• Will GenAI be seized upon as a short-term funding fix for UK higher education?

• Can you get Claude to explain why it refuses to insult you? An exploration of LLMs, guard rails and self-reference

• Join us on August 3rd to celebrate the intellectual legacy of Margaret Archer

• Are special issues of journals becoming the norm rather than the exception? How will GenAI interact with this process?

• The risk to authorship when using GenAI for notetaking

• Why digital elites are embracing Trump

• One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for

• AI Policy and Higher Education Under a New UK Government

• Generative AI and the Automated University

• Generative AI and the Enjoyment of Academic Writing

• Hatred, even of meanness, makes you ugly

• Pierpaolo Donati’s relational humanism

• You can now build and publish simple web apps using Claude

• Two ways to use Claude as a meeting scribe

• A relational theory of existential challenge

• Our conception of the lifeworld needs the mundane as much as it needs the dramatic

• The street art I saw and the street art which was really there

• Claude 3 onwards is considerably less prone to hallucinate than other LLMs

• Claude’s project functionality could be hugely important for academics

• Nick Cave on becoming a person

• The basic sociological problem of artificial intelligence

• Obsessional neurosis as private religion and the mediation of collective reflexivity by the internet

• Learning to enjoy your enjoyment

• What is sexual attraction? Some Lacanian thoughts on asexuality studies

• Claude Opus just suggested a collaborative research project to undertake with me

• A prompt to turn Claude 3.5 Sonnet into Claude 3 Opus, ironically written by the former

• Are Anthropic lobotomising Claude in order to turn it into ChatGPT?

• An example of how GAI hallucinations can be generative

• Claude, write me a Lacanian analysis of Jehnny Beth’s I’m The Man

• 📍(Generative) AI and the automated university: June 24th, 9am BST

• ChatGPT knows what MA DTCE stands for but Claude doesn’t

• Epistemic flooding

• We are not whole and we never will be

• How to enjoy writing #23: be clear about why you are writing

• Why you can’t use ChatGPT and Claude to answer a factual question

• Not giving up on your own desire

• How to enjoy writing #22: confront the creepiness of LLMs head on

• The conventionally handsome professional man who stalks ChatGPT’s unconscious

• How to enjoy writing #21: make your peace with the fact you don’t have creative freedom

• In late modernity the signposts established by tradition are now blank

• How to enjoy writing #20: being a writer means being good at AI

• How to enjoy writing #18: understand where the ideas which influence you come from

• How the interaction of AI search, social media and generative AI will entrench existing status hierarchies

• Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

• Hegel’s account of the righteous violence of education

• Ticketmaster is the epitome of enshittification

• A Lacanian reading of digital elites

• Asking Claude the easiest way to perform a digital task

• A first person account of losing your creative job to AI

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #88

• On finding the words that work

• “neologistic excess is an abuse of language that turns thought into a pile of words, into delirium”

• “I’m behind with everything I’ve got to do before dying and I’m finding it difficult to make progress”

• Navigating the Misinformation Minefield: The Role of Higher Education in the Era of Generative AI

• If you want another reason to dislike Turnitin

• Prompt engineering is an expression of cultural capital. Some (critical) notes on Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence book

• Am I a voluntarist about technology?

• Socio-epistemic bubbles as the ubiquitous tacit structures of knowledge production

• Is the energy consumption of AI being overestimated?

• Towards an ontology of LLMs in the workplace

• The proto-agency of LLMs

• Two GPT-4s having a chat

• What would I do if I was in charge of generative AI in higher education?

• Ubiquity and multimodality is what will enable GAI to show up in everyone’s lifeworld

• The interaction between climate change and antimicrobial resistance

• How to enjoy writing #14: using generative AI as an interlocutor

• My favourite Claude character yet: the Lacanian psychoanalyst who packed it in to become a motivational influencer

• The beautiful problem of the value of life

• How to enjoy writing #12: Claude’s ecology of ideas self-assessment tool

• 📣 Generative AI for Academics: coming from Sage later this year

• 🎧 Generative Dialogues: a podcast about GAI in higher education

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

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

• Adam Tooze on the sweaty muscularity of state power

• The enjoyment of turmoil

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

• GK Chesterton’s Fence and the Problem of Automation

• The terrifying future of AI-driven news

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

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

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

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

• Capaciousness as a sociological category

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

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

• Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Current mood in AI generated images #77

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

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

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

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

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