Laura Quilter

Notes

  • academic journals RIP?

    My colleague Lisa DV posted a link to “In Memoriam: The Academic Journal” on an internal AI chat —

    In this piece we reflect on the life and influence of AJ, the academic journal, charting their history and contributions to science, discussing how their influence changed society and how, in death, they will be mourned for what they once stood for but for which, in the end, they had moved so far from that they will less missed than they might have been.

    — & it fomented some conversation. Some conversation centered on the utility or lack thereof of AI to research, & how it could be useful, & how even if it’s useful in some use cases, it still poses potentially insuperable problems to the existing scholarly publishing ecosystem.

    I summed up my take thusly:

    The Academic Journals RIP piece is cute. But the bigger problem is not academic journals (which as I’ve said if they die, I won’t be mourning) but the research enterprise. So long as academics’ life outcomes — their salary & financial well-being & their healthcare & so forth — are all dependent on research outputs, there will be incentives among academics to cheat. Indeed, just as there are incentives among students to cheat for grades, credit, & the eventual certification that a degree offers, allowing access to higher-level salaries and so forth. There’s been lots of pre-AI cheating putting strain on the system for a while — from data fudging (hence the replicability crisis) to citation rings to splitting papers into “minimum publishable units”. And plenty of exploitation of these motives by publishers. AI might super-charge these problems, but if so, it’s just going to make more apparent the existing dysfunction. 

    Perhaps it’s worth spelling out that this is all a predictable consequence of the capture of scholarly research by capitalist business interests, from publishers to tech transfer office activities to …. on and on. 

    If we want intellectual advancement, we need to disentangle it from “the research enterprise” anyhow. The current incentives are very messed up. 

    I played a bit of a dirty trick (unintentionally!) on my colleagues by posting that (to which they reacted) & then editing to add this:

    Relatedly — I’ve been playing w/ Claude code over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been helpful in both (a) advancing a project, and (b) helping me master some new skills. A friend blogged about his experiences w/ people like me (maybe me included) here: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2026/01/07/ai-psychosis-ai-apotheosis/

    and I thought he had some good points: 

    “I don’t think you get power by asking for it, and only rarely get it by demanding it. In the world of technological empowerment, you get it by stealing it.”

    Posting here in furtherance of my goal to reboot my brain with daily (or at least more frequent) creativity practice….

  • reading …

    • Blake Reid, Copyright Office proposed legislation
    • working on Supabase
    • developing my jolabokeflod, the family tradition we had before we knew there was an (Icelandic) word for it
    • oral arguments in Cox v. Sony
    • We the People by Jill Lepore (audiobook while I commute….)

  • modern snake oil

    This is more of a placeholder than a thought-out note, but reading about

    • (a) today’s Supreme Court oral arguments in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin (can New Jersey regulate deceptive advertising by anti-abortion clinics?) (Yes, I know there are broader civil liberties issues here raised by the breadth of the subpoenas (see Mother Jones article for a quick summary) but we know (a) the larger effect of the decision and (b) why the conservatives on the Court were interested in this case.)
    • (b) the 2nd Circuit’s decision yesterday allowing “crisis pregnancy centers” to sell “abortion reversal” treatments (Nat’l Inst. of Family & Life Advocates et al v. Letitia James (2d Cir. Dec. 1, 2025), and
    • (c) the various “we can sell conversion therapy” cases (too upsetting for me to dig up the links right now….),

    in the continued backdrop of the efforts to (a) raise “commercial speech” to levels of protection accorded political speech, and (b) our country’s continued adherence to treating healthcare as a commodity ….

    … I can’t help but see some weird SF futures. Like Edgar Pangborn’s Davy but without the post-apocalypse. Or with the wacky aburdities of Rudy Rucker’s futures written in the law.

  • a use case for G-AI

    I’ve been tinkering with chatgpt, Claude, & similar, for the past couple of years, mostly for self-education — how do they work, what are they good for? — and occasionally to actually try to get something out of one of them, also in a partially self-educational mode.

    Before today, it hadn’t been … hugely successful.

