Contributing editor @oxfordamerican & @arktimes, words all over Subscribe to my Substack! davidbramsey.substack.com Lexington, KY davidbramsey@gmail.com
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Used wikipedia random article generator to give me an assignment & landed on desert marigolds. So I wrote about desert marigolds! Also consciousness, prayer, contingency, convergent evolution, aliens, & my daughter. Proud of this one, it's a doozy, enjoy/share, etc. (link below).
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funny thing about current absurdity from SV capitalist class is that if LLMs have human-like rights, they shouldn't be bought and sold as consumer products at all!
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Yes Amodei saying AI “may be deserving of important rights” and—when asked about Anthropic’s role in the Minab school bombing—saying it was “a use case that doesnt even violate our red lines” perfectly captures how our ruling class thinks about human welfare in the coming decades
unfortunately AI safety is in the hands of lunatics who believe that if you shut down a computer you might be "killing" it and violating its rights
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Much more energy on student side re: resistance to AI in higher ed, but they need leadership/support/long-term vision from faculty. Professors are in a terrible spot right now for a million reasons, but... well, I dig this comic a former student of mine drew. cc: @Tyler_A_Harper
Hard to overstate how far academia is right now from the radical response to LLMs in higher ed @Tyler_A_Harper rightly calls for. Very little fight for the values currently under threat. Administrators have bought into transparent marketing b.s. Many profs snookered or scared.
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comic represents state of things a year ago, actually--while it was prevalent before, "head in the sand" went away forever over the course of last year. More drawings by that student in our Human Intelligence (Hi!) student-faculty working group manifesto davidbramsey.substack.com/p/…
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also find it to be terrible misunderstanding (or perhaps rejection) of our one clearly human universal--that we place great value on abstract or transcendent concepts that are meaningless to an LLM & not numerically reducible (love, beauty, value, meaning, morality, truth, etc.)
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I think human "it must be sentient" gullibility w/r/t LLMs is also HEAVILY culturally influenced, particularly by movies & tv shows. and obviously marketing by AI industry is now attempting to make a subset of evidence-free (absurd IMO!) philosophy/cogsci into a mainstream truism
The Navier-Stokes problem the OP mentions is a perfect example of this: our animal faith predisposes us to reflexively assume that anything that can do hyper-complex math must be a self-aware, advanced mind like ours. But there’s no evidence that’s true! It’s a leap of faith.
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David Ramsey retweeted
Yes I totally agree that’s the problem, which is why I used the term “hijacked.” This technology exploits our reflexive epistemic credulity that things that seem like minds are minds. That credulity is useful in a lot of circumstances, but is dangerous in *this* circumstance.
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David Ramsey retweeted
And many of us profs just feel helpless against the deluge. I’m trying to hold the line against LLM prose but I feel like I am a single sandbag thrown onto a beach in a hurricane.
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Virtually no undergraduate students think this way; they are avoiding humanities majors because they believe, incorrectly, that it will make it harder for them to get a job.
Many professors in the humanities keep calling it a packaging problem. Wrong. The real reasons enrollment is collapsing: obsession with identity, speech policing as virtue, and the conversion of entire disciplines into political projects.
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To make this work: 1) as @Tyler_A_Harper articulates, very strong policies that establish environment on campus as focused on LEARNING, an environment that must be explicitly protected 2) also have to nurture & encourage bottom-up, student-led culture shift for buy-in on #1
Hard to overstate how far academia is right now from the radical response to LLMs in higher ed @Tyler_A_Harper rightly calls for. Very little fight for the values currently under threat. Administrators have bought into transparent marketing b.s. Many profs snookered or scared.
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I would love to see some investigative reporting on this. cc: @DanaGoldstein
Exactly this: AI-powered edtech is being sold to universities under the guise of increasing “access.” Helping disabled students is a Trojan horse that has proven extremely effective for morally blackmailing admins into buying software, and profs into allowing it in the classroom.
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Hard to overstate how far academia is right now from the radical response to LLMs in higher ed @Tyler_A_Harper rightly calls for. Very little fight for the values currently under threat. Administrators have bought into transparent marketing b.s. Many profs snookered or scared.
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gross part: sending students w/challenging LDs to AI is just decision to teach them less. LLMs *by design* are "efficient" by skipping the process to get the product. LLM accommodations abandon teaching critical thinking to students 100% capable of learning critical thinking!
Exactly this: AI-powered edtech is being sold to universities under the guise of increasing “access.” Helping disabled students is a Trojan horse that has proven extremely effective for morally blackmailing admins into buying software, and profs into allowing it in the classroom.
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David Ramsey retweeted
There is a segment of progressive faculty that gets easily duped by the “AI increases access for disabled and/or disadvantaged students!” talking point. Edtech has figured out that university progs are terrified of being “ableist” and so their empathy can be readily manipulated.
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David Ramsey retweeted
Interesting that we’re getting “tens of thousands of illegal hacking episodes” before we get AI that can make a half way decent joke or marshal a single novel philosophical or political insight. I suppose the former is a certain type of intelligence but not a very impressive one
SCOOP: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens - in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios.
The sheer volume of incidents found in our reporting indicate that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is currently publicly known and disclosed.
The findings also raise questions about what level of control anyone working on AI development can expect to have over their own technology, and whether these kinds of incidents are becoming synonymous with frontier deployment.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-…
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this is different, bc doesn't have to do w/LLM "welfare" per se, but AI firms partnering w/universities are aggressively pushing evidence-free claims that LLMs are vital for disability access/accommodations. Smart move, bc "disability access" shuts down dissent in academia...
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David Ramsey retweeted
Exactly this: AI-powered edtech is being sold to universities under the guise of increasing “access.” Helping disabled students is a Trojan horse that has proven extremely effective for morally blackmailing admins into buying software, and profs into allowing it in the classroom.
this is different, bc doesn't have to do w/LLM "welfare" per se, but AI firms partnering w/universities are aggressively pushing evidence-free claims that LLMs are vital for disability access/accommodations. Smart move, bc "disability access" shuts down dissent in academia...
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David Ramsey retweeted
above is from me going on (and on) about this in the context of the catastrophe that LLMs represent in higher education. davidbramsey.substack.com/p/…
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