Maybe I’m burying
The ice is melting, so we’re finding junk from other civilisations. I call it junk because I live in a 350 year old farmhouse. Whenever I dig around in the garden, I find some junk. I found an old shoe once, circa early 1900s. And a smashed top hat with musical notes lining it, circa also early 1900s. I’ve not had these items appraised, they’re old and decrepit and just another child’s shoe and top hat. I found an old coin once too. That was from 1878, I think. I wanted to check, but I don’t know where I put it. It feels disrespectful to have lost something so old, but I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.
We humans leave our crap everywhere for literal millennia. We’re like the squirrels of the universe, burying our stuff and then forgetting where it is. Except that instead of the ecological outcome being a forest, our impact is planetary destruction. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinated by archaeology and have stared in awe at the ruins and rocks of ancient civilisations. I like to imagine what life used to be like.
I like to remember, too. Lately, we’ve been asked to remember a great deal of horrible actions and instigations in human history. Digging up the past as we struggle to understand what future might be coming for us.
It’s important to remember that our democracies weren’t always safe, certainly not for most people, and it’s important to push back against the people and systems making our world unsafe. It is also important to remember that we have options here. We don’t have to accept the status quo. It’s a lot, right now, but solidarity comes in many forms.
You aren’t burying your head in the sand if you’re trying to take care of yourself, your family, your friends and your neighbours. Just because you aren’t standing in the muck with a protest sign doesn’t mean that you are being complicit. I mean, I love a good protest, so if you’re feeling up for it, body count at those things does matter. But opportunities to make the world a better place come in other forms and present themselves all the time. Just be on the lookout and make a concerted effort to, indeed, do the right thing. Even if today it’s just telling an old friend who has been teaching in the Chicago Public School system for decades that TEACHERS have always and continue to do enough.
Remember that our actions have ripple effects. You don’t know how your bad mood is going to ripple out, just like you don’t know how your kindness will impact someone down the road. Be kind, check your attitude (note to self) and let’s keep uncovering the junk and remembering that we could busy ourselves burying acorns instead of trash.
I admit that the metaphor fell apart here at the end.
- Archaeologists are finding mysterious ancient objects on Norway’s melting glaciers > https://www.businessinsider.com/archaeologists-discovering-ancient-artifacts-norways-melting-glaciers-photos-2025-2
- Social Development > Self-Development > https://www.elysian.press/p/social-development-self-development
- We the Builders > https://www.wethebuilders.org/
Maybe I’m artificial
Oomph AI, amirite!? Idk if you’re here because you know me from my edtech days, which I obviously am still living, or if you landed here because you saw some stuff I did in open source. Or maybe you get this newsletter because you heard me wax philosophical about tech for good or technology and activism. Or maybe you’re my mom (hi mom!). Whatever the case, if you’ve been here for a while, you won’t be surprised that I get to write about AI.
I’ve already shared the Harnessing AI in Environmental Justice report we wrote for Friends of the Earth, but here it is again. We need actual regulatory guardrails because we’re wrong about AI. Our paper gives some advice on how to advocate for nuanced AI policies. It also gives some advice on how not to be a tool if you’re using generative AI.
If I had to summarise that advice, I would say: Think.
Once, I called a generative AI tool Doug‘s “little robot friend” and now whenever he uses generative AI for anything, he warns me by saying “I asked my little robot friend and…” This is transparency, and I appreciate it. I can be wildly critical of whatever the little robot says because I’m criticising AI output, not Doug’s thinking. Not everyone is so forthcoming about how and when they’re using generative AI.
I could write a big rant about the capitalist con that generative AI is, but there are others who are doing that quite well. My big thing is for the love of all that is holy get out of my streams with the AI generated BS. I can see it from a mile away and it erodes all respect I have for the “author”. I’m not saying it can’t be useful, but lordie the non-thinking usage, the outright slop. People are copying and pasting AI outputs willy nilly, leaving unchecked, unedited paragraphs all over the place and it’s MIND-BOGGLING to me.
Every single time I use generative AI, which admittedly is not very often because most of the time I feel that the cost outweighs the gain, it has some glaring mistake or forgot what I actually prompted or ignores all parameters. Honestly, when I try to use AI to do anything faster, it slows me down. Part of it is that I refuse to use all the Big Tech models and haven’t spent a lot of time trying to learn. Part of it, though, is that under the hood these things cannot actually think.
We shouldn’t be underestimating what a thinking brain can make with a tool like AI, but we also shouldn’t be underestimating what indiscriminate use of AI does to the thinking brain. I, for one, am going to keep on actually reading the thing instead of the AI output of the thing. Even skimming the thing seems to give me more accurate insight than AI summarising the thing.
“This is a piece of art that illustrates the concept of practice and failure in the context of creating something new, which can be emotionally challenging.” LLaVA pretending it knows what emotionally challenging means after I asked it to use OCR to pull text from an image
- The Generative AI Con > https://www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/
- Not so fast > https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/not-so-fast/
- How to be an activist in the world of AI > https://blog.weareopen.coop/how-to-be-an-activist-in-a-world-of-ai-b54b70f509a8
- AI Literacies for Open Educators: An Exploration > https://lu.ma/mak647t1
- F*ck Around And Find Out #1 (playing with AI stuff) > https://lu.ma/gkbv78pu
Maybe I need help
Once again I’m not sure the juice was worth the squeeze.