CRITER Weekly Mini-Update
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Hello, hello, hello, and happy Wednesday!
Listen, I had a hard time narrowing things down for you this week. It feels like every major news story has an AI angle at the moment, and the discourse on AI and the workplace really ticked up this week. But if you have a little time to poke around, here's what I recommend:
1. CEOs and other executives of some big companies are essentially announcing to their workforces that AI is going to lead to major disruption/movement/layoffs. This one from Amazon caught my eye: "As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."
But this one from Axios is pretty interesting too, and as a companion you could also look at this recent Gallup poll that says that AI use in the workplace has doubled in the last two years, mostly in white collar jobs. Also, here's how the NYT imagines 22 new types of jobs that might get created as AI comes to dominate.
[Yes, I snuck in three extra articles!!! But whoa, there's a lot going on!].
2. You're probably following the news that "tensions" between the US and Israel on the one hand and Iran on the other are really escalating. 404 Media reports that AI Slop is being used as a weapon in that war now: "A few days ago, Iranian news outlets reported that Iran’s military had shot down three F-35s. Israel denied it happened. As the claim spread so did supposed images of the downed jet. In one, a massive version of the jet smolders on the ground next to a town. The cockpit dwarfs the nearby buildings and tiny people mill around the downed jet like Lilliputians surrounding Gulliver. It’s a fake, an obvious one, but thousands of people shared it online. Another image of the supposedly downed jet showed it crashed in a field somewhere in the middle of the night. Its wings were gone and its afterburner still glowed hot. This was also a fake."
3. Finally, I thought this piece from Inside Higher Ed on some instructors reverting to handwritten assignments was interesting. At first I thought the idea might be reactionary, but the details here are intriguing: "... the handwritten work seems to have made an outsize impact. Not only are students more engaged with the material, but Gallagher also said they are talking and connecting with each other more than any of her other classes over the past several years, whose students had spent their formative high school years in virtual classrooms during COVID-19." Worth a read.
Bonus Reading!
CRITER member Liza Long sent this article about chatbots getting woowoo from The Conversation my way. I, myself, can be a little woowoo at times. But I'm not a bot.
Enjoy your Wednesday, happy Juneteenth Eve, talk to you next week!
Jen