Genai on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

more noodling on AI and creativity

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:30:59 +0000

The 2026 Oscars™ happened, and a questionable “AI Production Studio” and “AI Talent Agency’s”¹ “AI Actor” tried to use the occasion to convince The Academy™ that replacing human actors with AI is actually good, and that they just need to fully embrace it in order to unlock their full potential. The argument was presented in the form of a soul-less, unartistic, AI-generated “music video” that was basically autotune cranked to 3000 or something, belting out lyrics that had the emotional impact of a corporate press release. If this is “AI Art”, real artists have nothing to worry about.

Prototyping a new kind of online course community platform

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:41:40 -0700

On the plus side, your humble protagonist has finally figured out how to break out of “the only thing he blogs about is how he uses Obsidian.” Unfortunately, it’s because I appear to be firmly in the middle of a bout of “the only thing he blogs about is how he vibecodes some half-baked idea into a usable thing.”

A blog post in 2 parts:

The Course Community Application
The part about vibecoding and using frontier genAI tools despite everything

The Course Community Application

After my experiment last week in building a local-LLM “course coach” application that students could use to engage with their course materials, a few things happened:

not another think piece on generative AI

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:20:33 +0000

AKA Please, God, Not Another AI Thinkpiece!

Nope. There have been enough of those lately. Recent posts about art, intuition, semantic ablation, cognitive debt, cognitive shortcuts and atrophy. They get at lots of the nuance hidden between “AI is literally SATAN” and “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords!”. Mostly, (generative)AI is kinda useful for some things, is extremely problematic for many reasons, and isn’t going away no matter how much anyone wants it to.

AI Rounds: Teaching Through Change - Navigating AI and Educational Technology Disruption

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 10:20:00 +0000

I was recently interviewed by Dr. Jessalyn Holodinsky for the UCalgary Cumming School of Medicine’s AI Rounds Podcast. We talked about the Weathering Waves of Change blog post I wrote, and how it relates to AI and teaching and learning.

Building my own custom standalone comments app

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:23:14 -0600

Surely, one day, eventually, I will write a blog post that isn’t about vibecoding some bauble into existence and actually get back to something deeper. I think learning how vibecoding (and coaxing some form of LLM to do stuff in general) is an important thing to understand, not just read about. I’m absolutely not an AI Evangelist, but this work has changed my perception of LLMs and agentic tools as they (rapidly, so rapidly) increase in capacity. This is not that day.

Perplexity Comet and online quizzes

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:10:58 -0600

I’m pretty firmly in the “let’s redesign assessments so they authentically evaluate student learning” and not in the “ban AI and other tech to stop the cheating students from cheating!” camp.

And.

Perplexity released their Comet browser, with an integrated AI assistant. Similar to Google’s new (and then (temporarily?) redacted ¹²) Lens Homework Help thing³ that they’re building into Chrome.

Basically, the assistant lives in the browser and has access to whatever web page you’re viewing. If you’re logged into a website, the AI tool can still see the content of the page, where it previously would have been blocked because the AI server would have tried to access the URL directly. Now the AI assistant runs in a sidebar and just directly accesses the content of the main browser window as needed. Easy peasy.

AI-coding a decent asteroids game

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:27:13 -0600

I’ve been using Claude a lot for almost a year, but had never gotten around to trying the Claude Code version that integrates with Terminal to directly edit files. That sounds scary, and I’d been having luck with just copying/pasting stuff out of Regular Claude via the web interface. Anyway. I decided to try it out.

Anthropic’s instructions say to just run:

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

to get started. macOS doesn’t ship with npm, but brew.sh can install npm and all of the Node.js nonsense that’s involved. So, I got to run this first:

things I'm watching as a learning technologies and design leader

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:51:52 +0000

I had an impromptu chat with a dear friend who I respect for his thoughtfulness and approach to the work¹. After the initial “boy, is the nature of our work ever different from back in the olden days when we actually got to build stuff!”, and “it seems like the bulk of our work now is just profoundly unbloggable for all kinds of reasons…”, we eventually got to “so… what kinds of things are you paying attention to?” That’s a big question, worth articulating and sharing.

AI and the value of thinking out loud

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:59:14 +0000

First, I am still conflicted about generative AI. It’s still a horrible, extractive, resource-intensive, opportunistic, hype-addled, broligarchy-enhancing opaque bullshit machine. And it’s still the elephant in every room, the sometimes-unspoken layer underneath every conversation, such that I can’t just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Hence the ongoing conflict.

For thinking-out-loud, this was prompted by Audrey’s recent post on mirrors, awareness, and AI: A Better World Is Possible. Especially, this bit:

But here’s what I think: most people don’t want “AI.” Most people are exhausted by the onslaught of technology “upgrades” that have consistently made everything worse.

neurally networked

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0600

I fed a snapshot of my Obsidian graph into the new ChatGPT image generator dealie:

Create a photorealistic, dramatic, cinematic interpretation of this image.

obsidian network visualizing

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0600

I “vibecoded” a web utility for visualizing Obsidian note networks, using a hardware-accelerated D3.js chart that is different (better?) than the graph visualizer that’s built into Obsidian…

prompting claude to build a sleep journal

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 04:17:39 -0700

First, yes, ick. I am still conflicted about generative AI. And yet, it’s a thing that I need to deeply understand in order to be able to cut through the breathless hype. Which means that I need to plug my nose and use it. And I’m trying to document some of my GenAI explorations.

I’ve been using Claude since the 3.5 model was released, and have been paying for the Professional tier for the last 5 months (and counting). $30 CAD per month for a tool that I use pretty regularly. All AI companies are problematic, but Anthropic feels slightly-less-problematic than OpenAI, certainly less so than Grok. Claude feels less gimmicky - it is strictly a text generator and doesn’t generate images. Its ability to build simple software is pretty impressive, even if the process can be mind-numbingly frustrating at times.

Building an Agenda Box plugin for Obsidian

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:17:06 +0000

I’ve been using Obsidian as my note-taking app for a couple of years now. I’ve got over 5,000 notes for various things. Including lots of meetings. There are times when my job is basically going to meetings. And I need to be able to keep track of what we intend to talk about in each meeting (especially as they start to blur together).

Graph of over 5,000 notes in Obsidian. The red dots are mostly meetings. Blue are people, Orange-ish are Topics. Green are vendors.