Audrey Watters
@audreywatters.bsky.social
I’m just here so I won’t get fined — Marshawn Lynch https://t.ajrkmx1.com/331727/6224/0?po=6533&aff_sub5=SF_006OG000004lmDN
Chatbots (*the* interface for LLMs) are more like "chit" -- a voucher, an obligation, an IOU, a bind -- than "chat" 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/chit-chat/
Chit Chat
Chit: an official note, sometimes a voucher or an IOU; a slip of paper that grants permission Chat: an informal conversation; a friendly talk Chit-chat: "A reduplication with vowel variation of chat...
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The purpose of education, if there is "education" under techno-fascism/Christian Nationalism, is compliance and control. "AI" serves this perfectly. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/how-do-you-w...
How Do You Want to Be Remembered?
"The best way to honor Charlie’s memory," California Governor Gavin Newsom said, "is to continue his work." And so we've seen in the last week: the targeted harassment of those who've spoken out about...
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Today's bird is the screaming piha. Just a wee little thing, but one of the loudest birds in the world. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/voices-carry...
Voices Carry
I'm truly at a loss of what to say today. (Last week. It lingers, doesn't it.) So (I guess) let me just repeat a point I've made repeatedly: one of the saddest rationales for using "AI" is for "brain...
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Sowing and reaping etc 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-watch-li...
The Watch List
In a children's literature class at Texas A&M University this summer, a student interrupted the professor as she began to recap some of the previously covered material, "remarks on gender and sexualit...
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Someone asked me to listen to the latest Hard Fork episode on AI in schools, and I tried. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/booster-shot...
The Booster Shot
A couple of weeks ago, Ed Zitron published one of his epic rants -- the kind that, as he warned newsletter readers, is probably better read on the web than via email: it’s 16,000 words long; so long t...
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Brood parasitism is not a perfect metaphor, by any means, for AI, for the offloading of ed-tech development onto teachers and students, for the vampiric practices of VCs ... but it's the bird I went with to head this week's news round-up... 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/brood-parasi...
Brood Parasites
Humans have always invested great meaning in birds. No surprise, what with the feathers, the flight. Each week, when I look at all the stories that've been told about education and technology and try ...
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Talk of "inevitability" is a thought-terminating cliche, as Robert Jay Lifton called it -- language associated with brainwashing and cults, with shutting down criticism and agency 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/thought-term...
Thought-Terminating Clichés
Last week, Max Read asked "Is the 'AI' 'bubble' 'bursting'?" – those scare-quotes strategically deployed to encourage readers to question what we mean when we talk about "AI" or "bubbles," when we pre...
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How did public education in the US end? "Gradually, then suddenly." 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/i-know-what-...
I Know What You Did Last Summer
If you were to tell the story of the end of public education in the US, you wouldn't begin with the Trump Administration's bluster about closing the Department of Education. You wouldn't begin with Tr...
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Addressing "AI" (and the technofascism accompanying it) is going to take more than a little blurb on the syllabus this fall 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/back-to-scho...
Back to School Talk (Obligatory)
[Depending on your geographic location] It's almost/already back-to-school season, which always means a flurry of aspirational, inspirational stories (and their opposite) about ed-tech gadgetry, along...
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AI is automating the mistrust between faculty and students 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/education-as...
Education as Prediction Market
In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had co...
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Americans love a hoax. Maybe it's culture. Maybe it's capitalism. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/llm-as-mlm/?...
LLM as MLM
No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped. It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion ...
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We are dismantling our shared future – quite explicitly – by embracing the ideology and practice of the tech industry, one that promises radically individualized optimization but that is predicated on prediction, prescription, and compliance. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/prescriptive...
Prescriptive Practices
Math teacher Michael Pershan wrote an excellent newsletter this week, and I'd like to start there rather than with the ubiquitous stories about the underwhelming roll-out of OpenAI's latest GPT. Mich...
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Our society has prioritized productivity and efficiency over learning for a century now, so when Altman et al say AI is a "PhD in your pocket," they don't mean "smarter" as much as "cheaper" and "faster" 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/education-an...
Education and the New Cult of Efficiency
Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business g...
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Education and ed-tech have always been bound up in arguments about national security 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ballistic-mi...
Ballistic Misses
Simon Ramo published his essay "A New Technique in Education" in 1957 in Engineering and Science, a journal published by Caltech to showcase the institution's research. "A noted scientist proposes som...
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We have had a century of “big data,” seventy years of “AI,” decades and decades of Bill Gates' bullshit and “computers in the classroom.” It's batshit to believe that this time this time, the ed-tech is going to be good 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/degenerate-a...
Degenerate: Against Education at Scale
Ed-Tech Criticism. AI Refusal.
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When the "AI" boosters reduce the Socratic method to a system prompt: "Aim for a good back-and-forth." 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-alpha-be...
