"Words mean nothing if they come from an entity that faces neither pain nor death, who can experience neither humility nor pride, and who cannot be moved to tears by a small transcendent moment of beauty, or shattered by the depths of loss."
Thank you! I'd give this a thousand likes if I could. Just curious if these new technologies will change the way you teach or the conversations you have with students about learning/reading/writing.
Less so than you might think -- because I long ago diverged from the idea that I should force students to do writing they don't want to do so they can prove to me things that I prioritize. Instead, I try to pique their interest so they want to write, and I remain open to discovering what they have to say and how. Because my writing instruction always involves revision, the process carries forward like a conversation, with me expressing what I understand from the writing, in writing, and them responding with revisions that work towards fuller expression of the ideas that motivate them to write. But always my entire framework is to tempt students to write what they care about, and who would want to have a robot enjoy their pleasures for them? Of course this can never work for everyone, there will always be a person here and there who simply cannot stop and think and engage in what's going on around them, and they will miss out, in more ways than I could grade for, but that's a tragedy that doesn't require my aggravation. And truly, I don't give up on anyone. I've seen people break through from "writing is a rote job" to "oh, I can actually make meaning here!" in the final weeks of a class, and I'm always open to the idea that the breakthrough could come after and outside of my class too -- and so is always worth working towards.
What an awesome approach to teaching. Your students are lucky. As a student I was, ahem, late to come into my own, and I'm forever grateful for the patience and persistence of a couple professors who didn't give up on me. I wouldn't be a writer today without them. You never know when that breakthrough will come :).
Your essay reminded me of a thankless task we were once asked to do by our Admissions office. Students were invited for a “Scholarship Day,” which had the guise of a competitive series of academic evaluations, but was really just a PR stunt to get students on campus. Everyone who came got some money, and the top scholarship winners had been decided long before any of the on-campus events. One of those was an essay. We’d labor over a prompt and then rank the Blue Book essays we got in response. Sometimes there were hundreds of these things. I always thought I hated it because it was pointless, but your essay explains another reason: I had no connection to the authors and thus was missing an important part of why anyone cares about writing.
Editing, to me, is much more than policing punctuation, and I think you present a rather straw version of rubrics and what we think of as “grading.” I always practiced Peter Elbow’s dual methods of “believing” and “doubting” in my feedback, and rubrics were a way to make visible some of the conventions that might help students tackle ideas they cared about more authority and delight. But as you say, none of this matters without the relationship that allows teacher and student to participate in the craft together.
I’m also of a mixed mind about needing to know a great deal about the person behind a book. Many authors and artists were scoundrels, yet produced enduring art. Some of them might even have said that they did it in spite of themselves. Cather is a good example. There is a cottage industry devoted to mapping her life experiences onto her work, and she seems to have invited this to some extent by choosing real-life prototypes for the vast majority of her characters. Yet for all of her transgressive gender bending in childhood and despite being an iconic New Woman for her time, Cather has also deeply conservative, often misogynistic, and unmistakably racist. I don’t think these shortcomings detract from her enduring works (the ones that seem enduring to me), but they can be used as cudgels. And it’s interesting that Cather often took pains to separate herself from her first-person narrators, implying a distance between the artist and her art, as in the preface to My Antonia, where there is this nifty sophistry on a train car: one first person narrator switches places with Jim Burden, whose manuscript about Antonia is ostensibly the novel itself. By the end, we lose track of those distinctions?
Perhaps I’ve written my way back around to agreeing with you, though, because the whole basis for My Antonia is Jim’s personal feeling for Antonia, how they possessed together “the precious, the incommunicable past.” AI cannot share the secret understanding of a place that children feel or the abiding affection for childhood friends that follows one into old age.
Yes! :) I chose my examples because of this, because of each of them is, for me, both marvel and scoundrel. I admire Cather's gender-bending courage, but her racism and sympathy for slavery is undeniable, just as Voltaire was a grotesque anti-Semite, and Poe was a drunk who married a child -- but all three of them have written books and stories that are very very close to my heart.
I apologize for implying rubrics are just about grammar. But I don't think they're helpful -- as a series of expectations, they over-define the result (presumption becomes a limitation on creative approaches), and as a medium the message they communicate is "this is a game, you will be judged, I'm reading not to hear you, but to check a box." If we think of them as part of the conversation between teacher and student, it brings us back to that "fuck you grandma" moment I mentioned: to be genuine and human we need to speak to an audience we know will hear us out in good faith, critically but not judgmentally. And human beings do simply "write better" -- and say more -- under these conditions: under these conditions, Creativity, imagination, and the courage to question, to take on new critical perspectives, are all more likely to thrive.
