I recently had an informative and valuable conversation with someone who works in career services. The conversation was wide-ranging but among the more mutually illuminating parts of our conversation involved the differences between what we’re being told and what we see. My interlocutor conveyed how relentless is the message coming from seemingly innumerable channels that “employers want…
You do not need an AI policy. Forget the crisis in plagiarism and cheating; that’s yesterday’s news. It is becoming increasingly common for my colleagues, both within my own university and elsewhere, to wonder aloud what it is they are supposed to do when confronted with an email ghostwritten-by-prompt. A seemingly natural inclination is to come up with a set of guidelines. That’s certainly…
A refrain among the profiteers of automation is that the technology they’re selling will decrease everyone’s workload. But it has been shown time and again that automation intensifies labor: whether it means that employers require laborers to fill the other six hours of the day with more work now that they can supposedly do their old jobs in two or that the expectations for what one should be able…
In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares published a short story called “Del Rigor en la Ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”) The story, which you can read in the original magazine context in which it was published on page 53 here , goes as follows In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the…
When I ask the question, "why can't computer vision see the past?" the narrow answer is because computer vision is linear algebra, and as an art historian I reject the premise that math is sight. But the big answer is that the data extraction and brokerage industry is leveraging computer vision and a host of algorithmic models to erase the incalculable parts of history to engineer a profoundly…
This morning I woke up to an Amazon box on my doorstep. This was weird. We haven't ordered anything lately from Amazon; we try to avoid it as much as we can (not impossible, but challenging when you live 90 miles from the nearest city). When I opened the box I found a copy of Luke Healy's Americana in it, a book my husband ordered from a used book seller on eBay. After a minute of confusion, the…
No. But the Ohio State University says that its students are required to pursue this goal if they want to receive their degree. Time was when engineers, linguists, and psychologists wanted to create programs modeled on human cognition and speech. In fact, three quarters of a century later, that time is still now, as thousands, if not millions, of poorly paid contract laborers across the globe are…
The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself. It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on Apple's "Crush" commercial ), but especially now among the hustlers of "AI." The argument goes: just as Gutenberg's invention freed the minds of fettered and unlettered medieval Europeans, launching them…
The recent piece by Vauhini Vara, “ How Chatbots and AI Are Already Transforming Kid’s Classrooms ” is important reading for the week, and there’s much in it to infuriate. It’s good. But there’s one paragraph, arguably featuring the least enraging material, that I paused over because it’s a testament to how successful the tech industry has been in ensuring that the favorable language they use to…
A year ago, I received a fascinating email from a stranger. The stranger was a man who had recently traveled with his wife to visit family in Germany and had decided to visit Bingen with the expectation of seeing the original paintings made by Hildegard herself in the twelfth century. However, the man had found Hildegard to be "quite elusive!" The paintings were nowhere to be found. There were…
I enjoyed reading this week Neil Kraus’s The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (2023). The book’s core claim is that corporations and elites who subscribe to neoliberal tenets have promoted a narrative that has succeeded in becoming the conventional framework for addressing education reform. This framework he calls the “fantasy economy,” one in which…
Even if you spend just a small amount of time listening to people who believe that any kind of digital technology (whether that’s “artificial intelligence” or not) is an unquestioned good, you’ll hear a set of terms used to frame the conversation. Most of these terms have become a common part of public discourse, and they comprise a standard vocabulary of accepted values. Often, when they are…
Every so often someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman will dribble out some unadorned text, announcing with stentorian certitude the advent of a new world that their latest product will avail. Zuck seems to love dressing up his thought bubbles in Times New Roman for the purposes of LARPing intellect, which I find funny and tragic. I take an interest in this genre of bad copy not only because…
When I lived in the UK I watched a lot of Mitchell and Webb. A British comedy duo who should be more famous among Americans than they are, they made sketches just the side of absurd where—unlike Monty Python—things never devolved into the annoyingly silly (or racist). They did a recurring sketch which, signature Mitchell and Webb, sent up both the subject of the sketch as well as the other comedy…
A short book I’m writing with the somewhat forbidding title, Book History Is Not the History of the Book: Four Essays from Fifteenth-Century England , is founded on the simple premise that the traditional, linear formulas that have structured the field of book history (from orality to literacy, from roll to codex, from manuscript to print, and from print to digital) represent a technologically…
In the December 2023 issue of Modern Language Quarterly , I published an article that is the first to examine the circumstances surrounding and production of a renowned manuscript facsimile of the Rupertsberg Scivias , the most celebrated copy of the visionary text by Hildegard von Bingen. That manuscript facsimile was copied by three nuns of Eibingen Abbey and illuminated by the artist Josepha…