I’m interested that you mentioned that creative writing tracks are not lagging quite as much. Maybe there’s some hope there, in that while analytical essays are boring to write, lots of people still feel inspired to use language creatively. Maybe we need to shift from a critical/analytical approach to reading literature to a mentor-text approach, where the end is creation. Of course, this is also not AI proof, but it removes the religious aspect of literature and reframes it as a skill.
It sounds like the literature industry in which you are a participant is going the way of the proverbial buggy whip.
Rather than mourning for a pastime lost, carry on and set an example for a smaller less industrial clientele. University departments will need to adjust to computer generated reality.
You know, I don't think we're ever going to stop needing human beings to be able to express themselves clearly and understand other human beings thoroughly and deeply. And a lot of that understanding comes from language - in our case English.
In a completely different field, I taught a class that was full of the "why do we need to knows". The needed to do the work on my subject in order to train their brains to to the athletics for their chosen field.
But it was disappointing that they didn't just plain enjoy doing the thing like I did. Which is a part of what you are saying.
I love reading all these stories from lazy-assed professors realizing how bad at teaching they’ve been over the past few decades. AI is nothing more than a bright light shining on the broken US teaching profession, from K to post doc.
Absolute monarchy in early modern France gained the upper hand over feudalism in part because of a class of New Men, the nobility of the robe. The old aristocrats, the nobility of the sword, were the typical manor lords with feudal rights and responsibilities. Their power derived from their skill in war.
The nobility of the robe were bureaucrats and judges. They assisted the French king in centralizing authority by being competent administrators who could collect taxes and dispense justice. They were the basis of what was evolving into the modern state.
For a while these two classes vied for power, but eventually the nobility of the sword waned. Not due to the struggle with the king and his men, but because of the firearm. Guns democratized warfare and literally unseated heavy cavalry from its thousand year perch atop the battlefield.
By the time of the French revolution, all that was left of the nobility of the sword was a hereditary officer corps in professional armies. This was in turn obliterated by Napoleon. A hereditary warrior class, which had been a mainstay of life for thousands of years, came to an end.
The nobility of the robe was dealt a blow but was not obliterated. The demand for formal education during the industrial revolution and modern management techniques all enhanced the standing of the learned class. And although this class was forced to open its ranks to the commoners, there have always been barriers such that well-prepared children find it easier to get in.
I think, however, that in AI the remnants of the nobility of the robe - the educated, officialdom, the PMC - have met their firearm on the field of battle. AI is the tool that will democratize intellect, and the upper class that relies on brain power will be obliterated just as surely as the knights were.
In the past it mattered if you were big and armed, until the gun. In the present it matters if you are smart and educated, until AI. In the future we will consider it barbaric that society was stratified by intelligence to begin with, and that the intellectual classes were not under the thumb of a democratic society.
That’s a fascinating analogy. All, I can say is we shall see. It’s very unclear to me what the world is going to look like under the conditions you describe. Who will rule? What will people do for work? The military rule never went away, though, it evolved, as will the power of the robes. But, yes, we may be seeing the next upgrade in democracy.
My thoughts on the problems caused by AI in colleges now, is that for a large part it is caused by your teaching/examination system. The same as in the UK, namely turning in essays or papers written outside of classrooms. In Europe most universities have exams each semester where you are seated at tables and chairs in large rooms, sport halls, the gym etc. You are sometimes allowed to have books or laptops or phones, or just nothing. The students receive an exam paper with questions they have to answer in the three hours allotted to them. Therefore the thinking and the writing has to be done on the spot.
I know Eastern European professionals who did post-grad degrees in the UK, and laugh/cry at how easy it was. They tell me, attend tutor given meetings, write a paper at the weekend, repeat a few times and you have a Masters degree. They found it shocking.
I majored in Geology, so take my reply with that grain of salt, plus an apology for straying a bit out of literature.
That AI is said to hallucinate is disingenuous. In reality, and here I approach the religious element, AI lacks a soul. Perhaps it is sentient, which is less a compliment than a slight against sentience. When I look at AI, I rarely see a mind, which has honed a thought, an idea, a concept. I see the same deadness as in the eyes of a sociopath. (Which @stoshw also noted).
