Jon Ippolito

Blast from the past! Today's #EquityUnbound highlight is @jonippolito.net 's Personalization or Ensloppification? When AI Rewrites the Web Just for You. Explore how AI reshapes knowledge, bias, and cultural memory. Watch the recording: youtu.be/tseCbuO1CBs . #AI #EquityUnbound

We need to talk about AI and math. Most of the breakthroughs this year are counterexamples found by brute search, not theorems built from insight, and understanding that helps us grasp the power and limits of transformer models. jonippolito.substack.com/p/ai-is-fora... #AIliteracy

Writers dismissed a recent NYT op-ed arguing for the spoken word in the AI era. But speech may prove key to a future in which writing forks into conversational media—spontaneous and malleable like clay—and machine-readable media that are precise like marble jonippolito.substack.com/p/dont-dismi...

MIT takes a legitimate potshot at Harvard for its recent cap on the number of A’s faculty can dole out. Stoking grade obsession is only going to boost the incentive for students to ChatGPT their way to a 4.0. emilypittsdonahoe.substack.com/p/three-grad...

Any reliance on Palantir is an overreliance on Palantir. "Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Tech Contributed to U.S. Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children" gizmodo.com/pentagon-inv...

Calling the agents that hacked Hugging Face rogue misses the real danger. They were mice bred to chew, left unwatched in a storehouse for what felt like a decade. My latest Substack jonippolito.substack.com/p/the-storeh...

The Public AI Summit starting 9/16 has something for every educator, from scaffolding AI-aware assignments to learning about agents without accidentally deleting your hard drive. Thursday at 1 EDT I’ll share updated tools to discover your AI environmental footprint publicaisummit.org/summit/publi...

Trump says data centers are “liquid gold.” Voters smell something else, and savvy candidates will take advantage of that in November. My latest Substack for Crimson Goes Blue jonippolito.substack.com/p/run-agains...

Out today: TextGenEd: Continuing Experiments! I’ve got two pieces in the collection, coauthored with Jeremy Douglass and Jon Ippolito. Shoutouts to Jeremy and Jon, and congrats to Annette, Carly, and Tim on the new collection! @jonippolito.net

Is prompting chatbots training you to bully your subordinates—demanding outcomes, ignoring process, then shrugging when it breaks? A Transformers discussion on why expertise still matters when the machine does the work.

Dolly was the nicest celebrity I ever met—a low bar, but how many other Country singers fought for trans rights and gave $1M for a Covid vaccine? Fav quote: "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap"

Generative AI’s per-query footprint can be small compared to flying, eating meat, or even Zoom. Until agents show up and compute goes through the roof. How I updated my AI footprint calculator accordingly jonippolito.substack.com/p/agents-are...

How many cases of prompt injection in legal cases are we unaware of because they succeeded? arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Building a robot that looks like a human is like building a car that looks like a horse. www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of...

If AI were a nation, the increased economic activity it promises to stimulate would become the fifth largest CO2 emitter, just behind Russia—study. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Meta’s Ray-Bans, now with advanced "not my problem" filter

I'm seeing a resurgence of educators leaning on the "friction" metaphor, so I'm revisiting my EBR article on the subject. Let’s not fetishize friction, which can become a convenient defense of teaching practices that serve educators better than learners. jonippolito.substack.com/p/does-educa...

Attacks on the character of progressive candidates may be a distraction from the popularity of their causes. My latest for Crimson Goes Blue: how Graham Platner's legacy is affecting his successor. open.substack.com/pub/jonippol...

I'm the first to recognize AI is transforming writing, but for Harvard to shutter its Writing Center—where I once worked as a peer tutor—is to ignore the fact that we need even more attention to writing during this critical transformation www.thecrimson.com/article/2026... HT @anetv.bsky.social

Don't let the word "model" fool you. AI can nail the orbits and still miss the physics—the same trick Ptolemy pulled for fourteen centuries. open.substack.com/pub/jonippol...

Is the chasm between the billions tech is spending on data centers and its scant AI earnings a bet on a shiny future? Or is it a convenient mask for an even less popular agenda? I run the numbers jonippolito.substack.com/p/what-if-da...

Meta's new Anthropic compute deal hints at a bigger strategy: rather than just bet on AI, hyperscalers are building data centers that will continue to pay off even if the AI bubble doesn't. My latest Substack jonippolito.substack.com/p/what-if-da... #DataCenter #AIliteracy #Anthropic #Meta

Updated yesterday's Substack after news broke of Trump's teleprompter making $100k on Kalshi. This administration has certainly set a new low bar for self-dealing, but prediction markets are supercharging anonymous corruption at the highest levels of government. open.substack.com/pub/jonippol...

