I'm going to mention something else... a little shorter than my last response:
1) Currently at a trade fair for the many little industries that support medtech, watchmaking, etc... AI is great for programming robots.
2) AI as an asitance in writing: meh: If I give a monkey a chisel, a hammer, and a piece of marble... what will be the result. If I give it to an artist or a stonecutter... I'll get a great result. AI is the hammer and chisel.
3) AI in the hands of the STASI or Palantir ... I'm heading to Skellig Michael.
I think your list of things teachers want to accomplish when we assign essays is exactly right. Now we just need to figure out how to accomplish the same goals in a world with AI.
I was intrigued by this. As an experiment of my own, I picked a text very far from Hamlet and ran through a similar process. I chose The Twin Dilemma, a Doctor Who story from 1984 generally seen as the very worst the twentieth century version of Doctor Who has to offer: a stupid, scientifically-ignorant plot (about a giant slug kidnapping teenage maths genius to move planets around and spread his (their, I suppose) eggs across the galaxy), bad dialogue (“An alien kidnap, what I’ve always feared!”), bad acting, terrible production values, etc, etc.
I asked ChatGPT for a 1,000 word Marxist analysis, then, for contrast, a similar-length analysis based on the conservatism of the late Roger Scruton.
Both essays were coherent and there were no obvious errors. Both could have been published in a Doctor Who fanzine in the late 80s or 90s or on a fan website in the 00s. I felt that the second one made some interesting points. Maybe I would have felt that about the Marxist one too if I was a Marxist.
However, both essays were totally divorced from the reality of rapidly-produced, cheap television production for a mass audience. While some (many) Doctor Who stories do try to have some kind of political or metaphorical dimension, The Twin Dilemma is simply cheap, bad science fantasy produced to stop the BBC having to show the test card for four twenty-five minute slots.
I find these analyses questionable, therefore, as I’m not a great believer in the death of author. I want to know what the author was trying to say. If we’re going down the authorial intention route, we should probably note that the author, Anthony Steven, became ill during the writing and much of the final script was written by the script editor, Eric Saward, which makes the incoherence of the script somewhat more understandable. (Mis)reading the critic's own political ideology into a script that is clearly not political, though routinely done nowadays, seems to reach its nadir here, where you can literally apply any mode of analysis to any text and generate an internally-coherent outcome.
Trying to extrapolate, if, as you say, literary criticism for the last several decades has been a matter of plugging a chosen text into a chosen conceptual framework, then it is probably finished. (In theory. In practice, I suspect there’s a bureaucratic empire using government funding to produce Mickey Mouse degrees that could continue until the money runs out, which will depend on political and economic factors more than anything else. But you would know much better than I do.)
The alternative, as you suggest, is a return to a much more personal way of responding to a text, one that AI can’t fake or which it would not be meaningful for AI to fake.
It’s possible many of the humanities are going to be hit this way. Historians will still have to find and transcribe primary sources, but once they’re online, AI can probably do a lot of analysis. I suspect that there will still be room for exceptional literary/historical/philosophical analysis produced by an exceptionally able thinker (i.e. either groundbreakingly innovative interpretations or exquisitely beautiful prose), but that would mean the slimming down of humanities degrees to a size similar to that before the expansion of higher education in the 1990s. This will have huge knock-on effects.
What if--as I would argue--the issue of AI adds a new and possibly even urgent reason to continue to assign such papers: AI needs them, and will continue to need them, in order to avoid model collapse? Got room for a guest post answering your last two posts that travels down this rabbit (or perhaps basalisk?) hole?
Good paper, all well rounded, but I think you said it yourself... needs updating. And it does need some human touch, so you might prompt AI to make it sound more human. (Check Roger Penrose's critique of AI, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, etc...)
I would have given it an A as well, but I would have sat the "writer" down in my office (I was a TA at U-Mass where I did my MA), and questioned him or her (strange, it sounds like a "him" to me, but let's leave Butler out of this) about certain specifics and what he/she actually thought about Hamlet... I like unfinished stuff, gut feelings.
But why read Hamlet? Why read anything, for that matter, when you can binge on computer-written series all day, even while running on a machine in some horrid fitness emporium filled with vaporized perspiration and rhythmed with soft techno... For large swatches of the population, Hamlet is not even a thought. Nor is Beethoven, by the way. Nor is anything of western culture, other than the plague of Facebook and X, and other social media that rob us of our time and ease (Substack, too, btw, but where can old journos go these days?)... Nor do they enjoy our incredible convenience of not even having to get off our effing recliners to dim the lights...
Death by convenience... And then, many liberals get all outraged and shocked at Russian Orthodox evangelists attracting men to become "absurdly manly" by lifting weights to heavy metal music... Somehow, speaking of literary interpretation, it reminds me of Frankenstein, written in 1816 right here in my city, the epitome of everything the Enlightenment was not really, an irrational being in the midst of a drive towards rationalism, out of the purple salons, into nature, back to mythology...
I have a theory of where this goes... And it has to do with that mysterious thing called "reality", which is what happens when all our artificial mechanisms are switched off. The way back to that point is very simple. War.
Yes, well, I do sometimes think that all this angst about AI is going to mean very little after a nuclear exchange or a catastrophic terrorist event or an EMP, and then we all go back to farming and things look a lot more like McCarthy's The Road than the Matrix....
I used to spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about Hamlet—as an actor/director, and not a literary critic.
These days I’m constantly immersed in Torah. For the past few years, learning it, and more recently, teaching it.
Leaving aside the significant difference (ie: “lehavdil”) between Hamlet and Living Torah, I do tend to encounter students, especially those raised religious (unlike myself) who feel a tremendous stagnancy towards Torah study in general, and weekly Parsha study in particular.
They may very well be asking: how long will we keep returning to the Midbar?
Granted, that question somewhat misunderstands/obscures what Torah can be as a text rooted in Divinity and the unknowable infinite. Of course there’s always what to be mechadesh, renewed and further explored, through the careful reflection of each new individual who dedicates themselves to it in. Heck, we have a whole holiday about that coming up on Monday.
That doesn’t necessarily help the educator light up a disillusioned undergrad, though. How do we teach in a way that invites that level of self-discovery through learning?
This is pretty spot on... the fact that a robot can crank out academic papers of a so-so standard is a massive indictment of the mess we've made of the so-called universities and the largely parasitic journals that leech money from them. The rot goes much deeper than people realise, and I doubt many will have cause to let the Large Language Models shed light on these issues (as you have here).
That 'original contribution to knowledge' standard, by the way, originated at Oxford University in 1917 as far as I know, and is a signpost to the problem we have inherited, namely the gradual and complete corruption of epistemology, and the university system's unwitting collaboration in this disaster. But I guess that is a story for another time...
Alas, I don't know that much yet as I'm still investigating. But it seems he whole 'original contribution to knowledge' standard came from Oxford's decision to offer an MPhil. Somehow, it filtered out into the PhD.
So I need to learn what standard the PhD possessed prior to the 20th century, which I'm still researching, and dig into how it spread outwards. I already know a fair amount about the epistemological upheaval in the early twentieth century, but as ever, I still have a lot of questions... 😁
I like the personal essay approach--- maybe add an interview, a remix (my personal favorite), a text pairing. I can think of lots of approaches that require critical thinking plus creativity that may engage a few more students. (My dissertation was a case study of two high school teachers using remix as a composition tool in high school English.)
I was just thinking about how my son's English teacher had them write an op-ed recommending reform in Romeo and Juliet"'s Verona. That seemed like a pretty good way to engage them.
I'm going to mention something else... a little shorter than my last response:
1) Currently at a trade fair for the many little industries that support medtech, watchmaking, etc... AI is great for programming robots.
