Dr. Rebecca Ottman

If I look rough in my #4c26 virtual presentation this afternoon, mind your business I had a baby 3 days ago. 😂

Sama just posted that OpenAI got the contract:

I could write for days, months, years.

I could read decades of sci-fi from the most annoying Golden Age authors.

I could peruse the most cringe things on TikTok.

And still, I could never come up with the deeply embarrassing things Sam Altman says on any given Tuesday

Sitting in on a meeting about promoting ai at my university while simultaneously receiving emails about how the university is using ai to censor and align all of our syllabi ideologically is beyond dystopian.

Option 3. Hemlock will be provided in the faculty lounge for those who turn down options 1 and 2.

Texas universities deploy AI for course audits Records obtained by The Texas Tribune show how universities are using the technology to reshape curriculum under political pressure, raising concerns about academic freedom.

“At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender.”

www.texastribune.org/2025/12/15/t...

It’s so funny to me that the powers that be think adding an AI-themed Gen Ed is going to do anything beyond fostering a deep resentment for AI in students. AI fatigue is real, and it’s coming soon to a campus near you.

Wake up, new fresh hell just dropped!

if I see another academic describe LLMs - a tech owned by a small elite of white billionaires, built from extracting data from humans and minerals from the earth, and refined by the labor of underpaid workers in the global south - as an ‘important tool for decolonization’ I may simply just explode

Somehow, I inevitably end up back at Roland Barthes.

Really don’t know how to face my students today in light of the institution being all over the news for all the wrong reasons.

The tech companies, I fear, do not care about our input on their destruction of our learning sites, water infrastructure, or democracies.

“higher ed must steer AI adoption” as a position is incompatible with academic freedom.

"this meeting could have been a clay tablet"

Pretty sure this flavor of dudebro showed up in all my grad seminars lmao.

This is the political project every AI booster in higher education is facilitating

This semester, I’m teaching Plato’s Republic in my freshman writing class in that state everyone is talking about, and I’m not totally sure how to face my students tomorrow in the aftermath of my institution blatantly deciding that justice is indeed the advantage of the stronger.

Education is for liberation, not control.

Clapping back at other academics (or tech apologists) making ridiculous claims about their favorite shiny toy is not punching down.

I don't use feedback on my writing from an LLM because it can't read and I write for readers. When students say they find LLM feedback "helpful" what are we signaling about what's important about their writing? Helpful for what goal? Helpful how? What values are being reinforced?

TBH I think it's hard to overstate the gap between the assumed guard rails and reality.

people think "well it might be wrong on the details sometimes" and the reality is that it is **coaching children to commit suicide**

you wouldn't expect that from ANY product! why would that exist!

I hope James Dobson is having the afterlife he deserves.

Opened my email to discover the university libraries kindly made an online version of one of my assigned textbooks available on Proquest, which now uses an AI-based “Research Assistant” that handles all the pesky reading so students don’t have to. 🙃🙃🙃

You all are doing such important work with these resources. I hope you know how appreciated it is!!

Looks like handwritten feedback is back on the menu!

Hi. Hello. GRAMMARLY IS NOT A WRITING TOOL. IT IS SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM AND LINGUISTIC HOMOGENIZATION IN A TRENCHCOAT.

My personal theme for teaching FYC this year is slowness. Slow notes, slow reading, slow writing. Slowing down the process. Learning is a lifelong pursuit, and I’m over the pressure to optimize based on the whims of tech billionaires and admin who see students as nothing more than profit margins.

Has Sam Altman ever talked to an expert or is pretending to be one enough? 🤔

It happened again

What a time to
A. Be a rhetorician
B. Live in Texas
C. Try to write anything rn