Insider trading steering military decisions and politicians betting on their own campaigns. Prediction markets could be the most dangerous new technology since ChatGPT—especially for this administration. My new Substack at jonippolito.substack.com #Elections #PredictionMarkets #IranWar

Librarians wondering how AI affects media literacy/acquisition policies/patrons' needs should consider joining UMaine's Digital Curation program, which tackles AI's impact on collecting institutions. I'm quoted in this related story from local NBC affiliate www.newscentermaine.com/article/news...

One of the biggest election stories no one's talking about: the US Democratic primaries are becoming a proxy war between rival AI factions, with candidates tuning their strategies accordingly. My latest Substack digs into how that happened. open.substack.com/pub/jonippol...

If we don't get this right, we will have completely fumbled AI's arrival in the classroom. Quote from MYFest26 webinar co-led with @leaton01.bsky.social and organized by @mahabali.bsky.social and co. myfest.equityunbound.org/events/struc...

Librarian, archivist, or curator looking to level up your digital game? You might be interested in our online courses that teach #DigitalCuration skills. Cherrypick your favorite or take the full grad certificate digitalcuration.umaine.edu #GLAM #libraries #museums #archives #data

Interviewed for this "Spotlight on America" story about data center pushback, I said towns should compare what they're promised with the actual effects reported by communities that have had to live with these things mynbc15.com/news/spotlig...

Another way to see data centers aren’t just about AI: even by EPRI’s most generous forecast, AI accounts for less than half of the load added since ChatGPT. You may not like what the rest of the buildout is being used for. blog.still-water.net/what-if-data...

I remember the day a sharp-eyed art handler and I discovered that unlabeled piece amidst correspondence in the bowels of the Guggenheim. I'd never seen a Ramirez like it...led to an exhibition of hitherto unknown coloristic drawings by this outsider artist.

If AI accounts for only 20% of data center use, why is it the justification for nearly every new data center? I did the math and suspect Big Tech is using AI as a cover for unpopular uses like surveillance advertising. blog.still-water.net/what-if-data...

Need to put your collection in a database? On the web? There's a course for that! Join us online this fall for Digital Collections & Exhibitions, part of UMaine's all-online Digital Curation program digitalcuration.umaine.edu #DigitalCuration #libraries #collections #archives #museums #GLAM

Prompt engineering is a moving target. Here's my rundown on how GPT-5.5 and Claude 4.7 reward clarified output over magical incantations, and what it means for AI literacy www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Gallup finds Americans would rather live near a nuclear plant than an AI data center. This resistance seems largely independent of AI disapproval. And respondents didn't even cite less publicized hazards, like e-waste/noise/exhaust/job ephemerality www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

At today's UMA Faculty Institute @leaton01.bsky.social urges faculty to steer higher Ed through the AI disruption rather than sit back and watch

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

UMaine's summer Digital Curation classes are full but we have space in this fall's online course DIG 540 (Digital Collections and Exhibitions), aimed to help everyone from labs to libraries organize their material and put it online digitalcuration.umaine.edu

This week GitHub starts training on your code by default. For me, code reuse is probably the most ethical AI use case. But turn off training if you're worried about others using your code unethically: Settings > Copilot > Features > Privacy

A study of websites created since 2022 found 1 in 3 are AI-generated text. And their characteristics follow my prediction that AI will act as compression algorithm on cultural heritage. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

A dozen states have tried so far, but Maine is now on the verge of becoming the first in the US with a state-wide data center ban. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp... #MEpolitics #AIethics #DataCenter #Environment #Climate #Sustainability

Curious about AI’s real environmental impact? In this recorded webinar we debunk overblown claims from both sides, share new comparisons, and demo a tool that tracks your AI footprint in real time. digitalcuration.umaine.edu/teleconferen...

In just under two hours, we're hosting @jonippolito.net in a webinar presenting his research on the environmental impact of #AI use compared with other common digital technologies. Register for "How Green is your Prompt" webinar here: content.fromthepage.com/april-2026-w...

At 6:50am last Monday, markets spiked despite no news on the war. 15 minutes later, the US president announced he's reversing course to de-escalate. Someone's cashing in on vacillation over the war, at a time when Trump's circle is hobbling the SEC blog.still-water.net/its-650am-do...

Is it fair to compare AI’s footprint to Netflix binges or burgers? Join me Thursday 2 April for a non-partisan look at the science that will reveal why context matters as much as numbers. content.fromthepage.com/april-2026-w...

A $400K bet on Maduro’s capture and 11th-hour wagers before the US strike on Iran show how prediction markets can reward insider knowledge. Could they also shape government and military decisions? blog.still-water.net/corruption-g...