December already? Stayed up all night revamping my blog site instead of getting more grading done for some reason. Old habits, same old motions. I kinda fuck with this design, the old one was a bit cringe looking back. Way too colourful and computery, looked like the concoction of a 13-year-old who thinks Panic at the Disco is edgy (perhaps not too different from the worst parts of myself). I also only ever published like 1 blog post under that aesthetic, I think it had a sort of subliminal push that stopped me from writing. I’ll blame it on that.
But now I am back. We are so back. Well, I’ll be back to write another “New Year New Me” blog at the turn of the year. My mind has been anywhere but writing for fun.
I wish grading could be fun; I’ve been having my heart and ass kicked all semester. It’s not as if the level of AI I have to deal with as a TA has increased compared to the other times I’ve taught, but I’ve never felt more like Charlie Brown than I have now. This sounds completely narcissistic, but it hurts to feel vindicated in your beliefs about the world. Can the sub-literate speak? The answer to Spivak’s question is a resounding no. They can’t write either. I just can’t believe they don’t realize that AI writing is extremely detectable just through its style. I don’t need a crappy AI detector to do that job, I’m a truffle pig when it comes to detecting AI writing. It always sounds like some Reddit mod trying to do a Don Draper impression: Funkopops aren’t just toys, they’re your only friends.
One of the problems is that you’re told that you’re only really able to call students out if there’s hard evidence (hallucinated citations, Chatgpt literally written in the source URL of citations, etc.). And even once you get to that one-on-one with a student, you have to look into the eyes of a fellow human being and inflict some kind of administrative harm. It is a brutal process, I’ve had to talk to 2/5ths of my students (around 20 students), and I am hollowed by it. My point here isn’t what’s already stated a lot in the “AI university” discourse: that even if the student wanted to double down and appeal, they would very likely have a decent chance of winning due to how university admin ghouls want to avoid the controversy and keep the diploma mill money churning. No, my point is that the actual realistic response to the level of sadness and disenfranchisement this makes me feel is to leave academia. I truly love the teaching side of this job, and while I have some fantastic students that I can try to improve over the course of a semester, the quality of the “average” student slips every term. I treat TAing sort of like Football Manager, trying to improve my group of wunderkinds throughout the season through specialization/training. And maybe, perhaps, much like Football Manager, only a very small percentage of your youth intake can make it at the professional level. The Professional-Managerial Class level.
I can’t tell if it’s a symptom of a coldness I have, or just a characteristic of a very amicable personality, but each student I’ve talked to has admitted to AI. Some have taken longer than others, but everyone admits it. But shame is missing for most who admit it. There’s no shame at all, there’s always a few attempts at articulating logical reasons for it. Now, I do think that the shame is hiding somewhere beneath these articulations, but I fear they’re hidden so deeply that the student before me doesn’t even consciously recognize that they’re hiding it. It’s not that I want them to feel ashamed (honestly, maybe I am), they don’t have to remorsefully demonstrate how “sorry” they are. What I want is some reasonable response to what got them into the context of this situation. But no, it is the banality and routine nature of using AI that I detect the most. The student has become the servomechanism of their AI tool. I also think it proves true something that some professors must have known all along, that most students begrudgingly learn to write. They never get good at it; they never read anything; and they avoid writing as soon as they leave the university’s conditions. I am extremely suspect of professors who encourage/plan assignments that allow for AI use. These ghouls are exploiting the learning potential you could have had and exchanging that for keeping you a zombie for 3-4 months. This wasn’t the case for the course I’m teaching right now, but little good did that do for reducing the amount of AI. Maybe it’s all fruitless, but I’ll fight until they stop giving me TA positions (one more term)
Been whining about this too much, and I’m growing more concerned that everyone I’ve told my AI interrogation methods to thinks I’m a psychopath. And you know what? Maybe this is a perfect “adapt or die” moment for academia, the ego of which higher education operates needs to be knocked down many, many pegs. Now, dying is very likely what academia will do. No answer to AI will come in the form that actually forces students to learn, it’ll be capitulation in the form of mass AI accessibility in the university.
So now I go back to grading final papers about ethnography. Something very funny about using AI to write about a methodology that is very personalized to your experience through a space. Fuck my Chungus life, is this all there is? Any moment now, I’m going full Ginsberg reacting to the IBM computer. Mad Men rewatch incoming–as if I am ever not rewatching Mad Men.
-> Slopunk <- 