I’m still rolling this contraption of words, just not as often or as urgently as I once did.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Teaching with and without AI

AI Log reviews A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

AI Log reviews The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

Learning about AI through teaching about it

Something big is happening, but how do we describe it?

On reading Plato and Mark Carney

AI Log reviews Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Is there anyone better at using the essay form to understand the experience of living and working within the institutional constraints of the modern research university than Rafe Meager?

Language without mind and the ends of OpenAI

Alternatives to language-as-a-service

Alternatives to Language-as-a-Service

AI Log reviews Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

And why Chad Orzel has me worried

Higher education leadership in this moment of crisis

Notes and image credits for my talk at the AAC&U AI Institute

AI Log Reviews Superbloom, Part Two

AI Log reviews Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?

AI Log turns two years old and I celebrate with a listicle and a public declaration about my next writing project

An introduction to the course I will be teaching this fall about How AI Is Changing Higher Education.

AI Log reviews "Dartmouth College V. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good" by Adam R. Nelson

Logpodge #10 is all about strawberry statements. Columbia could use leaders like Herbert Deane today. At least he had the courage of his anti-democratic convictions and spoke the truth.

Logpodge #9 When it comes to AI in education, models, teams, and ambitions should be small

If Socrates was right, what do we make of Claude?

The modest power relative to the size of the economy of GPT LLM MAMLMs as linguistic artifacts. Of course, since the economy is super huge, a relatively modest effect on it is still huge one. But...

What does generative AI teach us by being weird?

My talk from Explorance World 2025

At least in the classroom and the workplace

I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

I was speaking at a conference this week in Kansas City and got a question about where higher ed faculty might start to get up to speed on AI.

Read / Watch / Listen to fourteen writers on the social uses of large AI models. Gopnik / Farrell / Narayanan & Kapoor / Mitchell / Shalizi / Evans / Davies / Pickering Breen / Allen / Fourcade & Heal...

Historians are finally having their AI debate

How "trained incapacity" explains why leaders of NGOs are celebrating Trump's executive order on AI

Complex adaptive systems and social intelligence are ideas that help explain what large AI models do. That does not make their outputs safe to consume.

Management cybernetics is a old set of ideas. Stafford Beer and thinking about large AI models as a social and cultural technology together give us a way to approach new public problems.

A new paper that we will expand into our next book

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Logpodge #7 where I explain why last year's AI may be all you need and ask who benefits when OpenAI and Anthropic pay universities to be their customers. Hint: it is not the investors looking for a pa...

We need new language for talking about large AI models. Alison Gopnik, Henry Farrell, James Evans, Cosma Shalizi, and Dan Davies provide one.

This essay is the fourth and final in a series about how I used generative AI in a class I taught in the fall term of 2024.

A watershed moment for Cognitive Resonance

An underappreciated risk to institutions of higher education is that the regime will do to a university what it did to New York City: claw back funds using the ACH system

ailog.blog reviews "More Than Words" by John Warner

Kevin Drum's writing was crystal-clear, heterodox, very opinionated, and often illustrated with time-series charts. Here's how I learned to love those charts by reading him.

Like the press release last month announcing its partnership with California State University, I see NextGenAI as an act of desperation by OpenAI, a company that has yet to figure out a profitable str...

Here is my advice for higher education executives facing the unprecedented challenges of the coming years: invest in your people first and the technology only to the extent you can afford it. If you p...