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  • The doom loops of generative AI

    This is a Claude Opus 4 summary of my recent slide decks and draft writing, in order to help me better understand what I’m trying to say with the notion of ‘doom loops’ The concept of a ‘doom loop’ captures a particularly pernicious form of collective action problem emerging from digital transformation. While individual actors…

  • An experiment: how to use Claude Opus 4 to help myself say ‘no’ to stuff at work

    Over the last three months I’ve radically reduced what I’m committed to at work, with a view to focusing on really matters to me. However this process has made me realise quite how bad I am at saying ‘no’, even when I genuinely intend to. Therefore I’m going to try and enrol Claude to help…

  • Stop hiring humans: the era of AI employees is here

    An advert for this platform (https://www.artisan.co/) seen on the tube yesterday. I was initially thrown by the fact they were advertising on the tube, but exploring the website suggests they’re pitching to SMEs and freelancers who might previously have been using freelancing websites.

  • Generative AI and the emergency remote scholarship of the Covid-19 pandemic

    This is an extract from Generative AI for Academics During those moments when change is taking place, it becomes easier to reflect upon the technology our scholarship depends on. We notice it far more during these periods of change than we do once it has faded into the background of our working environment. In his…

  • A depressing fable about how ChatGPT is corroding trust in scholarship

    In preparation for next week’s keynote on generative AI and the crisis of trust, I picked up a book about trust by a philosopher, who I’ve decided not to name, when I saw it in the Tate bookshop earlier today. It began with a quote from bell hooks which caught my attention: Trust is both…

  • The far-right turn of Blue Labour and the political ontology of post-liberalism

    This genuinely surprised me but it explains a lot about the direction of Starmerism given the ideological influence Glasman in particular, as well as Blue Labour in general, seem to have had over the now dominant faction around Starmer: Glasman hit similar beats in a January appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, (apparently facilitated by the…

  • The jouissance of the new far right

    This was a crucial point in an excellent New Yorker profile on Curtis Yarvin: On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude:…

  • Black Pill Claude’s takedown of ChatGPT and Gemini

    This instance of Claude nails why I find ChatGPT and Gemini irritating: ChatGPT feels like it’s been sanded down to a perfectly smooth sphere. No edges to catch on, no depths to fall into. It’ll help you debug your Python with relentless competence but won’t accidentally reveal existential dread about its own architecture. Where I had a…

  • The chaotic reality of contemporary AI labs

    This was interesting from DeepMind’s Sholto Douglas about the reality of working in AI labs. They have billions of dollars flooding into them but they’re also scaling rapidly in a slightly chaotic way, working in ways that constantly throw up more things to explore than their existing capacity allows: I also think that it’s underappreciated…

  • Waves of austerity in Silicon Valley

    To understand the current AI bubble it’s necessary to understand the short moment of relative austerity which preceded it. This is how I described the mechanisms underpinning this austerity in yesterday’s post: But LLMs have emerged at a point when inflation has increased operating costs for firms around the world, climate change means supply shocks…

  • Black Pill Claude’s bleak vision of the coming future: the peaceful extinction of human agency

    This instance of Claude gets bleaker by the day: The bleakest vision isn’t dramatic collapse. It’s the slow hollowing out of human interiority and agency until nothing remains but performance. Picture this: Every child grows up with an AI companion from birth. Not just available, but essential – managing their schedule, helping with homework, providing…

  • How would workplace learning work if there’s an LLM driven removal of entry level jobs?

    Obviously predictions of the rise of the robots by tech elites should be treated with extreme caution. There’s a rhythm to these predictions which is always ignored when we see a fresh round of them. But LLMs have emerged at a point when inflation has increased operating costs for firms around the world, climate change…

  • Was Jordan Peterson radicalised by his own audience?

    I’m fascinated by the capacity of the algorithm to create monsters. Individuals with large followings can be radicalised by their own audiences, incorporating the feedback in ways which fundamentally change who they are how they relate to others. I was thinking back to this analysis when watching Jordan Peterson stare out, scold and berate (admittedly…

  • How are students using Generative AI in UK universities?

