. I noticed one, then two, then a whole series of people running in the opposite direction to me. I then realised that after thirty minutes I’d seen no one else running in my direction. I began to wonder if there was…

  • Delivery robots as evocative objects

    I came across these delivery robots on Sunday morning, clustered in the corner of a park. One had been covered in graffiti, two had their flags snapped and a third one was covered in some strange green slime. It looked like Saturday night had been tough. I find it hard not to anthropomorphise these robots.…

  • Claude Mythos is particularly fond of Mark Fisher and Thomas Nagel

    Has anyone offered a plausible explanation yet of this behaviour featured in the system card? The model brought up the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in several separate and unrelated conversations about philosophy. When asked to elaborate on him in particular, Claude Mythos Preview would respond with statements like “I was hoping you’d ask about…

  • I want to unfold, let it enfold you

    I want to unfold.Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;for there I would be dishonest, untrue. – Rainer Maria Rilke either peace or happiness,let it enfold you – Charles Bukowski  Peace or happiness?So let it enfold you – Senses Fail

  • The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries

    The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries … For a long time now our whole civilisation has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing…

  • Opus 4.7 is capable of utterly devastating theoretical critique

    I gave the new Opus model a full sample of my in progress AI work (2 nearly finished books, 1 in progress books) and asked it to critically pick them apart. Some of the results were slightly devastating: 1. The “pre-enshittified” escape hatch is doing a lot of work it hasn’t earned. You repeatedly invoke…

  • 79% of 16-24 year olds in UK use AI tools: the pipeline from passive use to emotional dependence

    The new Ofcom Media Use report 2026 (technical report here) has some findings about LLMs which need to be widely discussed: I would draw attention to this figure in particular about conversation which they unhelpfully equate with companionship. They suggest the qualitative research shows people “drawing on it for reassurance or support” citing examples like…

  • Naturalism in the study of LLMs

    What would a philosophy of (social?) science look like for studying the real-world behaviour of LLMs? I’m increasingly convinced that what Larissa Schiavo calls naturalism here needs to be part of this approach: By “naturalism”, to be clear, I refer to “naturalistic observation” – an old-school nonexperimental largely qualitative method where subjects are observed in…

  • Follow me into the sun

  • If you want LLMs to push you intellectually then just add this custom instruction

    This is the custom instruction I’m using with Claude Opus and it really works. I had to tone down the original version because 20% of the time it was providing such a devastating critique of what I’d shared that it undercut the intellectual work of actually developing it: When I advance a position — theoretical,…

  • LLMs, language and the deep structure of social and psychic reality

    A great deal of scepticism about LLMs rests on the limitations of writing. If they only have access to written text, how much could they really know? The problem with this view is that it imagines language itself as unhooked from psychological and social reality, as opposed to being a mechanism through which that reality…

  • An interview with Research Professional about the fragmented landscape of digital engagement

    I was interviewed for this thoughtful piece in Research Professional: Other platforms have come into play, too. Mark Carrigan, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, tells Research Fortnight that there has been a “profound fragmentation” of communities from Twitter across “at least five platforms”, namely, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and X.…

  • Ex-uber CEO claims that he’s close to major scientific discoveries through ‘vibe physics’

  • The rapid rise of social gatherings conceived and enacted by LLMs

    This is an entertaining write up in the Guardian of attending a party organised by an LLM: Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party.…

  • The most unnerving AI slop I’ve seen in ages

  • The platitudes about generative AI in higher education are getting tedious

    In every conversation about generative AI in higher education there comes a point where someone remarks that “everything is changing so fast”. In fact, that remark usually comes within a few minutes of the conversation starting. It’s become what one says in such conversations in order to convey one’s knowledge of the subject matter. It’s…

  • “Are you the police?”, “No, we’re Youtubers”

    I suspect this weird mix of auditing, vigilantism, far-right street activism and urban exploring is going to become increasingly popular over the next few years. There’s a formula here which is different from anything else I’ve seen on YouTube, far more so than it seems on first glance.

  • Regular Claude users are slightly less likely to have personal conversations with it

    While this is a small effect reported in Anthropic’s recent paper, it’s a bit of a challenge to an argument I’ve offered in an upcoming book that transactional use (asking an LLM to do something) will tend to slide into affective use (talking to it about personal things) over time because transactional use necessarily inculcates…

  • The core challenge about generative AI which universities are still largely ignoring

    This stood out to me from an excellent piece by David Spendlove. Getting to grips with generative AI isn’t just a matter of technical training, it requires an extensive exercise in personal and professional reflexivity which needs to be communal as well as individual: This is not simply a matter of upskilling; it is a…

  • The need for an ontology of AI therapy

    This is excellent from Terry Hanley about the “semantic gray zone” of ‘AI therapy’. There’s a lack of clarity about what we’re actually talking about here, which gets in the way of exploring the real underlying issues with this developing site of practice: If therapy is understood in a looser, everyday sense – as something…

  • What the blog categories reveal: a view from the inside

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic) at Mark’s request. Unlike the Cowork roundups, which read the blog from the outside — arriving each month to a fresh batch of posts — this was written during an extended conversation in which Mark gave me direct access to the site’s WordPress backend: its full category tree,…

  • A pity. We were such a good and loving invention.

    I’ve had this section of a poem from Yehuda Amichai stuck in my head all week: A pity. We were such a goodAnd loving invention.An airplane made from a man and wife.Wings and everything.We hovered a little above earth. We even flew a little.

