My current research (book) project is (working title) Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My work on this site that is most related to that project is collected here.
Empire, AI & Society
CurrAIcular design
Yes, the AI is jammed in there. This is the May 2026 edition. It is interesting to see how our views develop on these matters. I know mine have shifted. Frontier AI’s has created a great deal of cultural instability, particularly in relation to higher education. Gen AI fundamentally undermined how students learn and faculty…
Keep readingThe conscience of AI refusal.
Last month at the Conference for College Composition and Communication, the national conference in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, the following resolution was passed “we affirm the rights of students and teachers to refuse to sign up for, prompt, or otherwise use generative AI in the writing classroom.” The resolution articulates several concerns that I would…
Keep readingRefusing AI: three Venn diagrams
I’ve been asked to discuss CCCC’s recent resolution on the right to refuse AI. I have already written about it here. From my perspective, this particular resolution is an academic freedom issue within a single discipline and largely focused on one kind of course: first-year composition. As this course is often taught by adjuncts, graduate…
Keep readingAI and what may be refused
When we are refusing AI, what are we refusing? A CS field? A commercial product? An ideology? A story? And what does AI refuse of us? What does the higher ed story of AI refuse of us and our students?
Keep readingartificial intelligence, going nowhere, and the remedy for thought
As we know, utopia is nowhere, literally. Much of the literary movement of “anti-anti-utopianism” can be understood as a recognition that utopia’s seek to go nowhere and dystopias are what result from the attempt. It might be useful to reframe this as anti-anti-nowhere-ism, but probably not. This confusing triple negative might be resolved in the…
Keep reading“mirror world” stories of fascism and AI
Ezra Klein has an interview with Naomi Klein today regarding her new book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It’s a wide-ranging conversation. Klein’s mirror-world has part to do with her being confused online with Naomi Wolf (90’s feminist turned conspiracy theorist podcaster). But that’s just one interesting story of mirroring that’s part of…
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Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 