See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
I joined Twitter for the first time during a session at an academic conference, and since then have mostly used it to keep in touch with academics who share my professional interests. But many of those professional contacts feel about Twitter the way I do, and have moved much (though not all) of their activity…
How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future? AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s…
TikTok influencers and celebrities are increasingly taking over from journalists as the main source of news for young people, according to a report published Wednesday by the Britain-based Reuters Institute. The figures were based on interviews with some 94,000 people across 46 countries, conducted for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of…
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is…
Years ago I spent some time in Second Life, taking my young son to visit a display of NASA rockets and historical sites from classical history, and for my own amusement wandering through a few Star Trek exhibits, and exploring the mostly empty landscapes. My university bought an island, and I was briefly excited at…
I rather miss teaching HTML and doing my own web design on the side. These days, when my students propose to make a web page, they have already decided to use Google Sites or Wix. Sometimes I can talk them into using WordPress, but there just isn’t room in my curriculum to teach them everything…
A good article about kids and dopamine. Apps and sweets can hijack the neural pathways we need to survive, triggering tantrums and aggression. The problem describes plenty of adults, too! It’s not actually happiness we feel when we fulfill that craving. While she’s staring into the technicolor images, her brain experiences spikes in dopamine, over and…
As Mike Edwards notes, “AI doomers will eagerly tweet this article, unaware that it’s not about the dangers of LLMs: it’s about *information literacy*”
In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that the chat bot could lead him astray.
It was time to download Google Chrome on a new Windows 11 computer. I typed “Chrome” into the Microsoft Edge search bar. I was greeted with a full-screen Microsoft Bing AI chatbot window, which promptly told me it was searching for… Bing features. Source: Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my ‘Chrome’ search with a…
What would you do? Today I wrote 192 lines of ChoiceScript code to address this journalism lesson.
Me: (Making a journalism game to teach myself ChoiceScript.)
Nobody:
Me: Maybe I should add a “current time” display.
Nobody:
Me: And I should code up all the special cases for a.m., p.m., noon and midnight, to match AP Style.
Nobody:
Me: How long could it take?
(Six hours later….)
“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.” In March, Goldman Sachs…
Shortly after my online AmLit survey began, I received two obviously AI-generated submissions. The responses did not address the prompt, there was no textual annotation and brainstorming assignment that was supposed to lead up to the written response, and the student did not take me up on my offer to meet to discuss how the…
The other day I got a last-minute request to video a show. I usually like to watch a dress rehearsal first, which gives me the chance to check out my equipment and get a sense of where the important action will take place. But yesterday I had to go in cold, and I felt a…
Long, self-indulgent essays from a writer I idolized, a gorgeous online portfolio of photos taken by a photographer in Japan, a repository of old State Department language learning resources, all gone. Link rot is real, folks, and with it comes a slow, steady sloughing off things on the internet we once loved — or still love,…
In October, 2002, I was blogging about The stupidity of explosions in space movies The Chronicle of Higher Education rescues the briefly defunct Arts & Letters Daily The superiority complex An anti-telemarketing script An “I Love Lucy: bible study Why whitespace matters when creating a sign The coming air age of 1955 (as envisioned in…
Students who cheat with ChatGPT can look forward to these $15/hr jobs training the AI that they relied upon to get them their degrees. The students who actually did the work themselves should be much be better prepared to demonstrate how their work differs from the mediocre stream of bot-produced content. Savreux is part of…
I am curious enough about cockatoos that I might click a link to read an article about people who own a cockatoos. I feel the same about British royalty, or “van life,” or VR. Other than remembering a cool exhibit that stacked up various NASA and other historical rockets so you could see the scale,…
Today’s students have many strengths. They are great at collaboration, introspection, and remixing. While my students are very familiar with phone apps, even the English majors who want to be professional writers are not very familiar with the conventions of writing for the World Wide Web. Because their sense of “being online” mostly entails interacting…
Occasionally, when I don’t know exactly what to search for, I have found it somewhat useful to describe a problem to Bing and see what topics it searches for as it assembles its answer. But decades of experience with search engines means I don’t usually need a bot to tell me what to search for.…