Simple question: would you rather be hired based on merit or demographics?

.@SenateCA panel votes 7-1 to rewrite gov't bill #C9 to outlaw Indian Residential School "denialism" under threat of two years' jailing: 'It can involve minimizing or denying the deaths.'  blacklocks.ca/vote-to-outlaw… #cdnpoli

.@SenateCA human rights committee votes 7 to 1 to criminalize Indian Residential School “denialism.” Public statements intended to promote hatred by downplaying impacts of Residential Schools would be outlawed under threat of 2 years in jail. blacklocks.ca/vote-to-outlaw… #cdnpoli @TerryGlavin @jonkay

I've gotten a lot of comments like this, so forgive me if this isn't very kind, but I'm at my limit. If you're a serious academic, you've spent a lot of time looking at citations, and you know they often contain errors. You know that it's very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible. Given that this is going on, it's kind of silly to think that we should have a kind of death penalty for having an LLM, hallucination mistake What you're doing is virtue signaling and pretending that citations are somehow sacred to what academics do, when in fact they're mostly just poorly put up window dressing. You're being dishonest. Perhaps with yourself, perhaps with me.

I've gotten a lot of comments like this, so forgive me if this isn't very kind, but I'm at my limit. If you're a serious academic, you've spent a lot of time looking at citations, and you know they often contain errors. You know that it's very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible. Given that this is going on, it's kind of silly to think that we should have a kind of death penalty for having an LLM, hallucination mistake What you're doing is virtue signaling and pretending that citations are somehow sacred to what academics do, when in fact they're mostly just poorly put up window dressing. You're being dishonest. Perhaps with yourself, perhaps with me.

1/4 Frances Widdowson travelled to @UofRegina campus to do Spectrum Street Epistemology, after her events were cancelled. She had a message for President Jeff Keshen. @SocietyforAcad1 @JimMcMurtry01 @ChanLPfa @WatSAFS @GadSaad @WokeAcademy @CanadaPoli2 @peterboghossian @jonkay

🚨 University professors have been saying AI is completely destroying learning and that we'll soon have an AI-powered, semi-illiterate workforce. Here's a glimpse into the educational apocalypse: "Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school. (...) After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.” - "By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.” - AI in education is a serious topic, and many schools and universities are blindly jumping into the "AI-first" wave without considering short and long-term consequences. It would be great to hear more from teachers and educators to understand potential solutions. This might be a great opportunity for rethinking the education system and how students are assessed. - 👉 Link to the full article below. 👉 To learn more about AI's legal and ethical challenges, join my newsletter's 94,700 subscribers (link below).

Academia *knew* entire fields could not be replicated. They watched junk science proliferate and said nothing. This was not oversight. It was cowardly complicity.

Legal case challenging municipality’s recording ban heard in court, judge reserves decision. ctvnews.ca/winnipeg/article/… @JCCFCanada @CanConLaw