Casey Fiesler

Been thinking a lot about the students in this class (presumably, but not certainly) using AI on a take-home midterm and then bombing the in-class final. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... But I think the real story here is not *that* students use AI, it's (part of) *why* …

Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat insidehighered.com

I'm starting to see a pretty coherent body of research pointing to this answer. For example, this paper "Social Dynamics of AI Adoption" is about *parents*: "Anxiety about falling behind can drive people to embrace emerging technologies with uncertain consequences." www.nber.o…

nber.org

Very little - class prep is more activity based (in part because there are so many freshman and I don't have learning to read academic papers as a learning objective). But here's the list from a previous upper division version: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

AI & Society Schedule & Readings: Spring 2026 docs.google.com

In the context of CS students specifically, from a preprint: "Some students are reluctant to use AI but feel pressure to do so anyway. This is because they feel that their peers use AI and can write code more efficiently as a result, potentially making them more employable." a…

Job Anxiety in Post-Secondary Computer Science Students Caused by Artificial Intelligence arxiv.org

On the first page of search results there's this recent preprint ("On Verbalized Confidence Scores for LLMs" arxiv.org/html/2412.14...) so I gave it a skim. Interesting! Then I realized that this paper was cited in the Google AI overview... for a claim that I was pretty sure i…

On Verbalized Confidence Scores for LLMs arxiv.org

Depressing that ACM is probably correct about this: "AI-assisted literature reviews ... are already changing research workflows. Publishers absent from AI ecosystems risk becoming repositories of record rather than sources of influence." cacm.acm.org/opinion/now-...

cacm.acm.org

Ever seen a news story about AI and thought “this could be an episode of Black Mirror”? We're running a research study where we ask people to imagine generative AI futures and pitch their own science fiction story. More detail at the link and please share! www.internetruleslab…

Black Mirror Survey Study — Internet Rules Lab internetruleslab.com

A side effect of a new department (founded 2015) is that we have very very few alumni donations. And I sometimes get the (very kind) question "how can I support you since you don't get paid for teaching random internet people about AI ethics?" Support my students instead :) bi…

giveto.colorado.edu

Brown University also just released a report on gen AI based in part on a survey of students. provost.brown.edu/sites/defaul... 88% of undergrads indicated concerns about the impact of gen AI use on their learning, and 87% indicated fear of negative consequences for their cogn…

provost.brown.edu

And of course this is true beyond educational contexts as well: problematic gen AI use in general being driven in part by comparative/competitive pressure and a "fear of being left behind." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

Particularly in the context of (appropriate) crackdowns on LLM-generated papers (e.g., on arXiv) and more and more tales of fabricated citations, two reminders: (1) LLMs do not "cite their sources" (2) Using an LLM to generate, complete, or fix LaTeX code can result in fabricated citations

In the "you can't make this up" category of LLM interactions... TL;DR Google Gemini claims that LLMs "often give themselves a 95%+ confidence score even when they are hallucinating" - which was itself a "hallucinated" claim - then later assigns itself 0.95 confidence in that hallucinated claim. 🧵

So I just got probably my fifth email this year from another AI startup focused on citation verification (wanting me to do ads for them). This time as I was looking at their website (tagline: "Write your paper with 100% correct references") I thought... wait, why do we actually want this? 🧵

Not going to pile onto that editor more, but I’m legitimately confused: When people say they use ChatGPT as a search engine do they really also mean for simple things like typing in the title of an article to retrieve a URL? I’m genuinely curious why?

I saw someone referring to the booing of commencement speakers talking about AI as a tantrum from students who don’t understand technology. That made me think that I bet machine breaking was also perceived as a tantrum. Anyway, here’s some thoughts about the Luddites.

Ran into another example of the Google AI Overview misinterpreting a search term as a command. :) This is a conference acronym that I saw on a CV and didn't know what it was!

Basically I only get recognized from social media at CS conferences. Also once in a Barnes & Noble four years ago, and twice on my own campus. But it turns out that the karaoke DJ at a local dive bar recognized me, and told everyone to follow me to learn about AI just before I sang Def Leppard.

You know what I really wish re: my university's ChatGPT contract? That it had token limits or something. I think a useful lesson would be to have to decide what LLM uses are "worth it" in order to fit into a limited amount. Trying to think of a way to simulate this in my AI & Society course.

My 1000-level AI & Society class launches today, and the enrollment is kind of interesting. The top majors (in order) are: Exploratory Studies (undecided), Psychology, Economics, Information Science (my dept), Finance, Strategic Communication, Marketing, Statistics. Also 1 engineering major, 0 CS.

If anyone would like to write a dissertation about my social media comments I have some theories. But the funniest phenomenon right now is the number of men who are leaving comments I’m 90% sure were written by an LLM, I guess… to sound smart? Because they had no thoughts of their own?