Tenille McDermott

Thrilled to have a short fiction piece in the latest volume of @meniscusAU! The whole issue is packed with brilliant contributions and is available to read online now: meniscus.org.au/current-issue

"refusing" AI is good but we need to focus, also, on the AI we can't refuse, the one already/increasingly embedded in our infrastructures (LMSs, surveillance, etc). the liberal "individual choice" frame sort of marginalizes that other, very insidious AI

as usual, these courses are actually extremely cheap to run and often end up subsidising other courses for the university, but consultants and management don't respect them and think they need to make the universities look futuristic by opening Raytheon AI Crypto centers instead

Universities don't need to "teach students to use AI well." The whole point of AI is that it doesn't require any skill. Universities *should* teach students how to write and research on their own, and foster an ethic of shaming people who outsource their basic ability to think.

I'm not even in the mood to joke about this, it's so depressing. You can't assign take-home essays anymore; it's completely pointless. Writing and reasoning abilities are very noticeably plummeting. Very discouraging to think where this is all going.

Slop essentially works like a cancer metastasising through the culture.

Many of the “AI” interventions mentioned here are the equivalent of paying for a gym that has machines that lift weights for you. I don’t mean it’s sort of like that, I mean, in educational contexts, it’s the exact same logic. It’s absurd in its face. I feel like I’m going insane

Two things have happened with Richard Dawkins here with his claim that the AI known as Claude is "conscious". 1. He's fallen for the Eliza Effect, first diagnosed in 1966. "A psychological phenomenon where humans anthropomorphise computer programs, projecting understanding, empathy, and intelligence onto them." 2. He has a mechanistic view of consciousness anyway. He frequently employs machine and computational metaphors to explain human consciousness and biology. He views the brain as a "complex computer" and humans as "survival machines" or "gene machines". So his framing belief system can only lead to his erroneous conclusion - that he and the machine are both conscious.

This is not a detainment camp in World War II, nor a prison in the Holocaust, this is Gaza. A chilling reminder that history repeats. A holocaust is happening right before our eyes and the world is silent

You can be well-educated, famous, rich, published, old, and play chess well, but if you aren't familiar with the theory of supervised learning and the math of the Perceptron, you will sound absolutely dumb when you speak about AI. If math is hard for you, then with AI, it's better to say nothing and be seen as smart than to say anything at all and prove that you aren't.

If you spent the Morrison years furious at his secrecy, at his obedience to the corporate death cult, and at his fawning to American ruling class power, but you're not bothered by the identical caricteristics in Albanese, you're not into politics, you're into team sports

I simply cannot overstress how brick stupid this man is. Reddit circa 2006 in shambles.

Oh, I almost forgot about this one! New review out from yours truly of Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward's The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism for Affirmations: of the modern doi.org/10.31646/am.158

Appalling. A 10% increase in homelessness under Labor. We are a wealthy country and we can fix this. Meanwhile, kids growing up in cars. abc.net.au/news/2026-04-2…

Boom! @TriciaDearborn is exactly right on this post and thread on Gen-AI and writing. I teach an advanced undergraduate course in economic policy writing, and this is exactly what I find. AI cannot generate an authentic voice/POV, and this creates huge structural problems in writing that are not easily fixed.

When my daughter "begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: 'Help me write.' If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is 'Help me visualize.' She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: 'Help me edit.'" Welcome to hell👿 newyorker.com/culture/progre…

Students discussing the essay they wrote with AI

TEQSA should be mandating minimum face-to-face teaching hours for degrees to count as "on-campus" study. This has funding implications and would go a long way to fixing the curse of pre-recorded content. theage.com.au/national/victo…

A wonderful article from three wonderful friends and colleagues, led by @DrClaireBrennan. At once bleak and hopeful, it details the practical cost of cuts to the humanities and the propects for arts education to live on in the digital commons doi.org/10.1080/008228…

Didn’t expect to quit UQP today but if you mess with Wiradjuri writers I’m gonna make it financially painful for you!!!

Both Evelyn and Jazz are national treasures and UQP can absolutely eat shit and perish. Wish I could say I’m surprised, but I’m not - just disappointed, and standing in solidarity with those taking a stand.