Liars have fooled me. AI has fooled me. Religious leaders have fooled me. Sometimes I spot the lies, the untruths, the sleight of hand. Sometimes AI spews words that sound convincing. What I have not found is an interaction with AI that fostered this thought: I would enjoy a dinner conversation with this person.
That is my Turing Test. People who have read great literature are far more likely to pass this test. And if the conversation happens to wonder into Beowulf, I’d pay for an after dinner port.
This is interesting but I feel it has missed something. I understand and relate to declining numbers, but in a way I think it’s more a problem of how we are selling the discipline. Firstly, the ‘if ChatGPT can analyse Hamlet what’s the point’ assumes that the point lies in the product rather than the process it took to get there. For me a study of literature is all about the process, the feeling, the grappling with ideas. Secondly, for me, Literature isn’t about studying some kind of “greatness” or to become good (in some objective moral or skilled way) it’s a process about examining what it is to be human, having a human experience. Reading is an act that elicits emotions and roots us in the essence of what it is to be a part of this big messy species, and digging deeper into that consciousness and exploring our very humanness is more important now than ever.
I have an English Lit degree from Brown University, and all it got me was "what's your typing speed honey" when I graduated in 1982, when supposedly we women were way past that. But for me, the question had always been, do I want to be a writer or do I want to be a painter, and the painter won out. I wanted from the get-go to be a classically trained painter and back then that was absolutely verboten and anyway everyone with any training had been excised from academia and the gallery scene. Fast forward 40 years and suddenly realistic painting is back in style. The university academicians have no idea how to paint, so flat, design-y paintings are de rigeur, but ateliers who teach the old techniques have sprung up like mushrooms all over the world. A lot of people want to learn how to draw and paint as if they know what they're doing. The trouble is, not a lot of people want to pay for their work. A painting by an atelier-trained artist brings in about 1/6 (maximum) of the price of a university-trained artist of equal stature, who only knows theory. The differential for women painters is worse; an atelier-trained female painter of top stature will command 1/10 the price of her equivalent male colleague. But there is a scene. There is a little demand, and it's international. I figure if painting came back, writing will come back. It may only be read by other writers — frankly it probably is even now — but there will always be people who write, who create art. There may just be no market for what they produce, and of course since we are competing with the products of software, there will be no way a human can compete with AI for price. That has severe consequences because the creators of culture have to do some soul-sucking day job to keep themselves alive, which means they don't have the time to put in the time to get and stay good at what they do. These are the choices our culture has made. Our culture doesn't value us. End of story. But then our culture doesn't really value humans at all. We don't value labor. We don't value honesty or honor. We value the quick buck, and damn anyone or anything that gets in its way. By this ethos, our culture will end.
It's rough. I always valued literature for literature's sake. I had friends who concentrated in English at The College at the University of Chicago - from my perspective, it seemed like a fun and easy way to get an undergraduate degree.
I recall once a late-night bone lab discussion. I did an Anthropology concentration and was preparing for the end of quarter osteology final exam in which you'd be given a fragment of bone and from that piece of bone (often an inch across) you had to determine sex, age and possible causes of death.
One of the young women in the class whom I only spoke to because I was trying to date her (unsuccessfully as it turned out) asked me what I was doing after graduation. She was in her second year and later went on to become a successful and somewhat renowned forensic physical anthropologist (kind of like "Bones," actually). I told her I was going into international technical sales. She looked at me startled and said, "Then why are you studying this?"
"Because I came to the university to be educated, not vocationally trained."
I'll never forget her reply. "Wow, that's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?"
All colleges began as seminaries for what became the Humanities, or for medical training in the sciences. They were began as a luxury product to churn out priests and pastors from the soft sons of the wealthy whose fathers judged them to be too candy-assed to make it in the competitive world of free markets.
Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago as a Baptist seminary. He never thought a young man of business should bother hanging around musty libraries debating with old bearded men. He thought strenuous men of affairs should find a berth at 16 years old in a trading firm and learn how the real world works.
