Mark – Page 7 – Mark Carrigan

Blog: https://markcarrigan.net/
Profile: https://markcarrigan.net/author/streetlightmanifesto/
Homepage: http://www.markcarrigan.net/

Why am I so fascinated by the aesthetics of abandoned media?

I can’t walk past abandoned media crap without feeling the need to take photos of it. It was particularly rich pickings in Manchester today 👇
7 myths about Generative AI in education

I’d like to develop this into a paper, though I’m slightly reticent about using examples of these myths because it risks being deeply critical of people I like:
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #130
Will the business model of GenAI be advertising after all?

I’ve been sceptical of the rush to impute a platform economy model to GenAI firms because there’s a range of different business models being experimented with: The one which has received less attention, as far as I can see, is advertising despite the fact that Meta are claiming growing success: One thing that is giving…
The friendly face of objet petit a

I’ve been obsessing about a Lacanian reading of these murals by Nick Hamilton which I took pictures of this weekend 👇
Burdened by the image of an unalienated future, one finds oneself fleeing from existence itself

From Todd Mcgowan’s Embracing Alienation, loc 1998: The lure of overcoming alienation entraps subjects in the pursuit of a false possibility that deforms their perspective on existence. Existence becomes the struggle to transcend the obstacles standing in the way of achieving happiness. Unhappiness becomes a state to flee rather than the normal state of existence.…
Interview about teacher training and generative AI in Times Education Supplement

A brief comment in this interesting piece on GAI in teacher training, alongside my collaborator Liz Birchinall who leads the primary PGCE: The university team involved will research the tool’s use in the years ahead to see how it impacts on teacher training, explains Mark Carrigan, senior lecturer in education and programme director for digital…
Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take

Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never opened Into the rose garden – T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (Murals by Nick Hamilton in Manchester UK)
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #129
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #128
The internet and pluralistic ignorance
Will Google crack generative search?

I was initially extremely sceptical but this rapidly improving. This was the result for the slightly niche query “university of manchester two-step I don’t have a smart phone” and it was exactly what I was looking for: This is exactly the page I needed from the university website, which is ironically the sort of specific…
Current mood in AI generated images #127
The things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream

And indeed there will be timeFor the yellow smoke that slides along the street,Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop…
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #126

(Mural by Nick Hamilton in Manchester UK) For each of you had an hour, or perhapsnot even an hour, a barely measurable timebetween two moments, when you were granted a senseof being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.- Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy
I live my life in widening circles

I live my life in ever widening circles, each superseding all the previous ones. Perhaps I never shall succeed in reaching the final circle, but attempt I will. I circle around God, the ancient tower, and have been circling for a thousand years, and still I do not know: am I a falcon, a storm,…
The impending GenAI driven automation of higher education

From Generative AI for Academics ch 8: Yet from a sociological perspective I see a genuine risk of academics being automated out of our jobs. Not immediately, nor everywhere. But a gradual process in which human scholarship becomes a retreating role, increasingly confined to elite institutions which charge a premium for human research and teaching.…
What the efficiency agenda in UK universities will look like in practice

From Peter Mandelson’s intervention today: In return, Mandelson said universities would need to make “more tough choices” to improve efficiency, noting that Italian state universities had one teaching staff for every 21 students while UK universities had one for every 13. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/sep/25/raise-tuition-fees-to-ease-pressure-on-english-universities-says-peter-mandelson I’m increasingly convinced GenAI will be proposed as a way to reduce staffing.…
That secret that you know but you don’t know how to tell

That secret that you knowBut you don’t know how to tellIt fucks with your honourAnd it teases your head
The new OpenAI o1 model will offer medical theories and that’s extremely dangerous

I’ve currently got a burst blood vessel in my eye. I found myself searching for potential connections to a supplement I started taking recently, as I suddenly remembered someone telling me it could potentially have mild impacts on blood clotting. I was amazed to find that o1 will theorise at length in response to a…
26% of 5-7 year olds in the UK own a smart phone

From the latest Ofcom Children’s Media Literacy study: (This must surely be an artefact of the sample, right? See the comparison between 3-4 and 5-7 🤯)
GenAI and the rapid disappearance of ground truth

This is a fascinating case study from the (consistently excellent) 404 media: Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat. The AI images were flagged by the moderator of the…
That time Bill Gates paid the government to build him a secret tunnel to his vacation home

From Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King by Anupreeta Das loc 4574: Highway 106 cut through the Alderbrook property, putting its parking lot on the other side of the road. The problem could be solved by rerouting the highway to move the lot to the same side. But that meant the Gates vacation compound, which contained five…
A concise explanation of why you should leave Twitter/X

From Casey Newton’s recent newsletter: We also stopped posting to X. It felt bad contributing to a site that had actively dismantled its own content moderation operation and predictably soon filled up with hate speech of all sorts. Posting to it made us feel complicit in both in Elon Musk’s war against journalism and his…
Yuval Noah Harari is like a ChatGPT condensation of broadsheet op-eds and magazine think pieces
Fling the emptiness in your arms out into the spaces we breathe

You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your armsout into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birdswill feel the increase of air with more passionate flight.- Rilke, The First Elegy
Put out my eyes, and I can see you still

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;And without any feet can go to you;And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.Break off my arms, I shall take hold of youAnd grasp you with my heart as with a hand;Arrest my heart, my brain…
The coming wave of automation in UK higher education

I find it hard to read this from today’s WonkHE and not worrying we’re about to see a coming wave of GAI-driven automation in UK universities 👇 Public investment and funding is clearly a significant part of that picture, but Universities UK will also want to show that the sector is prepared to revisit its…
Making the familiar strange

Reading Charles Taylor’s new book on romantic poetry reminded me how interesting it is that Novalis, the German romantic poet, offered a maxim which has come to define the sensibility of generations of qualitative sociologists, summarised here by Ash Watson: The maxim of ‘making the familiar strange’ seems so central to contemporary sociology it is…
The best resource on Lacan I’ve encountered so far

This podcast series is absolutely superb, particularly if you read along with the seminars while listening to them: https://lecturesonlacan.substack.com/podcast
Words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden

Words strain,Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,Will not stay still. Shrieking voicesScolding, mocking, or merely chattering,Always assail them.- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton From Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment loc 1257: But, and here the idealism enters,…
There was a Zelda: A Link to the Past 2 😮
Current mood in AI generated images #125

So I treat it like what it isI lay these eggshells to remember to be careful
What happens when the free trial period of GenAI is over?

I think Ed Zitron is undoubtedly correct that (a) this software is being run at a huge loss and (b) that can’t go on for ever, though I don’t necessarily think that means the ‘bubble will burst’, at least in a straightforward way: Almost every “AI-powered” startup that uses LLM features is based on some…
Nerd cultures building up around academics and their tools: mathematicians and chalk

HT Morten Hansen
The Deepfake Detection test

Saving this for next semester’s teaching 👇 I was not as good at this as I thought I was… https://detectfakes.kellogg.northwestern.edu/
Those whom we transform into myth are themselves myth-ridden

From Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy, by Irvin Yalom pg 81: Strange, I mused as I watched the van drive away, that I, who have devoted my life to apprehending the world of the other, have not, until Magnolia, truly understand that those whom we transform into myth are themselves myth-ridden.…
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #124
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #123
What you seek, it is near, now comes to meet you half-way

Warm the shore is here, and valleys open in welcome, Pleasantly lit by paths, greenly allure me and gleam. Gardens, forgathered, lie here and already the dew-laden bud breaksAnd a bird’s early song welcomes the traveller home. All seems familiar; even the word or the nod caught in passing Seems like a friend’s, every face…
The enigmatic desolation of Caspar David Friedrich
We must be still and still moving, into another intensity

We must be still and still moving, into another intensityFor a further union, a deeper communion – T.S. Eliot, East Coker
Could Claude generate an infinite number of ways to eat a mango without eating it?

