Ben Williamson

Why they matter

Researcher with public evidence across AI business, AI research, Culture, work & education.

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past 30d
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past 30d
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Researching data, tech, futures, and biological sciences in education | Senior Lecturer and co-director at the Centre for Research in Digital Education | University of Edinburgh | Editor of Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social

Articles & links

Ben Williamson reposted
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app

“Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.”

nytimes.com View on Bluesky →

"Certainly, AI teaching will be cheaper than teaching assistants. But we know that the second it becomes possible for an institution to achieve an end cheaply – even if it’s far worse – there is immense pressure from above to do so." www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom theguardian.com
AI Weekly's analysis
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 21 ↻ 2 ↩ 0 · 9 from the directory shared this · 11d ago
Ben Williamson reposted
@jeffgreene.bsky.social

This is ridiculous. “Google’s A.I. changes illustrate a longstanding power dynamic between consumer tech giants and the U.S. public education system. Tech companies regularly turn on new education product features for students…” (1/3)

nytimes.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Google turned on Gemini this week for some elementary through high school students using its Classroom app, which serves more than 150 million users worldwide.
  • Until this week, Google auto-enabled Gemini in Classroom only for students 18 or older; K-12 access still requires a school admin to flip the toggle.
  • The Gemini for Education version does not use student data to train AI, and Google says human reviewers do not read it.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky →

One good thing to say about this is STS researchers are going to have a blast doing ethnographies of its enactment. "Claude Science brings ... fragmented tools into a single research environment where scientists can conduct all stages of their work." www.anthropic.com/news/cla…

Claude Science, an AI workbench for scientists anthropic.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 6 from the directory shared this · 49d ago
Ben Williamson reposted
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app

“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”

Teachers need help with AI. A union is offering training – with $23m in funding from big tech theguardian.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • The AFT's National Academy for AI Instruction is backed by $23 million: $12.5m from Microsoft over five years, $10m from OpenAI, and $500,000 from Anthropic in year one.
  • The academy aims to reach roughly 400,000 K-12 educators by 2030, about one in ten US teachers, starting with New York City this fall.
  • AFT president Randi Weingarten frames the goal as putting teachers 'in the driver's seat' with 'commonsense guardrails' on classroom AI.
Read full analysis →
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Ben Williamson reposted
@kjhealy.co

Today’s gadget, with a nice dose of ordinalization. intheweights.com

IN THE WEIGHTS intheweights.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Joey Flynn and Thomas Dimson, both former OpenAI employees, built the site, which launched in June 2026.
  • The tool queries models including GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini, Grok, and Llama, scoring recognition up to a maximum of 996.
  • Appearing in a 1-billion-parameter model like Meta's Llama signals especially high relevance, because smaller models compress knowledge more aggressively.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky →
Ben Williamson reposted
@theverge.com

AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists

AI-generated research papers are overwhelming peer review | The Verge theverge.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • AI-generated academic papers now regularly pass journal peer review, evading both human reviewers and automated AI-detection tools.
  • Scientists identify mandatory data-sharing and reproducibility checks as the only remaining procedural safeguards capable of catching AI-fabricated research.
  • The crisis extends beyond arXiv's hallucinated-citation problem to affect broad peer-reviewed publishing across multiple scientific disciplines.
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MOOCs may have been so 2012, but the long-game data monetization plan to train AI looks like it was there all along. "Ng says some large companies launch products for the payout of data, not revenue, and then later monetize it through a different product" www.gsb.stanford.edu/…

Andrew Ng: Why AI Is the New Electricity gsb.stanford.edu
View on Bluesky · ♥ 34 ↻ 10 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 13d ago

The recent retraction of a meta-study claiming the learning gains from ChatGPT was a signal of something seriously wrong in AIED research. But the problems are deeper than one paper alone. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/i...

Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags arstechnica.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Humanities and Social Sciences Communications retracted the Wang and Fan ChatGPT meta-analysis on April 22, 2026, nearly a year after publication.
  • Before retraction, the paper had accumulated roughly 486,000 views, 266 citations, and an Altmetric score of 1,023.
  • The retraction notice cites discrepancies in the meta-analysis, including pooling of studies too different in method and sample to combine.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 54d ago

Recent commentary

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

View on Bluesky · ♥ 928 ↻ 420 ↩ 26 · 32d ago

What's most upsetting me as a journal editor is that many papers we receive where AI use is disclosed for editing and language refinement actually appear to have been ruined rather than improved by AI. We get what seem like promising underpinning studies, but totally obscured by over-complex text.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 454 ↻ 101 ↩ 7 · 1d ago

AI-assisted text is deadly for academic journal editors and reviewers. I'm detecting a lot more of it recently as an editor. It's still there in the "Frankencitations" and those little linguistic "tells" like "AI is not the cause. It's the symptom of an underlying reality." But it's more, too. 1/

View on Bluesky · ♥ 228 ↻ 61 ↩ 8 · 68d ago

The evidence about AI in education remains terrible as a basis for policy or practice. As schools in some places come back from summer next week (oh Scotland it's too early), here's a wee roundup on just how truly woefully AIED research has stood up and why educators shouldn't call on it 1/

View on Bluesky · ♥ 137 ↻ 53 ↩ 3 · 12d ago

Wee bit of advice for anyone writing up research about AI in education. Journals like the one I edit are drowning in it. Reviewers aren't accepting invitations. Most manuscripts offer *nothing* new. Yes it's a big current topic BUT it's not inevitably important as a research subject...

View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 19 ↩ 2 · 81d ago

Maybe if they had actually read what my work says about education, data and the edtech industry, instead of relying on some kind of AI summary of it, they would recognize that I - as an academic "who lives in the literature" - am about the last person to want to convert it into autosummary podcasts

View on Bluesky · ♥ 27 ↻ 4 ↩ 5 · 68d ago

Super intriguing that my university's head of tech today asked AI users to use Qwen running on institutional infrastructure instead of commercial LLMs ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that "incur token based charges" in order to "significantly save money." US big tech LLMs getting too pricy for HE now?

View on Bluesky · ♥ 20 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 14d ago

Whatever you think about LLMs in science and research, can we agree it's totally crossing a line to send 14 - *fourteen* - highly AI-produced autopapers *to one journal* in a *single week*! 1/

View on Bluesky · ♥ 23 ↻ 1 ↩ 2 · 12d ago

The imaginary of AI in education is so pervasive you can't even watch the Eurovosion Song Contest without weird references to automated classrooms and tutorbot assistants now

View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 3 ↩ 0 · 95d ago

Journal editing is tough these days with all the AI and exploitation of our work by publishers and now big tech too. BUT! Looking back on another academic year at @lmt-journal.bsky.social I'm really chuffed how we've stewarded some really great research on education and tech to publication. 1/

View on Bluesky · ♥ 15 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 27d ago

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