Neville Morley's Blog, page 8

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th September 2024

Very strange dreams – some sort of awkward conference dinner in the open air, which I think was with people (1) whom I had never met before and (2) who appeared to be American political scientists, then convoluted a journey back – when I say ‘back’, I’m not sure where I was heading back to, but it was definitely ‘back’ – through dingy alleys and across major roads. Slowly realised that it was still dark, and waking up was a bad idea; dozed, started to compose blog post in head, started to think about chord sequence for something connected to the blues as this was my jazz composition homework.

Eventually realised that I desperately needed the bathroom, so got up ten minutes before the alarm clock. Washed up last night’s dishes, fed cats, made tea, back to bed. Hector rushes to cuddle next to me, Olga disappears under A’s legs; Buddy, having a passive-aggressive turn, sits in his room and yells, expecting me to go and collect him. We don’t, in hope he learns a valuable lesson – A concerned that he becomes too dependent and manipulative, and that there will be problems when I go away – and he goes back to sleep.

The usual morning routine of reading web comics, blog updates and the Grauniad while listening to Farming Today and then trying to ignore the Today programme in the background; in particular, an infuriating segment in the business news on OpenAI: “This is really going to change the world.” And a lot of mention of “force for good”, simply arguing over whether it’s good for investors or ordinary people. Nothing on environmental concerns, nothing on the fact that it’s basically crap. Smarmy git meets incurious booster. Mutter, mutter. At half six A gets up and decides that Buddy needs to have at least ten minutes of cosy time under my legs under the duvet, so brings him in; he’s looking very smug and comfortable when I get up to have a shower quarter of an hour later, and he then sits on his cushion next to me as I have breakfast while A. showers. She heads off to work at half seven; I bring in the empty recycling boxes, clear cat litter trays, make another cup of tea and prepare some dough for Scandinavian-style rose and cardamom buns, primarily intended for Saturday morning breakfast.

Most of the morning is spent translating my rough draft of a book review into German, as it’s for a German academic journal (to which I need to make amends for failing to get a review written on time a few years ago because of the Long COVID brain fog). It’s interesting as ever to experience the gap between languages that can never be bridged by direct translation. A few weeks ago an Austrian friend on whose draft funding application (in English) I’d been commenting asked me why German is so abstract compared with English, but I don’t think that’s actually the issue – rather, they just express relatively abstract ideas in quite different ways (English, one might say, trying to pretend that it’s not abstract at all). It does mean that half my sentences, which would be perfectly clear to an English speaker, have to be completely rewritten in order to make any sort of sense.

This is quite a fun exercise on the whole, apart from the slight sinking feeling at the end when I realise I’ve forgotten to keep an eye on the character count – perhaps because it’s usual in English publications to focus on the number of words, so I do have an ongoing sense of roughly how much I’ve written and the overall length expected by that metric, whereas ‘8000 characters including spaces’ means nothing. Anyway, getting my German checked by a friend will probably change the count, in one way or another, so no point in trying to get everything spot on beforehand.

Manage to get the review sent off to said friend just before A returns home at half twelve. Make fried rice for lunch with last night’s leftovers, then another hour of work – largely spent hunting down email addresses so I can try to nag people into agreeing to write reviews for the journal, and the fact that this is an ever more time-consuming task is a sign both of the decline of Google search and the way that university webpages are now focused on attracting potential students and showcasing institutional strategies. Also exemplifying the general decline of everything is the new cat toy A. insisted we must buy for the gang, a remote-controlled rechargeable flapping catnip bird – which the box hilariously illustrates as a bat, which largely ignores the remote control, and which at best bemuses (Buddy) and at worst terrifies (Olga) the people who are supposed to derive great pleasure from it.

Off to Bristol mid-afternoon, where we have booked an early supper followed by a concert at St George’s. As the last three times I’ve booked tickets for a concert in Bristol we haven’t actually made it – one time because of my broken foot, one time because of appalling weather, and A and I can’t agree on whether the third time was because of sheer exhaustion or a combination of exhaustion and bad weather – I’ve been expecting floods and/or locusts, but the drive is fairly straightforward, with plenty of time (but rather limited energy) for chatting about German, academia, A’s colleagues, the cats and their ever-developing personal dynamics – and the numerous changes on the route since I last travelled it.

Still more in Bristol, as we see when we walk down Jacob’s Well Road from the West End car park to the harbour, admiring the energetic oarsmanship of various boats (one rather magnificently called Massive Attack) and assorted monuments of industrial archaeology, and onwards to the Cumberland Basin, where we find a new candidate for our list of favourite restaurants and some superb fish and chips surrounded by Bristol rugby fans enjoying the pre-match special. Actually venture a post-prandial espresso to make sure I stay awake for the rest of the evening, and to balance out the oyster starter. Back along the harbourside and past the cathedral to reach Park Street, which is probably the area which remains clearest in my memory from my Bristol years and so serves as a marker of change. So many restaurants have been replaced, and the Bristol Guild has gone – but the Futon Shop is still there. On to St George’s for a drink before the concert – partly reflecting on the striking resemblance of many of the women around that bar area to our friend C from Germany – A and I disagree on whether this is a distinctive arty type – and partly nervously checking whether there’s anyone I know.

