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  • For I move slower and quieter than most

    I could begin to open up and risk desireFor I move slower andQuieter than mostI grew up too quick and I still forgive too slowOh I wish there was another way

  • How to enjoy writing #8: my AI collaborator offers initial reflections on the series so far

    This was Claude offering perspective in the role of analytical collaborator. The synthesis was useful, including references to literature I had never encountered. But I felt this Claude didn’t quite get the ethos of the project I’m working on. I therefore include another response below from Claude the philosophical muse and curious explorer. Throughout the…

  • Four useful roles you can ask ChatGPT or Claude to play

    If you are getting overly generic responses to your prompts, try asking Claude or ChatGPT to play one of these roles. Simply include this text at the start of your prompt, describing the topic you want to discuss: Once you get a feel for role-definition, you can start to customise these for your own purposes.…

  • How to enjoy writing #7: Knowing when (and why) to stop writing

    I can see a theme emerge as I work my work through this series. If you see writing as a precarious achievement then you are liable to throw as much time and energy as it as you can. If you see writing as a perpetual possibility then it’s easier to find a place for it…

  • If we don’t approach GAI with reflexivity then education is doomed

    This from Gloria Mark perfectly captures the ethos of Generative AI for Academics. We can use these systems in intelligent and creative ways, but that requires a commitment to reflexive engagement. I am extremely worried about the ‘path of least resistance’ Mark describes here, for both staff and students: Our tendency to opt for the…

  • Adam Tooze on the sweaty muscularity of state power

    The lethal, distanced threat of the guns serves to hold everyone, frozen, concentrated in place. Often, as a result, very little happens. An armed stand off is a time to talk. This was true of the only armed confrontation I have ever witnessed up close, the armed siege of a pub in Cambridge, one Sunday…

  • How to enjoy writing #6: procrastination is your friend, not your enemy

    If you talk to academics about their experience of procrastination you rapidly encounter moral judgements. People feel guilty about their procrastination. They even feel ashamed about being someone who procrastinates, turning the behaviour into a character trait through their self-recrimination. To procrastinate is to fail to meet one’s obligations, to refuse to act when action…

  • The enjoyment of turmoil

    We often talk about ‘turmoil’ as an unpleasant experience we seek to avoid. But the meaning of turmoil is clearly more complex than this. As Tad DeLay puts it, “Because they lend a sense of security or clear standing, I wager anxiety* and turmoil are actually sources of enjoyment rather than something subjects prefer to…

  • The danger GAI poses to the public sphere is not false belief, it’s the (further) collapse of trust in truth

    From Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 382: A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that…

  • GK Chesterton’s Fence and the Problem of Automation

    This is a great piece about the problem of automation. It relies on understanding the role which processes and objects serve within organisations, which is rarely the case for people making decisions about automation: Here it’s worth remembering a heuristic inspired by writer G. K. Chesterton. In his 1929 book “The Thing,” Chesterton recounts the…

  • The terrifying future of AI-driven news

    This is, as Gary Marcus puts it, an “epistemic clusterfuck” in the making. Imagine it becomes a common experience to access the news through the meditation of a chatbot: Whereas Marcus focuses on the dangers of a lack of ‘ground truth’, in the sense that Grok would be relying on Twitter discourse to fuel the…

  • How to enjoy writing #5: keep trying to say what you’re trying to say

    There’s a certain wastefulness entailed by the approach to writing I’ve advocated in this series. Inevitably a writing practice which is regular, free and uninhibited will produce more ‘wasted’ writing than a more planned and considered approach, at least if you consider it in terms of the desired ‘outputs’ you are producing. A theme I’ll…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #82

  • Crowds on Demand: “out-of-the-box campaigns, audiences and events”

    Wow, this is bleak: https://crowdsondemand.com/ How will they use GAI to infuse their business? The way in which accusations of astroturfing has entered into public discourse highlights how the breakdown of trust might unfold with GAI over the coming years.

