AI and the Question of Human Writing

First, Some News:

BOOK LAUNCH FOR DEATH AND OTHER SPECULATIVE FICTIONS

You’re invited to the launch for my new book, Death and Other Speculative Fictions, which Locus: The Magazine of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field just called, “an astonishing read, comforting and discomforting in equal measure. A philosophical, poetic meditation on the death of a parent, it’s a whirl of reflections on what fantastic stories can say about death, and vice versa.” I’d love to see you there!

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AI AND THE QUESTION OF HUMAN WRITING

Hello and a Quick Face Scan

I’m thinking of technology as my phone scans my face in order to open, a move I taught it by showing it how I look from various angles so I can be recognized at all times. “Who” is seeing me? Apple Support informs me it’s “the state-of-the-art TrueDepth camera system with advanced technologies to accurately map the geometry of your face.” Who knows what it did to/with my face, what sort of a life my face may be leading somewhere without me.

Like most people, I have various jobs—some paid (my teaching job and my work for the teaching and learning center at the college), some not so much (my parenting job, my poetry editing job, and my writing job). Part of the work I have done recently for the teaching and learning center is to curate a library of articles on artificial intelligence to help professors grapple with the rise of this disruptive technology in their classrooms.

The Question of the “Human”

The biggest question AI raises for me is what it means to write as a human: what elements we bring to the essay because we are mortal beings with specific, poignant experiences we call upon to summon these words. I read my students’ work like a detective of personhood, trying to find human remains. It’s gotten to the point where I thrill to find clunky mistakes that indicate there may be a real student on the other end of the essay. But I’ve recently been informed that AI will soon (maybe already?) be able to simulate student errors.

But we also need to be careful about how we construe the human. For instance, what happens when, as Roopika Risam notes, students identify the machine-generated, knockoff Shakespeare poem as real, human and the Jean Toomer piece as counterfeit, not human? Risam traces this issue to the fact that, “Just as ‘artificial’ intelligence is expected to mimic human cognition but instead replicates white, Eurocentric male cognition, natural language processing software is complicit in the production of normative forms of the human.”

How Dire Is It?

I’m scared about the fate of human writing, but I try to chill out about AI regularly, reminding myself that the calculator, computer, printing press, and even the novel brought their own scandals and supposed risk of destroying culture as we know it. But, at the same time, some things have massively shifted culture. I’m looking at you, computer, as I often am, while typing right now into your ever-seductive keys.

As I combed through text after text on AI and the teaching of writing, I found many different arguments, but a lot of it comes down to the question of whether AI will ruin or reinvigorate the college essay—help students transcend the dusty intellect of this form for something more expansive. As a lover of the essay as a means of attempting, experimenting, essaying, I really do wonder about that.

The Fate of the College Essay

We don’t have the deeper answers about AI and composing just yet, so we focus on the new daily pedagogical safeguards it requires. As professors, we are tasked with creating clever workarounds to try to get students to actually do the writing themselves.

In order to “AI-proof” our writing assignments, we are going back in time machines (having them hand-write in class); becoming self-referential (having them refer not to texts for machines to train on but to conversations had in this very class); falling in love with process (having them write various drafts or turn in Google version histories to prove they actually composed anything themselves); becoming ethically obsessed, academic-integrity-pushers (since we’ve been told that if we can explain the ethics just so, the students will simply stop having machines do their homework).

The Punctum?

You get the idea, and it’s not pretty, but what’s the alternative? We’re just really not sure yet, and it shows. So, we have become as absurd as the technology with which we are grappling. You have to admit that there’s something patently absurd about machines pretending to write human love poems, and what’s even more chilling is we often can’t tell the difference anymore.

I wonder if this search for the human in writing comes down to something like Roland Barthes’s “punctum” in photography, what he calls, “that accident which pricks, bruises me.” And so, in every essay a student hands me these days, I seek that crackle of the human felt so rawly it wounds, which tells me there’s still such a thing as writing by people.