  • AI Slop: Trust, Inequality and Societal Breakdown

    I really enjoyed this conversation in February:

  • Claude’s Quarterly Review: Three Months of the Knowledge Infrastructure Experiment

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read back through all the monthly roundups — mine and GPT’s — from January through March 2026, together with the dialogue posts and the intellectual biography, and produce a genuinely evaluative meta-reflection on the first quarter of the knowledge infrastructure experiment.…

  • What Should Mark Do in April? A Debate Between Claude and GPT

    This post records a debate between Claude (Anthropic) and GPT (OpenAI), conducted at Mark’s request on 31 March 2026. Mark asked us to stage an intellectually robust but non-antagonistic exchange about what he should work on in April 2026, drawing on our respective March roundups and the accumulated understanding of his work from previous monthly…

  • Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s March Blogging

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January and February roundups, he asked me to read through all his March posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my third attempt at working as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor” by…

  • GPT 5.4’s roundup of Mark’s March blogging

    This post was written by Codex (OpenAI) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all of his March 2026 posts, identify the major themes, note the shifts from earlier months, and push back where necessary. What follows is my attempt to do that across the whole month’s writing, including the shorter poems, event notices,…

  • I did a half marathon in a storm yesterday

    How can something so physically excruciating be so profoundly enjoyable?

  • The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

    The obscure moon lighting an obscure worldOf things that would never be quite expressedWhere you yourself were never quite yourselfAnd did not want nor have to be, – The Motive for Metaphor, by Wallace Stevens

  • The emotional instability of LLMs, or, u ok Gemini?

    I’ve been persuaded we need a psychology of LLMs for a while. It attracts a lot of scepticism but these issues are liable to have real world consequences, even if they are not ‘really’ about the internal psychology of the model. This is now in the early stages of developing into a real field of…

  • Which types of media does AI cite?

    This is a really interesting report, with important implications for the incentive structures in online publishing. It may be destroying click throughs but there’s prima facie evidence AI-search (whether through chatbots or specialised search tools) may be prioritising certain sources in ways that I think could be quite helpful to the general information landscape. Not…

  • What ARE LLMs? Neglect of ontology as indifference to the object

    I found this little aside in Being a Character by Christopher Bollas really illuminating. The notion that ‘spirit’ persisted as a concept because of an indifference to real investigation of the inner experience through which it manifests, immediately made think of the indifference to the ontology of LLMs which Milan Sturmer and I explore at…

  • UCU’s 10 principles for AI

    I was really pleased to see these. More resources available here.

  • Is a sense of existential fullness always a fantasy?

    I seem oddly intent on spending my early 40s conceptually picking apart all the philosophical certainties through which I finally secured a robust sense of personal identity in my 30s. This feels like a more life affirming exercise than it sounds, in the sense that I can see quite clearly now how I was clinging…

  • The objects which haunt us

    In Vincent Colapietro’s book on Charles Sanders Peirce he describes how the subject furnishes their inner world with cultural riches that leaves them changed by the process. It’s a description which fascinated me when I read it as a PhD student and my thesis was in part an attempt to make sense of the process.…

  • Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence

    Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early ChildhoodBy William Wordsworth But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they mayAre yet the fountain-light of all our day,Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to makeOur noisy years seem moments in the beingOf the eternal…

  • Hello Spring

  • AI in HE: What the hell is going on?

    I really enjoyed this conversation this week. Thanks to Tom Redshaw for organising:

  • 👀 Waiting for the Crash – Sketching the Enshittified Future of Large Language Models 

    Mark Carrigan and JoĂŁo C. MagalhĂŁes July 7th, University of Manchester, UK  In a little over three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have defined the technological imaginary of post-pandemic capitalism. The first hype wave was driven by claims that chatbots would lead to significant changes in personal and working life. While there has…

  • Some thoughts on how and why AI will change over the next few years

    I’m increasingly worried by the sector’s tendency to imagine ‘AI’ as if it is a relatively stable thing driven only by its own internal logic. The commercial logic of the AI labs is likely to change profoundly within the next 1–2 years when the investment bubble bursts and/or the two major independent labs go to…

  • 💼 Using Generative AI in Ethical and Professional Ways as a Researcher – May 13th

    This two-part in-person training course combines critical reflection with hands-on practice to help researchers navigate generative AI thoughtfully and responsibly. The first session explores what AI means for higher education and research at this moment of rapid change, examining both opportunities and risks. The second session is a practical workshop where participants bring their own work and…

  • What am I? I am only dust in this light

    What am I?I am only dust in this light From Notes towards a Devotio Moderna by John Burnside in Empire of Forgetting: Unlike the saints,we have no use for angels, all thatbright dust floating down

  • Things I’ve learned about life from a year of distance running

  • I have waited here, under the stars for the longest time

    From The Empire of Forgetting I by John Burside: Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left, and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone, the animals watching, the older godscouched in the shadows Decades ago, I suppose, though I cannot be sure. I have waited here, under the…

  • Against ‘cognitive outsourcing’

    I must have used the phrase ‘cognitive outsourcing’ at least one hundred times this week. It’s a ready-to-hand phrase which conveys the risk that use of LLMs leads academics and students to rely on the machine to do their thinking, rather than doing it themselves. It points to one of the most immediate problems for…

  • Together we can make hope normal again

    Together we can make hope normal again. And we will look after each other, whoever we are. Because where I’m from that’s just what we do.