Following Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna's "The AI Con" (Bodley Head 2025), I call large language models "synthetic text extruding machines" rather than characterizing them as "artificial intelligence" (31). As Bender and Hanna make clear, such text-extruders have multiple problems, both in themselves and in their academic, social, economic, environmental, and epistemological effects. All that has led me to decide not to use them myself and to ask my students to not use them in the courses they take with me. Still, I don't want to police them, so if they do use text-extruders, I will ask them for documentation of how they used them and adapt my comments accordingly. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 September 2025)