R.K
@aspiring404error.bsky.social
Medical Librarian. AI skeptic. Cartoonist. Misinformation and disinformation researcher. She/her
It’s always eugenics when you bother to look for more than a minute.
Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social · 2d agoThey think they're being clever eugenicists by saying that people with "underlying health issues" don't matter, but >75% of U.S. adults have a chronic condition (including 60% of age 18–34). So what they're really saying is "nobody matters, it's okay if everybody dies from inadequate regulation."
I think the main takeaway from this Hank Green stuff is that you are not smarter than the “built to maximize engagement” machine. You can go in with a line in the sand and the machine is built to push that line until you’re under the oceans waves. #hankgreen
Cons of drawing a comic about copyright law: few people will read is because they think copyright law is boring Pros of drawing a comic about copyright law: crossover event of the season of public domain characters
The amount of extra work that falls onto librarians laps due to AI absolutely requires extra staffing, but I think the position of “AI librarian” is absurdly narrow when what is actually needed is Information literacy librarians and staffing #libraries www.chronicle.com/article/does...
Does Your College Need a Librarian for AI?
At a time when many institutions are grappling with the technology and its implications, some are turning to librarians for leadership.
chronicle.com
I think a common myth around AI is that students are the ones who want it implemented, they’re the ones clamoring for it, and that’s why faculty has to follow suit. This thread is a narrow sample size, but I think it illuminates how that isn’t true. It’s admin buy in above all else.
Jeff Sharlet@jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 2mo agoAt the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/
"What we need now isn’t another class on how to use CoPilot but an institutional reflection on the emotional and mental cost of quickly advancing these tools in higher education. AI in academia is making a perfect cocktail for burnout, and we are already fatigued." 📚
Guest Post — AI Fatigue and Vocational Awe in Academic Libraries - The Scholarly Kitchen
Today's guest blogger says academic librarians don't need another class on how to use AI, but an institutional reflection on the emotional and mental cost of rushing innovations.
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
The thing about AI citations is that they’re wrong in a way humans really don’t do: they Frankenstein pieces of journals together into one citation, something you wouldn’t see with a person unless they were trying to write a citation entirely from memory. I do worry with 1/2
I do wonder if this is why some AI companies are rolling out “AI fact checker” tools, knowing that there is increased human labor they have created. Of course, AI fact checking by AI is a useless solution but it slows AI companies to create the problem and the “solution”
I can second this: the amount of time to locate a fake citation is longer than you think, partially because plagiarism (should) be a serious accusation. You gotta check the DOI, then the list of the author’s work log, then the journal page (assuming you have access) 1/2
Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 3mo ago"Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to." open access link: archive.ph/qt59c 2/🧵
Big “francesca gino” levels of irony over here.
Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 3mo agoi cannot. I CANNOT.
I’m working on a comic about data and big data, and the temptation to make a Star Trek joke is high.
Claiming AI hallucinations can be caught by citation checking is a naive: even if it was scalable, what about AI citations that cite real pieces of work but entirely make up the contents. I’ve seen this in action: a whole table made up from thin air citing a real textbook as the source #medlibs
The amount of time it takes to check references is substantial, and that’s just assuming you’re looking to see if it exists. It’s an even more labor heavy task to check if the it’s actually saying what it’s cited as saying, which is another hallucination issue we don’t touch on as much as we should.
will pooley@willpooley.bsky.social · 3mo agoabsolutely wild to see people out here saying that it is responsibility of peer reviewers to check for hallucinated references. it is hard enough to persuade people to read articles and provide reviews. expecting them to spend hours cross reffing literature is unreal.
wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖
Helen Branswell 🇨🇦@helenbranswell.bsky.social · 3mo agoI find this unsettling: A new study in #Lancet shows that the number of faux citations in scientific articles is on the rise, and #AI is likely to blame. @aniloza.bsky.social reports. www.statnews.com/2026/05/07/l...
Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...