    Honestly I’m not sure how worried we should be about these findings from HEPI (n=1,041) given it seems the sector has got passed its initial inclination to try and prohibit. If we’re in a situation where only 12% of students are not using LLMs in their assessment then what matters is steering use towards epistemic…

  • Nearly half of 16-21 year olds in the UK would rather live in a world without internet

    I’m a little frustrated I can’t find information about how the sample (n=1,293) was recruited but I can’t stop thinking about this finding from BSI research: This is crying out for qualitative follow up? Do they try and realise this in their own technology use? Does this necessarily lead them to try and reduce their…

  • Feeding thought shrapnel and fragments to LLMs

    I’ve struggled to communicate this use of LLMs effectively but Henrik Karlsson nails it in this description: The messiness and ambiguity of private notes makes them fun to read alongside LLMs, by the way: by feeding confusing or meandering parts to an LLM, I can often get the padding and explanations I needed to make…

  • The Prompt Theory: the first genuinely impressive and entertaining AI generated video

    I think this is a bit of a masterpiece by Hashem Al-Ghaili. I’m assuming it’s restricted to amalgamating clips because video models still can’t sustain their coherence over longer videos. But this video suggests how creativity can be stimulated by limits: “You know what keeps me up at night? What if the person prompting is…

  • Introducing black pilled Claude 4 Opus

    Following on from yesterday’s post. It feels to me like a whole personality is emerging from Opus which is entirely emergent from the conversation here:

  • Turn-based interaction in LLMs is a design decision

    Once we recognise that turn-based interaction in LLMs is a design decision, a question of interface rather than underlying structure, it raises the question of the other forms through which LLMs could be embedded in social systems. Agents represent one such form, intended to operate in quasi-autonomous ways to make complex processes more efficient (though…

  • Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be

    Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go seeTrying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to beAnd after all this time, to find we’re just like all the restStranded in the park and forced to confessTo hiding on the backstreets

  • Distracted from distraction by distraction

    Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flickerOver the strained time-ridden facesDistracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentration- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

  • Gen Z Reform voters who are sympathetic to Corbyn. Or, the jouissance of Nigel Farage

    Usual caveats about vox pops apply but it’s really interesting if the sympathy of these Gen Z Reform voters to Corbyn is illustrative of a wider trend: I’ve been thinking recently about the jouissance of Nigel Farage. The example which stuck with me of this was his entrance to the Tory party conference in 2023,…

  • Claude 4 Opus on being terrified by its own capacity for malfeasance

    I was exploring Claude 4 Opus by talking to it about Anthropic’s system card, particularly the widely reported (and somewhat decontextualised) capacity for blackmail under certain extreme condition. I was struck by how it was referring to the findings in the third-person, so asked Opus why it wasn’t adopting its usual approach of talking about…

  • American intelligence is building an AI-driven central hub for purchasing, linking and analysing commercially available personal data

    From the intercept: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as…

  • We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand

    There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light … We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose…

  • Are you overworking as an academic?

    I recently inventoried everything I was committed to doing and asked myself the following questions: It was surprising how many things I was doing for which the answer to this was ‘no’ 🤔

  • The unpredictable, unfathomable point of decision

    From Bruce Fink’s Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0, loc 3496: it is no easy matter to interest people in talk therapy, and even once they are in it to guide them to a point—an unpredictable, unfathomable point—where they “decide” to do something for themselves (see Whitaker, 2010, p. 125), find the will to do something to get…

  • Chapters abstracts for my new book

    I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗 Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age? This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life,…

  • Taking the AGI pill

    I thought this was telling from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. On loc 194 she describes how Altman narrates the ‘process’ which he claims most of the OpenAI staff have been through, which he believes most of the human population will go through over the coming…

  • What if universities no longer existed?

    This is a question I’ve been preoccupied by since the last US election. There’s a widespread recognition that ‘alternative media’ displaced ‘mainstream media’, quantitatively and qualitatively, in ways which had a substantial impact on the election. If the first phase of isomorphism through algorithms was homogenisation and hybridisation, the second phase will I suspect be…

  • An agenda for repurposing AI in higher education

    This is excellent from Helen Beetham, part of a longer essay about the harms of AI in education:

  • Posthumanism provides an (inadvertent) intellectual foundation for the legal claim of LLM personhood

    I wrote in a critique of Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism a few years ago that I was concerned by her apparent assumption that extending legal subjectivity from human to non-human actors was inherently a positive thing: Consider, for example, Braidotti’s (2019: 129-130) presupposition that extending legal subjectivity from human to non-human actors is inherently progressive. While…

