The American Association of University Professors recently revised its comment policy for the Academe Blog and it's a deeply revealing document. It reveals just how stunted and scared is the professional-slash-labor union organization. While ostensibly framed to ensure civil and productive dialogue, the new restriction in particular—concerning an outright ban on comments written "with the assistance of generative AI"—demands critical analysis that opens up a broader look at this ordinary element of an organization of PhDs that declare themselves stewards for the social good
From the perspective of the Professional Society of Academics (PSA), these rules are not merely procedural; they are potent symptoms of the defensive posture of the Higher Education Institution (HEI) model and its associated guardians. They raise fundamental questions about the AAUP's commitment and competence regarding open inquiry and the very nature of academic freedom in the 21st century.
[IMPORTANT NOTE: It should be said that the AAUP has blocked me on X (Twitter) for doing what I am doing in this post, though there I did it with more decorum than these dipshits deserve. Further, though I don't yet claim to have sufficient documented evidence of it, after checking back over months of Academe Blog comment sections, I could detect no obvious AI-generated comments, in fact there are normally very few comments and the functionality is turned off within a few weeks. But more than that, after this initial research into past comments on the Academe Blog, I found that I am the only commenter to openly acknowledge my use of a Constitutional AI assistant--that I built quite by accident and I'm offering a manual here on B4C for anyone to build for an AI-assistant for themselves. If a guy thought himself relevant, he'd think the AAUP's comment policy change was directed at him specifically.]
by Shawn Warren, mostly generated through PSAI-Us (a specialized instance of Gemini Pro developed by Warren to understand and produce text on the reasoning that follows)