This is 💯 not true. It is never a choice between ‘taking big tech’s money and doing nothing’. A stronger moral imperative is NOT to take the money and the strings attached to it - particularly if you do not and cannot yet understand the implications

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4h ago

“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.”

I’m telling you this as a political scientist. The person who is electable is the one who is elected. This can and does change over time. Any and all speculation about “electability” is either puffery or anxiety and is often both.

Julia Azari@juliaazari.bsky.social · 13h ago

One way to be safe is to never write an electability take

Trying out the features in Claude for education. Join me as I see how it "helps" me write a research paper. My chosen topic: "AI and education". /1

We're experiencing loneliness epidemic. Could AI chatbots help solve that problem? If you would have asked me up until recently I would say "probably!". But we don't know for sure. To answer this question, researchers in France recently ran a very cool experiment...

Oh hey Boston folks, @bostonglobe.com says my book event tomorrow @harvardbookstore.bsky.social will be one of the best of the week

The best local book events, Aug. 2-Aug. 8 - The Boston Globe

All events are free and in-person unless otherwise noted.

bostonglobe.com

Mark has kindly invited me to do this interview. How I got into metascience, how my path diverged from the mainstream and more if you're interested. I enjoyed thinking about his questions. Hope you enjoy reading!

Mark Rubin@markrubin.bsky.social · 2d ago

Q&A with @devezer.bsky.social about metascience, open science, and her work in this area.

I love Talarico and hope he wins. But he’s already raised $70M On the flipside, control of critical state legislatures will come down to seats where candidates raise 0.1% of that. I’ve researched the highest leverage swing district candidates you should donate to secure.actblue.com/donate/donat...

Donate to the candidates on the front lines of the fight against MAGA gerrymandering

These are anti-MAGA state candidates in *extremely* close races

secure.actblue.com

Listen to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social when she writes that AI is "the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation” - and then teach about and against the technologies with the help of the books she cites:

Opinion | Want to Fight Back Against Big Tech? Start Here.

A.I. is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.

nytimes.com

Brilliant piece from @hannahforsyth.bsky.social . Of course, nobody or almost nobody reads academic “outputs”. Their function is to get jobs, secure promotion, avoid redundancy, get better scores on dubious metrics. Which makes AI almost the perfect tool for the unscrupulous professor.

If you can't be bothered writing it, I can't be bothered reading it.

The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market.

substack.com

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

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/🧵

My boiling hot take on this is that, if tech companies are going to fund this kind of research (looking at Schmidt too), then the money needs to be given *no strings* to an independent arm's length research body, pooled with other funding, and treated as a donation not as direct funding.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 5d ago

Anthropic AI research fund offers $5m - $30m for social science research on themes of AI impact on workers; transition initiatives; income support; building worker stakes; and wider evidence on public investments. Total fund of $200m available www.anthropic.com/news/economi...

If you know a manager who actually wants to prioritize reliable, accurate AI, tell them to check out our book Auditing AI. And if they refuse to test their systems, our book is a helpful guide to journalists, citizens, and public servants seeking accountability. auditingai.cc

Home - Auditing AI -- The Book

How tech companies, journalists, and policymakers can prevent AI decision-making from going wrong. How tech companies, journalists, and policymakers can

auditingai.cc

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3d ago

“The AI assistant, which Kinney Drugs named Burt, after its founder, was built by a third-party AI pharmaceutical company, Synerio. In the pharmacy’s terms, Kinney Drugs states that ‘Burt may not be accurate, complete or up-to-date and may be misleading or contain errors and omissions.’”

Great piece on what “co-” (copilot, co-author, etc) does for situating the relationship to LLMs. One thing to add: “co-“ allows just enough of the user to absorb accountability for what the model does wrong or badly, while asserting nonetheless that the model is just as capable as a person.