The concert, a Norwegian fiddle player (partly normal violin, partly a national instrument that isn’t called a Harbinger but I can never remember the proper name) and a Norwegian harmonium player, playing assorted traditional hymns and folk songs. Atmospheric and calming, but for my taste they could have done a lot more in the way of improvisation rather than simply playing the tunes. What did strike me (and A, as became clear as we talked on the way home) was how far the tunes echoed others; the hymns could have been Welsh or English, the folk tunes often sounded Scottish or Irish in their cadences. And if traditional Norwegian hymns can be turned into something that at least faintly resembles ECM-style Scandinavian jazz, then maybe one might do something similar with Thomas Tallis… Anyway, St George’s does have a lovely acoustic.

The great thing about a concert finishing at a quarter past nine is that the journey home is very straightforward – getting out before the rugby match finished, for a start. The cats are predictably cross when we get home (and still frightened of the new toy) but settle down; we read for a while, then go to bed. The beer I’ve had counteracts the espresso nicely, and I sleep reasonably well; A has an awful night…

Breathing

I’ve been trying to think of a suitable analogy for the rise of Generative AI. Currently, I’m torn between cigarettes, asbestos and neoliberalism. The point is to think of something that combines (1) claims that the thing is new, exciting and absolutely transformative, so must be adopted and promoted; (2) claims that the rise of the thing is inevitable and should not be resisted; (3) loud insistence that (1) and (2) apply to individual as much as to society and economy generally; (4) the amount of money tied up in the thing, which among other things drives (1), (2) and (3); and (5) the thing not only failing to live up to the hype but actually being basically disastrous and destructive, both individually and socially.

Cigarettes certainly tick (4) and (5), but were they ever pushed on the basis of their futurity, or historical inevitability, other than after the fact when millions were addicted? Neoliberalism seems to tick all the boxes except (3) – I don’t have a sense that individuals were pushed to adopt neoliberalism and suffered adverse personal consequences as a result (unless one counts the moral and psychological effects of taking an MBA). And one could say the same of asbestos, though in that case the direct personal impact is pretty obvious. Hmm. Microplastics? Social media and smartphones? Fossil fuels?

One reason I’m thinking about this is that I spent an hour or so yesterday talking with colleagues from History about my work on GenAI and assessment, especially in the light of the university’s decision that ‘AI-Supported’ assessment should be the norm. One of the many interesting questions raised was: What happens if a student reproduces some GenAI nonsense and then objects to being penalised for this, given that the university has encouraged the use of such tools? I have no doubt that the official position will be that it’s the student’s responsibility to check the work before they submit it, so tough. But it raises the possibility of other sorts of consequences from jumping on this bandwagon.

Hypothesis 1: in five years’ time the house of cards that is GenAI’s financing (see e.g. the regular posts of Ed Zitron) finally collapses, as still no one has found a productive or profitable use for it to justify the terrifying costs (and we can assume that the environmental impacts aren’t even being considered, let alone costed); GenAI tools simply stop functioning, and companies hastily try to rebuild their old systems; students start putting together class actions on the grounds that universities devoted so much time and effort to promoting skills in using GenAI that turn out to be completely useless.

Hypothesis 2: in ten years’ time it becomes clear that the promotion of GenAI and tools like Scholarcy as valuable time-savers has left significant numbers of students simply incapable of reading or analysing text critically, despite this being one of the key skills their degrees were supposedly developing. To say nothing of the consequences of relying on such tools to get an overview of different academic topics and problems. Universities have not merely failed to teach their students adequately, they have actively encouraged them to adopt approaches that work against learning; this does not look good.

Yes, there’s a reasonable case that others are even more to blame for the rotting of everyone’s brains – but at this point in the future the firms pushing GenAI have no money left, and their backers have plausible deniability, and the individuals concerned have disappeared off to their private islands or secret volcano lairs or Mars. And universities, like states, really ought to have known better, and should be protecting people from things like asbestos, inflammable insulation, sewage-filled rivers and fraudulent financial schemes rather than defending or promoting them and boosting the snake-oil merchants. Don’t drink the water, don’t breathe the air, don’t delegate your thinking to the stupid tech…q

GenAI and Humanities Teaching Resources

Partly for my own benefit (and not least because I switched the tag from ‘LLMs’ to ‘GenAI’ at some point, so they’re not all easy to find), I thought it made sense to pull together links to the various things I’ve written about GenAI and the teaching of history and classical studies over the last year and a half, including findings from the project I’ve been running.