2) AI as an asitance in writing: meh: If I give a monkey a chisel, a hammer, and a piece of marble... what will be the result. If I give it to an artist or a stonecutter... I'll get a great result. AI is the hammer and chisel.
3) AI in the hands of the STASI or Palantir ... I'm heading to Skellig Michael.
I think your list of things teachers want to accomplish when we assign essays is exactly right. Now we just need to figure out how to accomplish the same goals in a world with AI.
I was intrigued by this. As an experiment of my own, I picked a text very far from Hamlet and ran through a similar process. I chose The Twin Dilemma, a Doctor Who story from 1984 generally seen as the very worst the twentieth century version of Doctor Who has to offer: a stupid, scientifically-ignorant plot (about a giant slug kidnapping teenage maths genius to move planets around and spread his (their, I suppose) eggs across the galaxy), bad dialogue (“An alien kidnap, what I’ve always feared!”), bad acting, terrible production values, etc, etc.
I asked ChatGPT for a 1,000 word Marxist analysis, then, for contrast, a similar-length analysis based on the conservatism of the late Roger Scruton.
Both essays were coherent and there were no obvious errors. Both could have been published in a Doctor Who fanzine in the late 80s or 90s or on a fan website in the 00s. I felt that the second one made some interesting points. Maybe I would have felt that about the Marxist one too if I was a Marxist.
However, both essays were totally divorced from the reality of rapidly-produced, cheap television production for a mass audience. While some (many) Doctor Who stories do try to have some kind of political or metaphorical dimension, The Twin Dilemma is simply cheap, bad science fantasy produced to stop the BBC having to show the test card for four twenty-five minute slots.
I find these analyses questionable, therefore, as I’m not a great believer in the death of author. I want to know what the author was trying to say. If we’re going down the authorial intention route, we should probably note that the author, Anthony Steven, became ill during the writing and much of the final script was written by the script editor, Eric Saward, which makes the incoherence of the script somewhat more understandable. (Mis)reading the critic's own political ideology into a script that is clearly not political, though routinely done nowadays, seems to reach its nadir here, where you can literally apply any mode of analysis to any text and generate an internally-coherent outcome.
Trying to extrapolate, if, as you say, literary criticism for the last several decades has been a matter of plugging a chosen text into a chosen conceptual framework, then it is probably finished. (In theory. In practice, I suspect there’s a bureaucratic empire using government funding to produce Mickey Mouse degrees that could continue until the money runs out, which will depend on political and economic factors more than anything else. But you would know much better than I do.)
The alternative, as you suggest, is a return to a much more personal way of responding to a text, one that AI can’t fake or which it would not be meaningful for AI to fake.
It’s possible many of the humanities are going to be hit this way. Historians will still have to find and transcribe primary sources, but once they’re online, AI can probably do a lot of analysis. I suspect that there will still be room for exceptional literary/historical/philosophical analysis produced by an exceptionally able thinker (i.e. either groundbreakingly innovative interpretations or exquisitely beautiful prose), but that would mean the slimming down of humanities degrees to a size similar to that before the expansion of higher education in the 1990s. This will have huge knock-on effects.
What if--as I would argue--the issue of AI adds a new and possibly even urgent reason to continue to assign such papers: AI needs them, and will continue to need them, in order to avoid model collapse? Got room for a guest post answering your last two posts that travels down this rabbit (or perhaps basalisk?) hole?
Sure, of course
Be my guest, literally ;-).
It’s in your email!
That was quick! I’ll have a look, but it’ll be a few days before I put it up.
I may do some copy editing then if you okay it.
Good paper, all well rounded, but I think you said it yourself... needs updating. And it does need some human touch, so you might prompt AI to make it sound more human. (Check Roger Penrose's critique of AI, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, etc...)
I would have given it an A as well, but I would have sat the "writer" down in my office (I was a TA at U-Mass where I did my MA), and questioned him or her (strange, it sounds like a "him" to me, but let's leave Butler out of this) about certain specifics and what he/she actually thought about Hamlet... I like unfinished stuff, gut feelings.