Over time, the "higher propaganda" machine evolved its own rationales, and even in places like Florida, returned to excellent higher education, with a focus on how that education relates to making a living for your family and contributing to society.
Yep. You're right and there's not a goddam thing anyone can do about it. The cages get smaller and the pens more crowded. But the mind must stay large. That's the best to hope for and literature is the only thought amplifier worth the time of your life.
I majored in French and German literature both in UK high school and in US college and found that both gave me deep insights into their cultures and their violent 20th century history. Most of my educated American contemporaries never got this and remained excruciatingly superficial in their understandings of Europe and the world. I used to feel sorry for them, until I realized that they weren’t really missing anything that mattered in their lives. People who cheat or take shortcuts only cheat themselves, but does it matter? Civilization has always been 90% empty dross. AI won’t change that.
"When ChatGPT can analyze Hamlet as well as any grad student, we might reasonably ask, 'What is the point of writing papers on Hamlet?'"
This is an interesting question. In my field (molecular biology) I've started asking AI for help finding papers that have reported specific findings and even for suggesting experiments. It sometimes misinterprets scientific papers and thinks they contain information they don't, but it's right often enough to function as a research assistant. It still probably couldn't run my lab though. Likewise, my impression is that ChatGPT could say intelligent things about Hamlet but not generate genuinely novel insights. Maybe nobody has anything new to say about Hamlet at this point, but I doubt AI could say insightful things about any book beyond what people on the internet have written about it. At this point, I don't know if ChatGPT will plateau at "repeat things other people have said about the topic" or if it will eventually be smarter than us all.
I’m interested that you mentioned that creative writing tracks are not lagging quite as much. Maybe there’s some hope there, in that while analytical essays are boring to write, lots of people still feel inspired to use language creatively. Maybe we need to shift from a critical/analytical approach to reading literature to a mentor-text approach, where the end is creation. Of course, this is also not AI proof, but it removes the religious aspect of literature and reframes it as a skill.
It sounds like the literature industry in which you are a participant is going the way of the proverbial buggy whip.
Rather than mourning for a pastime lost, carry on and set an example for a smaller less industrial clientele. University departments will need to adjust to computer generated reality.
Start learning how to create artificial reality.
You know, I don't think we're ever going to stop needing human beings to be able to express themselves clearly and understand other human beings thoroughly and deeply. And a lot of that understanding comes from language - in our case English.
In a completely different field, I taught a class that was full of the "why do we need to knows". The needed to do the work on my subject in order to train their brains to to the athletics for their chosen field.
But it was disappointing that they didn't just plain enjoy doing the thing like I did. Which is a part of what you are saying.
I think spending class time on why do we need to know would be hugely useful. The answers may vary for different people.
I love reading all these stories from lazy-assed professors realizing how bad at teaching they’ve been over the past few decades. AI is nothing more than a bright light shining on the broken US teaching profession, from K to post doc.
Absolute monarchy in early modern France gained the upper hand over feudalism in part because of a class of New Men, the nobility of the robe. The old aristocrats, the nobility of the sword, were the typical manor lords with feudal rights and responsibilities. Their power derived from their skill in war.
The nobility of the robe were bureaucrats and judges. They assisted the French king in centralizing authority by being competent administrators who could collect taxes and dispense justice. They were the basis of what was evolving into the modern state.
For a while these two classes vied for power, but eventually the nobility of the sword waned. Not due to the struggle with the king and his men, but because of the firearm. Guns democratized warfare and literally unseated heavy cavalry from its thousand year perch atop the battlefield.
By the time of the French revolution, all that was left of the nobility of the sword was a hereditary officer corps in professional armies. This was in turn obliterated by Napoleon. A hereditary warrior class, which had been a mainstay of life for thousands of years, came to an end.
The nobility of the robe was dealt a blow but was not obliterated. The demand for formal education during the industrial revolution and modern management techniques all enhanced the standing of the learned class. And although this class was forced to open its ranks to the commoners, there have always been barriers such that well-prepared children find it easier to get in.
