I wish Berry would include his comments in the main body of the article rather than as a footnote to demonstrate he's not just whining. He names: academic collectives, gov't reform, alliances with students and admin and staff, and development of professional standards. These are the aspects of discussion I would like to read.

yup, eating our brains, consuming our knowledge; replicating and outnumbering us and putting us at risk of extinction. But we can resist and we can fight back. We don't have to accept the zombie apocalypse. We're all here in higher education trying to learn, to be better, to create change

And also can take advantage of less experienced academics. Someone who has been to decades of committe meetings and has seen paradigm shifts over different leadership tenures will certainly be more critical and informed than those less experienced. I also note the exhaustion factor here: reasoned response and critical thought take time, while AI generated respond to a cut and paste query take seconds. Perhaps Khadrija had it correct this morning: we're playing the game wrong. And that's so tough because we want to maintain integrity and critical thinking and honesty, but the playground isn't being fair :/

I don't think this is the "burn it to the ground" we've been looking for. It feels more like a paradigm swing back to early 19th C. higher learning. If most (read smaller and less well funded) universities become more like skills training factories, who gets the best education? If LLMs market knowledge as accessible (and transactional), whose knowledge is favoured and lauded? The dominant hegemony. You can go to university, but we don't have any programs to teach you how to think. You'll think what we tell you to think in the way we want you to think it.

Despite academics moving into these administrative roles, there is still a culture they have to fit into. There are procedures already in place that they have to follow. IF they're there long enough, maybe they can change them, but the onslaught of meetings, redtape, push back and lack of funding saps energy from even the best. Despite many wanting to retreat back to teaching and research to avoid administrative exhaustion, the long term defunding and RW dismantling of higher learning is unavoidable. The cracks aren't just showing; they're endangering the foundation.

They want universities to produce unthinking workers who will do what they're told and not lift their thinking heads long enough to question. Public defunding ensures that critical thinking, interrogation, and knowledge pursuit and creation is a waste of time. In a consumer world, we just need more workers and more consumers to buy goods so the ruling class can be our paternalistic guardians who can use their great learned minds to shepherd us (gag). Dumb us down and overload us and distract us and burden us until we're too tired and/or incapable of critique and action.

Nope, it can just be a checklist and a tally sheet. People? pssshhh: bottom line, baby!!

New Commercial:We can make those long meetings and difficult decisions so much easier! Don't worry about making the right decisions and listening to everyone's opinions and experiences and well researched recommendations! Order a 10K robot to do it for you! Who needs committee meetings? Robots could do it 24 hours a day and the back log could be gone so much faster! Have a dispute? our robot army can ID everyone and take them away. Noone needs to sully their names or lose their fat publicly funded pension.

The quantity idea is troublesome for me because the more AI outputs, the more it feeds back into itself and spits back out to a "reading" public to take as "truth." And the fact that quantity is often preferred over quality is also at play here. Notice I didn't say literate, because many people are fighting to maintain or even create digital literacy for all ages, not just in academics. And we are, with AI, certainly in a post-truth existence. I see this a lot with my sons who are in their early twenties versus my husband who is in his late 60s: my children can immediately spot AI images and CGI while my husband cannot. Conversely, my husband is better able to identify faulty logic and reasoning or even evidence in his specialized field. For a field unknown, EVERYONE in the family has to be wary of source and target audience and construction.

This surface level is an accountant's wet dream (sorry dad)! Boxes can be checked and action plans can be signed off on if there is an appearance of deliberate and mediated consideration. They can ignore the realities: people lose their jobs, students miss out on a smaller class size, and faculty remain isolated and dejected. But the emails are sent out in a timely fashion and with the correct phrasing to match whatever phrasing said committee decided on. And time will pass and they hope people forget....

In creating a means for the public and non-academics to feel as if they have the "creds" to code switch into academic language, they gain only the vocabulary and the lexicon but they miss the subtext, the cadence, and the depth of experience. It erases academic authority and rigour. "Someone" told us a story the other day about a hired consultant who was in a meeting with academics and said it was necessary to check to make sure everyone in the department actually had PhDs! Now, I understand that they were hired for accountability, but when universities are screaming that they don't have enough funding, they don't consider the optics of this? They don't respect their own employees? Another PhD or expert from within the university can't fill the role of this (probably high paid) consultant? AI is a symptom of a dominant culture: echoing right wing politicians who seek to control, devalue, and undermine liberal or leftie critical arguments and voices.

I think this is the key word because it captures the power dilemma involved with using AI and LLMs: if all knowledge becomes "public" knowledge, or easily accessible for all, what power do those who control the AI and LLM platforms have over the users? When they turn off the access or decide to charge for access (and that is probably coming after a few years of "watch this commercial for 1 minute to see your information"), they prove they now own the knowledge. And so they can control what people know, which people know, how much they know and when they know. An illiterate population is less able to organize and rebel.

I find it ironic, and am in complete agreement with Jess, that Berry sets out to discuss the transition from authentic to inauthentic and yet seems to have zero trouble with using AI generated images. Is he being intentionally ironic or does he have his head in the sand about images but not ideas? He talks about scholarslop but uses slopart. Why is it ok that he does that as long as he includes his "creative prompt" at the bottom? Like the scholarslop that impersonates and undercuts the reflection, thought, and energy behind academic work, these images would take days to weeks to create by hand. I desperately hope that it's his intention to be ironic :/

yes, because how can one person represent all queer experience? But often leaderships spots the "queer person in the room" and suddenly they're expected to be the voice of ALL queer people.