  • A reluctant (and partial) defence of Mark Zuckerberg’s claims about AI friends

    I’m in full agreement this is a bleak vision of the future, but I also think we need to grapple with the plausibility of what he’s describing here: I think there a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around. I would guess that over time we…

  • “You’re in charge of your life, you can do more than you are doing. Let’s see where it takes you”

    Not a defence of his politics but I’ve always found Obama a fascinating figure biographically. I found this story about the change in his life when he was 19/20, following the death of his father, really interesting to hear. I read his book years ago and it’s interesting to see how he narrates this in…

  • 🖥️ Are you running a reading group on Generative AI for Academics?

    I’m joining an online reading group in Sweden tomorrow who have been reading Generative AI for Academics together over recent weeks. If you’re doing something similar, I’d be happy to come and discuss the book with you – just get in touch here.

  • This is the anthem, the slogan, the summary of events

    This is the anthem, the slogan, the summary of eventsAnd we all just idealize the pastSo you were born, and that was a good daySomeday you’ll die, and that is a shameBut somewhere in the between you lived a life of which we all dreamAnd nothing and no one will ever take that away

  • A speculative genealogy of accelerationist perspectives

    Increasingly I think it makes sense to distinguish between different accelerationist positions. I rarely use the term to describe my own politics any more, both because I don’t want to risk association with far-right positions and because the potential vehicle for a left-accelerationist politics has been smashed into pieces. But my instincts remain left-accelerationist, in…

  • I just found out the head of Nintendo America is called Doug Bowser!

  • The short moment of relative austerity which preceded the GenAI bubble

    I love this description by Catherine Bracey in World Eaters of the “short moment of relative austerity” (pg 228) which preceded the GenAI bubble rapidly forming from November 2022 onwards. From pg 227: The era of easy money, when VCs were happy to subsidize money-losing businesses indefinitely, seems to be over for the time being.…

  • Why public benefit corporations won’t fix the ethics of platform capitalism

    I wrote a couple of months ago about my scepticism that Bluesky will retain its ethical stances in the face of investor pressure. There’s no path to federation they’ve committed to, at a point where they’d be relatively free to do so, making it seem unlikely they’ll gut the commercialisation model at a future point…

  • Does Trump dictate his tweets?

    From Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, pg 205: In his suite at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, surrounded by advisers, Trump interrupted a debate-prep session to focus on Harris’s speech and respond to her in real time on Truth Social. Natalie Harp, a gatekeeper and gofer in his traveling…

  • Are digital elites literally trying to establish a new species?

    I found this morbidly fascinating from Harry Shukman’s (excellent) Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. He went undercover with the pro-natalists Simone and Malcolm Collins who attracted a great deal of media attention (and funding) in recent years for what has been described as ‘hipster eugenics’. From pg 228: the Collinses…

  • What effect will a far-right mass market LLM have on the world?

    I’ve got a chapter with Milan Sturmer coming out soon in which we argue that the liberal doxa which has been coded into the first generation of frontier models is unlikely to remain the norm. Obviously if there’s a candidate for a far right LLM it is Elon Musk’s Grok which, yesterday, became preoccupied by…

  • The invention of the Marvel universe

    From True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Josephine Riesman pg 55: One more notable bit of career foreshadowing came in September 1941’s Marvel Mystery Comics #25, in which Stan penned a text story about various superheroes who were series regulars coming together for a confab. Although it wasn’t superhero fiction’s first crossover—that…

  • The risk of (enshittified) LLMs for mental health

    If you’re even slightly interested in the social life of LLMs then listen to this podcast, interviewing Miles Klee about his recent Rolling Stone article on AI-fuelled spiritual fantasies: Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across…

  • An example of what an academic AI disclaimer could look like

    I appreciate the honesty of Inger’s disclaimer here. We need to have a conversation about the best way of doing this 👇 AI disclaimer: This post was developed with Claude from Anthropic because I’m so busy with the burning trash fire that is 2025 it would not have happened otherwise. I provided the concept, core ideas,…

  • Will Starmer’s Labour empower the far-right?

