Author: DavidWebster
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Brain Rot, AI Slop and the Work of Thinking
How can we teach and work in what Adam Aleksic calls our ‘hypermediated reality’? I spoke today at EdTech World Forum in London on Education in an Age of Brain Rot, AI Slop and Cognitive Offloading. The title is not elegant, like my usual efforts… But it tries to capture the feeling many of us…
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Eating the tompouce
There are some things that resist being done neatly. I am fond of sweet pastry-related offerings—to put it mildly. So, on my many trips to Groningen, when I saw something that looked (and largely behaved) like a vanilla slice, I had to give the tompouce a go. But unlike the vanilla slice eating of my…
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I Taught Philosophy for 20 Years. Here’s What I Learned.
[Apologies for the clickbait title!] I taught philosophy for at least 20 years. Long enough to become reasonably confident in what I was doing and then realise that at least some of that confidence was misplaced. We tend to think we are teaching philosophy when we explain arguments, optimistically set readings, and guide students through…
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Against Nihilism, For Appetite: Why Teaching Still Matters
Cross-posted from my LinkedIn posts, where I mostly put stuff these days.. “In these troubled times” is a phrase we hear often, sometimes in a darkly humorous, sarcastic-not-sarcastic tone. At other times it feels like mere rhetorical habit. And yet it persists, because the underlying feeling it gestures towards persists too. The nihilism that Nietzsche…
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Dead University Theory?
This is a short LinkedIn post that I’ll post here as a reminder to expand! You’ve heard of ‘dead internet theory’?* Which seems to get more persuasive every day. The idea that the internet is now largely driven by bots and algorithms interacting with each other, and as the automations and AI take up more…
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Disciplinary Specificity and Domain Expertise: Why Generative AI systems need scholars.
Does anyone need to remember or know anything anymore? We carry the sum of all human knowledge in our pocket, so can’t we just look stuff up? But this atomised attitude towards knowledge as mere lists of discrete facts is hugely inadequate. Not only is there the matter of knowing what to ask, but most…
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Why Being Polite to AI Matters (And Not For the Reason You Think)
Cross-Posted from where I put it on LinkedIn: I am writing a longer piece on politeness to AI and ethics, but in light of Sam Altman’s recent comments – I asked Claude GAI (very nicely) to extract a 250 word summary from my draft – which I have (quite heavily) edited and is here: We…
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GAI Podcast on Desire in Pali Buddhist Canon
NotebookLM and podcast generation: A test… So – to really test NotebookLM’s function of generating a ‘Deep Dive Conversation’ , I uploaded my book on Desire in Pali Buddhist texts, and asked it to generate the conversation – and it took under 5 minutes – and here we go – a 20 minute (US- accented)…
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Restraining the Uncanny Guest? Video…
I recently did a blog post called ‘Restraining the uncanny guest: AI ethics and university practice‘ for the Society for Research into Higher Education – following up my post about the idea of GAI as such a figure in HE. I expanded on these ideas as part of the University of Liverpool’s GAI-Fest a couple…
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Learning to AI – podcast series
Just a quick post to note that I am now leading a Podcast series from the University of Liverpool. The first episode features, as the notes say: In this episode, Professor David Webster from the University of Liverpool talks to Professor Jon Dron of Athabasca University in Canada. They discuss the mood in Higher Education…
Dave Webster 