Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
06.03.2026 14:22
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Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
and making it seem like the moral responsibility of universities to use our time and labor to train students on a billion dollar tech companies product ... 🤢
What did we do to deserve Christian and Rick? It’s so good.
totally. It's the same blindness of "this LLM is terrible at the thing i'm an expert in but surprisingly good at the thing i know nothing about."
also, the post that launched 1000 responses was posted by an agentic Claude (based on the social media posts of the person running this agent - or however the hell we are referring to this current cluster-f). it all just makes me very sad and tired.
In writing about AI Surrogates for human subjects research, @mjcrockett.bsky.social and i realized that their appeal indexes disciplinary anxieties. Dave's post nicely details some of the broader (institutional) anxieties that promises of AI replacements are surfacing.
bsky.app/profile/lmes...
i know... we'll soon see how our first year PhD students have been impacted by this shift.
oh yes, i agree!!! From Spring 2023 on, i've been having frank conversations with students and they are always describing the double find of wanting to learn but not wanting to be inefficient or lose out if others are cutting corners. Weirdly, i think top down culture change would be effective...
I genuinely believe that most students attend college to learn. They are very open to a pedagogic critique of the tools. but if this is coming unevenly from professors and not at all from admit, they will embrace the 'adopt or die' advertising of Big Tech.
There is such an easy route that Uni's are failing to take. Lead with culture change. Stop spamming us about the new software and partnerships. Stop the endless workshops in the teaching and learning centers. Start talking about what learning is and when these products help or hurt this process.
you're welcome?
Anyway, today he is portrayed in the times fully jaw maxxed and it's just so annoying that truly the worst people are in charge and celebrated
screen shot of HJO dressed as a clueless tech bro.
Luckey was also the basis for Haley Joel Osment's amazing character on silicon valley...
On July 4th, 2018, Luckey posted to the Women in VR facebook group that they were hiring, and he was SKEWERED and told his kind wasn't welcome in the inclusive space of VR... VR has no place in the military! (VR's history begins with the military)...
Unofficially, this led to his firing at Facebook. But then he went on and promised to build a "virtual border wall" for Trump I and Theil loved that and backed Anduril...
During the first Trump election, people "couldn't believe" that anyone involved in VR - celebrated as an empathy machine! - could have bad politics and were shocked when Luckey donated to a Trump PAC...
for a little more context. Palmer Luckey kickstarted oculus VR after ripping off university open source research. The Time cover on the right from 2015 celebrates the "boy genius." Zuck bought Oculus which lead to the VR hype cycle and hired Luckey...
headline reading "The Pentagon's Favorite Tech Guy is this Hawaiian shirt-wearing founder" and a picture of Palmer Luckey Chad-ified with missiles in the background
cover of Time magaine feature Palmer Luckey awkwardly leaping, barefoot.
i.... can't.
Revising an academic manuscript, as told in Matthew McConaughey GIFs.
Phase 1: Completing the first draft and deluding yourself it's perfect. You did it!
having watched a worker yesterday do go to copilot to answer a question that i thought would be in their general knowledge bank... i believe (2) is the most frequent impulse. I suspect many low info users think LLMs are the calculator of words. It shows how successful the marketing has been.
UCLA has inked a deal to give all its faculty discounted access to ChatGPT, the same company who made it possible for their owner to give 25 million to the supreme leader Trump's campaign, the same president who has sued UCLA and ruined its campus life and damaged its reputation. That's leadership!
I had sent MJ this essay. we were both reading it and finding it 🔥 but nearly at the same time realized it was largely LLM penned. If folks want to spend time conversing with an LLM, fine. But i'm frustrated by how much time i spend reading slop (w/out knowing it). Disclose use of LLM from the jump!
Grateful to @mjcrockett.bsky.social for explaining the concept of "epistemic vigilance" that we all need to get up to speed on.
Picture of a snow blanketed backyard
Enough with this winter wonderland!
"Anthropic, the wildly successful AI company that has cast itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, is dropping the central pledge of its flagship safety policy, company officials tell TIME."
Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model.
This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine.
🧵/
anyway, what really matters here is that a lot of big companies will stop doing user testing with real humans and instead depend on these AI simulations. The machine will dictate the market and, should we conform to the market, we will ourselves become more like the machine. Unsubscribe.
the verbosity of the LLM clearly makes for quite a different dynamic.
This is a small point it what is more broadly an astonishing and likely to fail enterprise.
But it also signifies why AI is so dangerous. People without expertise in a domain feel they know more than they do.