    My most annoying & story-worthy incident came when I was prepping a talk about the Establishment Clause, and I wanted to write about how the Supreme Court had effectively killed off the Lemon test, without explicitly overruling it. I had a great idea for a graphic! A little gravestone with Lemon v. Kurtzman on it …. I asked chatgpt to make this for me … and it lectured me about how it couldn’t threaten anyone with violence. We went back and forth and back and forth and I got some graphics that really did not meet the need. Anyway, I made my point in class that night about Lemon, and an extra point about gen-AI.

    One of my first experiments was also trying to prompt for graphics — I wanted a mermaid with an alligator tail instead of a fish tail — and was definitely not able to get that. In retrospect, I should have just asked Freddie Baer to collage something for me, because that was definitely what I was visualizing ….

    Most frequently, I’ve used these tools to generate ideas or outlines or talking points, and then used those as — well, as negative counters from which I could, shaking my head and rolling my eyes, write my own that was better. Well, more to my needs. No, better.

    But! Today I actually, truly, used a gen-AI tool for something and it was helpful!

    Necessary backstory: A few years ago, when my university dropped BePress & BePress simultaneously dropped their “expert gallery” or “selected works” product, I failed to export my list of 50+ talks, submissions, papers, etc. I didn’t care, because (see last post) my focus, energy, and fucks to give have been blowing out into vacuum for several years.

    But, I figured out quickly that I really did not want to have to recreate that list — even though it was 10 years out of date & so therefore just a snapshot of a few years’ worth of stuff.

    My colleague helpfully send me the bepress dump, which was nested folders of xml files & the original PDF uploads.

    But now I was faced with my utter inability to effectively muck about with xml & re-generate the humanly readable bibliographic data.

    Voilà! Chatgpt to the rescue. I had it analyze the zip file & convert it into a .ris file, then imported the whole thing into Zotero. Then I was able to easily dig out the relevant citations & add to the “writings” section here. Behold the fruits of my labor!

    Now I am preening because I Learned a Thing. Not, you know, xml parsing or atom or even ris formats. But a use case for ChatGPT that was actually effective.

  • … Freddie

    My friend Freddie Baer died on November 12 of this year — two Wednesdays ago.

    I’ve been processing it ever since, in various ways. Helping organize some of the stuff in her house. Helping digitize & archive her many works, and setting up a website for that (https://freddiebaer.com/). Writing various announcements. Obviously, looking back through my journals & photos, & talking about her, sharing her with others in my life, & co-conspiratorating w/ Liz Henry, among others. Dreaming, even, that I was talking with her, in her house, about her work & her death…

    All this reflecting and processing has helped push me further into a reawakening. For almost five years, I’ve been immersed in one reality — focusing just on one thing, putting everything else in autopilot. I often described my brain like a spaceship that has had a hull breach — everything is blowing out into the vacuum of space, and anybody in the ship is just clinging desperately to whatever they can find. Part of my brain is focusing on the latest copyright news, my work at UMass, the fight against fascism, native plants, puzzles, etc. — but all those interests are just clinging desperately against the pull of the vacuum.

    But over the last year or so, I’ve started tiptoeing back into the world — traveling for a reunion with friends in Minneapolis, visiting family in the Bay Area, reaching out to old friends — visiting Freddie in Eureka.

    And I’m realizing I need to reclaim the parts of me that have been put on hold — the parts that are still clinging, and maybe some parts that have been spaced. And I need to fix the freaking hull breach, somehow.

    So.

    Writing has been one way I’ve organized myself over the years, and it’s readily accessible, and affords some discipline. I have no grand ambitions for this blog — “notes” captures where I’m doing.

archives

website to do

website to do

bluesky posts

Bluesky
2026-01-08

impeach noem.

Bluesky
2026-01-07

head exploding by the non-contradicted statements of a republican apparatchik on cnn discussing venezuelan oil compared with iraq invasion. my silent fellow observer obligingly changed the channel when i found myself unable to stop myself from yelling — literally yelling — at the tv…. wtf cnn

Bluesky
2025-12-24

I have not previously seen Homeopathic Battleship: www.monkeon.co.uk/homeopathicb…

… brilliant
#homeopathy
#science