Inspired by an aside in this episode of John Oliver I asked Claude 3.5 “how do I eat a mango without eating it?“ It got to 45 possibilities before I got bored, highlights including ‘mango-themed escape room’ and ‘mango obstacle course’, before I asked if it could produce an infinite number of options for eating…
Seeing my response under the new description allows me to experience it in a new way

From Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor, loc 1313: We can see this if we think of cases of self-correction, such as, for instance, when I come to see that my anger at your action was not really indignation—that is, morally motivated—but that what really disturbed me was that it…
🍂 Current mood in AI generated images #122

Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose-garden. My words echoThus, in your mind. But to what purposeDisturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leavesI do not know. Other echoesInhabit the garden. Shall we follow?- T.S. Eliot
What will the next stage of capitalism look like? Two possibilities from Cedric Durand responding to Brett Christophers

From Landscapes of Capital, 86-87: The first is that rentierism will be displaced by a new form of capitalism which is more competitive and state-directed—capable of dynamizing the accumulation of productive capital and realigning financial claims to allow for their effective valorization. Under the whip of external competition, notably the rise of China, Western powers…
LLMs and cognitive lock in

I found this a really thought-provoking argument from Morten Hansen about the commercialisation strategies for LLMs, developing from the familiar focus on monetising attention (surveillance capitalism etc) to monetising cognition: I propose that cognitive lock-ins can be defined as arrangements reconfiguring cognition across users and technology in ways that makes replication contingent on that specific…
An introduction to GenAI for Academics in 15 Minutes

Find out more about the book here: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/generative-ai-for-academics/book288289
The fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering

This was apparently Eliot’s inspiration for the Four Quartets: I have the A minor quartet on the gramophone, and find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of…
What would it mean to take a deflationary stance towards Generative AI?

I’ve been thinking recently about what a deflationary stance towards GenAI would look like. It’s a term I’ve often associated with Richard Rorty’s style, in which he is prone to ‘fuzzing up’ distinctions and trying to recover the pragmatic questions lurking behind overblown discussions. Filip Vostal captures it here in relation to the acceleration debate…
The GenAI debate is being filtered through social media in problematic ways

I’ve recently seen repeated references to an Australian government study which shows that “Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents”, being confidently used to dismiss the mundane value of LLMs within organisations. Intrigued by how obviously wrong the popular framing has been (i.e. they’re obviously not worse in every way,…
The cultural politics of AI and the impasse of atomisation

This extract from a recent Rob Horning newsletter left me thinking about my frustration with ‘AI realism‘ in the mode of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Horning describes what we could think of as the impasse of atomisation: The Verge articles take it for granted that this “we” won’t come together and will never be ready…
When will the AI bubble burst? What will be left behind?

It must surely burst at some point, but it’s interesting reading this New Statesman piece from early August suggesting that the sharp dip in July could turn out to be a parallel to the dot com crash: he dot-com crash began on a Friday – 10 March 2000 – but it wasn’t named as such…
Disillusioned Awakenings in Dark Times: Reading Bernard Stiegler after the Covid Event

The discussion of the ‘so called Covid crisis’ which was ‘not a health crisis at all’ kicks in at 17 minutes 👇 I found this really grim, though quite thought-provoking on how the sophisticated conceptual vocabulary of philosophy of technology can co-exist with the crude vocabulary of ‘false science’, ‘scams’ and ‘criminality’.
An example of using Claude to ask questions from Kindle highlights and notes

I extracted my Kindle highlights and notes from Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident and shared it in the context of an ongoing conversation about LLMs. Here are Claude’s suggestions for questions which could link Stiegler’s work to the investigation:
Current mood in AI generated images #121
I’ve been free associating with Claude 3 which is now enthusiastically free associating back to me

So let’s free associate together for a moment. When I sit with the phrase “creative darkness”, a few things come to mind:- The mythological motif of the hero’s descent into the underworld, a journey of trials and transformation- The incubation stage of the creative process, where ideas marinate below conscious awareness- The Dark Night of…
How to free associate

From Irvin Yalom’s Creatures of a Day pg 43: Think of that statement … just free associate to it, by which I mean: you try to let your mind run free and just observe it as though from a distance and describe all the thoughts that run across it, almost as though you were watching…
The more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists

From The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang pg 127: I mean this not only of dailiness, which is full of restless hours that must somehow be spent, but also the sky, the walls, the trees, my dog, the windows, the curtains, the floor—all of which are but a small portion of everything that needs…
On being sane in insane places

Saving this for myself to read later. Unsettling experiment in which researchers deliberately got themselves sectioned in order to gain first-person experience of psychiatric facilities 😮
How we integrate GAI into teaching will be as much determined by political economy as pedagogical purpose

