Interestingly, the intuition I felt and spoke from -- that embodied knowing -- is precisely the kind of thing AI, for all of its performative anthropomorphic gesturing at the simulacrum of personhood, can't do. Tech billionaires want us to believe that our embodied/human ways of knowing are useless!
I'm still not angry like many of my colleagues in the digital humanities who were deeply offended to realize they sat through a talk by a scholar who confessed, ONLY when asked, to "writing" his entire book with AI and proudly proclaiming that his goal was to not write a single word himself..
Anyway. Back to this man telling the audience he felt useless. It's actually worse than that. He said he felt we would all be rendered useless by AI's computational prowess. This reminded me immediately of the Ivy-league professor who recently penned an op-ed calling himself useless in the age of AI
I did actually find the talk thought provoking and brilliant, albeit in a diabolical way. It raised many reflections for me, but more than anything, an embodied feeling -- a sense that something wasn't right. And to receive that confirmation in real time was one of the wildest moments in my career..
I actually had a conversation with the keynote speaker afterwards, and told him what a shame it was that he allowed an LLM to make him believe in his own worthlessness. I tried to reason with him: "That's exactly what these companies want you to believe, and it's ridiculous." He was unmoved..
Last thing for now: He never directly said the keynote was written by Claude. What he admitted was worse--an entire current book authored by AI. We were all left to infer what it meant for him to "work closely with AI" in relation to the keynote itself. And none of this was mentioned until I asked.
A pair of Gray Foxes made a den under our shed, and now I can’t get anything done with all the cuteness happening out the window. A nice problem to have 😍
As I walked away, I had another funny feeling. What if this "book" and his entire "experiment" is funded by an AI company? This is exactly the kind of "scholarship" tech bro overlords want -- influential academics, preferably men, telling the rest of us that we are now useless in the age of AI.
Critical Nostalgia
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.. and impose ever-increasing mechanisms of social control. He didn't answer that question. In fact, he was not able to answer most questions colleagues asked in the Q&A. Someone asked him about Heidegger since he talked at length about phenomenology. He had no response. Did he need to ask Claude?
