The loss of research API access to social media destroyed a big chunk of crisis informatics inquiry. APIs were the only way to reliably retrieve realtime, on the ground, large scale geolocated info and images after a catastrophic disaster.

I have a preprint of a book chapter on post-API social media data collection with a timeline of platforms’ CYA moves due to privacy scandals, lawsuits, and the rise of LLMs.

Happy to send it your way if it would be helpful.

Google Gemini is also in the game spreading its tentacles into all Google Ed products. This popped up in a student's programming project yesterday.

Mere weeks before the end of the semester when everyone is tired and easily seduced by "time savers". I'm going to flip my lid.

Whoa! Please tell me that your mom was a co-author of the Belmont Report.

if the AI 'bubble' pops today - ie major players see a major drop in share price - it won't make a jot of difference to the specific climate and environment impacts that are going on, or locked in for the next half-decade at least.

Oh, I don't believe GenAI is at all an answer to outdated/outmoded teaching. But it is a reason why students may be susceptible to using chatbots for assignments when the work is not tethered to concerns/skills/needs of this century (seriously) and the learning objectives are a mystery to students.