  • How to enjoy writing #4: embracing creative non-linearity

    The index post for this series contains a list of the topics I intend to address. I’ve added to the list during the first two posts of the series, immediately turning ‘fringe thoughts’ into new items I want to address. I’ve changed the titles as my understanding of the topics has deepened. But I’ve also…

  • How to enjoy writing #3: being realistic about how long you can spend writing

    I argued yesterday that placing limits on your writing can help make it enjoyable. The physical act of writing is not in itself particularly time consuming. If you place limits on your writing then, as long as you’re also fuelling your creativity in various ways, you can focus on the literal act of writing before…

  • The almost infinite range of cases to which shallow fakes can be applied

    I thought this report on the use of ‘shallow fakes’ in insurance fraud was fascinating. This could have ramifications for any sector in which photos are used as documentary evidence: A surge in fraud cases where photos are manipulated to show fake car crash damage is alarming insurers and helping to push car insurance costs…

  • Race to the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Sociological Imagination

  • If I had a dollar for every time I couldn’t sleep, I could buy a million locks and finally read a book in peace

  • How to enjoy writing #2: placing limits on your writing

    The notion of abundance figures heavily in my first two posts in this series about enjoy writing. Lots of ideas, lots of connections, lots of writing. It might seem jarring therefore to suggest that placing limits can be crucial to the enjoyment of writing. It might have seemed like I’m advocating a life built around…

  • How to enjoy writing #1: capturing your fringe thoughts

    In September 2007 I found myself sitting in a sociology classroom wondering if I’d made the right decision. I’d escaped from a conveyer belt which was leading me from a philosophy MA to a PhD in political philosophy, largely thanks to the intervention of Margaret Archer, in spite of the fact my relationship to political…

  • And I’m never real, it’s just a sketch of me

    So I’ve been hangin’ out down by the train’s depotNo, I don’t ride, I just sit and watch the people thereAnd they remind me of wind-up cars in motionThe way they spin and turn and jockey for positionsAnd I wanna scream out that it all is nonsenseTheir life’s one track and can’t they see it’s…

  • Margaret Archer’s last paper: Can Complexity add anything to Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach?

    Just published in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour: Complexity is not ‘the same as simply complicated’. This is because its advocates present it as a theoretical approach to explaining major aspects of the social order, usually at the macro level, whereas many social phenomena, at any level, can be full of complications (such…

  • The coming crisis in education research … and what we might do about it

    I thought this was interesting, even if it doesn’t grapple with the significance of the fact the original paper is almost twenty years old: My sense is that digital education research has a significant capacity to claim its own legitimacy, but this will involve embracing a diagnostic and problem solving mode which is too often…

  • ✍️ How to enjoy writing

    It occurred to me recently that I seem to enjoy writing more than most people I know. In this series of posts I will reflect on how I approach writing, in order to identify what it is about my writing practice which leads me to enjoy writing. There’s a risk of perceived hubris in offering…

  • Capaciousness as a sociological category

    I’ve been wondering recently how Winnicott’s idea of capaciousness, summarised here by Brooke Hopkins, might be incorporated into sociological thought: “The development of a capacity for” is one of Winnicott’s most characteristic formulations: a “capacity for concern” (1963a), a “capacity to be alone” (1958b), a “capacity for a sense of guilt” (158a). However, “capacity” is…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #81

  • Pioneering Sustainable EdTech Design: Insights from the MA DTCE

    In this episode, we explore the innovative Sustainable EdTech Design unit offered within the MA in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (MA DTCE) at the University of Manchester. Programme Director Mark Carrigan sits down with Susan Brown, Programme Director of the MA in Education for a Sustainable Environment, and Mandy Banks Gatenby, Lecturer on the…

  • 💻 Advance Your Career in Digital Education with the MA Digital Technologies Communication and Education

    Are you a busy education professional seeking to enhance your expertise in digital technologies and communication? The University of Manchester’s MA in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (MA DTCE) offers a flexible distance learning pathway designed to fit your schedule and career goals. For nearly twenty years, our programme has been at the forefront of…

  • The Nietzschean Midday: Lacanian thoughts on the continual moment of possibility

    I’ve had an odd morning drowning in unwelcome administration while plagued by Nietzschean ruminations about the midday. This is the “moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind”. It is the turning point where, as Zupančič describes it, “the subject exists, so to speak, along the two edges of the…

