"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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
Here’s a related argument: https://tidal.com/magazine/article/critic-vs-ai/1-89051
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!
Great perspective - I learned a lot. Love your artwork!