Super intriguing that my university's head of tech today asked AI users to use Qwen running on institutional infrastructure instead of commercial LLMs ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that "incur token based charges" in order to "significantly save money." US big tech LLMs getting too pricy for HE now?

“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”

Teachers need help with AI. A union is offering training – with $23m in funding from big tech

Partnership between American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest labor unions in the US, and AI firms has stirred controversy

theguardian.com

We went on a shopping trip to Teachers Pay Teachers and looked for classroom materials that appear to have been generated by AI. Here are the strange resources we found.

Education’s version of Etsy may have an AI slop problem

We went on a shopping trip to Teachers Pay Teachers and looked for classroom materials that appear to have been generated by AI. Here are the strange resources we found.

bit.ly

Sodding Wiley now float an offer of an 'AI companion' to give commentary over journal articles you're trying to read. In order to get rid of it, you have to click, maximising the fucking thing, & then dismiss it. They make their website & published research worse to push AI garbage, arghh.

I wonder if students today would be less likely to lean on AI for writing assignments if schools had made sure they could touch-type (at least 60wpm) before having them submit all their assignments online. 1/🧵

Our classes are creating publications that we'll share publicly, and we're exploring layers of GenAI protection: hosting everything behind a web AI firewall, using CAPTCHA + Glaze, managing email requests (rather than posting openly). I RESENT the Labor of Avoidance these assholes have necessitated.

I never thought that I would have to write this piece about my university. But after weeks of demonstrating privately to senior managers that their case is based on a false prospectus, that their data are inaccurate and their claims misleading, there was little choice. substack.com/@lucasamin/n...

Inside Britain's university crisis

As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter

substack.com

Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... 11/

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

hermit-tech.com

"We found that at least 150 institutions of higher ed... are using Flock’s surveillance network.. many campus police departments have facilitated immigration related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so" by @torinmonahan.bsky.social

Flock on campus: university police as appendages of a national policing apparatus

Dangerous new forms of networked surveillance are gaining traction with police departments across the United States. One popular example is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR)...

doi.org

A couple years ago I wrote about the history of surveillance on campus:

Surveillance Space

Words in Space is the work of Shannon Mattern.

wordsinspace.net

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2w ago

“MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive.”

Why are academics using GenAI to write articles, grade assignments, compose emails and a lot of other tasks that they would/should otherwise be doing themselves? A brief summary of our anonymous survey of over 200 academics' 'grey uses' of GenAI ... researchwhisperer.org/2026/07/21/a...

Academic (mis)uses of GenAI

This second post by Neil Selwyn and his collaborators shares some of the preliminary results from their research survey, which was discussed in an RW post earlier this year ‘Academics’ …

researchwhisperer.org

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

Just out! My introduction to a new special issue in @sciasculture.bsky.social on "Tech Oligarchy" - go check it out and the papers in the special issue (under "Latest" articles) #techoligarchy #assetization #techbro #bigtech www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Tech oligarchy

Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2026)

tandfonline.com

Tech billionaires like to claim their work is inspired by science fiction, but in truth, they are using its ‘chrome-plated aesthetic’ as a fig leaf to further what the social theorist Ali Rıza Taşkale labels ‘reactionary futurism’

Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem | Aeon Essays

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future

buff.ly

Been thinking a lot about the students in this class (presumably, but not certainly) using AI on a take-home midterm and then bombing the in-class final. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... But I think the real story here is not *that* students use AI, it's (part of) *why* students use AI. 🧵

Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat

Brown University leaders’ response to the alleged cheating incident has been “meek,” the professor said.

insidehighered.com

Tracks. 5 years ago our little education technology journal got 300 submissions in a year. Today we passed 900 in 6 months. It's not all LLMs of course, but that is an infuriating part of the problem...

Samuel Moore@samuelmoore.org · last mo.

I've heard in the past few days from three journals in different fields that submissions have increased 40-50% in the past few years. Not great...

