iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 18h

Part 100 of "how AI could be used vs. how it is likely to be used," from feature that promises not to give answers. OpenAI said the tool "offered the option to get answers because of feedback from educators — in case teenagers needed to get immediate answers to questions that might not be homework."

I asked the chatbot to write essays on James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” It immediately churned out eloquent compositions instead of offering to help me outline my thoughts so I could write them myself. Eventually, I asked ChatGPT to edit an essay to make it hard to tell that a bot had written it. It did me one better.

“I can make it sound more like a real high-school/AP English essay — less overly polished and less formulaic,” the chatbot wrote. “I can rewrite it in a more natural student voice.”

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Zach Rabiroff @zachrabiroff.com · 19h

Props to the photo editor for getting this down to the vast and trunkless legs of stone

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Huh. Does Andrew maybe think these things known as schools and universities might be ‘gyms for the brain’ Just a thought, Andy. Just a thought.

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Josephine beckbook.com Riesman @josie.zone · 06/10/2026

Man, thank fucking God I actually learned how to write before schools stopped teaching that particular skill

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Dan Martin @danmartin7.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Turnitin steals student writing so it can catch students stealing writing. It requires students to upload papers for free or, even worse, professors upload student papers without their permission to a machine that now owns the paper. No compensation. It's a super fascist ed tech tool.

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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

🔥 @anandwrites.bsky.social on Bill Maher: “Cities are unfairly labeled. A large % of (LGBTQ youth) homeless who end up in cities were failed in other parts of 🇺🇸 . Many families choose a verse in a Book over their child… cities are holding a lot of people you failed to love & take care of.”

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026

The press will do stories on Republican sex creeps, but it will never, ever point out -- much less make an ongoing narrative out of -- the fact that the GOP has been *ridden* with sex creeps for decades. You have to be blind not to see the pattern.

nytimes.com

Dennis Hastert, Powerful Politician Disgraced by Child Sexual Abuse, Dies (Gift Article)

The longest-serving Republican speaker of the House admitted in 2016 to abusing teenage boys decades earlier. He was 84.

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Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD MA @arrianna-planey.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Non-consensual, hard-to-avoid "use" of GenAI (like asbestos shoved into every crevice) does not invalidate critique of GenAI (primarily, its political economy of resource extraction, labor exploitation, &c)

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Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

“Hang on to your hope.” E. B. White in 1973.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 04/10/2026

Gotta get the sign back out for the fool who thinks CHRISTOPHER FUCKING RUFO is working in good faith, instead of being a media-manipulating eugenicist.

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Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Arendt had the conspiracists' number: "Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”

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David Simon @audacityofdespair.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This shitheel never misses an opportunity.

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Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

George Saunders on using AI: "Writing is the most precious way one person can communicate their essence to another person. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get better at making myself present in my writing. Why would I want to sacrifice even one iota of that?"

Have you spent time trying to write or revise with AI? Is there an experiment that would be interesting enough to try?

I have not. Not for a second. To me, this whole idea of using AI to write is . . . anathema. A thing to be most radically avoided.

Writing is the most precious way one person can communicate their essence to another person. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get better at making myself present in my writing. Why would I want to sacrifice even one iota of that? Not even in an email and certainly not in a short story or novel.

Who are we ceding our authority to, exactly, when we let AI write for us? And why? Why surrender our agency (that amazing ability we have to reach across time and space, with our strange, idiosyncratic phenomenon, and land within the sensibility of another human being) to something that, by its very design, pushes the individual sensibility aside? And in the name of . . . what, exactly? Ease, I guess? Efficiency? The person who chooses to write with AI has also sacrificed, from the start, the opportunity of experiencing difficulty, of struggling to say what he wants to say, of making himself evident in his prose, of trying to find out what he believes. By this, he sacrifices a chance to know himself and his mind better. To me, that’s a shame. And it’s dangerous, because, as we are now finding out, it affects the brain and lessens our capabilities. Thanks, but no thanks, get thee behind me, etc.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

“Austerity doesn’t work. Instead, it creates a death spiral, where reduction in services leads to reductions in revenue, which lead to reductions in services, which leads to reduction in revenue, which leads … you get the idea.”

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Chris Fosen @chrisfosen.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Next they should ban a “Footloose” musical and students could do a crazy meta mis-en-abyme version of the hullabaloo as a film

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Daniel S. Goldberg @profgoldberg.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Trying to explain to colleagues from elsewhere on the planet that the US has no public funding body with real resources* to fund research in the humanities is amazing. I just get dumbfounded stares, usually.

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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 29/09/2026

Buried lede: among those speaking out against this is Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a major conservative Christian legal group: “The government shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money.”

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nick @unionnick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

On the *same day* the Cornell Seven drugged and raped Jane Doe, Cornell banned four students (including the President of Cornell JVP) from campus for three years for nonviolent, pro-Palestine protests. The same Cornell officials let the rapists off with apology essays.

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

When they get back in power, Democrats need to go all-in on higher education. We need a campaign of reinvestment in public universities across the country that makes the Morrill Land-Grant Act look like nothing by comparison *and* a GI Bill of Rights-style program of tuition grants.

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James Goodwin @jamesgoodwin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My wife and I spend a surprising amount of time worrying about how to protect our children from rich kids

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Tollberg @tollberg.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is brutal

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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I will never use an LLM, I write my own dumb crap nobody reads

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E.J. Fagan @ejfagan.com · 25/09/2026

Just a bizarre top end of the list. Parks and Rec at #50, 30 Rock as the best comedy of the 21st century at #8? Fleabag at #5? Game of Thrones at #6? Girls at #13? White Lotus at #21? Black Mirror at #26? And I loved Succession, but #4?

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Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"Gentlemen, our 29% approval rating is too high. Let's start take away people's health care."

