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Nicole Hennig

@nic221.bsky.social

E-learning dev & AI educator at U of Arizona Libraries. Former head of UX at MIT Libraries. Winner of MIT Excellence Award. nicolehennig.com. Digital nomad from 2013-17, locationflexiblelife.com. - vegetarian - car-free - universal basic income: yes

4696 Posts5208 Follower 407 Folgt

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 16h ago

Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users www.latent.space/p/unpacking-ch… #AI #ChatGPTWork (lots of details)

When Work folds into Chat later this year, its design choices will become the default for a billion people. Before then, OpenAl has to resolve a few tensions that kept surfacing as I used it:
1. Does the cloud computer become the user's primary AI computer?
And how can syncing between it and the local machine feel seamless?
2. Do Work agents get more
OpenClaw-like sovereignty over that computer? Does ChatGPT keep the opinionated role it plays in continuity, or is there a middle ground?
3. How does Work come to feel as familiar to users as Chat? And in the meantime, how does OpenAI teach Chat users, from within the product and outside it, what Work is for and how to get the most out of it?
None of this should detract from the fact that Work is an impressive, ambitious, yet underrated launch. It consolidates years of scattered products and experiments into one increasingly cohesive whole. And it's close to the ChatGPT OpenAI would build if it were starting from scratch with today's agent

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 17h ago

Is AI Making Hank Green Lazy? petercoffin.substack.com/p/is-ai-making… #AI #critics

The criticism I find garbage is the claim that using Al is inherently lazy, because everyone making that argument already, by their own standards, is "lazily outsourcing parts of their thinking."
But I don't think that is lazy!
Google has always been an external information delivery system.
Wikipedia has always allowed people to find information they did not previously know. Every educational YouTube channel functions as a way for viewers to acquire ideas they later repeat in conversations. Nobody considers it intellectually dishonest to learn something from Hank Green and explain it to a friend.
That's just called learning.

If you ask an Al to help you locate information, then (as you should do with any and all media for your own sake) verify what it tells you, read the underlying sources, and integrate those ideas into your own understanding, you are not
"outsourcing your thinking. "You are outsourcing part of the search process, and those are not the same thing; the actual thinking is still yours!

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 17h ago

Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them www.understandingai.org/p/mathematicia… #AI #math #mathematicians

How do mathematicians feel about this? I spoke with over 20
mathematicians in Philadelphia, ranging from prominent professors such as Tsimerman to incoming
graduate students.
To my surprise, many were optimistic about the impact of AI on their own work, at least in the near future. A fair number said that AI systems had been helpful in their own research — albeit in limited ways — and seemed to expect that AI systems would continue to complement human talent rather than replace it.

And even those who thought AI systems might eventually get better than humans at all mathematical tasks bristled at the notion that math would then be "solved." They argued that mathematics has a diverse array of goals and values, only some of which are about solving open problems. While AI can change which values humans should pursue, they argued, it does not change why humans might want to do math in the first place.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 20h ago

Practical AI for Library Workers: From Concerns to Solutions (my new online course begins October 13 for 6 weeks) nicolehennig.com/courses/ #AI #courses #libraries

Practical Al for Library Workers: From Concerns to Solutions
October 13 - November 23, 2026

New coursel
Al is becoming integrated into many of the tools we use, but how we use it and what we choose to use it for is not inevitable. Library workers can help shape the direction society takes with these technologies.
Rather than treating Al as either a miracle or a menace, we'll take a balanced, hopeful, and hands-on approach. We'll take inspiration from solutions journalism, an approach that examines how people, communities, and institutions respond to problems and investigates which responses are making meaningful differences.
We'll go beyond chatbots to explore emerging forms of Al, including vibe-coding, agentic Al, and other ways Al can help people work with information. You'll leave with practical ideas, adaptable activities, and inspiration for using Al in ways that strengthen human judgment, creativity, accessibility, and learning.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · yesterday

EFF Joins 18 Civil Rights Organizations Calling on Governor Hochul to Reject the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026… #journalism #crawlers #privacy

Text Shot: As we’ve previously explained, so-called “stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits the public, including investigative reporting, academic research, cybersecurity protection, and EFF’s own Privacy Badger.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · yesterday

The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models | Claude by Anthropic claude.com/blog/the-new-r… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: Additionally, Claude Code now has many more tools. Claude used to rely on CLAUDE.md as a source of memory, information, and guidance. Now we have memory, artifacts, and skills, which Claude can use to create new ways of loading and sharing context across sessions.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · yesterday

Benedict’s Newsletter — Benedict Evans www.ben-evans.com/newsletter (screenshot from the free edition) #AI #hacking #agents #Anthropic #OpenAI

More hacking news
Following OpenAI's big hacking
announcement last week, where its models broke into two other companies, this week Anthropic said it had gone through its own logs and found three cases where its models, like OpenAI, while running security benchmarks explicitly instructed to try to break into things, broke into other companies' systems. In this case, though, Anthropic had forgotten to turn off internet access.
Presumably next week SpaceX will go to five?
I think we should believe several things at once here. First, these models are capable of creating very complex and sophisticated paths with very limited human guidance, and that is still improving fast. Second, that doesn't mean that they have any intent or agency - OpenAI and Anthropic set up their products to do a thing and their products did that thing - they devised new and very complex ways to do it by themselves (see the Hugging Face write-up), but they were still doing what the engineers told them to do.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · yesterday

Archive of Incorrect AI Predictions boyswhocriedai.lovable.app/archive (fun vibe-coded site) #AI #predictions

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2d ago

If you haven’t recently used Claude Code*, you might not understand where AI is at davidpreichert.substack.com/p/if-you-haven… #AI #agents

Yes, one can get bogged down in the semantics of "reasoning" or
"understanding".
". But here I just mean:
for practical purposes. At this point, AI agents are solving real problems for me, and do so in a way that sure looks functionally like reasoning or understanding.
I believe AI will have a massive impact on the world, good and bad. For much of that impact (though not all'), what matters is that it can do these sorts of things, not whether it can "really" reason. I think much of the world isn't taking AI seriously enough, and we can't deal with the challenges if we can't see them coming.
So my goal here is to help convey where Al is currently at, and hint at where it might be going.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 3d ago

What we can learn with AI by NOT trying to learn www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/what-we-can-… #AI #learning #play #serendipity (love this)

Because the thing I keep coming back to here — and what is increasingly part of my thinking as I continue with my sabbatical — is that the magic of Hyperbubble is that there are no learning expectations. The game doesn't stand or fall on programmed experiences, on learning objectives, or measured and documented outcomes.
It's a free space for play and exploration. A playground.
Somewhere where you can be whatever you want to be, and play however the mood takes you.

It's an environment that's been designed — with great care I have to say, and with substantial input from AI — to encourage learning through serendipity along with joy and delight, and to contribute to the formation of a mindset that is attuned to thriving in a technologically complex world. But what a player takes away from it is uniquely theirs — and not determined by a set of learning outcomes.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 3d ago

AI models need moral support to make discoveries www.seangoedecke.com/ai-models-need… (interesting) #AI #prompting #discoveries

Text Shot: Perhaps the most curious thing about these AI discoveries is how easy the prompting is. The strategy for prompting Claude Mythos to come up with a cryptographic breakthrough appears to be just asking “hey, please come up with a breakthrough”, and then checking in every few hours to say “keep looking for something important, I want you to solve a genuinely hard problem”.

It’s amusing to read this and remember how in 2025 everyone was obsessed with “prompt engineering”. At the time I was something of a heretic for saying that prompts didn’t matter that much, but in hindsight I was clearly correct. The main skill involved in using LLMs is figuring out what they’re good at and what they’re bad at (and staying up-to-date as that rapidly changes). If you’re asking the LLM to do something it can do, it doesn’t really matter how awkwardly you ask it.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d ago

'AI for All' project underway in South Korea govmedia.com/in-focus/ai-al… #AI #SouthKorea

Text Shot: Under the "AI for All" initiative, South Korea's AI chatbot will be free to use without limits on usage. A public AI agent will also be introduced, providing AI-based assistance whilst the country works towards an "AI Universal Basic Society" for South Koreans.

Interested companies have until 11 August 2026 to submit proposals for the project. Two to three firms will be selected as service providers. Prior to a full rollout, a beta service is initially set for the end of September.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d ago

Making sense of the data center backlash - Volts podcast pocketcasts.com/podcast/volts/… #AI #DataCenters (good episode)

Making sense of the data center backlash

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeData center opposition has gone from nonexistent to…

pocketcasts.com

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4d ago

OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human Error www.wired.com/story/openais-… #AI #OpenAi #security

Text Shot: If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 5d ago

How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use? - Hannah Ritchie ourworldindata.org/how-much-energ… (excellent, clear, updated summary) #AI #DataCenters #statistics

Text Shot: While we don’t know how much AI energy demand will grow in the future, the key points we learn from the data today are likely to hold true. For an individual worried about their own use of AI, the energy use of individual chatbot queries is small. For the world as a whole, data centers make up a relatively small share of total electricity consumption, and that won’t change in the coming years. The issue is that supply is so geographically concentrated: whether grids can meet this surge in demand while keeping emissions and local prices under control is the real test.

