From markcarrigan.net
The compulsive search for signs
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I’ve just finished reading Robert Fine’s Being Stalked: A Memoir. It’s a thoughtful and self-therapeutic reflection by the late political theorist on his experience of being stalk…
#QAnon #Trump #paranoia #wrestling #conspiracy #francoberadi #epistemicchaos #conspiracyculture #epistemicchaosofplatformcapitalism
on Sat, 3PM
From markcarrigan.net
I wish Anthropic would stop trying to optimise user engagement with Claude
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I understand why they’re doing this but there should be some way to turn it off:
#claude #anthropic #SocialMedia #userengagement #commercialisation
on Sep 5
From markcarrigan.net
There is always a missed understanding between people
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From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding vol 2: In Lacan’s view, no such intersubjectivity is possible because there is always a fundamental hiatus or disjunction—a misunderstanding or missed …
on Sat, 12PM
From markcarrigan.net
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Dr Mark Carrigan FRSA FHEA is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester where he is programme director for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (DTCE) and c…
on Dec 13
From markcarrigan.net
The Lacanian distinction between love and romance
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From Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the …
on Dec 12
From markcarrigan.net
To love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object
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From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič pg 174-175: To love – that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone &…
on Dec 12
From markcarrigan.net
A symptom isn’t a symptom until it’s reflexively recognised as such by the analysand
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From A Clinical Introduction to Freud, by Bruce Fink loc 4298: Something is a symptom and potentially accessible to analytic treatment only when it is the patient him- or herself who complains of i…
on Nov 10
From markcarrigan.net
It’s time for academics to let go of Twitter
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Imagine discovering that a colleague was regularly posting on Gab, Parler or Truth Social. These alt-media platforms became notorious over recent years as spaces parallel to the mainstream of socia…
on Nov 9
From markcarrigan.net
The Great American Showdown of 2028: Elon Musk vs The Rock
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By Claude 3.5 The nation collectively blinked when two of America’s most prominent personalities announced their candidacies within days of each other. Elon Musk, fresh off his latest Mars mi…
on Nov 7
From markcarrigan.net
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He spent far less time on WWE than he did on the Apprentice but listening to the crowd chanting “Donald” here leaves me curious about how much this shaped his approach to performance. H…
on Nov 7
From markcarrigan.net
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My third and final Twitter account was fully deleted today, after the thirty day deactivation window expired. I briefly considering turning it into a bot autotweeting the posts from this blog but a…
on Oct 31
From markcarrigan.net
Sam Altman: the billionaire prepper who believes he has achieved enlightenment
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From Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World loc 643: To handle his anxiety, Altman got into meditation, sometimes sitting with his eyes closed and concen…
on Oct 19
From markcarrigan.net
The friendly face of objet petit a
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I’ve been obsessing about a Lacanian reading of these murals by Nick Hamilton which I took pictures of this weekend 👇
on Oct 9
From markcarrigan.net
Interview about teacher training and generative AI in Times Education Supplement
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A brief comment in this interesting piece on GAI in teacher training, alongside my collaborator Liz Birchinall who leads the primary PGCE: The university team involved will research the tool’s use …
on Oct 7
From markcarrigan.net
The impending GenAI driven automation of higher education
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From Generative AI for Academics ch 8: Yet from a sociological perspective I see a genuine risk of academics being automated out of our jobs. Not immediately, nor everywhere. But a gradual process …
on Sep 25
From markcarrigan.net
What the efficiency agenda in UK universities will look like in practice
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From Peter Mandelson’s intervention today: In return, Mandelson said universities would need to make “more tough choices” to improve efficiency, noting that Italian state universities had one…
on Sep 25
From markcarrigan.net
GenAI and the rapid disappearance of ground truth
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This is a fascinating case study from the (consistently excellent) 404 media: Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal er…
on Sep 24
From markcarrigan.net
A concise explanation of why you should leave Twitter/X
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From Casey Newton’s recent newsletter: We also stopped posting to X. It felt bad contributing to a site that had actively dismantled its own content moderation operation and predictably soon …
on Sep 24
From markcarrigan.net
What happens when the free trial period of GenAI is over?
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I think Ed Zitron is undoubtedly correct that (a) this software is being run at a huge loss and (b) that can’t go on for ever, though I don’t necessarily think that means the ‘bub…
on Sep 21
From markcarrigan.net
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Saving this for next semester’s teaching 👇 I was not as good at this as I thought I was…
on Sep 21
From markcarrigan.net
Nerd cultures building up around academics and their tools: mathematicians and chalk
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HT Morten Hansen
on Sep 21
From markcarrigan.net
A worrying scam backed up by an AI-generated website
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I was momentarily thrown by this earlier today: Dear owner of I represent the Intellectual Property division. We have identified animage belonging to our client on your website. Image Details…
on Sep 19
From markcarrigan.net
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I found this a really thought-provoking argument from Morten Hansen about the commercialisation strategies for LLMs, developing from the familiar focus on monetising attention (surveillance capital…
on Sep 15
From markcarrigan.net
What would it mean to take a deflationary stance towards Generative AI?
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I’ve been thinking recently about what a deflationary stance towards GenAI would look like. It’s a term I’ve often associated with Richard Rorty’s style, in which he is pron…
on Sep 15
From markcarrigan.net
When will the AI bubble burst? What will be left behind?