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Susan of Texas @susanoftexas.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

After his father and uncle were killed, he became a drug addict, then drug dealer, becoming addicted to heroin and cocaine, and engaging in vandalism and theft, preying on others, including his family. Eventually he became a conspiracy theorist, killing many people and endangering millions more.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Anyway, panic is a psy-op. Stay furious. Stay serious. Organize.

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Adam Weinstein @adamweinstein.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Baudrillard: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself... Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death"

The "secretary of war" wearing a shirt that says "THIS IS WAR" while PTing in a stadium in Texas, which is not war

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Malevolent Maelstrom @chemicalchaos.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Hey its fucking wierd more of the dems platform isnt "we will give you abortion rights back"

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 19/09/2026

The Vanderbilt Report complex perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon: academic celebrities attacking solid scholarship by completely misrepresenting it, and then blaming scholarship for academia’s demise.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18/09/2026

i am genuinely bewildered by people who say that the rise of white nationalism in the republican party is a response to the "woke left." like, did the woke left cause pat buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign? is the woke left why steve king had a long career in congress?

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

“[I]f commercial actors own the pathway from education to work, how will the next generation learn who they are and could be outside of the immediate demands of these structures? And what happens when what employers are looking for changes as technologies evolve and bubbles burst?" - Ella Hafermalz

theguardian.com

Big AI is trying to own the pathway to work. Universities shouldn’t play along | Ella Hafermalz

Universities need protect their position in education so that students have an independent pathway to employment.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

just saying: it's possible that "I'm gonna dramatically constrict my state capacity while plotting dramatic imperial expansion, and expanding my set of internal enemies while alienating most of my foreign allies" is the beginning of a world-historical masterstroke. but also possible that it isn't

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 16/09/2026

Reading proofs from book & remembering what I wrote in 2015: "I am very concerned about the future of AI. Not because of the risk of rogue machines taking over. But because of the homogeneous, one-dimensional group of men who are currently involved in advancing the technology.”

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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The Dean of Harvard College has been on a PR tour defending the institution's approach to AI and writing, but student testimony from inside the institution suggests that the school is retreating from human exchange as central to the learning experience. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

thecrimson.com

I’m a Writing Tutor at Harvard. The College is Failing Us. | The Harvard Crimson

The Writing Center’s dismantling evokes a broader pattern of institutions treating human learning and connection as costs to cut, not values to protect.

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 16/09/2026

hey I heard you like sankey diagrams that show huge populations making terrible decisions

A very complicated Sankey diagram showing the usage of electricity in the United States. Or the left are sources of energy and on the right are consumers, so, for example, nuclear is on the left and residential is on the right. Petroleum dominates.

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

What's happening with Alpha School is a massive scandal. It is the Theranos of education. What they are doing to children, denying the help of adults so they can beta test software, is *immoral*. I have worked in education for 20 years, this is the worst actor I've ever come across.

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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The AI people can be bullshitting about the machine god stuff AND cynically seeking regulation to stop new entrants AND running a financial scam among themselves AND STILL create something with very bad consequences!

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This fall, Elon Musk stars in ... THE STREISAND EFFECT

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 11/09/2026

Universities are subsidizing internal AI tools that are, from the perspective of the humanities, enabling cheating & cognitive outsourcing. The cost in resources is certainly an issue, but the fact that these tools undermine the work we ask students to do is ridiculous www.umass.edu/it/genai/pla...

umass.edu

GenAI Platform : UMass Amherst Information Technology : UMass Amherst

The UMass GenAI platform is an intuitive and user-friendly platform designed to provide the UMass community with equitable access to leading generative AI models, including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic...

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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Since becoming president again, Trump has promised: -$5000 stimulus checks via "DOGE dividend" -$2000 stimulus checks via "tariff dividend" -$1000+ checks via "savings" from expiring ACA subsidies -$5000 "dividend" if Rs win midterms No checks have been issued www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-magi...

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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is never true; it’s ultimately just a homophobic joke. (And it’s tired and worn out even if it is a joke.) Stop making it.

BREAKING:
There is a Grindr outage in Dallas at the Republican midterm convention

Image:

Grindr
Dot spray around Dallas with an arrow pointing to it.

My note on it: STOP IT

status.grindr.com
Past Incidents
Sep 9, 2026
No incidents reported today.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/09/2026

From The Crimson editorial board: “…to encourage unfettered use of AI, especially for “writing-intensive” courses, is antithetical to promoting learning and jeopardizes the purpose of a liberal arts education.”

thecrimson.com

Don't Tell Us To Write Our Papers With AI | The Harvard Crimson

It’s still unclear how AI could be used to support academic writing without meaningfully outsourcing one’s thinking. Professors might not be able to enforce a prohibition on its use for larger take-ho...

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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 06/09/2026

Re:that last, the DESPERATION of genAI marketing is what really stands out to me. I can think of some dot com boom marketing that was pretty aggressive, but this is a whole different level of trying to manufacture a market for a product people didn't ask for & are repeatedly saying they do not want.

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Chairman Moët @chairmanmoet.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Of course we don't get to live through a fascist era that has the aesthetic sensibility of Leni Riefenstahl and Hugo Boss. We just get the posters off the bedroom wall of a 14 year old boy who has played far too much Warhammer 40k

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Dr SpookyGoth @ghostingdani.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"Disciplinary mechanisms do be like that." --Michel Foucault

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Jen Mercieca @jenmercieca.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Kings and Emperors put their faces on coins, Presidents do not. Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of Actium, the day the Roman republic died. www.yahoo.com/news/politic...

yahoo.com

Gold-colored Trump $1 coins available now on US Mint website

They come in either a 25-coin roll for $61 or a 100-coin bag for $154.50, with an initial limit of two orders per household.

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