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This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. There are only five links (the others are easter eggs for hardcore tea sippers) and I promise they’re usually more interesting than just being excuses for my own ranting!

NOTE: I purposefully send the full newsletter out via email since it’s what most people signed up for, but if you haven’t clicked through to my actual website in a while, check it out. I have a new template for a cleaner reading experience, which I think is nicer than the email. And if you wait a few hours, you’ll get to see the “final” edit!

_ONE

What is a reluctant reader? | Ellie Lathbridge

The label ‘reluctant reader’ is often given to learners who, for a variety of reasons, seem disengaged from reading. However, the term itself could be contributing to the problem. The limitations that some place on what counts as reading feeds directly into the issue with ‘reluctant reader’ terminology. Guy notes that it focuses more on the educator or parent doing the defining, and not the learners themselves.

I’ve always despised the term “reluctant reader” and discourage its use at the day job, but I’d never taken the time to solidify my thoughts about it, never mind write them down.

A few months back, after Lathbridge wrote an excellent article on Comics, Manga, and Neurodivergence, we had a couple of conversations about reluctant readers that helped solidify my own thoughts about it. She combined those conversations with her own intellectual curiosity, found an actual expert to support our shared hypothesis, and wrote this excellent article on why the term needs to be retired.

Anyone who’s referred to themselves or someone else as a “reluctant reader” needs to read this (yes, reading online counts!) and recalibrate their definitions of readers and reading.

Hot Take: If listening to audiobooks counts as reading — which some people feel very strongly about — than reading comics and manga absolutely count, too. Hell, I’ve strongly argued that watching movies with subtitles and playing text-heavy RPGs (hello, Persona 3 Reload! Metaphor: Refantazio! Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader!) count more as reading than audiobooks, but it’s not a competition.

__TWO

Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills | AJ Dellinger

Instead of AI getting so good at completing tasks that it takes the place of a person, we may just become so reliant on imperfect tools that our own abilities atrophy. A new study published by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that the more humans lean on AI tools to complete their tasks, the less critical thinking they do, making it more difficult to call upon the skills when they are needed.

Microsoft is one of the major players pushing AI into everything, everywhere, all at once — from investing billions of dollars in various AI startups, including Open AI, to quietly slipping Copilot into Office 360 subscriptions. Last month, they announced an $80B investment in AI-enabled data centers “to train artificial intelligence models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications.”

And yet, Microsoft’s own researchers have recently added to the growing body of research that says all of the marketing hype around claims of AI’s productivity and creativity boosts are just the usual smoke and mirrors, with significant downsides.

When you’re inexplicably* betting this much money on something, “inevitability” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy out of necessity — even when you know it’s all built upon a throne of lies. Big Tobacco knew smoking was bad for decades, they just didn’t publicly release their own research confirming it, and yet here we are…

* Spoiler: It’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism.

___THREE

AI-Generated Poetry Responses | James Brush

I often have my students write a quick 1-paragraph response to what they read. It allows for a quick assessment for me and a memory tool for them as well as possibly the basis of a longer composition. I got to wondering how well ChatGPT could handle this assignment. We had recently read and viewed “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty, so I figured I’d start there.

I usually hate ChatGPT “experiments” like this, but Brush’s is depressingly “interesting” for its purpose and specificity.

Poetry is frequently subject to interpretation, and the poet’s own explanation / intent isn’t always considered to be the correct interpretation, especially if it isn’t a satisfying one. I always found writing about poetry to be much harder than writing poetry itself, and my early experiences with reading poetry actively turned me against it, so I can understand the appeal of relying on ChatGPT for an assignment like this.

Unfortunately, as the aforementioned Microsoft research shows, doing so ensures you still won’t understand the poem nor how to write about it, and as Brush notes, many teachers will be unable to determine that as long as we live in a society that values standardized testing and scoring over actual education and enrichment.

We’ll never know whose insights were mined and synthesized to generate these convincing responses (as long as there’s enough existing data about the subject for the LLMs to synthesize), and because most people aren’t very good writers to begin with, these tools are going to make it impossible to know who’s using them vs. writing authentically — especially if you don’t value good writing to begin with.

PS: I especially hate that the run-on sentence prompt he used sounds like my own first and second drafts! Cooked, indeed.

____FOUR

Thanks, AI hate it | Dominic Wellington

A lot of LinkedIn was slop before GenAI; all the LLMs have done is to accelerate the production of slop. Instead of individual posts being slopped out by hand, GenAI promises to create slop automatically at scale. Not sure that’s a win, actually.

For the past several years, LinkedIn has been one of my primary social platforms — I even hosted this newsletter there for several months — and until they started going the walled garden route and limiting the reach of posts with external links, it had become a decent substitute for Twitter to keep on top of industry-related news and insights. It’s always had problems with wannabe social gurus and lazy salespeople, but you could reasonably control your home feed as long as you were intentional about building your network and only following relevant professionals.

Unfortunately, the shift towards prioritizing engagement on the platform over links to external content; self-serving prompts and calls for “expert” insights; and, of course, the addition of AI-assisted job search — has added up to the one thing that’s become truly inevitable for anything chasing scale online: enshittification.

It’s been depressing watching people I used to respect playing the attention-seeking game by LinkedIn’s latest rules, some going so far as to re-post significant chunks of articles they’d previously link to rather than risk less reach with a link and their own insights. The absolute worst, though, are the blatantly AI-regurgitated posts offering the blandest “insights,” or templated comments that demonstrate the person didn’t actually engage with the post they’re commenting on. “Commenting for reach” has been weaponized and democratized! *barf emoji*

PS: Remember, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and last year they quietly opted all users in to allowing their content to be used for AI training. Fool me once…

_____FIVE

As Humanities Fight for Support, New Journal Aims to Celebrate Their Role in Public Life | Jennifer Howard

Academia “needs to be a little less pompous and inaccessible, and one way to do that is by putting itself in public,” she says. “How do you take really amazing academic research and turn it into social information, public knowledge? It’s an ongoing question that some academics find stressful.”

I’m no fan of academia’s publish or perish model, and I’ll never forget the two editors from academic presses who thought they could be Writer’s Digest‘s editor-in-chief despite never having managed a budget nor had any concerns about the commercial prospects of their books, but I also believe academic publishers do important work that shouldn’t be weighed down by commercial potential.

I criticized Dan McQuillan’s Resisting AI for being “frustratingly academic,” mostly because I was disappointed that his important work wouldn’t reach more readers. There needs to be a middle ground between academics like McQuillan and the obnoxiously grating, long-winded, but aggressively accessible Ed Zitron, otherwise the never-ending hype around AI effectively goes unchallenged for normal people who are being told by their bosses that they need to be using “AI” for… reasons.

Public Humanities sounds interesting, attempting to address the same problem represented by McQuillan, Zitron, and mainstream media coverage of AI. The best research is often written from, and typically for, an academic perspective that isn’t as accessible as the Trojan horse op-eds and fawning media coverage that gets the most attention. Unfortunately, while their open access model is laudable, their online presentation is disappointingly academic, unlikely to gain any traction outside of academic circles.

On the bright side, it looks like they have an RSS feed!

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