You know what I really wish re: my university's ChatGPT contract? That it had token limits or something. I think a useful lesson would be to have to decide what LLM uses are "worth it" in order to fit into a limited amount. Trying to think of a way to simulate this in my AI & Society course.

If you are understandably bummed that you can't see The Odyssey "as Nolan intended" because you don't live anywhere near one of the 41 70mm IMAX in the world, rest assured that living near one also doesn't mean that you can see it haha. www.denverpost.com/2026/07/27/c...

Denver’s only 70mm IMAX projector breaks down again, stranding ‘Odyssey’ viewers

It has become something of an odyssey for Denverites who want to see “The Odyssey” in its 70mm, IMAX-scale format.

denverpost.com

Today I spent an hour going through all of my email for the month of July, and hit “reply” on anything lingering that I needed to reply to or required action. I now have 48 emails sitting in my drafts. 😭 Everyone in my inbox: I am SO sorry. I am trying, I really am…

Last week I gave the closing keynote at the CRA Annual Summit, and my my talk was "the case for ethics at the core of computing as a discipline." Anyway, the day before the conference started this was in the NYT crossword puzzle! Awesome to have the universe on my side!

Conversation with my 73 year old dad: Dad: you know I've been using that 'Chat GTP' a lot lately, I don't even use google or bing anymore Me: as a search engine? Dad: yeah, you can ask anything and get the answer right away without having to click anything! Me: but you know it can be wrong?

A common Q I get on social media is: how do I get into tech/AI ethics as a field/for a job? I would love some help with this! What is some helpful advice here that (a) is not about academia or even research really; and (b) doesn't involve getting a PhD?

I might have been the lead example in the New York Times, but in the Denver Post I get to be the official face of very stupid NSF grant terminations! www.denverpost.com/2026/07/19/c...

Colorado academics worry about future of scientific progress amid fallout from Trump’s research cuts

More than $375 million in federal grants to Colorado schools have been terminated and reinstated — or axed altogether.

denverpost.com

Not going to pile onto that editor more, but I’m legitimately confused: When people say they use ChatGPT as a search engine do they really also mean for simple things like typing in the title of an article to retrieve a URL? I’m genuinely curious why?

So I just got probably my fifth email this year from another AI startup focused on citation verification (wanting me to do ads for them). This time as I was looking at their website (tagline: "Write your paper with 100% correct references") I thought... wait, why do we actually want this? 🧵

Depressing that ACM is probably correct about this: "AI-assisted literature reviews ... are already changing research workflows. Publishers absent from AI ecosystems risk becoming repositories of record rather than sources of influence." cacm.acm.org/opinion/now-...

If you're attending the CSCW conference this Fall in Salt Lake City: I am co-organizing a workshop on public scholarship! The application process is very lightweight (just a form, no papers required). Please share with folks interested in this topic! Deadline 8/15. sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...

CSCW Public Scholarship 2026

🎶 Wake up in the morning gotta check that feed Like that study, share that blog, we gotta get up to speed Before we leave, post a vid critiquing the AI stack ‘Cause CSCW researchers, we aint holding ...

sites.google.com

If anyone would like to write a dissertation about my social media comments I have some theories. But the funniest phenomenon right now is the number of men who are leaving comments I’m 90% sure were written by an LLM, I guess… to sound smart? Because they had no thoughts of their own?

Just have to share that I've had a video go slightly viral, and three different people have commented to compliment the placement of Enshittification on my shelf, which I find particularly impressive since he text is mirrored because I film with my front camera. :) /cc @doctorow.pluralistic.net

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

Basically I only get recognized from social media at CS conferences. Also once in a Barnes & Noble four years ago, and twice on my own campus. But it turns out that the karaoke DJ at a local dive bar recognized me, and told everyone to follow me to learn about AI just before I sang Def Leppard.

So excited to be working on this project with Dr. Fiesler, if you’re interested in science fiction and AI futures, we’d love your participation!

Dr. Casey Fiesler@cfiesler.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ever seen a news story about AI and thought “this could be an episode of Black Mirror”? We're running a research study where we ask people to imagine generative AI futures and pitch their own science fiction story. More detail at the link and please share! www.internetruleslab.com/black-mirror...

The ACM GROUP conference (social computing, HCI, CSCW, sociotechnical studies, etc.) has a poster deadline coming up on August 5! This is a GREAT place to present a poster, especially as a student, because the conference is small and friendly. :) group.acm.org/conferences/...

I am actually about to attend my FIRST FAccT conference, despite having published multiple papers there already. So for the rest of the crowd excited about discussing fairness, accountability, and transparency in Montreal this week... please say hi! (I am easy to spot, it's the glasses.) Also...

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

Well I guess it's nice that the bots are supportive of my Black Mirror + generative AI research study...

So today I stumbled onto a minor publication with a fabricated citation with my name on it. :-\ Opinions on whether I should do anything here? I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the idea, but wonder if at the very least I should email the author.

I think that if I were a law professor my exams would be entirely based on controversies sourced from social media. Contract Law currently has the gift of the Bricks & Minifig situation, and for Trademarks recently, in addition to Pattie Gonia vs Patagonia, we've also got "hot girls read"(tm).

Ran into another example of the Google AI Overview misinterpreting a search term as a command. :) This is a conference acronym that I saw on a CV and didn't know what it was!

In the "you can't make this up" category of LLM interactions... TL;DR Google Gemini claims that LLMs "often give themselves a 95%+ confidence score even when they are hallucinating" - which was itself a "hallucinated" claim - then later assigns itself 0.95 confidence in that hallucinated claim. 🧵

Ever seen a news story about AI and thought “this could be an episode of Black Mirror”? We're running a research study where we ask people to imagine generative AI futures and pitch their own science fiction story. More detail at the link and please share! www.internetruleslab.com/black-mirror...

Black Mirror Survey Study — Internet Rules Lab

We're recruiting for a survey where you pitch your own Black Mirror episode about the future of generative AI!

internetruleslab.com

hey so if anyone wants to do the "for science!" thing and pilot/give me feedback on a (long - because I would love feedback on where to shorten) survey about AI that also involves creating science fiction... reply and I will DM you :)

A big shout-out to Michael Correll (is he on Bluesky...?) for this blog post which is ::chef's kiss:: as a bridge to HCI from my work on ethics education in the context of "hey maybe let's re-think what it means to be good at computer science." mcorrell.medium.com/the-othering...

A side effect of a new department (founded 2015) is that we have very very few alumni donations. And I sometimes get the (very kind) question "how can I support you since you don't get paid for teaching random internet people about AI ethics?" Support my students instead :) bit.ly/cu-info-fund

Double Your Impact: Information Science Student Opportunity Fund

Support CU Boulder Info Science students — every dollar matched through June 30! 🎓

bit.ly

Yesterday I posted a video based on this thread, woke up to 100k views or so and hundreds and hundreds of comments. Scrolling through them, the amount of “well, actually…” and “you’re wrong” and “sounds like a skill issue” is absolutely wild.

Dr. Casey Fiesler@cfiesler.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A common comment on my videos about LLM "hallucinations" is that this isn't as much of a problem because LLMs "cite their sources" now. This is a category error. Citing a source implies it was consulted. LLMs do not consult, even with RAG. A citation might be *included* but it's not *consulted*.

I've been annoyed by this for many years now, and even inquired about it when I was chairing an ACM conference and putting together the registration site and was told it can't be changed. WHY DOES THIS SAY OPT IN AND NOT OPT OUT