I fully agree with Mairéad Pratschke’s analysis here in Generative AI and Education: Digital Pedagogies, Teaching Innovation and Learning Design. From loc 2231: The innovation we have seen in digital education over the last two decades risks being undermined if we use GAI to revert to outdated models of delivery. GAI, rather than increasing automation…
Current mood in AI generated images #120
What the gardener ruining my shrubs illustrates about prompting LLMs

I came home recently to find that my request to a gardener to “cut back the shrubs” led him to absolutely decimate them: What does ‘cut back’ mean? I meant slightly trim overgrowth but leave them otherwise intact. It was a text I sent while travelling and listening to a podcast, without putting much real…
I just discovered Therapist Reaction YouTube and I can’t stop watching it

It’s weirdly engaging content but what are the clinical implications of this? Imagine how transference would be inflected through a parasocial relationship with a therapist who does reaction videos? I prefer this one but it won’t embed for some reason: https://youtu.be/JxSo5sVKe5Q?si=zYAGpnAXelZOuzQt
Current mood in AI generated images #119
Scholarly publishing creaking under the weight of GenAI

I’m just finishing off the proofs for Generative AI for Academics. I think this prediction written last summer (god publishing books is slow) is holding up depressingly well: I suspect these productions will thrive within the ecosystem of openly predatory pay-to-play journals, as well as those more ambiguous cases where publication is tacitly transactional between…
Reflexivity was always integral to Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology

From The Social Origins of Educational Systems loc 967: A basic mediatory mechanism is postulated which carries out this shaping process. It consists in the structural relations of contradiction or complementarity distributing frustrating or rewarding experiences to different situations in which actors find themselves. Where contradiction characterizes relations between elements, strains are experienced as exigencies…
He came home from the war with a party in his head

Well, he came home from the war with a party in his headAnd an idea for a fireworks displayAnd he knew that he’d be ready with a stainless steel macheteAnd a half a pint of Ballentine’s each dayAnd he holed up in room above a hardware storeCryin’ nothing there but Hollywood tears
Why hasn’t Twitter/X died yet?

I’ve spent the week wondering this as I contemplate deleting my Twitter account. There are influential people across every sector who have significant online followings who are reluctant to leave but the logic of this is complex: These reasons create a coordination problem. As long as there are a critical mass of influential users within…
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #118
The liquidation of significance and symbolic misery

From Bernard Stiegler’s Acting Out pg 56: Such is the consequence of symbolic misery, to which the liquidation of significance leads – and from which no one, in the end, escapes. It weighs or hangs like a phantom over so many dinners, for example, during which there is no longer anything to say.
If Donald Trump represents an insurgency against elites then why do so many billionaires support him?

An insidious idea that I’ve encountered more frequently in recent years, particularly amongst people travelling in a post-left direction, is that Donald Trump represents an insurgency against elites even if he might in other respects have undesirable characteristics. If that’s the case then why do so many billionaires, as well as the foundations they fund,…
The frontier models still hallucinate wildly for literature searches

Over the last few months I’ve slowly experimented with asking frontier models (GPT4o and Clade 3/3.5) for suggestions of literature on particular topics. It’s something which was obviously impossible with earlier models because of how uniformly they hallucinated references. In contrast the recent generation of models were capable of producing at least a few interesting…
I wish Anthropic would stop trying to optimise user engagement with Claude

I understand why they’re doing this but there should be some way to turn it off:
Bev Skeggs on being a head of department: “a layer of protection against idiocy”

This is a wonderful reflection from Bev Skeggs on a new website: Behind all academic research and writing lies an infrastructure of administration that is done at a department (or school, or faculty level). The department level is the most difficult as you are working with your colleagues with no institutional distance between you. A…
A poor lost and confused fox running down one of Manchester’s main shopping street in the middle of the day 😢
Hannah Arendt Consortium Launch event Sept 26th and 27th, 2024

The Launch of the Hannah Arendt Consortium Thu 26 Sep 2024 9:30 AM – Fri 27 Sep 2024 9:00 PM University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, Donald McIntyre Building, Room TBC, CB2 8PQ Hannah Arendt and Common Worldbuilding in a New Age of ExtremesConsortium Launch Event Deadline for Registration: September 10th, 2024 Conference Organisers: Professor Jo-Anne Dillabough, Associate Professor, Irit Katz, Dr Daniele Bassi (Post-Doctoral Fellow),…
Ridiculous the waste sad time stretching before and after

