A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
How Do We Talk about LLMs?
By Jim Clifford It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all deal…
Pluralistic: Writing vs AI (07 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher.
Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use
I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material.
Pluralistic: Formalities (31 Oct 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.
Pluralistic: Formalities (31 Oct 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.
Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
Teachers Are Not OK
AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."
Pluralistic: AI’s pogo-stick grift (02 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."
Lincoln Michel on Twitter / X
This was my read on AI from the beginning and it proved very true. Whatever hypothetical benefits LLMs have (and they have some), their main use is to waste everyone's time wading through slop. Longer colleague powerpoints. More spam emails. More slop clogging up all the systems. https://t.co/2gtGfqf7KF— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 21, 2026
Pluralistic: Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem (09 Feb 2023)
The media spectacle of generative AI (in which AI companies' breathless claims of their software's sorcerous powers are endlessly repeated) has understandably alarmed many creative workers, a group that's already traumatized by extractive abuse by media and tech companies.
An Anti-LLM-as-AI stance against “Leftists for AI” — miftah
One absurd thing with so-called “Leftists for AI” is that beyond pretending that the hype-market for LLMs and their capital-conducive nature that is shaped rather than being an immutable property of language models, “is” metaphysically what “AI” is, and often using this to justify putting out slop “art” to promote their stance, they act as if we’re reaching a higher phase of communism overnight.
How do LLMs affect writing? Talks by visitors to the AI STORIES project | UiB
The AI STORIES project is hosting a day of research talks focused on analysing AI-generated writing, with approaches ranging from the qualitative analysis of a professor of writing to large-scale computational analysis finding that prompting an LLM to edit a text to improve its grammar leads to significiant shifts in meaning.
