Research measuring the effects of AI in education has a major quality control problem that should disqualify most of it from being considered in policy discussions or applied in teaching practice. Quick new post from me codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/t...

While the current turn against Turnitin responds to its plan to use student essays for AI training, the underlying extractive model was there all along. Students wrote the work; Turnitin took market advantage from being the obligatory portal for submissions. But now...?
wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

Turnitin's biz model was based on licensing student essays, first in UK then worldwide. Turnitin was the original edtech hyperscaler. It amassed millions of assignments as the basis for product and feature R&D, making it a multibillion dollar edubiz codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/a...

Back in the very early 2000s, the UK's digital learning agency Jisc made a deal with what was then a startup called iParadigms for plagiarism detection, giving an immediate market advantage to what became Turnitin wonkhe.com/blogs/a-hist...

Funny that UK universities are starting to cancel Turnitin contracts over proposed "new terms regarding the processing of student submissions using AI tools", since UK HE was where Turnitin got its first foothold in the sector www.timeshighereducation.com/news/more-un...

The benefit of AI agents reading papers, THE reports, may be better author attribution and compensation. But Manghani argues it also anticipates the near-future "monetisation of passages and segments" of papers, with science valued by its priceable parts
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/publish...

we have a policy for the use of genAI at the @aial.ie. we reflect on values key to scientific integrity, such as replicability, and err on the side of not using it

blogpost: aial.ie/blog/gen-ai-...

pdf: zenodo.org/records/2322...

The tokenization of academic labour with AI is accelerating. Will we end up thinking of our papers and publications in terms of how many tokens they contribute to science? HT Sunil Manghani who has a fantastic post on this over on linkedin lnkd.in/p/ecU9Zi6S

A new startup plans to set AI agents loose in academic publications. Editing or reviewing for a journal could ultimately be about responding to the demand to curate high quality academic content for AI agents to crawl and collect valuable knowledge tokens. www.redpine.ai/insights/pub...

This piece I have written for @prospectmagazine.co.uk says things about the AI narrative being pushed by the industry that I have been wanting to say for some time. I hope it might help to bring about a more critical and discerning position in the media.
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

"If students continuously interact with proprietary AI systems, teachers facilitate those interactions, and schools provide the institutional environment in which they occur, then education systems risk becoming live testing grounds for AI [and] sites of extraction too" www.ei-ie.org/en/item/3308...

“Universities must stop falling in love with every new piece of software … that the tech industry pitches as essential. Administrators spend on software as if it is a durable investment, when all of the evidence shows that it … makes bloat worse.”

globecollegetown.substack.com/p/higher-ed-...

Can you tell whether the #ideas in a piece of writing came from a human or an AI?

As AI writing becomes common, policies on AI use focus on who came up with the ideas in the text rather than who wrote it.

AI detectors answer the latter, not the former.
We release #IdeaLens, a detector of AI ideas.

This new study of genes implicated in "intelligence" is... complicated. For a start, the first main para of that press release - I mean, really? It kind of launches off in media res, and gives few clues about what the takehome is. /1
www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/ex...

Slight clarification - Cambridge U is only "considering alternatives" to Turnitin at this stage, not actually cancelling its contract. Pretty admirable work on resisting Turnitin across the country seems to be largely driven by students' unions www.varsity.co.uk/news/32158

We just had a discussion on this in our editorial meeting of Internet Policy Review.

It would be great to hear from other academic journal editors what are their policies around researchers using synthetic data.

->
www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...