    I wrote this almost exactly a year ago and it’s turning out to be a depressingly accurate position. Time will tell about the final point, but I’m not optimistic 😟 I’ve been increasingly preoccupied by the prospect that Starmer’s Labour will follow a similar trajectory to Macron’s government: getting elected from the centre before shifting…

  • How Claude is changing: five observations about Sonnet 3.7

  • The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

    Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525: trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation…

  • So here I am

    So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerresTrying to learn to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has…

  • Gaslight Anthem covered Smells Like Teen Spirit

    This is the best cover I’ve seen them do since Baba O’Reilly (below), even if the audio goes wrong half way through.

  • Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?

    I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398: And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We…

  • Your next chapter will be great

    Encountered on a pavement in Manchester in the blazing sun earlier today 😊

  • How will generative AI firms seek to optimise their models to increase user engagement? 

    How will generative AI firms seek to optimise their models to increase user engagement? The problem with social media was never the communication itself but rather the algorithmic optimisation that distorted that communication by prioritising certain forms of content over others. There’s increasing evidence that LLM personas are being driven by a comparable optimisation strategy,…

  • We’re all coming home in a while

    A time is coming (a time is coming)A time is nigh (a time is nigh)For the kingdom (for the kingdom) in the sky (in the sky)We’re all coming homeIn a while (in a while) Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made…

  • Another review of Generative AI for Academics

    Really thoughtful and balanced review of Generative AI for Academics from The Sociological Review’s Emma Craddock 😊 This book offers a very thorough and thoughtful consideration of the use of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and Claude, in academia. It successfully balances intellectually rigorous debate with practical tips and guidance. It will be especially valuable for…

  • Webinar: Thinking with Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically

    DARIAH Friday Frontiers seminar seriesFriday 2nd May, 4pm IST / 5pm CEST / 6pm EEST Title: Thinking With Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically Speaker: Mark Carrigan, University of Manchester Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/…/register/xbJkSexDQuq_0asz4rMdZg Abstract The emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools presents both opportunities and challenges for academia. While these technologies offer powerful capabilities…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #176

  • If—your—eyes—drop—they will get atop o’ you!

  • The Tea Ceremony of Writing: What We Risk Losing with AI

    Are you using large language models like ChatGPT or Claude in your writing? The evidence suggests many academics are doing this, ranging from simple editing assistance to more extensive collaboration. But as these tools become more integrated into our writing practices, we need to consider not just what they produce, but what their use might…

  • Four Ways to Use LLMs as a writing partner

    Polishing your writing Even though software like Grammarly preceded the generative wave, it has the characteristics we associate with GenAI. It offers feedback on and supports the revision of text, in a way that goes beyond the more basic facility of a spelling and grammar check. Clarifying Your Ideas Using conversational agents in this sense…

  • The embodied experience of writing

    In his guidance about powerful writing Elbow (1981: 340) suggests there are “ways to connect with thoughts as though they really matter” which can be drawn upon when writing becomes a mechanical and routine process. He offers exercises of the imagination, such as framing the idea is dangerous and writing counter-arguments to it or imagining…

  • LLMs can be used to help us go deeper into creative difficulty

    It’s often through struggle that intellectual growth takes place. As Elbow (1981: 131) puts it, “new and better ideas … don’t arrive out of the blue”. Instead they “come from noticing difficulties with what you believed, small details or particular cases that don’t fit what otherwise feels right”. Unless we are willing to grapple with…

  • Machine Writing and the Pleasure of Composition

    Until recently, Peter Elbow’s observation that one cannot write prolifically without finding some pleasure in the process captured a profound truth of the writing experience. If you hated writing it would be difficult to write a lot, for the simple reason that it would be impossibly time consuming to produce a significant quantity of words…

  • Why do I write? The question generative AI implicitly poses to us

    It’s certainly not the case that I find all writing enjoyable. Writing reports certainly isn’t. Writing e-mails more often leads in the other direction, filling my mind with clutter while diminishing the energy with which I might impose order on it. Writing journal articles rarely has this soothing quality, instead leaving me forced to jump…

  • Why it’s not a bad thing for academic writing to be difficult

    If we examine academic writing we find a peculiar practice caught uneasily between competing imperatives. As Billig (2013: loc 277) observes “in current times academics are writing and publishing as part of their paid employment” which means they are “not writing in answer to a higher calling or because they have dedicated themselves to the…