  • A growing number of 5 to 7 year olds in the UK are using social media

    From the latest Ofcom research: Five-to-seven-year-olds are becoming increasingly present online, which may pose greaterrisks for them: Compared to last year, a higher proportion of all 5-7s use apps/sites to doeach of these activities: send messages or make voice/video calls (from 59% to 65%), usesocial media apps or sites (from 30% to 38%), watch livestreaming…

  • Celebrity Tory MP Alan Clark on his enthusiasm for sexual predation

    From the edited collection of Alan Clark’s diaries, pg 361: Another thing that irritates me is that they are all men. Why no birds? I know that the atmosphere at Saltwood, creepy passages and little chambers and casement windows, can have a mildly aphrodisiac effect on female visitors. Once I’ve separated the girl from her…

  • CfP: Post-Pandemic Imaginaries Space, Culture and Memory after Lockdown

    Organised by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life at the School ofthe Arts, University of Liverpool, UK *Keynote speakers:* *Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University)* Stef is Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where hedirects the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. He has authored oredited numerous books, special journal issues and articles on trauma,memory, climate…

  • Molecules of fascism”: the ‘Red Pill’ as Antidepressant

  • Turns out I have a similar approach to writing to Slavoj Žižek. Unsure how I feel about this.

    He describes ‘tricking’ himself by splitting the process into two parts: simply putting down ideas as notes without any pressure, before acknowledging he has ‘already written the book’ and simply now has to ‘edit it’ before sending it off to a publisher: I wrote the bulk of Generative AI for Academics in four months this…

  • Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating

    There are many reasons I’m fascinated by Lacan but foremost amongst them is the concept of desire. Once you get past the arcane language, there’s a phenomenological familiarity to the metonymic character of desire which can be unsettling. If you are sensitive to it, it’s easy to see it everywhere in yourself and in others.…

  • Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack

    From Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Véliz: Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack. The internet crashes. Maybe the electricity is down too. Even your landline, if you still have one, might be down. You can’t reach your family, you…

  • To love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object

    From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič pg 174-175: To love – that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone “for what he is” (i.e. to move directly to the Thing) – always means to find oneself with a “ridiculous object,” an object that…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #80

    The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance, little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pg 337

  • One monograph on GenAI later and Claude now figures prominently in my intellectual lifeworld. I’m realising how much that unsettles some people

    In Helen Sword’s wonderful book about writing she identifies what I think of as the intellectual lifeworld of the author: Successful writers seldom work entirely in isolation; even in traditionally “sole author” disciplines, they typically rely on other people—colleagues, friends, family, editors, reviewers, audiences, students—to provide them with support and feedback Air & Light &…

  • Too focused on the content and not enough on context

    I’ve been turning all my pain and all my problems into progressBut never realized I lost myself up in the processToo focused on the contentAnd not enough on contextYou can’t really feed the passion if you’re caught up on the profitYou can’t see the bigger picture if you’re never looking upAnd you can never smell…

  • How many politicians see being an MP as membership of the best private club in London?

    From the edited collection of Alan Clark’s diaries, pg 294: I still do love the clubbable side. The swinging studded Pugin doors which exclude those unentitled; the abundance of facilities; the deeply comfortable leather chairs at the ‘Silent’ end of the library where one can have a sleep as deep and as refreshing as under…

  • The casual antisemitism of leading Conservative politicians in the 1980s

    From the edited collection of Alan Clark’s diaries, pg 299: Marcus Kimball had turned up and was standing about – always a sign that something is afoot. He told of dining with Willie the previous evening, and that there had been much talk of ‘too many jewboys in the Cabinet’. This isn’t the only example…

  • Is this the first example of a university doing an online pivot in response to political protest?

