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johnrgallagher.bsky.social
I use qualitative and computational methods to study writers on the internet. I study how machine learning experts communicate. More generally, I study writing and writers. Associate professor.
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One of the most interesting website functions I've seen in the past five years is substack's requote feature. Users highlight a passage and then reshare. I'm genuinely struck by the affordances of this feature.

19 years of course evals in the books. I've managed to keep all but the very first semester (lost to time somewhere, in a pre-digital age)

Too many journalistic AI pieces are actually just press releases in which the journalist parrots what managers tell them.

The lousy, uncritical AI journalism needs to stop. This reporter (Kevin Roose) wrote this: "Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company." I call baloney. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t...

The lousy, uncritical AI journalism needs to stop. This reporter (Kevin Roose) wrote this: "Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company." I call baloney. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t...

There is more plot development in Miss Congeniality than any Mission Impossible movie

Okay, I would take this class

What are your favorite novels about social media? I might teach a class about it for spring 2026

Total failure

Great video. "...MIT economist Daron Acemoglu offers a more modest forecast. Drawing from his research, in this brief video he explains why AI might automate only 5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the next decade." www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zF1...

Doing rotors and brake pads tomorrow 🫠

People are having a difficult time with the corruption being out in the open and transparent. We are so used to our stories about corruption being secretive.

How do other people with kids manage to keep their jobs? No afterschool care to be had at any price, minimum days appearing on the calendar arbitrarily, constant conferences and appointments in the middle of the workday. It’s impossible.

The inefficient code of ChatGPT should really give people a sense of the inefficiency of ChatGPT’s prose.

I highly recommend this book if you're interested in audiences as well as niche long-tail types of media consumption. nyupress.org/978147983390...

At Kairos, we have a 7-stage copyediting process, and not one of those stages would benefit from using AI instead of trained copyeditors. As I've been teaching editing courses & brining in AI-as-editor examples and exercises, it's clear that even the best gen AI apps are detrimental to the process.

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

Inbox: 0 *closes laptop* *set laptop on fire*

"We find that speed is correlated with perceived humanness and trustworthiness of the AI tool, as well as the perceived quality of the generated text. We discuss its implications on creative and writing processes, along with future steps in the intentional design of AI writing tool interfaces."

"We find that speed is correlated with perceived humanness and trustworthiness of the AI tool, as well as the perceived quality of the generated text. We discuss its implications on creative and writing processes, along with future steps in the intentional design of AI writing tool interfaces."

Most of us in higher ed in the US are going to lose something over the next four years (opportunities, or funding, or time). But if we believe universities exist, in part, to preserve historical memory and create a space for dissent, our primary job right now is to fight and take the hit.

✊🏼

One of the best things I read about writing in the times of LLMs.

Grades submitted!

I thought narwhals were a fantasy creature until I was 37

Reach out after 3 months. If you don’t hear back after two weeks, contact again. Repeat if you don’t hear back. If you don’t hear back after 3 tries, pull your paper and move on.

A classic song remixed

I wrote about audiences, generous mentors & professors, my friend Bill, and my dad. ChatGPT is in there...sort of. My spouse told me this was more of a journal entry than a blog post. Let's prove that wrong. "The audiences that only humans carry" meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-audien...

I wrote about audiences, generous mentors & professors, my friend Bill, and my dad. ChatGPT is in there...sort of. My spouse told me this was more of a journal entry than a blog post. Let's prove that wrong. "The audiences that only humans carry" meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-audien...

Maybe if AI is saving so much time with email…the problem is email. And the solution is not AI but…less email