{"id":7953,"date":"2026-04-24T18:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T01:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/?p=7953"},"modified":"2026-04-24T18:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T01:41:09","slug":"tgfi-volume-552-why-stanford-will-endure-ais-erasing-anonymity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2026\/04\/24\/tgfi-volume-552-why-stanford-will-endure-ais-erasing-anonymity","title":{"rendered":"TGFI, Volume 552: why Stanford will endure, AIs erasing anonymity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a>\n<\/p>

You\u2019ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Fridays I share articles\/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things Glen Found Interesting<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
    \n
  1. College Won\u2019t Get Fixed. But It Also Won\u2019t Disappear.<\/a> (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): \u201cThe Ivies and other top schools will prove invulnerable. Their value for networking, and also as a dating and marriage service, is unparalleled. There are no trends that threaten to disrupt those functions. If these institutions can prove useful in other ways too, such as learning and research, consider that gravy.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. I can never talk to an AI anonymously again<\/a> (Kelsey Piper, The Argument): \u201cFrom only the above text, 125 words, Claude Opus 4.7 informed me that the likeliest author is Kelsey Piper. This is an Opus 4.7\u2011specific power; ChatGPT guessed Yglesias, and Gemini guessed Scott Alexander. I did not have memory enabled, nor did I have information about me associated with my account; I did these tests in Incognito Mode. To make sure it wasn\u2019t somehow feeding my account information to Claude even in Incognito Mode, I asked a friend to run these tests on his computer, and he received the same result; I also got the same result when I tested it through the API.\u2026. I think the amount of public text that is needed for this kind of deanonymization to work is likely to eventually decrease. You should expect that, if you leave a detailed anonymous review on Glassdoor after leaving your job, within a year or two it will be possible for companies to paste that text into an AI and learn exactly who wrote it. How long it takes for this to happen will depend on how much data about you is in the training data and on how much anonymous text you produced.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. AI Is Not Draining the Colorado River. I Measured It.<\/a> (Len Necefer, Outside): \u201cI work on the Colorado River water for a living as a filmmaker and storyteller. I have a PhD in engineering and public policy. I am Din\u00e9. The threats to the river are not abstract to me; they are very real. So earlier this year, I decided to quantify something that has been missing in the conversation about AI and water: I measured my own AI water use. For 11 weeks, I tracked all of my AI use. One hundred sessions. I counted the tokens processed and applied publicly available numbers on per-token energy and water intensity from Epoch AI and operator-reported data from Microsoft and Google. Anyone can run this math. In those 11 weeks, I built an iOS app from scratch and wrote policy briefs on extreme heat for nonprofits I work with. I produced documentary pitch decks and drafted a 15,000-word climate fiction piece about the Colorado River collapse. I used AI every single day, often for hours at a time. Total lifecycle water footprint of all that work: about five gallons. That accounts for everything: the water used to cool the data centers, the water consumed at power plants to generate the electricity, and the water embedded in manufacturing the hardware.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?<\/a> (David DeSteno, New York Times): \u201cAnthropic\u2019s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn\u2019t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises \u2014 texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated \u2014 but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.\u201d \u2014 Far more interesting than I expected. I almost skipped because I imagined I knew where the author was going. I was quite wrong. The author is a psychology professor at Northeastern. FYI: the author is not personally religious, he just studies religion.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. A Brief History of Singing in the Early Christian Church<\/a> (podcast, 33 minutes): According to Augustine, Ambrose re-introduced the practice of congregational singing of hymns in the western church, which raises the question of what had happened to singing before that. An interesting listen. Recommended by a student.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. There\u2019s a Reason Americans Hold Israel to a Higher Standard<\/a> (Ross Douthat, New York Times): \u201c\u2026Americans have a fundamentally different relationship to Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel than to any of the \u2018much worse governments\u2019 that Gur is referring to \u2014 Saudi Arabia and its war in Yemen is his prime example, but one could make a much longer list of authoritarian states whose war crimes pass without sufficient notice.\u2026 So part of the answer to Gur\u2019s question \u2014 why do Westerners freak out in a unique way about Israel policy? \u2014 is connected to identification, not hostility, and to the feeling that Israel is part of our zone of identity and responsibility in a way that the Saudi monarchy is not.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Three articles about the Southern Poverty Law Center case: