The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market.
Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else.
We read aloud in our household. A lot.
We always have.
When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my horror that we were so absorbed that it was her bed time and we (OK, responsible adult here, I) had forgotten we also needed to cook and eat dinner.
We scrambled through the Snow Queen incident but didn’t ever stop reading aloud. We read all the Harry Potters (yeah, yeah I know, don’t @ me – but they were great to read aloud) multiple times. If we drove somewhere, or were on holidays, one member of the family – and taking turns is important – would read. Vacation campfires were kept aflame by reading aloud. Stories, Poetry. Non-fiction.
My daughter’s been out of home for several years but my beloved and I do the same, still. We read Carlyle’s French Revolution aloud, until it got boring and we switched to Hilary Mantel’s version. We’ve read EP Thompson’s ‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd’ and Kindleberger’s Financial History of Western Europe aloud. And many, many more.
Recently, somehow not aware that a major film was in the offing, we’ve been reading Homer’s Odyssey – the Emily Wilson translation, obviously. It is fucking great. When you hit the Cyclops, the iambic pentameter really takes off and it has energy. Wondrous.
I saw the film the day it was released, approximately 24 hours after learning it existed – I loved it, don’t @ me – and have coerced my beloved (who hates going to the movies) into coming with me again. Yes, six hours of my one precious life at the movies watching the same film. Totally worthwhile.
As we were reading Book 10 the Odyssey about Circe tonight I was struck by what precious time reading is. And – like you, I expect – it is so hard to ever have enough of it. I know most people think Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey had multiple authors, but their coherence to me suggests a singularity of vision, at least. This will matter in a minute.
Reading time is scarcer than I wish. I honestly can’t keep up with everything written by friends and in my field(s), let alone pleasurable reading. I subscribe variously (as much as I can afford…so the profile changes a bit) to New Left Review, Jacobin, Solidarity, Overland, Griffith Review, LRB and a bunch of academic journals especially Labor, Economic History Review and Labour History. Getting through these plus everything people send me and the articles in the journal I co-edit, Australian Historical Studies. Well, frankly, it is a fuck load of reading.
And that doesn’t even include the reading I need to do to prepare for writing the book I want to write, or to do the paid work I do. And it definitely doesn’t include the dozens of other substacks, nor the FT, nor the ABC’s markets blog that I follow religiously.
I’m sure you feel this too.
So. I’ve been beyond puzzled to see people getting chatty (or other AI) to write their stuff.
I totally get the pressure to produce. Academics have been long turned into content churners. ‘Publish or perish’ in some regions and institutions meant how much could you produce in how little a time. As a postgraduate student I attended a workshop where a senior professor describes turning the same conference paper into five publications FIVE!? Who do they think was going to read all this samey shit?
Later, ‘publish or perish’ meant ‘quality’, which some senior professors could claim also meant producing less (the rest of us were not typically afforded such luxuries). Quality ofc was measured by some juvenile fucking rankings of outlets in which you published, not – as was implied by the word quality – how good was the work.
And then quality went out of favour, and ‘impact’ came in. Show us your ‘impact’ they said. My first book in 2014 was quoted in the Federal parliament. Recently both my books were cited in a submission to the NSW parliament. Which is fucking IMPACT, right? Well, actually it just means I said exactly what the Shadow Minister Kim Carr needed. It didn’t actually change anything. Still. ‘Impact’ was really only meant to be performative, because uni bosses saw them as metrics, not real things.
How stupid – disconnected from any reality – are the metrics under the logic of managerialism? But we all internalised them. And when academics do it, how can we be surprised when students do, too?
Of course, this is all a symptom of what Pete Chalmers in this excellent essay in the magazine * Arena* has called the ‘thru-put model’ of higher education:
By around 2012, Australian universities had embraced the ‘thru-put’ model: big-box, drive-thru, on-demand, in the cloud, flexible. As a system, it is designed to smoothly pump through as many students as possible, not to provide a better education to a greater number, but because it is both profitable and scalable….
Inside the field generated by the thru-put model, bot lecturers and bots who do your homework for you pop up as an appealing step-change in efficiency, led and controlled by the universities supplying it.…
The thru-put model is not about knowledge, learning or pedagogy, but rather is a wealth transfer racket, and it works because it’s so scalable while labour costs are trivially low. Learning may or may not happen, and sometimes good learning still does. But it’s a racket because even if it doesn’t work, students are indebted, while the core beneficiaries are always the most handsomely paid, regardless of performance.
Writing is learning. It is thinking. It is problem solving. It is collaboration. Writing is the path by which we find stuff out, critically, analytically.
We are all looking on in horror as students trade learning for robot outputs. Understandable in an environment where AI seems the only reasonable path to a decent grade and decent grades may help secure a future in a seriously volatile world. This (they reason) will get them what the metrics require. But in fact we’ve largely been complying with the logic that made this happen well before the tech automated it and cut out the middle man (human brains) that seemed superfluous if the essay as output, not the learning that came with it, was the point.
The same has applied to professionals. Several of the writers I follow have semi-regularly said that this was a newsletter written by AI. It was the author’s prompts, sure. But the robot’s words.
I get it. But geez, I have fucking enough to read, let alone reading work by a robot I didn’t choose to follow, no matter who is prompting it.
Friends and colleagues slump visibly as they describe grading hundreds of assessments written by robots.
My last semester teaching was the first we had to grapple with this. At the time I thought there should be a stream of university life where if you want the robot to write your essay then a robot will grade it (I know this is happening too). Hard to see the point of this, surely. On the other hand, if you actually want to learn how to do and be a historian, let’s spend real time together – and not waste my effort grading robots.