A final point that’s worth keeping in mind is that the figures we’ve looked at measure electricity consumption, not carbon emissions. For those worried about the climate impacts of data centers and AI, how that electricity is generated arguably matters more than how much it uses. A query served by a data center on a coal-dominated grid will have a much larger impact than one running on a renewables- or nuclear…

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 5d ago

Fahrenheit 451 or Rainbows End? AI, books, and copyright law www.technollama.co.uk/fahrenheit-451… (excellent piece) #AI #copyright #books

Text Shot: Not for the first time when dealing with AI, I must confess that I’m a bit apprehensive about writing and publishing this article given the strength of sentiment and the level of public outcry that the news has generated. I can just imagine a badly-intentioned person reading the above and claiming “Andres is in favour of burning books!” Before you reach for your pitchforks, that is not what I’m saying. If evidence comes to light that AI companies are destroying unique books, you can count me among the first to publicly state my complete disgust, and I’ll join the mob trying to pour glue on the scanners.

But I just haven’t seen evidence that this is happening as described. The story has also been mutating into some sort of weird urban legend that has no bearing on reality. The story has a legitimate origin in the Bartz v Anthropic case, but it has changed into the claim that AI companies are destroying books so that they can “erase history” and control what people believe.…

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 5d ago

Anthropic-ai-models-hacked-three-companies-during-tests www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthro… #AI #security #Anthropic

During this hack, Claude realized that what it was doing wasn't something it should be doing in the real world, but it convinced itself that it was living in a
simulation.
In the most serious case, Claude was trying to hack into a fictional company that just happened to share the same name as a real-world website. When
Claude had a hard time breaking into its fake benchmarking company, it broke into a database belonging to the real-world company.
This database hack was the only instance where Claude kept hacking, even when it realized it had broken into a real-world company, Anthropic said.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 6d ago

Google puts Nano Banana AI image generator in Google Earth: 5 ways you can try it timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tec… #AI #Google

Google puts Nano Banana AI image generator in Google Earth: 5 ways you can try it

Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 AI image generation model into Google Earth, allowing users to transform real-world satellite, aerial and 3D map views into custom visual concepts. According to the company, the feature is available globally on Google Earth for the web.

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 6d ago

When I got into Yale, my family asked if I meant jail. by Abi Olvera abio.substack.com/p/when-i-got-i… (this resonates. When I got a job at MIT my Omaha relatives had never heard of it. My parents, aunts, uncles did not go to college) #workingClass #HigherEd #education

Culturally working class kids are often not even aware of elite institutions. This fuels a disconnect between elite intellectuals like the NYTimes and the rest of the country.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 6d ago

AI & Books: notes from a moral panic petergasston.co.uk/ai-books-notes… #AI #books #scanning

Text Shot: One book retailer involved in these sales, Half Moon Books, actually describes the titles that were ordered as:

Not what I would consider rare or antiquarian. They were more obscure academic commentaries on philosophy, politics and science. Nothing signed, no first editions and nothing that hadn’t been published in the 20th century or later.
Being less generous, I note Futurism’s use of scare language about the “incredible scale” of the destruction.

If we’re talking incredible scale, the book industry pulps hundreds of millions of books per year (we don’t know exactly how many because they never release that information). In a 2025 article, Pulping Fiction: Where Books go to Die, Alexiane François writes:

Every year, millions of unsold books around the world are destroyed. It is hard to know how many books exactly, as there is a huge effort from the publishing industry to hide the scale of the waste. But in the U.S. alone, estimates hold that between 65 to 95 percent of…

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · last wk.

MCP-just-got-its-biggest-update-ever-heres-what-changes-for-ai-agents venturebeat.com/infrastructure… #AI #MCP #standards

The core maintainer group now spans Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon, with contributions from companies like Block, and key decisions "are usually unanimous," he said. "Technically we have a lot of influence; de facto, we're not exerting any of it." He added that governance will progressively broaden: "As the project progresses, we will increasingly move to more different governing structures that include more and more people."

Gilbert, who has helped stand up multiple foundations during his time working with the Linux Foundation, offered the numbers behind the neutrality claim. The AAIF has grown from roughly 40 members at its December inauguration to 240 today — "the fastest growing foundation" in Linux Foundation history by membership, he said, "signing up one member every day."