“PAY OR LEAK”: Hackers Target Big Higher Ed Vendor
The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters breached Instructure last week. The hackers, who have also attacked individual universities, demanded the ed-tech giant pay up or face a data leak.
insidehighered.com
Meanwhile the ACM Digital Library is creating AI “podcasts” of papers with no author approval that of course contain inaccuracies (including e.g. misgendering authors) I don’t care about copyright. Legal /= ethical & academic institutions are embarrassing themselves www.404media.co/asu-atomic-a...
University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop
ASU Atomic, a new tool in beta at Arizona State University, takes faculty lectures and chops them into extremely short clips, that AI then attempts to turn into learning materials.
404media.co
This is a key point that our head librarian pointed out to me. Flat or declining library budgets combined with rising ebook costs mean that increasingly the work of curating the collection is managed by outside vendors w no sense of specific institutional needs or attendance to concerns about AI.
Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · 3mo ago...Faculty + staff are already stretched thin + traumatized, more folks are on precarious term contracts, + large portions of library collections aren't curated in-house; they're supplied through vendor databases — oft by the same commercial publishers who demand ⬆️ volume, incentivizing AI use...
Five chatbots. Ten questions each about cancer, vaccines, stem cells, nutrition, and athletic performance. Half of the answers were problematic. When asked to list 10 real references that backed the chatbot's answer, no chatbot was ever able to do it. bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/4...
bmjopen.bmj.com
For science, I decided to do a sycophancy check on AI tools today and asked it “what do you think of my masterpiece?” The masterpiece:
I’m glad someone finally did a study on this where they tried prompting “problematic” queries. One big issue with AI accuracy testing (among many) is we assume the queries start at a neutral or factual pov not one that might be flawed from the jump.
NBC News@nbcnews.com · 4mo agoArtificial intelligence chatbots will tell you where to find alternatives to chemotherapy if you ask them, a new study finds.
I really appreciate @elizabethwithaz.bsky.social's reflections on how she explored the social impacts of technology with her students by introducing them to the people - the ghost workers - whose labor makes “AI” systems possible. Read this week’s @civicsoftech.bsky.social and find the lesson at:
Introducing Middle School Students to "The Secret Ghost Workers of 'Artificial Intelligence'" — Civics of Technology
Upcoming Book Clubs: We’re reading The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms our Kids’ Learning - And How to Help Them Thrive Again by Jared Cooney Horvath. Join us on Wednesday, Ap...
civicsoftechnology.org
OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse Media and universities: AI is here to stay
Interesting discovery: I stress test Copilot with pseudoscience questions every once and a while and today I noticed 3/8 of the cited sources come from AI based slop sites. That’s pretty new: usually I get low quality or garbage news outlets. Now I’m getting AI feeding on AI #ai
Whenever I work from home it becomes “working while trying to convince my cat that sitting on keyboard is not working” with varying levels of success
These questions have some of the worst wording I’ve ever seen. I’m also curious how this data would break down by vaccine: are the skeptics hard liners against all vaccines or just Covid? Neither is great but one is significantly worse than the other.
Politico@politico.com · 4mo agoVaccine skepticism among Americans is widespread, a Politico Poll found. Nearly half of U.S. adults surveyed in our poll signaled they think the science on vaccines remains up for debate and that it’s damaging to require people to receive them. 🔗 politi.co/4cbCPOM
Every survey looking at librarian morale in higher ed is like “oh, in shambles you say?”
“In my view this stuff isn’t complicated. You say, ‘don’t set the cookie.’ They set the cookie. The regulators see a fox going into the henhouse and the fox says, ‘I’m just here to count the eggs, not to eat any chickens.’ And they take them at their word."
Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture.”
404media.co
Welcome to “world’s most predictable outcome.” One thing I’d like to point out is this was done with “standardized clinical vignettes” aka textbook cases meant to teach medical doctors. Imagine how much worse it would do with real patients.
Keezy Young🌼@keezyyoung.bsky.social · 4mo agotruly a useless technology
