WHY WE NEED TO BE WARY ABOUT INTRODUCING AI INTO OUR TEACHING AND RESEARCH: COMMENTING ON GUEST ET AL.

Today I’m using my post as an excuse to read an article titled “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia” by Olivia Guest and 18 other authors based mostly in the Netherlands. This text can be found in a pre-print repository (https://philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU) where it was filed on 7 September of the current year. […]

OMINOUS PROPOSALS: AI-DEPENDENT STUDENTS CANNOT BE OUR EDUCATIONAL PARTNERS

Today I’m reading an article by, I quote, “Mary Curnock Cook CBE, who chairs the Dyson Institute and is a Trustee at HEPI, and Bess Brennan, Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus, which is running a series of collaborative events with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.” […]

A MUCH DEEPER DAMAGE: LOSING ACADEMIC LIFE TO AI

I was supposed to take part in a seminar next week, which I’ll have to miss, with a talk about how to use AI correctly. In this talk I was going to describe, once more, how the late Iain M. Banks presents AI in his Culture novels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series).             The Culture is a post-scarcity, […]

DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR FRONT: NOTES ON CHATGPT (SO FAR)

These days I have been proofreading my forthcoming book Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature (Universidad de Jaén), which gathers together an essay and a selection of posts from this blog up to 2020. I worry that the volume is already outdated because of its many references to plagiarism, and the absence […]

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATIONS (AND A COUPLE OF PROBLEMATIC SOLUTIONS). PART 1: THE ROLE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION

This is the English translation of the article in two parts originally in Catalan, which I published in the web El Biblionauta (https://elbiblionauta.com/ca/, November 2021). Here is the second part. In Douglas Adams’ humorous novel The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (1978), a small, yellow animal known as a Babel fish is used, inserted into […]

SQUID GAME AND THE DANGERS OF MACHINE TRANSLATION: A WARNING

NOTE: This post was originally written on 1 November 2021, but it’s published now, months later because of the cyberattack that UAB suffered then and that caused the temporary suspension of this blog I am not following Netflix’s South Korean mega-hit Squid Game, being currently off the platform, but I have noticed that the series […]