professor of Media, digital rhetoric, and artificial intelligence
In 2026, there is consensus among the 38 public AAU universities that AI will provide a social benefit. That provision is often expressed as conditional, of course, on the important role of the university. But AI social benefit will arrive, and the university must invest in that future. I could argue there is little evidence […]
Last month, I wrote about “context laundering” in AI summarization. Over the last few weeks, this issue has taken on some new dimensions. In June, TIME began delivering Markdown versions of their website. This was done in response to the increase in bots and agents in scraping their website and is part of their larger, […]
Frontier AI's value proposition relies on our accepting the AI operation of inference as reasoning itself. For frontier AI's success, inference cannot be simply a proxy for judgement; computational inference must become a judgment machine. The slippage occurs when an inferential output is treated as a judgment, especially when that judgment organizes or directly initiates action. However, if AI…
Amidst the talk of AI bubbles, perhaps you’ve encountered the concept of the Jevons Effect. Jevons’ argument has to do with coal, hence the title of his work, The Coal Question. The principle is that an increased efficiency in the use of a resource (e.g., coal) might result in an expanded consumption of that resource. […]
The basic criti-hype concern in AI nationalism lies in slippages that occur in where the nationalism lies. If we want to argue that the US needs its own AI, for example, then what does that imply about the "always already" ideological process/content of AI? In turn, what does that say about the knowledge produced with these AI? It's almost as if we are suggesting that knowledge is shaped by the…
The generic pedagogical tools of any LMS (discussions, quizzes, etc.) are generally "free to use" elsewhere on the web. The feature set, while necessary in an LMS, is not where the commercial value lies. The value-added of the LMS is that it provides a digital enclosure that demonstrates a university's due diligence in privacy protection, and expands the university's management of learning. The…
The NY Times reports today "U.S. Workers Are More Productive Than Ever. A.I. Isn’t the Key. Companies have been getting more out of employees for several years." Golf clap for companies. What does it mean to "get more out our employees"? The American mythology is that increased productivity makes everyone's life better, but this apparent victory lap suggests something else. It might suggest that…
The bubble doesn't have to be that bad to bring financial and reputational damage to the AI Forward university. All that really has to happen is that decreased confidence in investment in Frontier AI destabilizes the value proposition of investing in the AI Forward university. The financial damage will be obvious in all the money spent transforming the university to be AI forward. AI-centric…
This research suggests that AI remains dependent on human evaluation as a filter. While our digital experiences are algorithmic, aside from AI slop, the content of the internet is human filtered in the sense that we made it. It is also filtered post-hoc in many human ways. There are moderators on Reddit, Wikipedia, and so on. And there are discourse communities on the web that regularize online…
In turn, if AI companies are charging by the token then they have a different market incentive. Verbose responses chew through tokens. The overuse of automation in workflow as when someone prompts a bot to turn a folder of files into a slide deck summary of those files. Reasoning inflation, when users select an over-powered model for their task, or when the machine just runs off on its own, as…