The Alpha Bet
Sometimes you have to repeat yourself. Sometimes you didn't say things clearly the first time. Sometimes your intended audience didn't hear you or they didn't listen. Sometimes there were louder voice...
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"AI" promises friendship without risk of conflict; it promises relationships without the burden of reciprocity; it promises frictionlessness in all things 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/push-button-...
Push-Button Promises and (Not) Doing Hard Things
Although I linked to it in Friday's newsletter and even embedded the Instagram clip, I have not been able to stop thinking about Ocean Vuong's remarks on how social media has shaping students' thought...
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The ed-tech vision: Everything and everyone is a machine to optimize and control. Everything and everyone is a market to be exploited. Teachers and students are utterly, utterly expendable 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-prime-di...
The Prime Directive
Over a decade ago, at the height of the MOOC madness, many people crowed excitedly about "the end of college" – not because the various technologies they believed would enable this were any good (by "...
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"AI" is designed to make us feel like we need it, feel like we're bigger better faster stronger cleaner smoother jazz hands... 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/how-does-it-...
How Does It Feel?
Abetted by technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its hegemony over the Earth by annexing the core of human desires – Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics Last week, METR released th...
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Imagine a future without "productivity software" -- no, not because "AI" but because, you know, liberation 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-agents-o...
The Agents of Unproductivity
"Could AI slow science?" Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan ask, and proceed to poke a sizable hole in one of the major claims about "AI" – about its application in healthcare, in education, and beyon...
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This is about Johnson & Johnson and corporate malfeasance, and health. And, of course, it's about education technology, corporate malfeasance, and health 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/bad-company/...
Bad Company
For decades, Johnson & Johnson was one of the most trusted brands in the world. The maker of bandaids and baby shampoo, its name was associated with care for our health and our bodies and, more import...
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Ed-tech is sponsored content 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/into-the-bre...
Into the Breach
There's been plenty of ink spilled in the last week in response to The New York Times's story on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college application to Columbia University, in which he ti...
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On "selective moral disengagement," and the "Gernsback Continuum" in ed-tech (but above the fold, for free subscribers, some thoughts on reading books vs "brainstorming" with the bullshit machine) 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/read-receipt...
Read Receipt
One of the popular uses of "AI" that I truly do not understand involves "brainstorming" – and okay, I admit, I truly do not understanding using "AI" at all with what we know about its politically, psy...
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It's an all-out war on children 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-raw-and-...
The Raw and the Cooked
You know how last week I had some good news? Yeah, well... that was nice, wasn't it. Because this week – Happy Fourth of July! LOLSOB – everything isn't just bad, it's dire. Trump's "Big Beautiful Bi...
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You might think "AI" offers a meaningful vision of a better world, but damn, "AI" is some Andrew Cuomo level shit: just this empty but entitled presumption that we will all keep going along with the exploitation. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/a-better-wor...
A Better World is Possible
Greetings from Maine where Kin, Poppy, and I are visiting family for a few days. As such – as summer – today's missive is a little shorter than usual. And, quite unlike recent emails, today's newslet...
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"Feedback" -- a metaphor of engineering -- is how we assess machines, how we assess one another, how we assess ourselves. How does this metaphor shape how we think about thinking? About our relationships to one another? 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-machiner...
The Machinery of Feedback
Several weeks ago, a commenter suggested the word "howlround" to describe the dangerous tendency of LLMs to "glaze" their users – to provide responses that are self-reinforcing in both substance and s...
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Honestly I don't care whether "AI" works, whether it "reasons." I care that it harms 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/war-pigs/?re...
War Pigs
While I was pleased to see millions of Americans turn out for last weekend's protests, I have to say I've spent this week more depressed and more worried than ever about the road ahead. Perhaps it was...
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On AI as a symptom and a cause of grief and trauma -- pandemic related and otherwise 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/grief-and-tr...
Grief and Trauma and "AI"
I recently finished reading Geraldine Brooks's memoir Memorial Days, about the sudden death of her husband, author and journalist Tony Horwitz. It was fine, I thought; others have given the book much ...
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There is no education in the "AI" eschatology -- but a future where the planet is covered in data centers and surveillance cameras. We have to resist. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/bird-of-pray...
Bird of Pray
"This is not right. This is not right." @justsayuhatebasketball I know this is a basketball page but I can’t think about hoops 🏀 right now. 🚨PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT🚨 PROTECT YOURSELVES AND YOUR ...
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I've noticed a lot of talk of "shaming" lately -- finger-wagging about shaming, in particular -- which strikes me as politically regressive 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/no-shame/?re...
No Shame
There was a time when Elon Musk was positioned as some sort of tech genius, appearing in the second Iron Man movie with a cameo that implied that he was some sort of a real-world Tony Stark. There wer...
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