Alan
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aswirsky.bsky.social
Alan
@aswirsky.bsky.social
130 followers 300 following 16 posts
English teacher, aspiring War Lit scholar, martial artist, and nerd.
I probably followed you on Twitter.
He/him.
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Reposted by Alan
seasonedrice.bsky.social
Putting AI competency on the same level as numeracy and literacy is hallucinatory. Becoming literate is the greatest change that happens to a human being in their lifetime. Giving the suicide-baiting machine to children en mass is not likely to develop their critical reasoning habits
December 26, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Reposted by Alan
pookleblinky.bsky.social
An easy way to explain this:

Which is easier to do, bake a cake from scratch, or fix a cake that someone baked after they accidentally used salt instead of sugar?
courtneymilan.com Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 8d
Just a thing about this: a common statement in writing is that you can fix crap, but you can't fix a blank page.

I have heard AI apologists claim that this is why it's fine to generate a first draft.

Now, to be clear, fuck this.

But also: an AI draft is a fucking blank page.
courtneymilan.com Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 8d
I know I don’t talk about writing much. It is because I am writing so slowly.

But I want you to know that I am taking a part of this story that absolutely sucked and took me months to produce four of the worst chapters I have ever written and in the edit I figured out how to fix it.
December 24, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Alan
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I will add the following: our students lack the research skills required to audit an LLM essay for errors. They don’t arrive on campus with these skills; we teach it to them over four long years. So throwing freshmen in the deep end and saying “swim your way to a shore of rectitude” is folly.
November 24, 2025 at 1:23 PM
Reposted by Alan
writnelson.bsky.social
everyone on a game is a storyteller and the storytellers on Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator fuckin’ despise the incentives of late stage capitalism

also that kid beto is pretty cool
November 22, 2025 at 1:44 AM
Reposted by Alan
meltingcomet.com
every single frame of animation, in-house developed sound effect, line of code, visual asset, chart, and line of dialogue was done by a human and done without using generative AI tools in the making of UNBEATABLE. relinquishing creative choices to tools makes your work empty, vapid, and meaningless
November 12, 2025 at 6:07 AM
Reposted by Alan
amandalitman.bsky.social
Want a party that actually fights back? Run for office. We’ll help you. runforwhat.net
Run for Something
Find offices you can run for
runforwhat.net
November 10, 2025 at 12:38 AM
Reposted by Alan
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Alan
sketchesbyboze.bsky.social
If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.
[quoting a tweet by fractalcounty that reads, “today I learned that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you using chatgpt. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles”]
August 2, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Reposted by Alan
malloryomeara.bsky.social
The other big problem with using generative AI to help you write is that it makes you a huge fuckin loser
chuckwendig.bsky.social Chuck Wendig @chuckwendig.bsky.social · Feb 20
One danger of embracing generative AI as a learning device and in language assistance is that you're letting the keepers of that AI have power over what you learn and how you write. It will be programmed with biases, unintentional but often *quite* intentional, that you will unknowingly adopt.
February 20, 2025 at 4:55 PM