If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it. However. This raises some troubling questions.
Authorship is a bit shit, but it is better than not having it. #
Way, way back when I was writing a PhD thesis about knowledge and power and universities I spent a whole lot of time trying to think about authorship and stuff like that.
Authorship is a bit shit, what with how it implicitly claims that one fucking person came up with stuff as if they went into a cone of silence all by themselves and magically produced something that came out of their Very Special and Unique Mind. Y’know, like ‘You’re a wizard, Harry’.
This kind of thing valorised authorship claimed power and authority in ways that produced hierarchies by valuing some knowledge and marginalising others.*
But the threat right now seeks to turn a modest insight that authorship is not all it has been cracked up to be into a gigantic farce. Like how Elon wants to do a special Odyssey for Racist People with AI. But. Who wants to read Gro(n)k’s Odyssey? Or Chatty’s Iliad?
For all that the author is a bit shit, we still want them.** Just for authors to be a bit more modest.
The outputs are not the point. The people are. #
One of the things that mass education kept fucking up was that the purpose of an education – well, an Arts education at least, but in the spirit of the great Australian scientist Ian Clunies Ross, I think everything else too – was to produce a uniquely skilled person, not a set of plug and play competencies.
Sure, if you just need some generic and weirdly upbeat dot points that summarise what you can find on the internet. Well then. Chatty is definitely great at that.
But if you want to be a person, a whole human whose disposition, skills, talents, loves, ethics positions us to both write and be. WELL THEN.
The same applies to reading. I’ve been on vacation a bit lately and using that precious time to do some reading. In that time I didn’t (for instance) read Sven Beckert’s new doorstop * Capitalism* because I needed to know some information. I read it because I wanted to know what
histake is,
hisargument, hisnarrative.
Though we might acknowledge some unfairness about the kind of power authorship produces and seek systems of education that could allow more democratic and anti-colonial impulses – including learning and reflecting and integrating (say) First Nations knowledges that were traditionally excluded by the authorities hierarchies of authorship engendered – we should also acknowledge that generic outputs without an author are a dystopian prospect. We want to know the author’s views, writing style and method of argumentation. Not what chatty said in response to their prompts.***
So, I can’t unsee the value of the authorship of the people I read. Nor forget the individual student becoming that I watched as a teacher. I wasn’t watching an accumulation of a generic set of specifiable skills and knowledges.**** But of the historian, thinker, teacher – human – that only they can ever be. What a privilege it was to be their teacher, not so there would be a uniform drone army of history graduates in the world, but for the remarkable individuals they would be, at work and elsewhere
I see lots of uses for the robots – I quite like some help checking on the consistency of my language, for instance; or checking my maths, which is even worse than words for the ways meanings can get mixed up in the process of editing and re-editing – though I refuse to join the painful pontification of the self-declared AI experts that are somehow in every room these days.
I love you, the author. And if you can’t be bothered writing it. Well. I’m busy enough.
And so are we all as readers – readers grading student essays, as well as those of us just wanting to read for learning, pleasure and work.
In this excellent blog post Chris Newfield looks at the sorts of transformations needed to teaching as AI poses new threats not just to the integrity of work and student learning, but to the whole ‘market’ for education.
If AI does anything really good for us at all it might be that in undermining the current business/learning model universities will have to undo the thru-put system, have smaller classes, where real-life teachers engage more closely with students.***** Those of us who write need to also model slower, more engaged and high quality discovery and writing ourselves. For if we think about our writing as something we must produce at speed, we are also the thru-put model.
- I know we want to protect expertise in this post-fact, anti-vax, climate-denying world crashing in on us. But we can’t just forget these insights in the process; forgetting inconvenient things we know is nota good way to recognise the value of intellectual life.
** I’m of the generation that as an 18-21 year old spent many an angsty party sipping red wine (for foreign readers, 18 is drinking age here) in the corner of a run down terrace house in Chippendale debating the ‘death of author’. Shortly we hoped that the internet might make for a more democratic read-write interaction between writing and reading that would undermine hierarchies and…HAHAHAHA. Ooops.
*** Which all reminds me of an argument that Foucault made, that authorship emerged not only to make money for authors who were being ripped off by booksellers (also true), but so there was a name to discipline as writers began to claim authority from the church. Imagine it in Trumpland: if an un-authored encyclopaedia said climate change was real, who would you punish? Authors are needed for discipline and control of ideas, not just as their originators but to control who can have them.
We can surely feel this sense of discipline in the present moment. Censorship of course materials, books and what it is possible to write is the fruit of authoritarianism – often enough perversely deployed under the banner of ‘free speech’, which for Muskism means confining the AI’s diet to racist, sexist stuff so it doesn’t get infected by the ‘virus’ of ideas Musk doesn’t like.
So, for all that Foucault wanted the right as reader to (for instance) mis-interpret Marx in order to explore his question, we also needed him as an author to challenge the authority of the structures of knowledge that controlled ideas about (say) sexuality. And we still do.
**** I’m also not denying that lists of skills we need for a job can be valuable – in history ofc this includes gathering evidence, synthesising, analysing, developing a narrative that speaks against or into other narratives you have learned about. Right now two carpenters are working to re-build the bones underpinning what will be my new roof. The specific skills they developed at technical college are very important – it matters to know what they can do. But I’ve been watching them problem-solve our old, tricky house and their disposition as carpenters, including their adaptability, creativity and critical stance towards what they know is also crucial to making sure the thing stays up and doesn’t leak.
***** There is just no way the current lot of managers will be prepared to do that. They need to get out of the way.