Bibs & bobs #41

 A better read of my pet hates or a semi-interesting, time wasting serendipity machine

I’m interested in uses of LLMs that allow things that were not possible or too time consuming to be carried out pre-LLMs to now be possible with a LLM. 

I was reading one of Jeremy Caplan’s Wonder Tools posts and one of the suggestions in an intriguing list of alt think apps and ideas seemed to fit the bill. The list comes from a conversation between Caplan and A.J. Jacobs. 

The suggestion:

• Seek out surprises A.J. asked Claude for 10 articles he would probably find boring, annoying, or offensive. It surfaced one gem, about ancient Egyptians buried with golden tongues so they could speak in the afterlife.

 I used ChatGPT 5.6 and lazily copied the text:

Find 10 articles I would probably find boring, annoying, or offensive

This is what the machine produced:

The anti-CJ reading list

These are not necessarily bad articles. Some are sensible. That may make them worse: intellectual irritation works best when wrapped in reasonable prose.

1. “AI Is Making University Students Dumber, Melbourne Professor Warns” — The Australian
   Likely offence: 9/10. AI causes “brain-rot”; handwritten examinations arrive as intellectual holy water. You will probably object to treating writing technologies as contaminating substances rather than participants in changing practices. Useful, though, as an unusually pure specimen of restorationist thinking. (The Australian)
2. “How to Stop Students From Cheating With AI” — The Wall Street Journal
   Likely offence: 9/10. It begins with cheating and therefore ensures that assessment design, disciplinary knowledge and institutional hypocrisy enter through the servants’ entrance, if at all. The headline alone could power three of your blog posts. (The Wall Street Journal)
3. “In the AI Era, How Do We Battle Cognitive Laziness in Students?” — Times Higher Education
   Likely annoyance: 8.5/10. “Cognitive laziness” turns a relation among student, task, assessment, institution and machine into a character defect located conveniently inside the student. Bloom’s taxonomy is also summoned, presumably because no educational emergency is complete without it. The article itself is more careful than its title. (Times Higher Education (THE))
4. “AI Won’t Replace Teachers—But Teachers Who Use AI Will Change Teaching” — Education Week
   Likely boredom: 8/10. The immortal “AI won’t replace X, but…” construction returns, having survived several thousand LinkedIn posts. It adds connection, care, wisdom, discernment and the calculator analogy: the full ceremonial fruit basket of moderate AI commentary. (Education Week)
5. “Will AI Replace Teachers? It Depends on How They Teach” — Forbes
   Likely offence: 8/10. The title quietly relocates responsibility for technological restructuring onto individual teachers: adapt correctly and perhaps your occupation will be spared. A fine example of structural change dressed as professional self-improvement. (Forbes)
6. “Surfing the Future: Why Education Needs to Embrace AI, Soft Skills and Self-Awareness” — World Economic Forum
   Likely annoyance: 9/10. It contains outdated systems, agile learners, future jobs, soft skills, an “AI tsunami” and instructions to surf it. It also invokes learning styles and frames teacher development as strategic investment. Almost unfairly well calibrated to annoy you. (World Economic Forum)
7. “Why AI Literacy Is Now a Core Competency in Education” — World Economic Forum
   Likely boredom: 8/10. Education becomes a delivery mechanism for skills that employers are projected to require, including prompt engineering and algorithmic thinking. “Core competency” is the phrase organisations use when they want an idea to become compulsory before anyone has worked out what it means. (World Economic Forum)
8. “AI Will Transform the Workplace. Will Education Keep Up?” — Forbes
   Likely annoyance: 8/10. The question assumes that education’s natural function is to chase the workplace while carrying its coat. Economic mobility supplies the moral justification; “dynamic educational systems” supplies the management-consulting atmosphere. (Forbes)
9. “AI-Driven Personalised Learning Will Become Mainstream in 2025” — Global Services in Education
   Likely offence: 9.5/10. This offers “true differentiation,” automated planning, instant feedback, improved outcomes and competitive advantage for international schools. The author’s organisation also develops and manages schools, making the article a useful example of a market describing the inevitability of its own products. (Global Services In Education)
10. “Making AI Work for Schools” — Brookings Institution
    Likely boredom: 7/10. AI integration becomes a playbook of transparency, accountability, human-in-the-loop design, equity and monitoring, supported by experimental learning-gain results. All defensible; all tidy. You may object that the school has been rendered legible enough to manage but not strange enough to understand. (Brookings)

My predicted winner: No. 6. It combines workforce instrumentalism, soft-skills soup, learning-style residue and a surfing metaphor. It is less an article than a bingo card that has achieved consciousness.

Not bad. Could be useful with better crafted prompts and as always, generates work for the LLM user.