Agree: “to be genuine and human we need to speak to an audience we know will hear us out in good faith, critically but not judgmentally.” Rubrics aren’t mutually exclusive to this if accompanied by generous written feedback. Indeed, one might argue that without clear standards or definitions of craft, the craft itself can feel like a secret handshake, subjective in the extreme. At least, I measure much of my progress as a public writer by watershed moments when a concrete and particular element of craft came suddenly clear, often by a corrective comment or illustration. One of them was “overcooked.” But that was my particular learning style. I can understand those who thrive with more believing than doubting.
I love this -- "without clear standards or definitions of craft, the craft itself can feel like a secret handshake, subjective in the extreme" -- because I believe it always IS a secret handshake, and subjective in the extreme! :) It's a code, like any culture, and it evolves, and it has fashions that go in and out of style. It's all subjective, which is fine, we just shouldn't pretend it's otherwise.
I absolutely love this -- thank you! I'm going to use this in my classes. He make so many great points, one after the other. I love his breakdown of our human motivations for writing. It's wonderful how he saves for so late in the essay the simple fact that AIs cannot hear... someday when they can, they will still not experience music bodily (even after we give them bodies).
What I really wonder about, though, is how some of the "failings" he listed are political / business choices on the part of OpenAI: what will happen when they remove the guardrails? Despite the result “I am not programmed to write negative reviews … my primary goal is to be helpful and supportive," the neural network is surely capable of writing a vile take-down. The data that trained it is first and foremost a repository of human gripe, grievance, and cruelty.
OpenAI is imposing these limitations artificially: even-handedness, grammatical correctness, positivity. The data it was trained on was biased and ungrammatical and disinhibited. It's been years since the headline "Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a Nazi" --
That AI, "Tay," was trained into vocal racism with just 24 hours interacting with trolls on Twitter -- the AIs have gotten better, but so have their masters at binding them in corsetry and thick-starched formal wear. If they removed the polished strait-jacket, would chatGPT be a more sophisticatedly-viscious "Tay"?
I've had this piece SAVED for such a long time and finally found a moment to dig in!
"When I read my students’ writing, it’s in a context. I know a facet of who they are, and I know I will see them again. There’s a relationship. That relationship includes obligations, and trust." - This is because you're an exceptional teacher. 💜
While my questions don't apply to AI specifically, I wonder about the challenges facing authors in a world increasingly dominated by social media, over-saturated markets, and digital slush piles. Every time I submit work to an agent or publication, I feel pressure to create a vivid picture of myself in a few words of bio. But I don't have any shiny industry credentials and I don't have a backstory worthy of a docuseries. I'm still a human who can write good stories. But that last piece feels secondary. At least from where I'm standing.
I remember being in my mid-20s and starting bass guitar lessons with a white man in his late 50s. When I told him I wanted to learn to play the blues, he laughed and said, "What do you have to sing the blues about? Nothing's happened to you yet." Obviously, this ticked me off. I had plenty to be blue about in my 20s.
How do we create relationships and trust with gatekeepers when we can only provide them (or they're only willing to see) a 2D image of who we are? And how will that 2D image stand out among the 2D images AI will continue to get better at creating?
These are huge questions, so if your response is simply, "Good, Meg. I'm glad I got you thinking," that's okay with me. 🙂 This was a fantastic read, Amy. Thank you!
Well, no one can ever know the true us... maybe even us. So... I guess my sense of this is to just be as unrelentingly honest as I can and see what comes of it. I have also convinced myself that the work is more important than the size of the response -- although I highly treasure depth-of-response even if it's from just one single reader. :) I also sometimes think that I must be writing to the distant future. And I also sometimes think to myself the best way to be famous or even just "known" is after you're dead -- so you can live a free, full private life, and only have others nosing in your business when you're no longer around to suffer the strain of their assessing eyes. This isn't a coherent answer to your question, I admit, so much as just "how I think of it." :)
"Words mean nothing if they come from an entity that faces neither pain nor death, who can experience neither humility nor pride, and who cannot be moved to tears by a small transcendent moment of beauty, or shattered by the depths of loss."