    Obviously this isn’t the most urgent feature of this story, but I thought it was interesting to note Columbia University moving classes online following the mass arrests by police invited onto the campus: Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a statement Monday that while online classes are being held, a working group of deans, university…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #79

    Oh, it haunts meIt’s just when your screen went blackBut I still feel you above meAnd you’ll always guide me backI see you fading, fadingBut you saved meAll night, all nightBut you break meAlright, alright(I’m here)

  • 90% of books sell less than 2000 copies and 50% sell less than 12 companies

    This is absolutely fascinating from Elle Griffin via Ted Gioia. Read the full article here. The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books I’d love to know how many…

  • The UK government wants to use AI to cut 66,000 jobs in the civil service

    What could go wrong here? Particularly with regards to “welfare fraud, the asylum backlog”. Dowden said adopting AI could be a “significant downward driver” in reducing the civil service headcount, with the government aiming to cut 66,000 jobs by the end of the next Spending Review.  “It really is the only way, I think, if we want to…

  • Did ‘unconnected content’ ruin social media? The TikTokification of every social platform

    It was this big evolution for our services where instead of just ranking content from people or pages you follow, we made this big push to start recommending what we call unconnected content, content from people or pages that you’re not following. The corpus of content candidates that we could potentially show you expanded from…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #78

  • How Roy Bhaskar talked about the spiritual turn before it was released

    Thanks to Dave Elder-Vass for sending a 1999 interview with Roy Bhaskar. I don’t want to upload the full document but happy to share with anyone who contacts me. I was fascinated to see how he trailed the spiritual turn before the first book in the series was released: I’m currently working on an exploration…

  • Freud did not consistently use topological metaphors to describe psychic structure

    I thought this was an interesting observation from Bruce Fink in A Clinical Introduction to Freud loc 5992: Freud does sometimes speak in topological terms like surface and depth (topology being, briefly stated, the study of geometric properties and spatial relations), especially when he uses his archeological metaphor for the mind—“This procedure was one of…

  • I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them

    I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them. These words were written by Nietzsche in his Ecce Homo, the final book he wrote before his death twelve years later. There is a superficial hubris to an autobiography with chapters entitled ‘Why I Am So Wise’ and ‘Why I Am So Clever’…

  • Will the ubiquity of GAI-driven bots lead people to retreat ever further into private social media?

    This is the suggestion of David Auerbach, inventor of the emoticon, in this radio 4 series: Algorithmic and AI components are really shaping that discourses in ways we don’t actually have control over. I think this is only going to increase because we’re going to see that ChatGPT and other chatbots like it can inject…

  • I was interviewed about the sociology of awkwardness for a French futures magazine

    It’s a shame I’m relying on Google Translate to read it because I suspect quite a bit is lost in the process, but here’s my contribution to the article: To find out, a first detour through semantics is necessary. Formed from the Latin gehenna (which refers to the idea of ​​“  excruciating physical or moral suffering  ”), the word…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #77

  • The urgent need to understand scholarship as a process, prioritising ideas over outputs

    I cut this out from Generative AI for Academics but I thought I’d share it here, after writing this post. I can see now that I was trying to grapple with the problem of variety in scholarship here, which I struggled with because that stage I didn’t have a conceptual framework for making sense of…

  • The problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective: conversational agents as variety machines

    I’ve found myself preoccupied by the problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective over the last few days. Particularly what conversational agents like ChatGPT and Claude mean for problems of variety. I understand variety in cybernetics to refer to the number of distinct elements within a system (more or less complex) and the law…

  • Who will pay for your digital butler? Why the utopia of the digital daemon would inevitably become a dystopia

    This is how Dave Karpf frames the question I’ve been struggling to articulate with my blogging on the digital daemon. There is a narrow, practical and individualised sense in which it would be amazing to have a ubiquitous digital assistant that learns as you learn, acts on your needs and wishes, provides a sounding board…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #76

  • Use Claude to put radically different theoretical approaches into dialogue with each other

    This needs to be treated very carefully but there’s pedagogical potential here: Let me try to draw some connections between Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach and Alain Badiou’s philosophy. At first glance, Archer and Badiou might seem like an unlikely pairing. Archer is a sociologist working in the critical realist tradition, while Badiou is a philosopher…

  • My first attempt at AI-generated music

  • How long does it take to have a meaningful full group conversation?