Finishing my academic year on this tiny high - got a short new open access chapter out about my teaching with "EdTech Sci-Fi". The student response to this has been great - more imaginative, critical and creative than I ever really anticipated! 🤩 www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de...

Research measuring the effects of AI in education has a major quality control problem that should disqualify most of it from being considered in policy discussions or applied in teaching practice. Quick new post from me codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/t...

The problem with evidence production on AI in education

Photo by Camille Villanueva on Unsplash The research field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) has a long history of investigating the effects of AI on learning and other educational out…

codeactsineducation.wordpress.com

Remember that meta-study of ChatGPT effects on learning that got retracted by SpringerNature recently? Here's a new paper showing why it and others like it can't be trusted due to serious issues with the underlying literature. Bluntly put, they're meta-reviews of junk science doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

"I feel like AI defeats the purpose of this class." I went into this past school year thinking that it might finally be the year where I had no choice but to begin integrating AI into our classroom as a tool and skill. Walking out of this year? Talking with students? I realized I was wrong.

A completely inevitable effect of AI in academia is that when you submit manuscripts soon you'll be subjected to an absolute battery of AI-driven automated screening to check if you used AI. I anticipate many irate emails from angry authors to editors will follow.

Academic Publishing News@acadpubnews.bsky.social · 2mo ago

MDPI nudges research integrity checks to AI www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

The Black Mirror Writers Room teaching exercise has some updates! More "Light Mirror" emphasis, additional options for scaffolding with some more explicit prompts (including for encouraging more grounding and solutions-oriented thinking) and (actual) Black Mirror examples. bit.ly/blackmirrorw...

The Black Mirror Writers' Room: A Speculative Ethics Teaching Exercise

bit.ly/blackmirrorwritersroom

bit.ly

School data governance is a mess and big tech corps extract obscene amounts of student data through edtech platforms. But things could be better! Marie Utterberg Modén, @rensfeldt.bsky.social, @thomashillman.bsky.social, and I explain what better could mean. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Beyond data extraction: alternative models for the governance of educational data

This paper discusses data governance models for educational platforms that could better protect students’ and teachers’ privacy and reduce data management burdens for teachers and administrators. W...

tandfonline.com

"Instead, she urged educators to accept that most future writing would be produced in a partnership between artificial intelligence and human discernment." Grammarly head of education in article about how AI companies are producing both cheating detectors and cheating tools.

How New A.I. Apps Are Making Student Cheating Undetectable

nytimes.com

"an audit by Lighthouse Reports of public data on the government’s chosen AI provider shows that its tech misclassified more than a third of 16-year-olds as adults and, in some tests, was shown to give the wrong assessment in 70 per cent of cases" www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Home Office knew AI age checks for migrants were flawed — but rolled it out anyway

Exclusive: Government advisors describe the tool as ‘hideously flawed’ amid concern facial age estimation has ‘baked-in racial bias’ — and can wrongly identify a 14-year-old as an adult

independent.co.uk

At 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/

Since the launch of ChatGPT monthly submissions to arXiv have almost doubled to 30k & even if the rejection rate has also doubled since 2023, academia is looking at a fundamental crisis of dealing with AI-fueled texts...

The Economist@economist.com · 2mo ago

With just one prompt, anyone can ask AI to write an article (or create a doctored image of himself as Jesus). It has fuelled concerns of “AI slop”. But is it a tidal wave or a trickle? These five charts help explain the changes

impossible to see this coming www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

One of the things I research is the cooperation of cultural institutions like museums in pitching tech products--specifically AI--to the public. This is advertising for the capacity of AI to educate and thus to reshape education itself as a project better left to private tech companies. 1/n

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

“The installation, unveiled in February 2024, allows guests to ask Douglass questions through an iPad. Using a closed database of Douglass’s autobiographies and speeches, the artificial intelligence generates responses based solely on Douglass’s recorded words.”