Encouraging reporting by Dana Goldstein and Lauren Lancaster in the NEW YORK TIMES this weekend, and Philip Matthews' profile of Karen Hao, ‘The age of slop: the growing backlash against AI’ in THE POST, both have me cheerful. Goldstein and Lancaster describe moves by teachers in college and school classrooms in the States to do things together, as communities of learners, that help: reading, writing, thinking, engaging. Chat-GPT (or Claude, or CoPilot, or any of the other slop they’re pushing on universities, and that is in turn being pushed on students) doesn’t repel me because it’s an aid to cheating. It repels me because what it produces is boring. And ugly. And dull. And - most important of all! - a _barrier _to learning. Why facilitate the adoption of something that’ll make us all less free? Pens and paper and scribbled-out lines and drafts and false starts don’t represent a return to anything old-fashioned. They show a revival of commitment to the process of reading. That’s fun! I don’t want my computer to generate a bullet-point summary of a thesis I’m about to examine. I want to be left alone to read. And I don’t “deliver content”. I teach. And, in teaching, I learn.
“AI” is a big deal and important for all kinds of (alarming) economic, social, political and political-economic reasons, sure. Anne Alexander and Holly Lewis (and Karen Hao) are my guides for all of that. But, in the literature classroom, it’s something much less interesting: a scam and a distraction.
Christina Gratorp (who was a coder for fifteen years before she started a PhD in Environmental and Energy System Studies at Lund University), has written a brilliant chapter on ‘The Hidden Labour of Automation’ (published in the book (DE)AUTOMATING THE FUTURE: MARXIST PERSPECTIVES ON CAPITALISM AND TECHNOLOGY, 2025). She writes about everything from the development of the microwave (and how it didn’t reduce unpaid domestic labour) to the place of the messenger boy in the era of the telegram. The idea that, somehow, somewhen, the technology will sort out social problems is, she points out, an ideological myth, not a social policy programme: “the present is always in a debugging phase.” Nothing is really automated, just like there is no such thing as software. The work, the manual labour, is happening somewhere in the cycle, just out of sight.
“Even if some automated processes can save time,” she concludes, “focusing on this distracts from the proper goal of reconstituting technosocial relations. Treating everyone’s time as equally important - which in the proper sense of the word would be radical - instead harks back questions about how work should be organised and how it can be sustainably, equally, and fairly distributed.”
(These thoughts prompted, in part, by the Canvas shutdown.)