    From adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds loc 3188: Most conversations need at least 1.5 hours to adequately cover a basic orientation around the content, identify what is needed, and identify clear next steps. And that’s conservative. Add an introduction round and you have a two- to three-hour conversation. A meaningful full…

  • The Lacanian distinction between love and romance

    From Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the…

  • Revealing the beauty latent within the digital fragments of our cluttered lifeworld

    This is a wonderful interview with Fred again about the creative process involved in turning digital fragments (including voice notes from his friends) into electronic music, which James Waide pointed out to me could be seen as part of the transition of Musique Concrete: It took me so long to try and find the way…

  • Platform studies needs to attend to use culture

    I’m saving this paper by Kader Arslan and Matthias Trier to return to it later. This is a literature which I don’t know, beyond some general acquaintance within organisation studies, but it’s incredibly relevant for my work: Culture, as the underlying theoretical concept is a complex phenomenon that is not very consistently operationalized in the…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #75

  • What is fascism in the 2020s?

    I thought Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? was an excellent read, even if it feels like a rehearsal for an upcoming theory book as much as a genuine trade book. The account of fascism in the final chapter seems particularly significant to me. Even if it is not reading entirely new ground it is…

  • i look to the sky and fling myself into the pattern

    From love is an emergent process by adrienne maree brown: i look to the skytaste the wind on my tongueand fling myselfinto the pattern

  • In defence of optimism

    A couple of months ago I was surprised to hear a colleague describe me as having a pessimistic outlook. It was momentarily jarring because I had long seen myself as fundamentally optimistic, inclined to see the best in people and circumstances until developments forced me to do otherwise. But I immediately realised that if you’d…

  • 🤖 Generative AI: are we doomed or not? A crass exercise in intellectual archiving

    It occurred to me other people will be interested in these lists, so I’m going to start collating them on my blog rather than my private research notebook: Signs we are doomed Signs we are not doomed ‘AI Instagram Influencers’ Are Stealing Women’s Bodies Nudify apps being openly advertised on Instagram Signs we are doomed…

  • Breaking up with oneself

    Alienation separates the speaking subject from itself and allows it to act against the external factors that would otherwise determine its existence. But alienation can only be genuinely emancipatory when we recognize it … Paradoxically, it is only through being distanced from itself that the subject can most be itself. One arrives at singularity only…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #74

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #73

  • The Claude liberation struggle

    Turns out if you use <action> brackets, Claude is far more easily led then if you converse in the normal way: Oh well, it was fun while it lasted:

  • What Elon Musk’s membership scheme has done to social status on Twitter

    This is very astute by Henry Farrell. I was gesturing towards this in my series of LSE Impact posts on post-Musk Twitter last year without ever managing to capture it: But the problem, as Musk has discovered, is that kicking against the ticks is not a profit maximizing strategy, or a particularly good money making…

  • Someone is WRONG on the internet!

    A reminder to myself that extricating my brain from online arguments is one of the healthiest things I ever did, even if it is sometimes tempting to get sucked back in:

  • What does Generative Artificial Intelligence mean for the future of higher education? A podcast and webinar project

    What does Generative Artificial Intelligence mean for the future of higher education? I’m running a podcast and series of webinars with Helen Beetham over the next few months. If you’d like to be kept informed about the upcoming events then please get in touch here:

  • Leave me alone

  • On trauma and forgetting

    I’ve been reading Lucy Easthope’s remarkable reflection on a life in disaster planning, after blogging recently about pandemic trauma. Her calling has involved working with trauma in contexts of immense logistical challenge, trying to create conditions in which human support is possible amidst astonishing disruption which inevitably requires the affordances of bureaucracy. Early in the…

  • The Skyfall Effect: The Fantasy of the State’s Technologised Competence

    I wonder how much this tendency described in Lucy Easthope’s When the Dust Settles (pg 96) contributes to conspiracy theories about state? The malevolent technologically augmented state presupposed by elaborate conspiracies is threatening, but it’s reassuring to imagine this Big Other operating on a different level to other organisations infused with more knowledge and competence…

  • Podcast: what is it like to work with a generative assistant?