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It must surely burst at some point, but it’s interesting reading this New Statesman piece from early August suggesting that the sharp dip in July could turn out to be a parallel to the dot co…
on Sep 15
From markcarrigan.net
What the gardener ruining my shrubs illustrates about prompting LLMs
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I came home recently to find that my request to a gardener to “cut back the shrubs” led him to absolutely decimate them: What does ‘cut back’ mean? I meant slightly trim ove…
on Sep 11
From markcarrigan.net
Scholarly publishing creaking under the weak of GenAI
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I’m just finishing off the proofs for Generative AI for Academics. I think this prediction written last summer (god publishing books is slow) is holding up depressingly well: I suspect these …
on Sep 9
From markcarrigan.net
Why hasn’t Twitter/X died yet?
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I’ve spent the week wondering this as I contemplate deleting my Twitter account. here are influential people across every sector who have significant online followings who are reluctant to le…
on Sep 7
From markcarrigan.net
Should other professional associations leave Twitter/X?
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I applaud this decision by the Association for Learning Technology 👏 should other professional associations leave? From 30 August 2024, ALT will cease all activity on X (formerly known as Twitter).…
on Sep 7
From markcarrigan.net
IBM’s Paperwork Explosion Prefigures Hyped Claims about GenAI
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HT Naomi Baron
on Aug 31
From markcarrigan.net
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The other psychoanalytical theorist I’m drawn to is Hans Loewald. I came across his work through the Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein, instantly being captivated by Loewald’s notion o…
on Aug 29
From markcarrigan.net
The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations
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I found this argument by L.M. Sacasas that ‘Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention’ immensely compelling. He’s one of the most interesting voices helping …
on Aug 29
From markcarrigan.net
Academic Publishing in an Era of ChatGPT
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In this episode of Generative Dialogues, Mark Carrigan and Helen Beetham discuss the implications of recent developments in academic publishing and generative AI. Key topics include: The Taylor &am…
on Aug 29
From markcarrigan.net
In the near future academic copy editing will be AI-driven
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This firm works for a lot of the major university and commercial presses. I’d hazard a guess that copy editors “only managing exceptions and problems that are not yet handled by the cop…
on Aug 26
From markcarrigan.net
We don’t have to be unequal, it doesn’t have to be unfair, poverty isn’t inevitable
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Reading Lynne Segal’s (super) Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy reminded me of the closing lines from Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance speech in 2015: I say thank you to everyone f…
on Aug 11
From markcarrigan.net
Technosolutionism meets anomie
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This is not satire as far as I can tell. I’m sure it will flop (though it’s only $99 which will help) but it’s part of a broader trend towards technosolutions for contemporary ano…
on Aug 7
From markcarrigan.net
Five propositions about the social ontology of generative AI
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A summary from Claude of the arguments Milan Stürmer and I have made in recent conversations we’ve been recording Based on the contents of your meeting transcripts, here are five propositions…
on Aug 7
From markcarrigan.net
Will OpenAI go the way of WeWork?
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I think this comparison by Gary Marcus is overstated because OpenAI have a remarkable (if flawed) product whereas WeWork had commercial office space masquerading as a disruptive innovation. But the…
on Aug 6
From markcarrigan.net
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In Helen Sword’s wonderful book about writing she identifies what I think of as the intellectual lifeworld of the author: Successful writers seldom work entirely in isolation; even in traditi…
on Aug 6
From markcarrigan.net
Conversational agents can be sponsors of literacy
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I just encountered this notion via Tusting et al’s Academics Writing and it immediately helped me clarify the sense in which Claude now shows up in my professional lifeworld: Professional wri…
on Aug 6
From markcarrigan.net
The triangulation of centrists emboldens the far-right
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Over the last few days I’ve been thinking back to this Richard Seymour piece about the strange connections between centrists and the far-right: Against all this, official liberalism has one m…
on Aug 6
From markcarrigan.net
The original source of the claim that ChatGPT overuses the word ‘delve’
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The original source of the claim that ChatGPT overuses the word ‘delve’ seems to be AI Phrase Finder which makes the claim on the basis of “our dataset of 50,000 ChatGPT responses…
on Aug 6
From markcarrigan.net
I want the joy of simple colours
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I want the joy of simple colours, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes fro…
on Aug 5
From markcarrigan.net
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This is a useful concept from Andrew Dryhurst in a recent paper in JCR. I’ve been prone to arguing for the same framing by talking about the need to historicise AI, in terms of a broader hist…
on Aug 1
From markcarrigan.net
What will be left after the GenAI bubble bursts?
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This is such an important question, initially from Cory Doctorow and then picked up by Alex Hanna. It is indisputable that it is a bubble which means that it will burst: Doctorow thinks that the re…
on Aug 1
From markcarrigan.net
Ten propositions about generative AI and the future of academic writing
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The advent of generative AI doesn’t just pose practical challenges for academic writing; it forces us to confront fundamental questions about why we write and what we hope to achieve through …
on Jul 31
From markcarrigan.net
The AI video generators are superficially stunning but deeply useless
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I’ve been playing around with them occasionally and I just can’t get them to produce what I’m actually asking for. For example this is Luma’s response to the prompt “A…
on Jul 27
From markcarrigan.net
Should I talk about LLMs, conversational agents, GAI or GenAI?
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I wrote a book in which I consistently used the acronym GAI to refer to generative artificial intelligence. But I’ve been struck that I’m literally the only person using this, leading m…
on Jul 26
From markcarrigan.net
We’re now up to 7 episodes of our podcast about generative AI in higher education
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(Annoyingly, none of the multiple ways of embedding Spotify seem to work on Wordpress, so please click above to access)
on Jul 19
From markcarrigan.net
AI Policy and Higher Education Under a New UK Government
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In this episode of Generative Dialogues, Mark Carrigan and Helen Beetham discuss the implications of the recent UK election for AI policy and higher education. Key topics include: Labour’s em…
on Jul 15