But why read Hamlet? Why read anything, for that matter, when you can binge on computer-written series all day, even while running on a machine in some horrid fitness emporium filled with vaporized perspiration and rhythmed with soft techno... For large swatches of the population, Hamlet is not even a thought. Nor is Beethoven, by the way. Nor is anything of western culture, other than the plague of Facebook and X, and other social media that rob us of our time and ease (Substack, too, btw, but where can old journos go these days?)... Nor do they enjoy our incredible convenience of not even having to get off our effing recliners to dim the lights...
Death by convenience... And then, many liberals get all outraged and shocked at Russian Orthodox evangelists attracting men to become "absurdly manly" by lifting weights to heavy metal music... Somehow, speaking of literary interpretation, it reminds me of Frankenstein, written in 1816 right here in my city, the epitome of everything the Enlightenment was not really, an irrational being in the midst of a drive towards rationalism, out of the purple salons, into nature, back to mythology...
I have a theory of where this goes... And it has to do with that mysterious thing called "reality", which is what happens when all our artificial mechanisms are switched off. The way back to that point is very simple. War.
Yes, well, I do sometimes think that all this angst about AI is going to mean very little after a nuclear exchange or a catastrophic terrorist event or an EMP, and then we all go back to farming and things look a lot more like McCarthy's The Road than the Matrix....
:-) ... We never know, do we..... We certainly haven't yet reached the end of history...
Troubling.
I used to spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about Hamlet—as an actor/director, and not a literary critic.
These days I’m constantly immersed in Torah. For the past few years, learning it, and more recently, teaching it.
Leaving aside the significant difference (ie: “lehavdil”) between Hamlet and Living Torah, I do tend to encounter students, especially those raised religious (unlike myself) who feel a tremendous stagnancy towards Torah study in general, and weekly Parsha study in particular.
They may very well be asking: how long will we keep returning to the Midbar?
Granted, that question somewhat misunderstands/obscures what Torah can be as a text rooted in Divinity and the unknowable infinite. Of course there’s always what to be mechadesh, renewed and further explored, through the careful reflection of each new individual who dedicates themselves to it in. Heck, we have a whole holiday about that coming up on Monday.
That doesn’t necessarily help the educator light up a disillusioned undergrad, though. How do we teach in a way that invites that level of self-discovery through learning?
Dear Thomas,
This is pretty spot on... the fact that a robot can crank out academic papers of a so-so standard is a massive indictment of the mess we've made of the so-called universities and the largely parasitic journals that leech money from them. The rot goes much deeper than people realise, and I doubt many will have cause to let the Large Language Models shed light on these issues (as you have here).
That 'original contribution to knowledge' standard, by the way, originated at Oxford University in 1917 as far as I know, and is a signpost to the problem we have inherited, namely the gradual and complete corruption of epistemology, and the university system's unwitting collaboration in this disaster. But I guess that is a story for another time...
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
Can you tell me more about that standard in Oxford in 1917? I’m very curious.
Alas, I don't know that much yet as I'm still investigating. But it seems he whole 'original contribution to knowledge' standard came from Oxford's decision to offer an MPhil. Somehow, it filtered out into the PhD.
So I need to learn what standard the PhD possessed prior to the 20th century, which I'm still researching, and dig into how it spread outwards. I already know a fair amount about the epistemological upheaval in the early twentieth century, but as ever, I still have a lot of questions... 😁
Thanks for enquiring!
Chris.
I'm using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps on Rashi... But I find the interpretations half baked😹
Dang.....
I like the personal essay approach--- maybe add an interview, a remix (my personal favorite), a text pairing. I can think of lots of approaches that require critical thinking plus creativity that may engage a few more students. (My dissertation was a case study of two high school teachers using remix as a composition tool in high school English.)
I was just thinking about how my son's English teacher had them write an op-ed recommending reform in Romeo and Juliet"'s Verona. That seemed like a pretty good way to engage them.