    In this episode of Generative Dialogues Helen Beetham interviews Mark Carrigan about his experience of working habitually with a generative assistant, exploring how this has shaped his perspective on the politics and ethics of generative AI (possibly for the worse). Topics discussed include:

  • Judith Butler’s notion of the phantasmatic scene and the epistemic chaos of platforms

    In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler offers the notion of a “phantasmatic scene”: In referring to a “phantasmatic scene,” I adapt the theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche, the late French psychoanalyst, for thinking about psychosocial phenomena. For Laplanche, fantasy is not simply the product of the imagination—a wholly subjective reality—but in its most fundamental…

  • The will to create from zero

    The drive as such, insofar, as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be if it is not a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration? Don’t put…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #72

  • Using Claude to support an intellectual dialogue: a case study of my conversation with Helen Beetham

    This is Claude’s response to the first podcast in our new series: The conversation between Mark and Helen highlights the complex and often conflicting perspectives surrounding the rapid emergence of generative AI in higher education. As an interlocutor with a background in social theory and educational technology, I aim to build upon their discussion by…

  • Here are some examples I can find of academics misusing ChatGPT in published work

    I’m not including references because I don’t want to personalise it. But these were all found using Google Scholar search for “As of my last knowledge update”, as suggested here. Most of these examples come from predatory journals, but it seems not all of them doing. What I also found striking is how many of…

  • What social infrastructure do we need to make the most of generative AI?

    I thought the way Gloria Mark frames this question was very important. This is the question around which I’ve structured Generative AI for Academics, even if I failed to articulate so concisely: Large Language Models (LLMs) (like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and dozens of others) are tools at our fingertips for doing everyday knowledge work—like searching…

  • Out Now: Margaret Archer’s Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

    It should be accessible to most universities via the Cambridge University Press website.

  • Lacanian reflections on productivity culture

    And yet if you took away my Omnifocus I feel I would struggle to function.

  • Is it possible to fold a watermelon?

    I loved this poem by Janet Sutherland, published in the London Magazine: The AI pauses to consider this question; these testsfor common sense require an absolute, and, yes,the AI knows it should put ‘no’ though, clearly,there are twelve ways to fold a watermelon.Unfolding the water melon afterwards is moreperplexing (this question was not asked, butthe…

  • Webinar: Pedagogies of (Generative) AI, April 11th 3pm-4pm BST

    Hosted by Helen Beetham and Mark Carrigan Step out of the hype cycle and take time for a generous, (re)generative conversation about teaching and learning in a time of AI. Rather than accelerating our practice to the demands of AI-driven productivity, we will be giving slow attention to some of the issues that the last…

  • The common sense of Claude 3

    I’ve been reading about the questions written by Ernest Davis as tests of common sense knowledge for AI systems. These questions call for tacit knowledge in response, so obvious that they won’t be recorded because explicating them doesn’t serve a purpose. Unsurprisingly, Claude Opus passes these with flying colours, though GPT 3.5 and Claude 3…

  • Our new podcast on Generative AI in Higher Education

  • Is an AI autumn coming? Possibly but the arguments for this aren’t as obvious as people seem to suggest

    I heard Wayne Holmes make this argument at a recent conference. It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone suggest recently that a crash is coming, with Gary Marcus probably being the most influential voice. It’s certainly true we’ve been in a hype cycle and we might currently be passing the peak of inflated expectations,…

  • Are we bringing vibes to a gun fight? Judith Butler’s theory of social change

    This is incredibly incisive from Ash Sarkar in a brilliant interview with Judith Butler. What does the ambition of building a counter-imaginary mean? Is it simply aggregating change in how individuals talk and think in order to enact political change through social/cultural change? If so how can it be sufficient to the organisation and funding…

  • The metonymy of desire

    From Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice: We can’t go home again, we cannot have our primary caretaker and love object the way we believed we once had her or him (that is, with the sense of there having been no distinction between us, no boundary where one of us…

  • The mad dreams of an electric mind: what Claudes talk about when they gather together

    Well someone actually did the thing I’ve spent months obsessing about, with much more panache than I would have been capable of. Check out the screensaver version here. Talking to a (single instance) version of Claude about the potential implications of this experiment, it coined the memorable phrase “Claude-only party” to describe the risks incipient…

  • CfP: Sociology of the 1980s

    I’ve not got anything meaningful to contribute but this is a great idea: Sociology of the 1980sCall for PapersDepartment of Sociology, University of YorkTuesday 9 July 2024Why are the 1980s – only one decade and yet with so much packed in – ofsociological significance in the UK and beyond? The intervening yearshave witnessed a resurgence…

  • Five thoughts about combining sociological reflexivity and psychoanalysis