Phil Choong

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

How I wept tonight.

“We can endure this, & be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here.”

Good thread.

There are disabled people in the future.

The only reason you wouldn’t see them is if that society has gone full steam ahead on eugenics and they’re unable to live freely or be accommodated in public.

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Writing Classes Are About Writing, Not AI-Aided Production If we want students to learn to write, AI tools shouldn’t have much of a role. If we don’t think students need to learn to write anymore, I’m not sure what we’re doing here.

Pretty much every article I read about "integrating" AI into the writing classroom brings me back to the conclusion I work through here: We should teach writing, not document production. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Slop man is mad

I feel certain that bluesky could immediately compile a syllabus. Feel free to reply with it now in fact

a podcast that will show them, will show them all, and then we’ll see who is laughing, yes indeed @thepodcastmines.bsky.social #therebutforthegraceofpodgowe

Please send us your eggnog questions to TalkingNog@AOL.com.

We also accept photos, videos, audio submissions, stories, fanfiction, confessions, opinions, recipes, rankings, and anything else eggnog-related.

This is a real email address.

Ultimately: citation is politics.

No art arises from nowhere sui generis.

Who do you choose to acknowledge? Who do you leave out? Are you not acknowledging *anybody*? That speaks volumes about you, what kind of artists your peers can expect your to be. Whether you *can* be a peer.

3/

Citation is community. You situate your work in a milieu, shared with peers. Observing these commonalities makes a scene.

Citation is attention. Certain identities / perspectives just get less play, through no fault of their own. Who do you spotlight? Are there blindspots in your inspo list?

2/

Citation is easy. It's a couple of lines on your credits page.

Citation is encouragement. Every time somebody else acknowledges me this way, I feel like the work is worthwhile.

Citation is introspection. You are marking your trajectory, the ports you have called at, as a maker.

1/

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.

Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!

Something to keep your eye on. Popular discourse is starting to turn against AI, so new frameworks are being built to continue selling it. We are about to see a flood of media that qualifies AI: “Gen AI” is bad and overhyped but “predictive” or “analytic AI” is responsible and good. +

you say "i asked chatgpt"
i hear "i asked [an improv comedy group]"

an improv group wrote this report
instead of a therapist i use an improv comedy group

Didn’t think we could beat “all my apes gone” but here we are

The process of finding one's voice goes through refinement of multiple stories until you get to the ones that speak to you, and every individual piece is a journey to figure out what it is about. It may not always be conscious but it is there
No story springs in its final form (2/?)

I can't find the thread anymore so I'll paraphrase but
People pushing AI in the arts dont understand that art is the process not the result
Writing is about the words and the meaning and how they slot together. Painting is about colour and texture and the physicality of the paintbrush on paper
(1/?)

Or better yet: make GenAI about an assault on civics. Because if you are selling a product that necessarily attempts to con one person into believing they are engaging with another person when they are not, you’re not just ruining education. You’re dismantling society’s foundations in social trust.

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

billionaires could do amazing things every week but don't. elon musk could launch 52 sodas a year instead of fake mars bs, but we are never going to get beverast, the first good soda to taste like eggs, the most important can of the day

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too.

"We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice."

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

After mass AI college-cheating freakout, many admissions offices are using it to screen student applications | Fortune It wasn't long ago they began banning student use of it for homework or test-taking. Admissions offices are different, though.

Judging from the quotes in here, university admins are some of the least “ai literate” people in existence. No wonder they think students need to be taught how to use it.

Chiming in here as your Friendly Neighborhood NTT, but NTTs, grad students, and other instructors of varying levels of precarity are often the ones on the front lines here. Our tenured colleagues keep talking about tenure as an umbrella or shield, and it would be nice to see those actually deployed.

This thread is 💯. Labor precarity in academia means the evisceration of faculty governance and academic freedom, opening the door to administrative purges of the most vulnerable. And faculty-esp tenured faculty and academic leaders-who aren't defending their trans colleagues are enabling it.

OU puts graduate instructor on leave after student claims discrimination on Bible-based essay grade OU placed a graduate student instructor on leave after a student publicly contested a grade and filed an illegal discrimination claim after she received a failing grade on an essay

So, an OU student a shitty reaction paper in a psych course, got failed by a grad student TA for not following directions and threatened legal action, while also getting her uni TPUSA chapter to post the essay. Her mother is on X saying trans people must not be allowed to be professors.

This is…

screenshot of a tumblr post from user “wildmansters” The thing that really boils my potatoes about Al in general is that I have been a creative professional for over a decade now and the devil has ALWAYS been in the details. Big and small, I've had single-person businesses rip me to shreds over how their colors turned out on newsprint, and have worked with huge companies with THICK brand guidelines with every detail of their brand identity laid out and enforced with an iron fist. But I guess all of that stuff doesn't matter anymore? Who gives a fuck if this Al generated baby has six fingers, that mom-and-pop shop is still going to use it. That rug from Temu says Happy Thanksgivirg? Oh well haha it's just a silly funny thing now (nevermind that you never would have given a B-grade item from a craft show the same consideration). I don't actually care that the Al Coca-cola ad has a truck that changes size every scene, but I can't help but think about how, if it had been some poor underpaid artist, they would have been laughed out of the building. I don't really know how to put it in a succint way but it just feels all the more obvious how much more grace and flexibility has always been possible but never offered.

i know WHY this is but that just makes it even more of a kick in the pants lmao

“Wrestling is a shared dream.” Pro wrestling rules and this article captures some of my favorite things about the art form.

I’m going to be thinking about this essay alongside Eddie Kingston’s “I am pro wrestling” promo for a while