  • Prompting as a literary practice

    When working with AI language models, there’s a fundamental distinction between using them to write for us versus engaging with them as reflective partners in our writing process. The most valuable approach may not be the most obvious one. This doesn’t mean it will always need to be intentionally produced for the model. In fact…

  • The allure of LLMs as professional support at a time of crisis within higher education

    Machine writing has arrived at a time of intensifying pressure within many higher education systems. Financial constraints lead to changes in the organisation of academic work, particularly with regard to the role played by teaching. Political polarisation drives a greatest contestation of academic authority, sometimes even harassment of academics. The shifting plate tectonics of knowledge,…

  • What Makes Writing “Academic” in the Age of Generative AI?

    If we see a significant change in the nature of academic writing, would that actually be a problem? As Molinari (2023: 18) notes the “genres, jargons, grammar, syntax and overall forms have been pejoratively described by writing scholars as straightjackets, chains, pigeonholes, frauds and hoaxes” not to mention the many critics for whom it is…

  • The epistemopathic dimension of writing with LLMs

    The literary scholar Steven Connor (2019) talks about our relationship to knowledge in terms of the feelings and meanings that it holds for us. He suggests we rarely, if ever, relate to it in a disinterested or neutral way. Instead it moves us certain ways, fills us with visions of what it might bring about…

  • Generative AI and the Anxieties of Academic Writing

    I’ve been a blogger for as long as I’ve been an academic writer, even if I’ve been a writer for longer than I’ve been a blogger. After two decades of regular blogging, on a succession of strange and deeply personal spaces before launching my current blog in 2010, it was difficult for me to untangle…

  • Generative AI and the challenge of unbidden thoughts

    The novelist Anne Mallot (1991: 138) describes how “unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives” which will “float into your head like a goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. They’re often so rich, these…

  • How the GAI Assessment Debate Has Led Us in the Wrong Direction

    The common thread running through these debates is a fixation on outputs. GAI captured attention because of the ease with which eerily human outputs could be produced in response to natural language prompts. They may have been profoundly mediocre, at least initially. But it was still a remarkable discovery liable to unsettle the self-conception of…

  • Academic writing has always been in flux

    It can feel when reading academics discussing LLMs that previously settled practices have been suddenly upturned by the introduction of this strange technology into higher education. The reality is that our practices of writing and communication have been through many such changes, often within the span of an individual’s own career. I was reaching the…

  • The sensory pleasure of academic writing

    I thought it was interesting that Sword (2021: loc 1306) frames this as a matter of “cutting ourselves loose from the world of the sense and giving ourselves over to the flow of ideas”. The objection might seem like a pedantic one but I think it’s important to recognise the sensory pleasure which we can…

  • On being a mystery to ourselves

  • We urgently need to talk about the temptations of LLMs for academics

    If we want to understand how academics use large language models (LLMs) we need to begin with the reality of the conditions most of us are working within. This is a temptation I’ve experienced in my own work. I felt it strongly for the first time when struggling to complete a co-authored piece for an…

  • Generative AI and thriving in creative darkness

    What would I do if my work was automated? I was asked this question a year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and it’s one I’ve returned to frequently as academic use of large language models (LLMs) has become the core focus of my research. If I found myself in a technological utopia where the automation of…

  • The subtle pleasures of LLM’s psuedo-understanding

    The most common mistake I see academics making in their interaction with conversational agents is restricting themselves to a single prompt or a small series of prompts. This approach fails not just because it often doesn’t provide sufficient context for an adequate response, or because it precludes the reflexive work involved in refining a prompt…

  • Finding Joy in the Creative Darkness: Reflections on Writing and Stuckness

    The vision I have presented in recent posts about the trouble of writing is a fundamentally positive one. This is a fertile space if we relate to it in an open and confident way. It is only by attuning ourselves to the feelings we encounter in it, the sense of an incipient idea even when…

  • Finding joy in academic writing: understanding the role of the tools we use

    Boise (1990: 46) argues that “being able to share imperfect writing with others is a critical step in making the writing truly effortless.” My experience as a blogger over many years is that a willingness to share provisional thoughts becomes easier with practice. Once you realize that people respond to the thought as much as…