I think, however, that in AI the remnants of the nobility of the robe - the educated, officialdom, the PMC - have met their firearm on the field of battle. AI is the tool that will democratize intellect, and the upper class that relies on brain power will be obliterated just as surely as the knights were.
In the past it mattered if you were big and armed, until the gun. In the present it matters if you are smart and educated, until AI. In the future we will consider it barbaric that society was stratified by intelligence to begin with, and that the intellectual classes were not under the thumb of a democratic society.
That’s a fascinating analogy. All, I can say is we shall see. It’s very unclear to me what the world is going to look like under the conditions you describe. Who will rule? What will people do for work? The military rule never went away, though, it evolved, as will the power of the robes. But, yes, we may be seeing the next upgrade in democracy.
Re: "There’s a viral post going around now, which I’ll link when see it again, arguing that “English Majors are illiterate.”"
Not quite illiterate. :-) I think you mean this post:
https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read
Thanks, fixed!
"Authors didn’t even exist anymore" seems intriguing, but it's a busted link.
Thanks for letting me know. I've fixed the link. And here it is: https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf
My thoughts on the problems caused by AI in colleges now, is that for a large part it is caused by your teaching/examination system. The same as in the UK, namely turning in essays or papers written outside of classrooms. In Europe most universities have exams each semester where you are seated at tables and chairs in large rooms, sport halls, the gym etc. You are sometimes allowed to have books or laptops or phones, or just nothing. The students receive an exam paper with questions they have to answer in the three hours allotted to them. Therefore the thinking and the writing has to be done on the spot.
I know Eastern European professionals who did post-grad degrees in the UK, and laugh/cry at how easy it was. They tell me, attend tutor given meetings, write a paper at the weekend, repeat a few times and you have a Masters degree. They found it shocking.
I majored in Geology, so take my reply with that grain of salt, plus an apology for straying a bit out of literature.
That AI is said to hallucinate is disingenuous. In reality, and here I approach the religious element, AI lacks a soul. Perhaps it is sentient, which is less a compliment than a slight against sentience. When I look at AI, I rarely see a mind, which has honed a thought, an idea, a concept. I see the same deadness as in the eyes of a sociopath. (Which @stoshw also noted).
Liars have fooled me. AI has fooled me. Religious leaders have fooled me. Sometimes I spot the lies, the untruths, the sleight of hand. Sometimes AI spews words that sound convincing. What I have not found is an interaction with AI that fostered this thought: I would enjoy a dinner conversation with this person.
That is my Turing Test. People who have read great literature are far more likely to pass this test. And if the conversation happens to wonder into Beowulf, I’d pay for an after dinner port.
I actually have had such discussions with ChatGPT. I hade an amazing discussion about nominalism and postmodernism and another about humor.
This is interesting but I feel it has missed something. I understand and relate to declining numbers, but in a way I think it’s more a problem of how we are selling the discipline. Firstly, the ‘if ChatGPT can analyse Hamlet what’s the point’ assumes that the point lies in the product rather than the process it took to get there. For me a study of literature is all about the process, the feeling, the grappling with ideas. Secondly, for me, Literature isn’t about studying some kind of “greatness” or to become good (in some objective moral or skilled way) it’s a process about examining what it is to be human, having a human experience. Reading is an act that elicits emotions and roots us in the essence of what it is to be a part of this big messy species, and digging deeper into that consciousness and exploring our very humanness is more important now than ever.