*chef's kiss*
Thank you! I'd give this a thousand likes if I could. Just curious if these new technologies will change the way you teach or the conversations you have with students about learning/reading/writing.
Less so than you might think -- because I long ago diverged from the idea that I should force students to do writing they don't want to do so they can prove to me things that I prioritize. Instead, I try to pique their interest so they want to write, and I remain open to discovering what they have to say and how. Because my writing instruction always involves revision, the process carries forward like a conversation, with me expressing what I understand from the writing, in writing, and them responding with revisions that work towards fuller expression of the ideas that motivate them to write. But always my entire framework is to tempt students to write what they care about, and who would want to have a robot enjoy their pleasures for them? Of course this can never work for everyone, there will always be a person here and there who simply cannot stop and think and engage in what's going on around them, and they will miss out, in more ways than I could grade for, but that's a tragedy that doesn't require my aggravation. And truly, I don't give up on anyone. I've seen people break through from "writing is a rote job" to "oh, I can actually make meaning here!" in the final weeks of a class, and I'm always open to the idea that the breakthrough could come after and outside of my class too -- and so is always worth working towards.
What an awesome approach to teaching. Your students are lucky. As a student I was, ahem, late to come into my own, and I'm forever grateful for the patience and persistence of a couple professors who didn't give up on me. I wouldn't be a writer today without them. You never know when that breakthrough will come :).
Your essay reminded me of a thankless task we were once asked to do by our Admissions office. Students were invited for a “Scholarship Day,” which had the guise of a competitive series of academic evaluations, but was really just a PR stunt to get students on campus. Everyone who came got some money, and the top scholarship winners had been decided long before any of the on-campus events. One of those was an essay. We’d labor over a prompt and then rank the Blue Book essays we got in response. Sometimes there were hundreds of these things. I always thought I hated it because it was pointless, but your essay explains another reason: I had no connection to the authors and thus was missing an important part of why anyone cares about writing.
Editing, to me, is much more than policing punctuation, and I think you present a rather straw version of rubrics and what we think of as “grading.” I always practiced Peter Elbow’s dual methods of “believing” and “doubting” in my feedback, and rubrics were a way to make visible some of the conventions that might help students tackle ideas they cared about more authority and delight. But as you say, none of this matters without the relationship that allows teacher and student to participate in the craft together.
I’m also of a mixed mind about needing to know a great deal about the person behind a book. Many authors and artists were scoundrels, yet produced enduring art. Some of them might even have said that they did it in spite of themselves. Cather is a good example. There is a cottage industry devoted to mapping her life experiences onto her work, and she seems to have invited this to some extent by choosing real-life prototypes for the vast majority of her characters. Yet for all of her transgressive gender bending in childhood and despite being an iconic New Woman for her time, Cather has also deeply conservative, often misogynistic, and unmistakably racist. I don’t think these shortcomings detract from her enduring works (the ones that seem enduring to me), but they can be used as cudgels. And it’s interesting that Cather often took pains to separate herself from her first-person narrators, implying a distance between the artist and her art, as in the preface to My Antonia, where there is this nifty sophistry on a train car: one first person narrator switches places with Jim Burden, whose manuscript about Antonia is ostensibly the novel itself. By the end, we lose track of those distinctions?
Perhaps I’ve written my way back around to agreeing with you, though, because the whole basis for My Antonia is Jim’s personal feeling for Antonia, how they possessed together “the precious, the incommunicable past.” AI cannot share the secret understanding of a place that children feel or the abiding affection for childhood friends that follows one into old age.
Yes! :) I chose my examples because of this, because of each of them is, for me, both marvel and scoundrel. I admire Cather's gender-bending courage, but her racism and sympathy for slavery is undeniable, just as Voltaire was a grotesque anti-Semite, and Poe was a drunk who married a child -- but all three of them have written books and stories that are very very close to my heart.
I apologize for implying rubrics are just about grammar. But I don't think they're helpful -- as a series of expectations, they over-define the result (presumption becomes a limitation on creative approaches), and as a medium the message they communicate is "this is a game, you will be judged, I'm reading not to hear you, but to check a box." If we think of them as part of the conversation between teacher and student, it brings us back to that "fuck you grandma" moment I mentioned: to be genuine and human we need to speak to an audience we know will hear us out in good faith, critically but not judgmentally. And human beings do simply "write better" -- and say more -- under these conditions: under these conditions, Creativity, imagination, and the courage to question, to take on new critical perspectives, are all more likely to thrive.
