"AI’s power must not be allowed to hollow out the very skills required to navigate an AI age successfully." After six months of writing and research, my white paper on AI and pedagogy is finally out! sagepub.com/explore-our-... Do share; do join the conversation.

Saw @tomchatfield.bsky.social last week, and he gave me a sneak peek at his forthcoming book ‘How To Think Clearly’, where he’d pointed to my #cognitivedebt coinage from earlier this year. So I have written a proper page laying out the thinking, examples etc… smithery.com/cognitive-de...

Cognitive Debt

“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts Newsletter #247, April 25th, 2025 I first wr…

smithery.com

I've spent the last six months writing and researching this white paper about why our greatest challenges are human, not technological. Do take a look. www.sagepub.com/explore-our-...

Missed our webinar on AI and academic excellence? Catch up on the discussion with Dr. Leo Lo & Dr. Tom Chatfield & discover how to turn AI into a collaborative tool for research while maintaining critical thinking & ethical standards. Watch now: ow.ly/5aYV50VgkTF @tomchatfield.bsky.social

Video from our 'Libraries and AI' panel is now online! www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsRk... Thanks @britishlibrary.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @timandraharkness.bsky.social, Maja Maricevic and Svein Arne #AIDebates

Libraries & AI - Opportunities or Threat?

YouTube video by British Library

youtube.com

mia ridge@miaout.bsky.social · 2y ago

I'm looking forward to an excellent panel at @britishlibrary.bsky.social 's #AIDebates on 'Libraries and AI' on Thursday, with @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @sveinarne.bsky.social and Svein Arne Brygfjeld thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com/event/librar...

A newsletter on the usefulness of hasty, heartfelt writing; plus some suitably speedy thoughts on AI, critical thinking and the future of literature. open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...

Thinking out loud onscreen

Harnessing the hasty and the heartfelt

open.substack.com

"If you think you might have something to contribute, don’t you have some kind of duty to move forward at 70%, instead of depriving us of your contribution thanks to your finicky and frankly rather self-indulgent insistence on perfection?" ckarchive.com/b/wvu2hghk5m...

The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent

@media only screen { .email * { word-break: break-word; } } @media screen and (max-width: 384px) { .mail-message-content { width: 414px !important; } } @media only screen and (m...

ckarchive.com

Perfection, of a kind.

First glimpses of Wise Animals in its paperback incarnation, out on 13th February. Please do consider picking one up! I'm very proud of this book. www.panmacmillan.com/authors/tom-...

I'm looking forward to an excellent panel at @britishlibrary.bsky.social 's #AIDebates on 'Libraries and AI' on Thursday, with @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @sveinarne.bsky.social and Svein Arne Brygfjeld thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com/event/librar...

Libraries and AI: Opportunity or threat? from See Tickets

Buy tickets for Libraries and AI: Opportunity or threat? at British Library from the official retailer, The British Library.

thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com

Given that AIs will in due course be trained upon all the papers currently being written about AI—including about ethics, deception and alignment, and how to test and explore such things—is there a genuine risk that today's scholarship will help improve tomorrow's automated manipulators?

Very much looking forward to this: do join us!

mia ridge@miaout.bsky.social · 2y ago

I'm looking forward to taking part in the British Library's #AIDebates on 'Libraries and AI' next week! https://thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com/event/libraries-and-ai-opportunity-or-threat-/british-library/3188447 (And a pre-FAQ - yes, it might be recorded; I don't think it's streamed)

there is so much hype around AI agents, but like most current AI, they spectacularly fail when put to actual real-world use www.answer.ai/posts/2025-0...

Crept into new days, Dodging old futures, sly looks From rickety dreams.

Stage Hamlet in a game of GTA and it’s all “⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ brilliant cross-fertilisation of genres, reimagining dramatic possibilities in the C21st” - but play GTA during a staging of Hamlet, and suddenly it’s “you have to leave now, Sir: you’re disturbing the performance…”

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2y ago

Grand Theft Hamlet review – in-game Shakespeare performance is brilliantly exciting

A moral milestone. My children are old enough to have learned the golden rule: do unto others whatever they'll let you get away with.

The notion that we may be glimpsing the nature and properties of a multiverse via quantum computation is rather beautiful blog.google/technology/r... the most fundamental informational properties of existence as we know it, shedding light on its unimagined other echoes

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

Our new quantum chip demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.

blog.google

Front-line reportage from the school Christmas fair's darker peripheries...

Coffee, to prevent that murmur, soon replies: "Lift doors opening. Going up."

NEW: I spoke to Gaia Vince about her book on the coming climate upheaval - and how cities and infrastructure will have to change. www.thereengineer.pro/p/we-have-to...

‘We have to adapt’ – Gaia Vince on cities, tech and climate migrants

The climate upheaval is already, arguably, underway.

thereengineer.pro

Morning tea brewing: A rope ladder dangled down The deep well of sleep.

@tomchatfield.bsky.social : "The UK’s creative industries generate over £124.6 billion annually not because they churn out content to order, but because they entail hundreds of thousands of people creating works that audiences love."

ALCS@alcs.co.uk · 2y ago

The results from our AI survey are in! Thank you to all 13k writers who took the time to share their thoughts - we've learned that you want choice, recognition and transparency. Get the full report at www.alcs.co.uk/ai/

Confirmation bias can sound so (laughably!) easy to avoid. And yet. To carefully ask what the evidence does and does not show, and how and why, is not only hard but can also be painful and thankless. So much simpler first to pick your side, then your story, then your evidence.

The season's sweet mulch Rots into a thousand lives. Hope, but not for you.

I'm very much looking forward to discussing Wise Animals with the great Adam Rutherford this Saturday afternoon in Hay. If you're there, do come! www.hayfestival.com/p-22707-tom-...

Tom Chatfield talks to Adam Rutherford - Hay Festival

A challenge to re-evaluate our thoughts on humanity’s entanglement with technology.

hayfestival.com

“… The promise of ‘human-in-the-loop’ approaches sits awkwardly alongside AI’s central selling point: scalability.” @felixsimon.bsky.social reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/neither... I would add: Sometimes it is quicker to write from scratch than it is to fact check AI output.

Neither humans-in-the-loop nor transparency labels will save the news media when it comes to AI

“The notion of a human needing to intervene in every decision undercuts the idea of speeding up various tasks,” argues our researcher Felix M. Simon.

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk

Easy to overlook the simple fact that people are above all interested in other people and even the choicest AI-generated content won't sustain a platform of engaged, curious humans. In the short term, people are easily duped. In the long term they get wise (and bored, and angry).

Miles slip past my feet Like a younger life lived well. There, almost in sight!

A sudden, sad thought that we may end up looking at today's LLMs like this if, rather than the mad/flaky/amazing business of chatting to them to try to work out what on earth they can (and can't) do we end up with endless streams of templates and productivity-enhancing tools doing pseudo work for us

ICYMI, an extract from Wise Animals, which came out in Feb and explores our co-evolution with technology. "To love something is to be obliged to worry about its history, purposes and imperfections; to want it to be better; to say no as well as yes to its offerings." open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...