I have an English Lit degree from Brown University, and all it got me was "what's your typing speed honey" when I graduated in 1982, when supposedly we women were way past that. But for me, the question had always been, do I want to be a writer or do I want to be a painter, and the painter won out. I wanted from the get-go to be a classically trained painter and back then that was absolutely verboten and anyway everyone with any training had been excised from academia and the gallery scene. Fast forward 40 years and suddenly realistic painting is back in style. The university academicians have no idea how to paint, so flat, design-y paintings are de rigeur, but ateliers who teach the old techniques have sprung up like mushrooms all over the world. A lot of people want to learn how to draw and paint as if they know what they're doing. The trouble is, not a lot of people want to pay for their work. A painting by an atelier-trained artist brings in about 1/6 (maximum) of the price of a university-trained artist of equal stature, who only knows theory. The differential for women painters is worse; an atelier-trained female painter of top stature will command 1/10 the price of her equivalent male colleague. But there is a scene. There is a little demand, and it's international. I figure if painting came back, writing will come back. It may only be read by other writers — frankly it probably is even now — but there will always be people who write, who create art. There may just be no market for what they produce, and of course since we are competing with the products of software, there will be no way a human can compete with AI for price. That has severe consequences because the creators of culture have to do some soul-sucking day job to keep themselves alive, which means they don't have the time to put in the time to get and stay good at what they do. These are the choices our culture has made. Our culture doesn't value us. End of story. But then our culture doesn't really value humans at all. We don't value labor. We don't value honesty or honor. We value the quick buck, and damn anyone or anything that gets in its way. By this ethos, our culture will end.
It's rough. I always valued literature for literature's sake. I had friends who concentrated in English at The College at the University of Chicago - from my perspective, it seemed like a fun and easy way to get an undergraduate degree.
I recall once a late-night bone lab discussion. I did an Anthropology concentration and was preparing for the end of quarter osteology final exam in which you'd be given a fragment of bone and from that piece of bone (often an inch across) you had to determine sex, age and possible causes of death.
One of the young women in the class whom I only spoke to because I was trying to date her (unsuccessfully as it turned out) asked me what I was doing after graduation. She was in her second year and later went on to become a successful and somewhat renowned forensic physical anthropologist (kind of like "Bones," actually). I told her I was going into international technical sales. She looked at me startled and said, "Then why are you studying this?"
"Because I came to the university to be educated, not vocationally trained."
I'll never forget her reply. "Wow, that's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?"
All colleges began as seminaries for what became the Humanities, or for medical training in the sciences. They were began as a luxury product to churn out priests and pastors from the soft sons of the wealthy whose fathers judged them to be too candy-assed to make it in the competitive world of free markets.
Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago as a Baptist seminary. He never thought a young man of business should bother hanging around musty libraries debating with old bearded men. He thought strenuous men of affairs should find a berth at 16 years old in a trading firm and learn how the real world works.
Over time, the "higher propaganda" machine evolved its own rationales, and even in places like Florida, returned to excellent higher education, with a focus on how that education relates to making a living for your family and contributing to society.
English departments are fucked.
Here is the link you mentioned:
https://open.substack.com/pub/kittenbeloved/p/college-english-majors-cant-read?r=1ivtg6&utm_medium=ios
Yep. You're right and there's not a goddam thing anyone can do about it. The cages get smaller and the pens more crowded. But the mind must stay large. That's the best to hope for and literature is the only thought amplifier worth the time of your life.
I majored in French and German literature both in UK high school and in US college and found that both gave me deep insights into their cultures and their violent 20th century history. Most of my educated American contemporaries never got this and remained excruciatingly superficial in their understandings of Europe and the world. I used to feel sorry for them, until I realized that they weren’t really missing anything that mattered in their lives. People who cheat or take shortcuts only cheat themselves, but does it matter? Civilization has always been 90% empty dross. AI won’t change that.
"When ChatGPT can analyze Hamlet as well as any grad student, we might reasonably ask, 'What is the point of writing papers on Hamlet?'"
This is an interesting question. In my field (molecular biology) I've started asking AI for help finding papers that have reported specific findings and even for suggesting experiments. It sometimes misinterprets scientific papers and thinks they contain information they don't, but it's right often enough to function as a research assistant. It still probably couldn't run my lab though. Likewise, my impression is that ChatGPT could say intelligent things about Hamlet but not generate genuinely novel insights. Maybe nobody has anything new to say about Hamlet at this point, but I doubt AI could say insightful things about any book beyond what people on the internet have written about it. At this point, I don't know if ChatGPT will plateau at "repeat things other people have said about the topic" or if it will eventually be smarter than us all.
What ChatGPT can do, like any good grad student is take a theory and apply it to Hamlet, which can in theory produced a new reading.