Maybe we could open some childhood wounds together
Barcelona, Spain
Joined April 2014
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🧵 1/ In Borges’s Library of Babel, every sentence ever written exists. But in our Spanish classrooms, we start with just a handful. How do those ‘starter shelves’ stack up? 📚✨ Our new article unpacks the linguistic complexity of Spanish graded readers vs. literary works.
Imma López retweeted
Most people do not realize just how easy the AP exams have gotten. They are not college level.
Why/how have they become so easy? What's going on?
This might shock you... A brutal new piece in Education Next just dropped, saying the decline in rigor of the AP in the last two decades is, in large part, because the content has been GUTTED. For example:
— AP Biology cut 40% of its material
— Required lines from the Aeneid in AP Latin halved
— Spanish Lit reading list cut from 56 works to 38
Then the questions themselves have become absurdly easier. Readability measures show English passages have fallen multiple grade levels, and some now include footnotes defining basic words...
A 2025 AP English prompt included footnote definitions for words like "optimism" and "pessimism."
At the same time, scoring was recalibrated so that more students pass: guessing penalties disappeared, rubrics grew more generous, readers were told to give students the benefit of the doubt, etc. — "no one at College Board had any incentive to maintain rigor."
College professors are now seeing students arrive with AP credit who lack basic content knowledge and writing ability. The College Board insists the exams have not become easier, but everybody familiar with them knows they've become an absolute joke.
Advanced Placement is no longer advanced. This is not college level.
It must be replaced.
Imma López retweeted
Here’s the thing about spotting the horrendous, soulless AI-generated writing infecting every corner of the internet now: it’s not just about the words — it’s about the patterns.
And once you start noticing them, you can’t unsee them.
The unnecessary em dashes. The polished transitions. The examples given in groups of three.
The weird metaphors that kind of make sense but kind of don’t — like a parachute opening inside a submarine.
The load-bearing use of the term “load-bearing.”
The random one sentence paragraphs.
The way a bunch of bland gibberish is quietly reframed as a profound insight.
The on-going and un-necessary hyphenation of every-day words that really don’t need it.
The cliches.
Read that again.
Cliches.
Louder for people in the back.
Tons of cliches.
That’s not a typo.
Sit with that for a moment.
And the biggest red flag? Asking yourself a question and answering it.
Because honestly? No sentient human writes like this.
And truthfully? If you can’t identify these red flags, you might not actually be sentient yourself.
Because really? If this formatting doesn’t immediately strike you as awkward and artificial, it means you don’t read books.
Ever.
Seriously.
But here’s where it gets interesting:
It doesn’t.
The point has been made but I’ll keep going. That’s what AI writing is all about.
Let’s delve into real problem. It isn’t the technology. It’s the people using it because they’re too retarded to generate an original thought of their own.
That’s not thoughtfulness. It’s intellectual laziness wearing digital makeup.
It doesn’t make the internet more fun. It makes me want to throw my phone in the river and forsake all of humanity and live as a hermit in the woods for the rest of my life.
Seriously this shit fills me with despair. I’m not kidding.
And the distinction matters.
Especially when you’re saying the distinction matters without actually drawing a distinction.
But here’s what nobody tells you.
When you ask a machine to manufacture your personality, you’re not just automating your writing. You’re quietly announcing that you’re a boring, insipid dork with nothing interesting to say.
Let that sink in.
The uncomfortable truth?
AI didn’t turn these people into tedious midwits.
It quietly revealed what they already were.
And perhaps — just perhaps — that’s quietly the most important takeaway of all.
But what do you think? Let's unpack this together in the comments. 👇
Imma López retweeted
Had an extremely dispiriting conversation with a young person recently. Said they just want to read books and actually learn things but they kept having AI assignments shoved down their throat by LLM-enthusiast faculty and AI “tools” foisted on them by the administration.
Imma López retweeted
AI is creating jobs in some of the dumbest ways possible
Talked to a Stanford prof last night who told me that AI has led to students all acing all the homeworks, never showing up to office hours, and then failing the final exams in-person.
So in response the department is changing the TA's purpose, by eliminating office hours and requiring students meet with TAs 1:1 and walking them through each coding assignment to demonstrate they actually understand what's going on in the code.
Imma López retweeted
Just the Editor-in-Chief of Nature advising scientists not to share their data and findings with external AI model companies.
Imma López retweeted
El estudio de Inmaculada López Solá (Universidad de Barcelona) con 85 aprendices de ELE demuestra que la eficacia de la práctica léxica asistida por ordenador depende de adaptar el tipo de ejercicio al error específico
#ASELE2026
Imma López retweeted
Last week I posted a new paper with Patrick Norrick: “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World.”