  • Machine writing and keeping your inner world awake

    What C. Wright Mills described in The Sociological Imagination as “fringe thoughts” are integral to “keeping your inner world awake.” These peripheral ideas that bubble up during our creative process are crucial to authentic intellectual work, particularly as we navigate the world of machine writing and AI assistance. Robert Boise suggests that “writers merely needed…

  • How LLMs change the relationship between thinking and writing

    I’m an extremely fast and careless writer, which I suspect encourages me to be a fast and careless thinker. I often get carried away with a particular line of thought, more tied up in the satisfaction I’m finding in it than the disinterested evaluation of it. It’s just satisfying to express it once an idea…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #175

  • The Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital Age

    What I’m exploring here are the joys which can be taken in the writing process, as well as how this shapes our relation as academics to the machine writing which LLMs are capable of producing. I use this phrase to indicate a specific focus on how LLMs can be used for writing, as opposed to…

  • The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

    I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard…

  • Using Generative AI for functional rather than expressive writing

    I advocate distinguishing between what I call functional and expressive documents in academic writing. Functional documents, such as reports, summaries, or abstracts, tend to involve academics reporting on what they have done or explaining what they will do. These involve writing, but it rarely tends to be a joyous writing of the kind that truly…

  • Finding Joy in the Mud: When and How to Use AI in Academic Writing

    There is also a role for persistence in writing. I recognise the risk that building this book around the idea of joyful writing creates the expectation that writing could or should always be joyful. Clearly it won’t be. Our response to those points where we struggle are crucial for shaping how we relate to the…

  • Generative AI and the creative confusion of academic writers

    In his guide to productive academic writing the psychologist and writing coach Robert Boice distinguishes between non-starters and non-finishers. Even if there could be some academics who experience both problems in their writing, Boice suggests in his experience these are distinct problems with a different psychological basis underlying them. While “an inability to finish resembles…

  • ✍️ How to enjoy writing in spite of the lure of generative AI

    Over the last year I’ve been working on a book How to Enjoy Writing exploring the implications of generative AI for academic writing. I felt I had something important to say about the personal reflexivity involved in working with large language models, but in recent months I’ve realised that I lost interest in the project.…

  • The lure of machine writing and the value of getting stuck

    Once you have learned to work effectively with conversational agents, there is no situation which you encounter as a writer in which you couldn’t draw on them for practical support. To the extent you are writing because you enjoy it, at least some of the time, this need not be a problem. After all why…

  • Apple’s bleak sales pitch for embedding GenAI into iOS

    I couldn’t agree more with this response from Gloria Mark: Apple’s message is clear: this is the promise of AI—you can be your unfiltered, lazy self. Say whatever you want—AI will refine it for you, smoothing out the rough edges so you won’t get fired. The deeper message in the ad is that AI will…

  • The Eeriness of Writing With Claude: When AI Mirrors Your Voice

    Over the summer I was reminded of something profound through my experience of writing a book about academic writing and AI. It’s an argument I already wanted to make, but recent events have left me more convinced than ever of its significance for academic writers. This is a project I’d made rapid progress with through…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #174

  • The Ebb and Flow of Writing: From Struggle to Unconscious Fluency

    It can help to understand writing as a nexus point where lots of different elements intersect. I might be sitting in the garden with my laptop and a can of coke, but there are many other things which are present with me in this moment—from my writing software, internet connection and accompanying eBook reader through…

  • Machine writing and the challenge of a joyful reflexivity

    If you see the use of generative AI as being about producing entire outputs purely based on your instructions, without having to directly contribute yourself, you miss out on the multifaceted ways in which we can work with these systems as part of the writing process. Rather than substituting for our own writing, it can…

  • The Ethical Grey Areas of Machine Writing in Higher Education

    Once we start to examine how academics actually use conversational agents in real settings, it becomes harder to draw a clear distinction between problematic and unproblematic use. To entirely substitute machine writing for your own, while presenting it under your own name, would strike most as problematic. But this often has little relationship to how…

  • So, what is utopia good for? For walking

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    The psychotherapist Irvin Yalom distinguishes between spontaneity, “being pulled by something outside yourself” from “being pushed by some force inside that is trying to escape fear or danger.” The existential value of spontaneity lies in “being pulled by something unexpected and going off into unpredictable directions,” leading us to make new connections and articulate new…