What Topics Does Mark Carrigan Cover on markcarrigan.net?

markcarrigan.net is the personal site of Mark Carrigan, a sociologist and writer whose work centres on AI in higher education, academic practice, and the cultural effects of large language models. If you are looking for sustained commentary on how generative AI is reshaping universities, scholarship, and everyday intellectual life, this site is worth following. If you want a single-topic blog, note that the content ranges widely — from assessment integrity to techno music and marathon training.

AI and higher education

This is the site's dominant thread. Recent posts and headings include:

• The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal — a book announced as available open access
• The risks of integrating AI too rapidly into higher education
• The two phases of the AI and assessment integrity in literature
• How will universities ration internal access to LLMs?
• Why AI vendors are targeting public institutions
• What are the judgements which students are making as they use AI?

The recurring concern is institutional strategy: how universities adopt AI, how assessment integrity is maintained, and how access to models is governed.

Academic writing, publishing, and scholarship

A second cluster deals with the conditions of scholarly work:

• Using LLMs to help you write papers doesn't help you get them published
• A conversation about scholarly publishing, AI, enshittification and the future of the university
• Why prompting should not be our focus when teaching students about AI
• New paper – Still emerging: understanding Generative AI use in Higher Education

These posts tend to treat AI as a factor in publishing and pedagogy rather than as a productivity shortcut.

Technology, culture, and cognition

Beyond the university, the site covers how LLMs affect thinking and culture:

• Low tech, no tech pedagogy to protect foundational knowledge from cognitive outsourcing
• The relational reflexivity of frontier models
• The moral placidity of LLMs
• The rapid normalisation of using LLMs for emotional support
• Even frontier models give wrong answers to financial questions more than half the time
• Are LLM-written Substacks getting out of hand?
• How visible are you in the LLM?

Music also appears, including several posts on techno and acid techno.

Personal notes and reading records

The site mixes in personal material:

• Things I've read in 2026 — an ongoing reading list
• I run my first marathon in five weeks
• A new academic and intellectual bio after an eventful year
• Reflections on productivity, writing, and creativity, including an interview about Omnifocus

How to decide whether to follow

The site references subscription options, so some content or updates may sit behind a subscription — check the site itself for current terms.