Coming out as an educational leader is dangerous for people in the public system but especially in the Catholic system where there are expectations of heteronormativity and expectations around patriarchal hierarchy that make high profile roles troublesome. Queer leadership is like a red flag for a bull to parents and members of the public who want to impose their stereotypes and biases on these people and the system at large. Having to deal with opposition from the public sphere can be taxing enough, but when people think they have the right to judge your capability solely based on your sexual identity, your soul gets worn down.

I have been involved in a national project interviewing educational leaders doing gender justice work. Many participants cited burnout as a leading pressure in doing this type of representation, because it's personal and exhausting work to always fight against barriers, limitations, and bias. Despite people coming to this work with passion and love, when you don't take care of yourself and get renewed with community and love for yourself, it can be very isolating.

I found the format of this overview of literature difficult to digest. I understand that they wanted to separate the concepts and create a linear sort of evolution to make the information intelligible, but the tables and such were disorienting and interrupted the flow of the arguments for me.

I took a course in 1995 at York called Language, Gender and Power in which people from a variety of disciplines met to discuss these interests. Queer theory was very new, and in linguistic circles researchers began examining the reclamation of the word "queer" by the 2SLGBTQIA+. It was a time in which coming out was dangerous, and talking about queer issues, let alone talking about the word "queer" as a positive powerful label, was tough for lot of people. There was a lot of disagreement about using the term. Many people felt it evoked too much trauma for them; others saw it as a powerful reclamation of language. It is a demonstration of complexity and tension that is important to keep in mind. This kind of bravery in scholarship and in physical classrooms is a small example of the type of risks people took and take still (risk of real physical violence) to normalize and authorize queer scholarship.

This phrase as an introduction is an interesting choice: "given", as if they didn't fight for it, as if the dominant powers hadn't felt pressured to do it because of decades of action and protest and education. But it also has connotations of "bestowal." And it comes with pressure, being in a spotlight, because it opens people up to the bias and stereotypes and misplaced anger of bigots.

In reading the articles @bonstewart posted (see replies to @ShawnaP 's comments connected to this phrase: "here's both the original article (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Schmitchell, 2021) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 and a 2026 update post by the primary author https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/stochastic-parrots-frequently-unasked-questions-49c2e7d22d11")

I especially loved the following quotation: "...the astonishing willingness of so many to surrender their own power and turn to synthetic text (for which no one is accountable) for all kinds of weighty decisions" (Bender, 2026).

It is despairing (I am making up my own words) that some people will surrender or choose to ignore the implications of relying on GenAi or LLMs, but I am heartened by the recent court decision to hold Air Canada liable for what their bot told a customer. I love that courts are beginning to hold companies' feet to the fire to make them responsible for the (dis/mis)information their property and creations are disseminating to customers. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416

GenAI is like a serpent eating its tail: feeding upon what it has access to, what it creates. Unlike the ouroboros, there is not a great deal of self-reflexivity as we understand it. GenAI and LLMs do not reflect upon their positioning and their potential mistakes or errors in judgement. That skill is left up to academics who advocate critical thinking, to the philosophers who point out ethical issues, and to the educators who warn against the commodification of knowledge.

the key words in this syntax are "a civilization's"...taking ONE civilization and providing its most popular—not its most ethical or equitable—not its brightest and best—not even its failings and bruises—idea(l)s and posing them as some type of ultimate Truth and Answer with no critique of its evolution. Indeed, in drawing from the WEIRD posters, GenAI presents (in this post truth permissability) any and all perspectives as equal and plausible and TRUE. Fact checking is nonexistent, like a Trump debate. And the more GenAI puts falsities online, the more it draws from itself for material and the more these falsities are perpetuated.

And so, if we commercialize knowledge as Sam Altman wants to do...meter it out through a pay per nugget model like a gas bill....then the future populations CAN be controlled. Their communications can be (and already are) monitored and potentially altered. If the billionaires who fund the right wing politicians provide governments with the means to surveille and control their populations, they can maintain and virtually police their privilege.

and this long process of a journey through and to knowledge...the coming to know, the knowledge being imbedded in the struggle itself is lost with an instantaneous "production" of one truth. And I use a small "t" deliberately: who benefits from people not engaging with the journey of their own knowledge generation? Who benefits from the commodification of knowledge?

And as much as I dislike the gatekeeping and pay walls of scholarly journals, I am thankful for them with regard to LLMs because...for now...that work is safe from being co-opted. With the rise of people being paid to train AI models, I fear that those doing these jobs DO have access beyond these paywalls and are inputting scholarship without providing accurate citations to those who generated that knowledge. With the amount of money these new platforms have, when will paywalls and gates be subsumed, ignored, and then selected for their compliance to dominant ideologies?

The "relationships between these words" points, for me, to the word prediction capability of of GenAI which often also falls into these same problems of reproducing biases and assumptions. Often predictive text is grounded in particular preferred systems. For instance, grammar is usually American, as is spelling. The Oxford Comma is ignored. What other writing conventions will/does GenAI value over others and thereby authorize?