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Lori EmersonOH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! đ [how do I include alt-text of the poster with the character limit?] #ai
ralf tauscher 
@loriemerson wonderful, thanks for sharing.
*_jßyrope@Lori Emerson Alt text in Mastodon has its own limit of 1500 chars i seem to remember (not using Mastodon here)
@jrp yes exactly - how do people get around it? there's a 1300 character limit on posts themselves. or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the point of alt-text
Video Game King@loriemerson @jrp Upload the same image multiple times and split the alt text across each one?
My camera shoots fascists@Video_Game_King @loriemerson @jrp
Or like someone did above, come from an instance that has extremely long character limits and write it out as a comment đ
DoKo@Mikal @Video_Game_King @loriemerson @jrp ... or split it in several postings (maybe with a counter like x / y)
Matthew Conroy@loriemerson Fantastic.
Amin GirasolOberlin Luddites Reject âYear of AI Explorationâ Adpoted hy Schual
Dear President Ambar,
We are writing to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we all know well. With it, we misspell words without the crutch of spell check or generative AI and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in a cognitive dialogue with ourselves, We do not seek perfection because we know that education is about the growing and challenging of our young minds' potential, not the chasing of institutional 'gold-star' approval.
We do not believe that your so-called âYear of AI Explorationâ providing enterprise ChatGPT and Google Gemini subscriptions to every Oberlin student aligns with our college's founding principles. You claim that this year will be one of experimentation, not adoption. But even just one semester of accepted (encouraged even) chat bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy and irredeem able tunnel of intellctual destruction.
We are a college grounded in learning and labor, which now risks straying from these rooted ideals. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays,and discussion posts will be generated for us, not by us. And let's not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for by our busy, anxious student body. We see your vision for this year as advancing the college's 'businessification'--an alarming trend also seen in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a 'bookstore' with no books in stock (just shiny merch) and an app replacing customer service. In one instance, the college assumes we want efficiency at all cost through automated rather than hand-pulled coffee. In the other lies the false belief that we simply desire to turn in an essay, regardless of how little we've written of it.
We need not stand by and witness the further atrophy of our liberal arts education. As you embark on your year of AI, we'll embark on our own year of self-actualization, of realizing the fruits of our Labor and embracing human imperfection and raw inquiry. We will boldly reject information technologies operating out of data centers that guzzle water and energy sources (that simply must contradict our campus's carbon-neutral devotion). We will turn instead to ourselves and embrace our natural intelligence, intentional hard work, and generative sweat rather than generative AI.
We urge anyone who feels similarly to risk disapproval, perceived backwardness and the outward appearance of naivete and join us. Let us not ask what AI can do for Oberlin students, but what Oberlin students can do ourselves, while we still have the brain capacity to think on our own.
Yours truly,
The Luddite Club of Oberlin College, Logan Lane, Charlie McLaughlin, Mary Claire McGreivey, Sawyer Van Dyck, Simon Puchner-Noel,and Marlowe Blantz
65dBnoise@loriemerson
«businessification» sounds quite familiarâŠ
«businessification» sounds quite familiarâŠ
Nicola@loriemerson I'm not convinced that is actually typewritten. The letters are too consistantly inked/weighted IMO, it looks like a 'typewriter font' printout.
Jae@CryogenicIce9 @loriemerson A cursory inspection shows clear variations in how several letters are rendered, plus one pretty fked up capital C. It also looks like this is a reproduction, not the original typed copy, which has likely had the effect of reducing any original variation (eg it looks like the contrast is higher than it would have been in the original typed copy). Why the immediate assumption of bad faith?
winstonsmith@loriemerson well, that is well done! on multiple levels with the medium being the message and all that...
Just a Mr Bill@loriemerson This warms my heart. Whatever the issue and whatever the decade, itâs guaranteed that Oberlin students will find the moral core of the matter, sharpen it to a point, and poke the administration with it relentlessly.
@loriemerson (Also, thank you for caring about blind and low vision readers.)
Will Berard đ«łđ€đ«¶What's with the space at the start of a line, before 'cognitive'? Who types like this, with otherwise perfect spelling? I call shenanigans.
Alistair K@MrBerard @loriemerson "Adpoted" in the headline, too