Ben Williamson

Schools in England start returning from summer break next week, and this term many will become AI testing sites as the Department for Education plans to trial AI tutoring, scale it up sector-wide, and create new standards for classroom AI codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/08/27/p...

"We may question whether the genomics companies’ promises of “best babies” are credible. But it may be more important to ask what their notion of the “best” is. What do they see as valuable and worthless in a human life?" www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Terrific reporting from @jillbarshay.bsky.social on the wave of (seemingly junk) meta-analyses claiming benefits of AI in education. hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

Publishing giant Springer Nature and the UK-based lab Google DeepMind have partnered on research seeking to produce an artificial intelligence peer review assistant. Frances Jones reports #research #peerreview #AI https://ow.ly/6xRH5100XNj

UCU branches plan coordinated fightback against ‘apocalyptic’ job cuts as they criticise ‘inadequate’ response from central union https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ucu-branches-plan-coordinated-fightback-apocalyptic-job-cuts

I have a long piece at @theconversation.com about AI and the university theconversation.com/friday-essay...

"Today we are receiving close to 1,000 submissions every hour. We rely upon the same basic human infrastructure we have had in place since The Journal’s founding..." Entertaining speculative piece on future academic journal editing and AI @jcultecon.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our cutting edge, award winning, forward-thinking course on how to make the future education more inclusive, sustainable, accessible & fairer has, somewhat ironically, been closed. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2665449...

we have a policy for the use of genAI at the @aial.ie. we reflect on values key to scientific integrity, such as replicability, and err on the side of not using it blogpost: aial.ie/blog/gen-ai-... pdf: zenodo.org/records/2322...

“Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.” Sun-ha Hong of UNC-Chapel Hill says the Silicon Valley hype machine systematically “borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present.” The cost, he argues, is a planetary-scale drain on our alternatives.

Editors of journals published by Taylor & Francis - hi! - may be alarmed to learn there is an emerging view T&F will get bought by private equity after Informa announced it's dropping it. And we know what private equity does to its acquisitions. Guts them. As if academic publishing wasn't bad enough

This piece I have written for @prospectmagazine.co.uk says things about the AI narrative being pushed by the industry that I have been wanting to say for some time. I hope it might help to bring about a more critical and discerning position in the media. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

"If students continuously interact with proprietary AI systems, teachers facilitate those interactions, and schools provide the institutional environment in which they occur, then education systems risk becoming live testing grounds for AI [and] sites of extraction too" www.ei-ie.org/en/item/3308...

“Universities must stop falling in love with every new piece of software … that the tech industry pitches as essential. Administrators spend on software as if it is a durable investment, when all of the evidence shows that it … makes bloat worse.” globecollegetown.substack.com/p/higher-ed-...

Can you tell whether the #ideas in a piece of writing came from a human or an AI? As AI writing becomes common, policies on AI use focus on who came up with the ideas in the text rather than who wrote it. AI detectors answer the latter, not the former. We release #IdeaLens, a detector of AI ideas.

SocArXiv now has a limit of two papers per week. If authors submit more than that we assume they are LLM-generated and reject them all. Normal humans who need to upload a batch of papers, which sometimes happens, must make arrangements. Also today, ArXiv set a two papers per month limit.

Universities are racing to buy AI—but they should implement AI governance that keeps today's procurement decisions from hardening into institutional architecture that can't be changed, says Tom Smith, academic director of Royal Air Force College.

Teachers at Euan Blair firm report ‘horrendous stress’ after AI used to rate their work

another day, another bit of evidence that the scientists who willingly hand over proprietary information to AI firms may experience some consequences

Unless academia learns to protect itself against AI generated papers and proposals, it will be overwhelmed, polluted and discredited by pure slop. marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/ne...

'University students have raised concerns over the software used to submit assignments and check them for plagiarism, amid fears their work could be used to train tools which use artificial intelligence.'

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

We have to stop using "paper count" as a useful scientific metric. More writing output no longer means more knowledge gained www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Public support for research falls sharply when it uses AI, study finds. Scepticism over artificial intelligence in taxpayer-funded research “demonstrates fragility” of support within UK. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...

"We observe how students actually used the AI tutor, and the answer is: not much." hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

"All corners of academia will soon be flooded with AI-generated research....Maths and CS go first because their entire output is symbol manipulation...Biology comes later not because biologists are cleverer but because the rate-limiting step is physical" giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

Many out there want to treat AI in education seriously. Then there's this from *Napster*. "Trained on a teacher’s material, courses, and papers, these digital twins will live online, becoming a 'copy of yourself that you can then use to scale your time.'” www.wired.com/story/napste...

When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.

Cloud has always meant more than “cloud storage” & “public/private cloud” has always been a meaningless distinction. The implications of UK police data on Azure US cloud (& indeed all UK government data on Azure & AWS) are vast. Let’s talk about some..1/ www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Five-week strike at Edinburgh University at start of new academic term #StopTheCuts #SaveHE www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/school-...