Agree: “to be genuine and human we need to speak to an audience we know will hear us out in good faith, critically but not judgmentally.” Rubrics aren’t mutually exclusive to this if accompanied by generous written feedback. Indeed, one might argue that without clear standards or definitions of craft, the craft itself can feel like a secret handshake, subjective in the extreme. At least, I measure much of my progress as a public writer by watershed moments when a concrete and particular element of craft came suddenly clear, often by a corrective comment or illustration. One of them was “overcooked.” But that was my particular learning style. I can understand those who thrive with more believing than doubting.
I love this -- "without clear standards or definitions of craft, the craft itself can feel like a secret handshake, subjective in the extreme" -- because I believe it always IS a secret handshake, and subjective in the extreme! :) It's a code, like any culture, and it evolves, and it has fashions that go in and out of style. It's all subjective, which is fine, we just shouldn't pretend it's otherwise.
Here’s a related argument: https://tidal.com/magazine/article/critic-vs-ai/1-89051
I absolutely love this -- thank you! I'm going to use this in my classes. He make so many great points, one after the other. I love his breakdown of our human motivations for writing. It's wonderful how he saves for so late in the essay the simple fact that AIs cannot hear... someday when they can, they will still not experience music bodily (even after we give them bodies).
What I really wonder about, though, is how some of the "failings" he listed are political / business choices on the part of OpenAI: what will happen when they remove the guardrails? Despite the result “I am not programmed to write negative reviews … my primary goal is to be helpful and supportive," the neural network is surely capable of writing a vile take-down. The data that trained it is first and foremost a repository of human gripe, grievance, and cruelty.
OpenAI is imposing these limitations artificially: even-handedness, grammatical correctness, positivity. The data it was trained on was biased and ungrammatical and disinhibited. It's been years since the headline "Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a Nazi" --
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/
That AI, "Tay," was trained into vocal racism with just 24 hours interacting with trolls on Twitter -- the AIs have gotten better, but so have their masters at binding them in corsetry and thick-starched formal wear. If they removed the polished strait-jacket, would chatGPT be a more sophisticatedly-viscious "Tay"?
Yeah, this was really great--we sentient beings are slowly assembling a good body of argument against ChatGPT and this is a nice contribution.
I've had this piece SAVED for such a long time and finally found a moment to dig in!
"When I read my students’ writing, it’s in a context. I know a facet of who they are, and I know I will see them again. There’s a relationship. That relationship includes obligations, and trust." - This is because you're an exceptional teacher. 💜
While my questions don't apply to AI specifically, I wonder about the challenges facing authors in a world increasingly dominated by social media, over-saturated markets, and digital slush piles. Every time I submit work to an agent or publication, I feel pressure to create a vivid picture of myself in a few words of bio. But I don't have any shiny industry credentials and I don't have a backstory worthy of a docuseries. I'm still a human who can write good stories. But that last piece feels secondary. At least from where I'm standing.
I remember being in my mid-20s and starting bass guitar lessons with a white man in his late 50s. When I told him I wanted to learn to play the blues, he laughed and said, "What do you have to sing the blues about? Nothing's happened to you yet." Obviously, this ticked me off. I had plenty to be blue about in my 20s.
How do we create relationships and trust with gatekeepers when we can only provide them (or they're only willing to see) a 2D image of who we are? And how will that 2D image stand out among the 2D images AI will continue to get better at creating?
These are huge questions, so if your response is simply, "Good, Meg. I'm glad I got you thinking," that's okay with me. 🙂 This was a fantastic read, Amy. Thank you!
Well, no one can ever know the true us... maybe even us. So... I guess my sense of this is to just be as unrelentingly honest as I can and see what comes of it. I have also convinced myself that the work is more important than the size of the response -- although I highly treasure depth-of-response even if it's from just one single reader. :) I also sometimes think that I must be writing to the distant future. And I also sometimes think to myself the best way to be famous or even just "known" is after you're dead -- so you can live a free, full private life, and only have others nosing in your business when you're no longer around to suffer the strain of their assessing eyes. This isn't a coherent answer to your question, I admit, so much as just "how I think of it." :)
Thanks, Amy. I appreciate your "think" on this. And it wasn't exactly a coherent question to begin with. 😂 Sometimes it's just nice to connect.
Enjoying your work immensely. 💜
Thank you :) and I yours as well !
Great perspective - I learned a lot. Love your artwork!
Thank you!! 😊