Brigitte Nerlich@bnerlich.bsky.social · 4d ago

I wrote this before the current AI going rogue kerfuffle but it relates to it - deals with the seductive prefix co- in AI speak: theconversation.com/why-the-ai-i... #AI #AIMetaphorObservatory #metaphor

Nature did a nice, accessible write up of a recent piece I wrote with @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and @carlbergstrom.com. Also, check out Carl's more detailed thread (with link to the paper in both). "Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well'" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts

Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.

nature.com

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

Summer should be like this 🎨 Léa Chaillaud

I recommend this article about AI reasoning, where the author lets us in on his struggles w/ AI cognitive dissonance. Plus some priceless quotes from @rao2z.bsky.social. (My recommendation has *nothing* to do with the fact that I'm quoted in it too 😇) www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-reason...

Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? | Quanta Magazine

The idea that artificial intelligence can “reason” is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled.

quantamagazine.org

I wrote about science funding, science reform, and anti-science agendas. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/s...

science funding and the cherry picking problem

Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…

scatter.wordpress.com

Sharing my research and recs for Substack alternatives! I see a lot of rants about Substack but not actual breakdowns of good, tested alternatives. Plus the alternatives are great, and are not trying to nag you into joining their social network. blog.byjasonli.com/finding-a-bu...

Finding a budget-conscious Substack alternative (what I'm using in 2026)

A guide to my favorite newsletter platforms in 2026, both paid and free.

blog.byjasonli.com

“Good science requires a ‘chain of custody of why’…We must be able to challenge and potentially falsify every decision point so that when something inevitably goes wrong, we can try to figure out where we went wrong. Protein-structure models [such as AlphaFold] don’t allow for this.”

John Trant@trantteam.bsky.social · last mo.

New sanctioned (t)rant about AI just dropped. On the limits of Alphafold and my worries about the disaster its use will cause for the literature and early-stage academic drug discovery. Look, they commissioned it. And by commissioned I don't mean I got paid, just invited. Awesome process btw.

I believe this 100%. The moral injury of the period, the grief from not just the too and so many deaths but the kinds of lives we had before, the laying bare of disposability, the non covid deaths it sped, the institutional strain, the collective fear and distrust, the prioritization of work anyway

The Fig Economy@figgityfigs.bsky.social · 7d ago

One of my Crank Theories of Everything, at least of Everything in the Recent Past, is that we are dealing (badly) with COVID trauma we’d mostly prefer to pretend never happened.

Will they be open to research that suggests the impact of AI is terrible? I wonder whether they are interested in real findings or only in research that supports their business model. Which is exactly why we need public funding agencies to underwrite real research.

Our relationship to visual evidence is being profoundly disrupted by GenAI tools, which will impact how we know, what we can know, and what we think can be known about the world. A massive epistemological shift is upon us.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 5d ago

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 5d ago

Anthropic AI research fund offers $5m - $30m for social science research on themes of AI impact on workers; transition initiatives; income support; building worker stakes; and wider evidence on public investments. Total fund of $200m available www.anthropic.com/news/economi...

This is wildly irresponsible of Google - allowing people to create AI generated satellite images. Satellite imagery has always been such a useful and reliable source because it came from reliable sources, but now Google is messing with it at source. www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-pla...

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

digitaldigging.org

"Students anted to know what their classmates thought rather than what a large language model produced; they wanted to wrestle with difficult readings+complex ideas. They didn’t want to outsource any of this effort to gen AI. They wanted to do the work.” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...

Students as Conscientious Objectors to Gen AI (opinion)

We should listen to them—and treat their objections with respect.

insidehighered.com

Sharing again today since the discourse is about AI companies guillotining books (the horror!). Read the first article to find the real villains...

Maria Antoniak@mariaa.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I curated some readings for class on "data tensions" and the list felt worth sharing. Come on a tour of datasets, books, the web, and AI with me... We'll start with this piece on the Google Books project: the hopes, dreams, disasters, and aftermath of building a public library on the internet. 1/n

This is crucially important.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 6d ago

New in PN: The new "science golden age" looks suspiciously like a grift "It’s impossible not to wonder whether part of Trump’s loathing for universities is that there's no way for him to corrupt the process and make money off it in the same way he can by giving billions to Silicon Valley types."

99% of the time, when someone accuses you of selective outrage, it’s a way of politically demobilizing you and shutting you up “Why are you angry about data centers instead of fast fashion” isn’t about making you care about fast fashion. It’s about shutting you up about data centers And visa versa