Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Michael Black

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 6h

“There are about a dozen companies that specialize in school surveillance…That monitoring reaches into students’ lives beyond school hours, with all but two of those companies monitoring students around the clock.”

What Do We Know About the Edtech Services That Watch Students? - EdSurge News

After talking with teens lobbying against the dark sides of AI, EdSurge asks: “What’s known about the companies that schools use to monitor students?” ...

www.edsurge.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

Chris Franklin @errant-signal.com · 11h

Even putting aside the fact that AI can't do this and will never be able to do this

Who would *want* this? Who wants a bespoke personal TV show? That they can't meaningfully engage anyone else with? That no human had a hand in crafting? You might as well tell someone about a cool dream you had.

Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social · 1d

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

Want to See Marilyn Monroe in Game of Thrones? AI Could Make It Soon

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

www.scientificamerican.com

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 1d

www.tomsguide.com/computing/so...

How to disable Copilot in Windows 11

Completely disable Copilot in Windows 11

www.tomsguide.com

Michael Black @mblack.us · 1d

I'm not saying you should give MS more money, but if you do happen to have the "Pro" edition of Windows 11 on a personal machine, you can turn-off Copilot integration OS wide with a single toggle in the Group Policy settings app.

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Reposted by Michael Black

wendy copium @alicebennett.bsky.social · 1d

one thing LLMs have revealed is that the belief that there is a magical incantation that will give you what you want is not just confined to pick-up artists and freemen on the land

Des Fitzgerald @desfitzgerald.bsky.social · 1d

Seeing people nonchalantly post stuff like makes me feel like I'm going crazy honestly.

A post from an academic on blue sky that says: "I'm learning about "prompt engineering" when asking LLMs to extract data. I now add this to all instructions:

Style
Be concise, analytic, and specific (cite page/figure if provided). If essential info is missing, keep going but flag Unclear and exact data needed. Never invent data.

#academicsky"

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Reposted by Michael Black

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2d

Anyone who claims that Silicon Valley would be better with more humanities education has to grapple with the fact that Peter Thiel was a philosophy major.

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Reposted by Michael Black

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 4d

Higher Ed in 2025 is opening your mailbox to see that your institution has sent you:

1. A Center for Teaching and Learning call to integrate AI into your classroom; and

2. An Office of Academic Integrity email encouraging you to crack down on students who use AI to cheat.

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Reposted by Michael Black

Carolyn Bertozzi @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social · 3d

My 14-yr-old and I were playing with Sora, gave it two prompts of things I/we had done that day 1/n

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3d

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT

GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.

www.theverge.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

Jake Wright @bcnjake.bsky.social · 3d

Or anything, really. Passing your grading off to AI is simply deciding that your students’ work isn’t worth engaging with. And if that’s how you feel, why on Earth are you in a classroom?

John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 4d

I strongly urge everyone to not just read this warning from @marcwatkins.bsky.social, but heed it, and be vocal and forceful pushing back against using AI to grade student writing. This must be anathema if we're going to have a world where learning means something. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

The Dangers of using AI to Grade

Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

substack.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

Dr. Mag 🌿👾 @nobugsnous.bsky.social · 5d

I wrote this blog about how feeling like a killjoy whenever I talk about GenAI.
refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/o...

On Being a GenAI Killjoy

Maggie Fernandes, University of Arkansas Photo by Maksim Romashkin on Pexels.com At a recent teaching talk about GenAI refusal, an audience member asked Megan, Jen, and me this question: how d…

refusinggenai.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 4d

Just like so many forms of mechanization the LMS was supposed to save us time. Instead, in a classic case of More Work for Mother, it made more and more miserable work for us instead.

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 4d

I cannot even begin to express the joy of not having a million levers to pull and bleeps and blips and bloops to push all the time. I got rid of Canvas and set myself free.

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Reposted by Michael Black

Laurasaurus @laurasaurus.bsky.social · 4d

It is frankly strange to be this obsessed with college if you no longer attend one and do not work in education. More people in legacy media need to be told that.

Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 4d

And who is the author of this op-ed? The billionaire CEO of an asset management firm who helped author the compact.

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Reposted by Michael Black

Jennifer Sano-Franchini @jsanofranchini.bsky.social · 5d

New post by @nobugsnous.bsky.social: On Being a GenAI Killjoy refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/o... #RefusingGenAI

"We should always strive to be compassionate and understanding, but killjoy praxis compels us to ask: compassionate to whom?"

On Being a GenAI Killjoy

Maggie Fernandes, University of Arkansas Photo by Maksim Romashkin on Pexels.com At a recent teaching talk about GenAI refusal, an audience member asked Megan, Jen, and me this question: how d…

refusinggenai.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 5d

It is also remarkable how far what is essentially advertising copy has penetrated into ostensibly neutral, scholarly contextualizations even of critical studies — rote invocations of AI’s “power,” “potential,” and ubiquity, untethered to any specific sources or data, are just background noise now.

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Reposted by Michael Black

Let the Right Hon In @danhon.com · 7d

Needless to say I think this is brilliant.

theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal

This is a comic about AI art.

theoatmeal.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

☠️deadward niedermurder☠️ @niedermeyer.online · 7d

everything about the attempt to co-opt the language of social justice to promote AI personhood makes my skin absolutely crawl

that people are doing it in the current political environment, where the most basic human rights are crumbling before our eyes, is as bleak as it gets for me

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Reposted by Michael Black

Dominic Pettman @dominicpettman.bsky.social · 7d

Going to tell me students this was Baudrillard.

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Reposted by Michael Black

Karl (sad trombone noise enthusiast) @brainnotonyet.bsky.social · 8d

influence economies and algorithmic entertainment markets are sociopathy machines.

kate bush’s husband @airbagged.bsky.social · 8d

This is legit insane btw:

Roach man whose father died has zero self reflection or growth.

Says he will be happy to do it again because he has no actual skills and his audience fucking sucks

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Reposted by Michael Black

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 11d

🫡

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More - Consumer Reports

AI features are crowding into Google search, Gmail, iPhones, Windows laptops, and other products. If you're suffering from AI overload, these settings can help.

www.consumerreports.org

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Reposted by Michael Black

Aftermath @aftermath.site · 11d

Saudi Arabia’s strategy is working because of greed and cynicism, as evidenced by both the Riyadh Comedy Festival and the $55 billion sale of EA. @nathangrayson.bsky.social explains:

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Reposted by Michael Black

Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 13d

I don't know how university leaders expect to sustain their institutions *even as class-reproduction machines* if they sell out to a dictator and crush their own core workers. Like, you have to put oil in the engine. You have to put gasoline in the car.

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Reposted by Michael Black

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 12d

If you believe AI is necessary to spark a child’s imagination, I’m guessing you haven’t met many actual children

Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 12d

I spoke to parents who are letting their young kids play with generative AI and tried to sort through some of the questions they have about it.

"I don’t know what this is doing to their brains," one dad told me.

Meanwhile, Sam Altman says, "Kids love ChatGPT on voicemode."

‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?

Some believe AI can spark their child’s imagination through personalized stories and generative images. Scientists are wary of its affect on creativity

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Michael Black

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 13d

I spent part of my day editing a very basic spreadsheet with some demographic data. Fifty-seven percent accuracy would actually increase my workload. It’s harder to hunt, find, and edit data than it is to just…enter it.

LAISSEZ LES BON QUESO ROULER @thequeso.bsky.social · 13d

Absolutely been said before but if you’ve got an AI agent that is 57% accurate you have an AI agent that is 0% accurate

Zoë “Baddie Proctor” Quinn @unburntwitch.com · 13d

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Reposted by Michael Black

Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 13d

The Sora thing is so bleak and shows how far we've come from AI companies pretending they did not train on copyrighted material

www.404media.co/openais-sora...

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus

The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.

www.404media.co

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Reposted by Michael Black

Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 13d

feels like we're living through some kind of cultural gas leak

The Verge @theverge.com · 15d

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

buff.ly

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