Dr. Katie Lanning

Associate Prof. at Wichita State University | C18 British Literature | Book History | C18 & C19 Reprinting | History of Detective Fiction | she/her

[Dr. Katie Lanning @kj_lanning]

I'm teaching my #bookhistory class remotely, so letterpress posed a challenge. Luckily I found the LetterMPress app for iPads and could share a little demo with my students. Mess-free and fun (and yes students knew I was playing fast and loose with the furniture and lockup!) 📚🤓

[Danielle Sepulveres 🌻 @ellesep]

Please stop saying casted. I can’t take anything you say seriously if you say someone was casted in a role.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas

[The Public Domain Review @PublicDomainRev]

The look of love.

A fad of the late 18th and early 19th century, “eye miniatures” — painted with watercolor on ivory and set in rings, lockets, brooches, toothpick cases — were gifted between lovers: https://t.co/PQuvjjBd8o

[femiiiiii. @femiiiszn]

books are amazing because a stranger from 200 years ago can still ruin your afternoon emotionally.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

every time I buy a new notebook there is a brief but powerful moment where I genuinely believe I am about to become the most organized human alive

[lauren 🦢 #MJTWT @thrillersbabe]

it sucks that companies won’t allow a toggle on/off AI button bc they know EVERYONE will turn it off

[Georgia Coley @artwithinpod]

the pope wrote a 42,000 word manifesto declaring war on AI. we are so freaking back.

[Max Lawton @maxdaniellawton]

The greatest harbinger of end times is not plague or war, but the sudden enormous proliferation of Xerox-quality POD editions (unmarked! no warning!) from houses like Penguin.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

If we're ever in a situation where we're both doing math in our heads, I'm just pretending. It's all on you.

[The Public Domain Review @PublicDomainRev]

19th-century Audible.

Albert Robida illustration from Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books” (1894), the French bibliophile's story imagining how printed text might disappear in the face of rapid advances in phonographic technology: https://t.co/bVyfCqR0v3

[hamna @kaulshiloshudon]

dumb question but does anyone know how to get this google back

[Velodus✨ @velodus]

Just throwing it out there that the lane is wiiiiiiiiide open for a tech company to get insanely rich by just replicating the 2010 version of big websites like Google while explicitly stating that they hate AI.

[John Gallagher @MereSophistry]

The smartest English departments will double down on ensuring their students have read long arduous books, numerous a semester. They’ll have reading labs where students read & take physical notes for 3 hours at a time. They advertise their students can concentrate for hours.

[sahib.e.qiran @sahibeqiran]

Yes this is why it takes so long!! Sometimes you spend a whole day reading just to add one footnote

[dior ✞ @deeore5]

the older i get the heller the no

[Swarthy Swabian @MuKuDk2]

What I have learned from this new bit of citation discourse is that gender studies underwater basket weaving programs have more rigorous academic standards than the entirety of STEM.

[love drops @lovedropx]

Me and my friends getting left behind by AI

[Hugh Selwyn Mauberley @Hughposting]

Animated BBC version of the Canterbury Tales from 1998 I had forgotten about and remembered last night in a dream--old favorite of some medievalists I used to know

[Elle Lookbook @EvaLovesDesign]

Panel from a 16th-century Venetian edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, illustrating Paradiso Canto XXII with Dante and Beatrice among the stars.