Digital Digs

AI and Ideological Flexibility, B.S.

One of the more persistent modern promises of education is that students should become more capable and adaptable humans. That said, we are familiar with how those terms are shaped by social, economic, and institutional conditions. Certainly this has been the case with the impact on higher education not only of AI as a technology…

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Empire AI and UB’s current state of affairs

In January 2024, Governor Hochul announced the Empire AI project as a consortium of public and private NY universities, state funds, and corporate partners. Fundamentally, Empire AI is a planned 15MW data center that is being built on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus. That data center will be located on a service road on…

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Inclined Planes for Social Good and Other Intellectual Maladies

The decision to trial Flock Security cameras on campus materially intersects with the university’s claims to pursue AI for social good. UB’s central university and decanal websites, along with its “AI and Society” department, clearly represent the institution’s public position on AI.

In short, the message is consistent: we do AI for good. UB…

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Post Hoc Public AI

The rhetoric of the higher education industry regarding artificial intelligence operates by the following premises. AI will transform society on a consequential scale. Universities must adapt to substantial social change. Universities have a responsibility for the public good. Universities must respond to AI by participating in its development, infrastructure, and governance. Therefore universities must transform…

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College student AI (mis)use by major/field

At the start of the academic year, some version of “students these days” often arises. This time it is in the form of AI cheating. There have been a few recently published reports on this matter. In Science, “Generative AI use and misuse call for assessment reform in higher education” (Chirikov, Smirnov, and Kzilcec) looked…

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“Generational” thoughts on AI for the first week of class

For the first week of class, I’ve put together some of the recent findings from the Pew Research Center that addresses generational responses to AI. These charts come from two summer reports: “Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact” (June 2026) and “Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of…

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Peripheral Vision: AirPods with Cameras

In the last week, several reports detailed Apple’s plan to include cameras in the next version of their AirPods. The product remains in development and the material is incomplete, but a few things have been reported. The cameras have both active and passive modes. The active mode includes users requesting information about what they see…

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watermarks of providence

with frontier AI’s own dream of self-generating code at the forefront. In short, the entirety of AI industry should be watermarked. And from there, this condition flows out across coding and data analysis through every profession that relies heavily on such practices. In other words, we could consider STEM fields, starting with computer science. Simply…

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