From T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton: Timeless, and undesiringExcept in the aspect of timeCaught in the form of limitationBetween un-being and being.Sudden in a shaft of sunlightEven while the dust movesThere rises the hidden laughterOf children in the foliageQuick now, here, now, always—Ridiculous the waste sad timeStretching before and after.
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #117
And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts

From Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth: And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that…
The limp charade of Cambridge in the 2020s

From The City of Today is a Dying Thing, by Des Fitzgerald loc 3321 Here, it seemed, was Cambridge in miniature: on the surface, an ersatz recreation of classical antiquity, timeless, traditional, sedately unmoving; but hiding in plain sight was the only thing making this limp charade even half possible in the twenty-first century, viz.…
On getting what you want

From Lacan’s Seminar X: Anxiety pg 306: Although ordinarily the fantasies of the obsessional subject, whatever level of luxuriance they may reach, are never executed, it does happen all the same that, through all sorts of conditions that postpone their enactment more or less indefinitely, he realizes his desire. Better still, it does sometimes happen…
What does habitual use of conversational agents do to your reading and writing?

I realise I’m probably an outlier in terms of the quantity and quality (i.e. particularly discursive) use which I’m making of LLMs, particularly Claude 3 Opus which I’m still defaulting to for anything intellectually complex rather than immediately practical. I’ve noticed that my reading and writing have got more rushed over the last year, leaving…
Who’s to hold up the sky if not you and I?
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #116
Should other professional associations leave Twitter/X?

I applaud this decision by the Association for Learning Technology 👏 should other professional associations leave? From 30 August 2024, ALT will cease all activity on X (formerly known as Twitter). Following recent events that conflict with our values and in consultation with our Trustees, staff, and members of the community, we will cease all…
IBM’s Paperwork Explosion Prefigures Hyped Claims about GenAI

HT Naomi Baron
My notes on Surveillance Capitalism
My notes on Deep Work by Cal Newport
My notes on The Nowhere Office, by Julia Hobsbawm
My notes on The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionise Everything, by Matthew Ball
My notes on Digital minimalism, by Cal Newport
My notes on Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion
Claude can now replicate my writing style to an eery degree

I’ve done some more work on the ‘voice print’ I developed last year. Effectively a two page prompt characterising the main features of my writing style. I’m not going to use this but I wanted to see if it could be done. In part because I assume other people must be doing this and more…
The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations

I found this argument by L.M. Sacasas that ‘Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention‘ immensely compelling. He’s one of the most interesting voices helping us escape from the panicked banalities of the digital distraction debate, by reconstructing the existential stakes which tend to get lost amidst the moral panic. I…
How to use Claude to analyse your eBook highlights and notes

First go to the notes and highlights option for a particular eBook then ‘export’: This is the prompt I used with Claude 3.5 Sonnet: I’m an academic social theorist who is reading widely and intensively for a current research project about the social ontology of generative AI. The diversity of texts I’m reading at the…
Academic Publishing in an Era of ChatGPT

In this episode of Generative Dialogues, Mark Carrigan and Helen Beetham discuss the implications of recent developments in academic publishing and generative AI. Key topics include: Throughout the conversation, Mark and Helen balance critical analysis of current trends with cautious exploration of potential positive developments and alternatives. They emphasize the need for academics to engage…
Generative AI Beyond the Bubble: Looking Ahead to the 24/25 Academic Year

In this episode of Generative Dialogues, Mark Carrigan and Helen Beetham reflect on the past year of discussing generative AI and look ahead to future conversations. Key topics include: Throughout the discussion, Mark and Helen emphasize the need for a balanced approach to generative AI in education, combining critical analysis with practical exploration. They express…
LLMs and our lived relationship to the knowledge we produce

This observation by Steven Connor in the Madness of Knowledge (loc 5976, my emphasis) feels extremely important for understanding what happens when academics start to habitually use LLMs. What I talk about in Generative AI for Academics in a practical mode as functional and expressive documents (or remixing your work for new audiences) is a…
“Dear Self, I know you’re crying out for help”

Dear Self, I know you’re crying out for helpSo, I thought I’d write this letter, what are you now, like 12?I know it seems like the pressure’s stuck on highBut I’ve come from your future to tell ya it’s fineYou need to worry less about how you are perceivedAnd focus a bit more on the…