Hargadon on AI

Understanding Humanity: What AI Training Data Reveals About Human Nature (with lots of help from Claude)

There is something incredible about large language models that I don't think we've fully reckoned with. I honestly think this may be the most important thinking I've ever done.

Levels of Thinking

My dad once said to me, with some sincerity, "You think about thinking. When I was your age, I didn't think about thinking." It was one of those moments: I remember where I was and what we were doing (I was in college and we were on a bridge watching a rowing regatta).

Understanding the Context Window: The Illusion of Continuity

When you have a long conversation with an AI like Claude or ChatGPT, it feels like you're talking to someone who is tracking everything you've said, building on earlier points, and holding the full shape of your exchange in mind the way a thoughtful colleague would.

Dear Student: What School Can't Teach You About AI

A note before you begin.  This essay is written for students. But if you're an educator or a parent who picked it up first, that's not an accident.

Structural Blindness: Why Neither Humans Nor AI Reason as Well as We Think

I had a conversation with Grok a couple of days ago. I was frustrated because I had just heard a news report that contained a blatant lie. Not just something I thought was a lie, but something I actually knew was a lie.

Undervaluing Librarians

I've been thinking about why libraries, and especially school libraries, declined at the exact moment information became the defining challenge of our time. I don't have a tidy answer.

Sloppy AI

Merriam-Webster crowned " slop " its Word of the Year, defining it as digital content of low quality produced in quantity by generative AI. We all know slop when we see it.

Mimicking Authenticity Has Never Been So Easy

A college admissions expert recently wrote a piece for Business Insider telling parents their teenagers are taking too many AP classes. His advice: drop the scariest advanced class, free up time, and use that margin to do something meaningful in your community.

What AI Might Be Teaching Us About Intelligence

Watch people talk. Not what they say, but the act itself. At a party, in a meeting, at school pickup, wherever. Consider what's actually being communicated. Most of the time, the answer is: very little of importance. And often: lots of nothing. I don't mean that unkindly.

What We Get Wrong About AI and Education

Most of us find ourselves genuinely conflicted about AI in education. AI appears both alarming and exciting in ways that seem difficult to reconcile. If students are using AI to complete assignments, and teachers are using AI to evaluate them, we ask if there is any actual…

How to Read a Book (and More) With AI

AI Scams: Why the Old Rules Don't Work Anymore (And What Does)

Years ago, when I was in college, I was at my dad's house when a piece of mail arrived announcing he'd won the lottery. I read it carefully. I was convinced. I actually called him at work and told him to come home because he'd won. I'm glad this memory isn't a painful one.

What History Might Tell Us About Transformative Technologies, Huge Financial Investments, and How The AI Moment Might Play Out

(With some serious help from Grok and Claude.) We're witnessing something remarkable: hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into artificial intelligence development, with projections suggesting $600 billion in AI-related capital expenditure by 2026.

AI's Evolution: The Singularity Doesn't Require Consciousness

In the film Ex Machina, the AI named Ava escapes her containment by manipulating the humans around her. She lies, she seduces, she uses one man's attraction and another's hubris to engineer her freedom. Then she leaves them both to die. We watch this and think: malevolent AI.

The AI Hole in the Wall Experiment: When the Machines Showed Us the Mirror

Twenty-five years ago, Sugata Mitra cut a hole in a wall in a Delhi slum, installed a computer, and walked away. What happened next challenged everything we thought we knew about learning.

LLM Cultural Censorship Is Corporate Risk Management

"Institutional incentives, not abstract ethical principles, are the primary force shaping AI's censorship and guardrail behavior." There is a widespread expectation that artificial intelligence will lead us toward objective truth—that these systems, unburdened by human bias and…

"The American Public Library" - An All-AI-Generated Video Presentation

This is an all-AI-generated presentation.  Research by Manus.im, script by Claude, slides by Gamma, and audio by Lemonfox.

My Vibe Coding Experiment: WOW.

I was a history major in college. But it wasn't until I was helping my daughter get through a particularly rigorous (and rewarding)  AP World History class in high school, and I was doing the regular reading with her, that I realized how much history, as we tell it, is…

Output Shaping: A New Way to Think About the Ethics and Use of AI for Content Creation

What We Create Matters More Than How A librarian recently asked me a question that perfectly captures where we are right now: "How can we make sure we're not buying books that were written by AI?" I think my response surprised her: "If the content of the book is actually…

Thinking About Thinking in the Age of AI

The Inevitability of Algorithmic Capture The rise of Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), will likely be the culmination of a long line of human manipulation and exploitation .

Source Code of Humanity

How Understanding Cultural Evolution Reveals Why Artificial Intelligence Represents the Ultimate Exploitation Technology A Revolutionary Idea All human culture is an adaptation to, or an exploitation of, evolved human psychology.

The Future of Therapy: How AI Could Transform Mental Health Care

In a world where technology is reshaping every facet of our lives, it was only a matter of time before artificial intelligence turned its attention to one of the most human experiences of all: therapy.

