Kane Murdoch

If AI is actually making your research and writing more efficient and productive, I would expect you to be reading more source material, not less. If AI is helping you read less, you are becoming dumber.

I've been seeing this more and more, labs are shrinking due to massive funding cuts and scientists are leaning more and more on AI. There used to be a lot of debate about whether or not academia was a pyramid scheme, but I think that will quickly be obsolete if labs start using AI rather than training new students. "The issue is not whether my students are valuable. In the long run, they are invaluable. The issue is that their value emerges slowly, whereas AI delivers immediate returns. I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit how tempting this is. In our culture, preferring an algorithm to a trainee feels like a betrayal of the academic mission. Yet I see these calculations shaping the labs around me. Close colleagues are quietly refraining from taking on as many students as they used to. When they do take students, they are noticeably pickier." science.org/content/articl…

New York subway rule: Dogs must be "carried in a bag" when boarding. As a result, this regulation has directly sparked a creativity contest among New Yorkers..

@Sally_Sharif1 They're outsourcing their brains. Ai has poisoned the well of education.

I just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric. *** The average was 64/100.*** My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85. Context: • This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material. • Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions. • Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay. • I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester. • We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don't have to do something on their own that wasn't covered during the lecture. • Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade). • Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz. *** But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.*** After the midterm, students reported: • They thought they knew concept definitions but couldn't produce them on paper. • They thought they understood the arguments but struggled to connect them or identify points of agreement and disagreement. My view: It might be “cool” or “innovative” to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly "know" the material. Moving forward: We have a second midterm coming up. I don't know how to convey to students that the best way to do better on the exam is to rely on and improve their own reading skills.

@boganintel He looks like a total nutjob

Nothing but smiles for him as our world is ending. The personality type of the self important career politician, and all the neoliberal missionary zeal, has led to a decline in Australian dynamism.

🚨🚨BREAKING: A judge has determined Columbia University violated NY state law by issuing “arbitrary & capricious” punishments to Columbia students, who protested the US-Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. nytimes.com/2026/03/03/nyr…

@melnickjeffrey1 @Tyler_A_Harper Senior execs at unis are, quite literally, the most fomo-prone people on earth.

Remembering the provost at my old job who told us all at a faculty meeting that it was time for us all to create our Second Life avatars because we would be having meetings there before too long

@Solzi_Sez It could be said, accurately, that you're talking crap. Muted.

@CCguerilla Or, it could be that said research is vastly beyond yours in diligence and skill, and yours is just lazy slop. There is no real correlation with the tools but with the user. However, if you are both diligent and skilled, and you refuse tech, you are going to get flat out beat.

"My research is worthless AI slop and yours should be too. Here's why."

@igorlogvinenko If you have to outsource thinking I'm not interested. Bye bye.

@CCguerilla Argumentum ad Machinam. Oppose it on merits

This feels like integrity at unis.

@jrhennessy Melbourne demands fellatio

They killed him for this

@Tyler_A_Harper End of the day it's money. Make teaching and learning cheap (but increasingly worthless) so senior execs can pay themselves more, make their lives easier, and build more buildings.

If you talk to admins at universities pushing AI, it’s clear what the game is about: outsourcing student services and support to bots, increasing faculty “efficiency” by giving profs “AI tools” to “empower” their grading (ultimately allowing higher student/faculty ratios), etc.

I agree with the spirit here but as I’ve written about before: universities aren’t avoiding cracking down on AI because they’re afraid of their students, but because they’re punch drunk on EdTech—and AI *is* EdTech—because it lets them cut labor costs: e.g. human writing tutors.

@ragandboneshop That's reasonable- we've concluded the same basic thing. espace.curtin.edu.au/handle/20.500.…

@CCguerilla i am heartened by few things these days, but my faculty and admin. seem to be taking the idea of mandated invigilated check-ins for online students (exams, major written assignments, etc.). they can use a testing center of their choice, etc. far from ideal, but workable.

it is very true. the job has been altered fundamentally in a way i didn't imagine possible when i started less than two decades ago. the way this technology has altered and damaged student-faculty trust is devastating. this can't possibly be overstated.

Kid graduated Stanford CS last month with $180k in debt and a 3.8 GPA Applied to 847 entry-level positions since January Got 3 phone screens. Zero offers. Interviewed at a Series C startup in October. Hiring manager told him straight up: "We used to have 8 junior engineers. Now we have 2 seniors with Cursor and they ship faster than the old team of 10." His roommate who graduated with him is driving for DoorDash The career services office is still telling kids that "software engineering is recession-proof" while their own alumni network shows 67% of 2023 CS grads still unemployed or underemployed Meanwhile offshore contractors in Hyderabad are getting $35/hour to do senior-level work with Claude 3.5 The same work that used to go to American new grads at $140k total comp His internship manager from last summer just got laid off. Team of 12 mobile engineers replaced by 3 contractors and a React Native AI agent The bootcamp kids who graduated in 2022 and got $120k offers? Half of them managed out during "performance reviews" that were really just AI productivity audits He's $180k in the hole for a degree in a field that stopped hiring humans at his level 18 months ago But sure, keep telling kids to "learn to code"

@ragandboneshop More than enough, and more than most people imagine, will do so. So it becomes a choice between higher ed totally losing respect/social license, and budgets. I couldn't personally give 2/10ths of damn about online flexibility if it leads to a collapse in education.

@ragandboneshop Agreed there's no effective, systematic way to prove AI use. Which means that the assignments it can complete undetected are structurally collapsed, from an assurance of learning perspective. Not all students will "cheat" (avoid accountability for their learning), but...

Thanks for sending me this, @im_atkinson! Agree with everything except the time scale. This isn't going to happen; it already happened. Researchers have already turned themselves into AI papermills, and it's killing research open.substack.com/pub/causalinf/…

Iran’s regime is illiberal and brutal, and the Iranian people deserve the freedom they have long fought for. This gives no right to the US or Israel -whose own policies in Palestine are also illiberal and brutal- to bomb Iran, nor to EU leaders to cloak escalation in hypocrisy.