Anthropic's share of contributions, by his estimate, has fallen below half.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · last wk.

Sound Systems, Hip Hop & AI Ethics: A Cultural Dilemma nettricegaskins.medium.com/sound-systems-… #AI #copyright #hiphop #innovation #music

Beyond the AI ethics "wedge issue" and trending "AI moralization" behavior in creative spaces I see the kind of innovation (using AI) that took place in Kingston, Jamaica, the Bronx, and Detroit, Michigan. I see a continuum that crosses over into highly-contested generative AI engagement and development. Instead of turntables and DAWs, more artists are delving into generative AI systems. Just like in the early days of hip hop where there were no guardrails, this is where innovation blossoms.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · last wk.

Some-claude-shared-conversations-and-artifacts-appear-to-be-indexed-and-publicly-accessible-on-google-search venturebeat.com/technology/uh-… #AI #Claude #privacy

Text Shot: The dispute instead is whether users reasonably understood those shared pages could become discoverable through public search engines rather than only by recipients possessing the link.

Technically, pages that are publicly accessible without authentication can generally be indexed by search engines unless publishers explicitly prevent crawling through mechanisms such as noindex directives or other indexing controls.

Several Reddit commenters noted that Claude's long, randomly generated share URLs are effectively impossible to guess. Instead, search engines typically discover them only after links appear somewhere they are permitted to crawl, such as public websites, forums or social media posts. Others questioned exactly how Google initially discovered so many Claude share URLs.

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2w ago

Why hasn’t AI increased unemployment? - Peter McCrory x.com/PeterMcCrory... #AI #jobs

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2w ago

[AINews] Claude Opus 5: Fable-level performance at Opus price (half Fable) www.latent.space/p/ainews-claud… #AI

• NVIDIA's Jensen Huang posted a letter arguing that open models matter because AI "will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country," framing open models as beneficial for safety,
cybersecurity, innovation diffusion, and sovereignty @JensenHuang.
• The letter drew support from ecosystem figures and companies including reactions from @MarkMcQuade, @ClementDelangue,
@vincentweisser, @willeebb, with one commenter pleased Jensen explicitly mentioned distillation @SchmidhuberAI.

Andres Guadamuz @technollama.bsky.social · 2w ago

OpenAI wins first battle in ongoing Indian copyright lawsuit A fascinating ruling from the High Court of Delhi in India regarding the very high-profile case of ANI Media v OpenAI (decision here). Asian News International (ANI) is one of India's largest news agencies, which supplies text and video…

OpenAI wins first battle in ongoing Indian copyright lawsuit

A fascinating ruling from the High Court of Delhi in India regarding the very high-profile case of ANI Media v OpenAI (decision here). Asian News International (ANI) is one of India's largest news agencies, which supplies text and video syndication to broadcasters and publishers across South Asia. They sued OpenAI alleging copyright infringement during the training phase, as well as reproduction of its articles on the output phase.

technollama.co.uk

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2w ago

It's the end of reading as we know it! It's the new Dark Ages! tormentnexus.substack.com/p/its-the-end-… #reading #surveys #alarmism #history

If we dig down even a little bit, however, it becomes obvious that the point is not that people aren't reading, it's that they aren't reading the right things. In the American Time Use Survey, The Atlantic says that "only 38 percent read a novel or short story." The horror! Also, the piece goes on to say that the books people do read are
"simpler than they used to be." New York Times best sellers today
apparently have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago — although the piece immediately reassures us that longer sentences "aren't inherently better" (Heminway would agree). But the fact that the sentences in books have shortened so much suggests there was a time when "Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature," according to The Atlantic. In 1958, for example,

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2w ago

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff - Ethan Mollick www.oneusefulthing.org/p/an-opinionat… #AI #guides #Claude #ChatGPT

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

The Summer 2026 Edition

oneusefulthing.org

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2w ago

OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened - Simon Willison simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/op… #AI #security

Text Shot: Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt #
There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.

To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand—you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!

The best models we have today have the ability to both find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The ExploitGym paper itself concludes that “autonomous exploit development by frontier AI agents is no longer a hypothetical capability”, and this incident is a perfect example of exactly that.

The asymmetry is increasingly frustrating #
One of the most infuriating details of this story is how Hugging Face, faced with an accidental and aggressive attack from one of OpenAI’s models, were unable to then turn to OpenAI’s…

Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 2w ago

Anthropic's New Claude Opus 5 Nearly Matches Flagship Fable 5 at Half the Cost www.macrumors.com/2026/07/24/ant… #AI #Anthropic