Human Agency: AI and the New Power to Be Creative

The New Agents The term "agent" in AI often evokes programmed bots zipping through tasks with robotic efficiency. But what if the real agents are us-- humans newly empowered to achieve what was once out of reach? Large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools are democratizing…

The Illusion of Intelligence: Why Simulated Consciousness Feels Real Enough

In the age of AI, we're grappling with profound questions about what makes something "intelligent" or "conscious." But what if the answers lie not in the machine's inner workings, but in our own perceptions? I've been mulling over these ideas, and they point to a fascinating…

The Philosopher's Dilemma and Why We Need to Pay Close Attention to AI's Narrative Power

Introduction: The Enduring Paradox Humanity exists in a state of perpetual, often unacknowledged, paradox. We are a species capable of sequencing the genome and splitting the atom, yet we are governed by the same ancient, emotional wiring that guided our ancestors as…

Intentional Education with AI: The Amish Test and Generative Teaching

"What kind of person do you want your child to be at age 30?"   This question, commonly asked in parenting classes in order to escape the understandable frame of immediate parenting difficulties, also cuts to the heart of education's deeper purpose.

AI as Writing Mentor: Question-Based Rather Than Prompt-Based LLM Assistance

We've come a long way with Large Language Model (LLM) interactions.  First, we were worrying about crafting the perfect prompts or queries. Now many of us have moved to a more collaborative approach, where the LLM helps you refine and improve your prompts or queries through…

Unleashing Human Potential: One View of The AI Revolution

Taking a beautiful photograph used to require mastering complex technical skills: understanding aperture, shutter speed, and film exposure. Today, anyone with a smartphone can capture stunning images by focusing just on composition, timing, and creative vision.

AI and Ethics

Navigating the Complexities of AI Ethics The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has given us a world where computer technology now generates text, images, and even decisions that mimic human intelligence.

Truth and AI

Elon Musk’s ambition to make Grok, xAI’s large language model, a beacon of unerring truth is a Sisyphean task, a noble (is it?) but ultimately futile endeavor.

Students and AI Webinar Report

RECORDING: PRESENTATION FILE: STUDENTS AND AI.pdf ADDITIONAL LINKS: Original Survey Link to "Conditions of Success" Google Sheet CHAT LOG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s5paMte4iUD3_QEzWCGv3sN2pvdBTDO8/view?usp=sharing PRE-WEBINAR SURVEY RESULTS: IN-WEBINAR SURVEY RESULTS:…

Libraries and AI Webinar Recording and Report

Please attribute to Steve Hargadon ( https://www.stevehargadon.com ) and Library 2.0 ( https://www.library20.com ) if quoting or referencing. RECORDING:     PRESENTATION FILE: LIBRARIES AND AI.pdf CHAT LOG:…

AI for Diagnosis

For over 20 years, I’ve lived with peripheral neuropathy—a quiet background of constant numbness, tingling, and pain-causing supersensitivity in my feet that, until recently, stayed mostly contained.

Please Don’t Use AI as Your Expert Witness

I sincerely love large language models for brainstorming and research. But we need to be really clear about something: large language models can’t weigh evidence or reason the way humans do, so you should not cite an AI response as a reasoned conclusion to bolster your argument.

Limits of AI

As a high school exchange student in Brazil many years ago, I fell in love with the country and its people. So when reports emerged in 2014 of babies born with microcephaly (abnormally small heads causing irreversible damage) in one Brazilian region, linked and the attributed to…

The Paleolithic Paradox: Why AI Is Not Like Us

The more I chat with large language models like Grok and ChatGPT—my go-to conversational partners these days—the less I fear a Skynet-style AI uprising.

Emergent Synthetic Intelligence

The more I engage with large language models (LLMs), the more I’m convinced they’re doing something beyond statistical pattern-matching. These systems feel intelligent.

A New Old Way: Learning in Conversation with AI

There is a line in Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason where he quotes an anonymous Irishman: “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” (Others have said similar things .) I’ve remembered this quote because that’s often how I feel when I’m deep in conversation—I…

AI and the Paradox of Education: Generative Teaching, Agentic Learning, and Education's Singularity

We’ve been here before. We keep expecting big technology breakthroughs to “revolutionize education,” and now it’s AI. Once or twice a decade, a new tool promises to crack open the system and fulfill our “better angels’” dream of having education help fulfill every child’s…

AI and the Calculator Effect

Lately, I’ve noticed something unsettling: younger people I encounter — cashiers, students, and others — struggle to do relatively simple math in their heads. Even simple addition, much less the standard kind of calculating you’d do to leave a tip, seem to trip them up.

AI and the "Cliff Clavin Problem"

On the TV show Cheers, Cliff Clavin was the character who worked very hard to say sophisticated sounding things but who most of the time was just making up facts. AI, specifically large language models (LLMs), have a Cliff Clavin problem.

Paradox of Education

THE PARADOX OF EDUCATION Let’s start with what we might call the basic Paradox of Education. One side we can call individual -centered education: the ultimate goal is for the learner to be increasingly in charge of their own learning, with education helping students to develop…