Dr. Casey Fiesler

This is fascinating: www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/I... Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate. Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

Tip for PhD applicants reaching out to prospective advisors: Don’t use an LLM to write these emails. It’s not a great first impression to express your admiration for a recent paper the faculty member published if that paper does not exist.

ha I was wondering when this would happen, but someone eventually noticed that this headshot (the one in my profile pic here) was actually taken by me and listed on my website as CC-0 (public domain), and added it to my wikipedia page :) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_F...

I just want to say that sometimes even when you have 100 things to do but not enough time to do it, and you’e really work-stuff-struggling, it’s okay to pause and talk on the phone for 2.5 hours with a friend and colleague who really in an alternate universe could have been a therapist. 🥰

I tried something in my class today that I was really excited about and I think went well! Basically a set of activities (with a bunch of polling) that turned students into an LLM in order to explain how they work. For example:

My 1000-level AI & Society class launches today, and the enrollment is kind of interesting. The top majors (in order) are: Exploratory Studies (undecided), Psychology, Economics, Information Science (my dept), Finance, Strategic Communication, Marketing, Statistics. Also 1 engineering major, 0 CS.

Extended deadline (August 27) to express interest in participating in our workshop on public scholarship at CSCW!

Excellent piece highlighting student voices on gen AI in higher education, including MS student Mirakle (pictured!) in my lab who is leading research on college student AI resisters. I can only assume that leadership at many universities are making incorrect assumptions about student attitudes.

You know what I really wish re: my university's ChatGPT contract? That it had token limits or something. I think a useful lesson would be to have to decide what LLM uses are "worth it" in order to fit into a limited amount. Trying to think of a way to simulate this in my AI & Society course.

If you are understandably bummed that you can't see The Odyssey "as Nolan intended" because you don't live anywhere near one of the 41 70mm IMAX in the world, rest assured that living near one also doesn't mean that you can see it haha. www.denverpost.com/2026/07/27/c...

Today I spent an hour going through all of my email for the month of July, and hit “reply” on anything lingering that I needed to reply to or required action. I now have 48 emails sitting in my drafts. 😭 Everyone in my inbox: I am SO sorry. I am trying, I really am…

Last week I gave the closing keynote at the CRA Annual Summit, and my my talk was "the case for ethics at the core of computing as a discipline." Anyway, the day before the conference started this was in the NYT crossword puzzle! Awesome to have the universe on my side!