We chose the title deliberately. No society in history has experienced the fertility levels now seen in South Korea, China, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, and many other countries. Our knowledge of the causes (and of the economic consequences) remains far more limited than most public discussion acknowledges. Much of what we write is, at best, educated conjecture.
The paper also struggles against a space limit. We wrote 20,000 words, far from the 250,000 or so we would need to address some issues in more detail (if I had the time and resources to hide away for a year, I could do that, but not now). That means some ideas are only sketched.
Nonetheless, we emphasize several important points.
First, fertility has fallen very fast everywhere: rich and poor countries, east and west, north and south, conservative and liberal societies, religious and non-religious societies (with the exception of the Jewish population of Israel; fertility has also collapsed among the Muslim population within the pre-1967 borders), you name it. Even in sub-Saharan Africa we see fast and unprecedented drops in fertility (alas, from a high initial level).
Second, and this is really interesting, the fertility collapse has been concentrated in poor and lower-middle-income countries much more than in rich countries. By now, income per capita and fertility are positively correlated within OECD countries. We conjecture this will hold globally in a few decades.
Third, and related to the second point, the fertility collapse has been concentrated among poor and lower-middle-income women within countries. In countries such as the U.S., the rich and highly educated now have more children than the poor and less educated.
Fourth, we document why we do not understand the data from the U.N. World Population Prospects. See, for example, Tables A.1 and A.2.
Fifth, we explain why some proposed mechanisms struggle when confronted with the data.
A more subtle point is at work here. Many commentators do not seem to understand the difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Yes, births might have gone down because fewer women are in long-run relationships. That is the proximate cause. But you need to explain why fewer women are in long-run relationships (the ultimate cause), and saying that they spend more years in school, to take one example, does not get us very far. Why do they spend more years in school? Once you start down the whole chain of reasoning, things become much harder than they seem.
The paper can be found here:
sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Demog…
Comments always welcome!
Imma López retweeted
1) started reading last year but probably boyfriend material
2) fascist
3) gay
4) rapist
Imma López retweeted
📢Us presentem els seminaris ROLLING del mes de maig i juny! Comencem el dilluns 11 amb l'Aurora Bel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)!
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📢Here you have the ROLLING seminars for May and June! We start next Monday 11 with Aurora Bel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)!
Imma López retweeted
This is not a mystery: because of grade inflation, many students don’t do the reading because they’re not incentivized to do the reading.
Students are just as smart and ambitious as they always have been, they’re just put in an environment where working hard isn’t explicitly rewarded. We are not cooked if faculty can reverse course (as many are already doing). Assign the readings, design the course to reward hard work and learning, and you’ll be amazed at the results.
Imma López retweeted
Never forget that you are the main data center. Drink water, and consume as much literature as possible.
Imma López retweeted
I cannot believe the number of "academics" I've seen bitching about the 1-year ban on arXiv for publishing hallucinated references.
Are you shitting me? You're mad that your research papers are expected to be factual? You couldn't be bothered to check your references?
Imma López retweeted
it's gonna blow your mind when you find out about the academic disciplines where people are capable of reading an ENTIRE paper. I've even heard rumours of a handful of incredibly talented thinkers who can make it through an entire book
The funniest thing about #arxivgate is that it’s going to drive everyone to use AIs to ensure their papers are in compliance because AIs are literally the only entity with the patience to read an entire paper.
Imma López retweeted
it’s funny how many college students seem to think that their instructors have no idea how college students try to trick their instructors. do they think i’m teaching college classes at 23 because i have no idea what i’m doing
Imma López retweeted
Academia is cruel because it selects for people obsessively interested in a narrow topic, but what’s actually rewarded is the ability to pivot fluidly to whatever’s new and fundable.
Imma López retweeted
En tiempos de IA, cuanto se agradece encontrar trabajos en los que se escucha la propia voz de los/as alumnos/as. Jamás pensé que abrazaría tanto sus imperfecciones, sus párrafos eternos y las subordinadas de subordinadas de subordinadas.
Imma López retweeted
Molta gent em pregunta per què segueixo editant la @Viquipedia ara que tothom fa servir Gemini, GPT o similars.
Jo ho veig així: la IA és com un barri ple de llibreries maques. Són elegants, maques i convenients, però poden tancar en qualsevol moment, convertir-se en espais de pagament o canviar el seu model de negoci d'un dia per l'altre.
La Viquipèdia és com la biblioteca pública del barri. És l'escala universal cap al coneixement i la garantia que l'accés a la informació continuarà sent lliure i gratuït per a tothom, independentment de la seva butxaca i la seva potència de càlcul. I ho serà en el seu idioma i amb el seu context cultural.
L'IA pot ser la interfície, però nosaltres en som l'ànima. Si no documentem el nostre món en la nostra llengua, qui ho farà? ✍️🌍
Som-hi
Imma López retweeted
Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.