Introductory Guidance for Colleagues

Since, clearly, the university isn’t going to be adopting this as official guidance any time soon, I don’t think there’s a problem in making it more widely available so long as I credit the fact that the work behind it was funded by the University of Exeter’s Education Incubator scheme: GenAI Guide for Academics

Pieces for other people

Blog post for Royal Historical Society, summarising results of study of how our students are using GenAI: https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2024/07/29/history-students-use-of-gen-ai/

Blog post for Times Higher Education’s Campus Matters on promoting critical engagement with GenAI (August 2024): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/three-ways-promote-critical-engagement-genai

Blog post for Council of University Classics Departments Bulletin on GenAI and classical studies testing (September 2024): https://cucd.blogs.sas.ac.uk/files/2024/09/Morley-AI.pdf

Pieces on this blog:

Automatic For The People (December 2022): my first encounter with ChatGPT, and already it seemed clear that it couldn’t write a decent history essay.

Idiot Wind (January 2023): on idiotic historical chatbots.

Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea (April 2023): my first encounter with essays that were almost certainly GenAI products.

New Kid In Town (May 2023): the biggest problem may not be GenAI but the way universities (over-)react to it.

Automatic Lover (June 2023): Cyrano de Bergerac and ChatGPT

Deeper Understanding (July 2023): part of the problem is the way that we think about and respond to the machines…

Pocket Calculator (August 2023): is GenAI no more dramatic than the impact of pocket calculators on maths exams?

And You Will Know Us By The Endless Appendices (August 2023): an initial attempt at advising students on the use of GenAI

Consequences (August 2023): how Lawrence Durrell illuminates ChatGPT (possibly).

Burn! (May 2024): student use of GenAI essay plans, and how to warn them off.

Trust In Me (June 2024): ChatGPT as bullshit, and the power of its rhetoric

Read ‘Em And Weep (July 2024): what should we learn from the fact that students are turning to GenAI for feedback? Let alone getting it to do the reading?

We Can Read It For You Wholesale (August 2024): on the use of GenAI to summarise scholarship

Substitute (August 2024): on the use of Scholarcy to summarise scholarship.

Song For Whoever (August 2024): is GenAI capable of genuine creativity – and, if not, can it help us think about classical reception?

Speak Like A Child (August 2024): the idea of the AI teacher who is both perfectly responsive to individual student needs and completely consistent

Question..? (September 2024): the idea of ‘computational thinking’ – should we focus on teaching our students to ask the right questions, including setting their own?

True (September 2024): the key aim of humanities education is to learn to discern truth – precisely what bullshitting GenAI is incapable of doing.

Lean On Me (September 2024): on my university’s new guidance, and the idea of ‘AI-supported’ assessment.

Lean On Me

Just when I thought I was out… It is clearly a very good thing that I am embarking on a two-year research fellowship and so can choose to ignore all teaching-related messages and edicts, on the basis that in two years’ time things will either have bedded down or will have changed radically from the current situation – because otherwise it looks as if I would be spending much of the next few months, at least, firing lengthy emails at higher levels of faculty and university management and blogging angrily about it. To be scrupulously fair: one bit of the system gave me funding to research an aspect of GenAI; there was never a promise, or even a suggestion, that any other part would take a blind bit of notice.

Yes, we have a brand new GenAI policy, just in time for everyone to redo their teaching plans: all module assessments must be clearly labelled as AI-integrated, AI-supported or AI-prohibited, and the middle one is expected to be the norm, with attempts at prohibition needing formal approval. I will grant that this could be worse, but I still find it disturbing. Whether or not this is intentional, the rhetorical choices present GenAI use as a new norm; ‘AI-tolerated’ would be a better label, to indicate that most students will probably not make use of it if they have any sense, but we won’t bust a gut hunting down those who do. ‘AI-supported’ feels too close to ‘AI-supportive’, especially when the exclusion of AI requires formal permission on the basis of as-yet-unspecified arguments and evidence. And the implication that there are ethical and responsible uses of GenAI that are therefore supported, without specifying what these are (because that’s too much of a can of worms?) or acknowledging the argument that in fact these don’t exist (see arguments about copyright, and the latest research on energy use), is likewise problematic.

Obviously if I ruled the world the default would be ‘AI-integrated’, for my values of integrated: explicit discussion of the tools and analysis of their outputs as a means of developing critical understanding and showing students why they are (1) inimical to proper learning and (2) really rather crap. I suppose the big question about this new guidance is how far people will be permitted to express such scepticism or explicitly warn students against relying on such tools for ‘support’ of any kind. If the university suggests that getting summaries of scholarship is an ‘ethical and responsible’ use of GenAI, hence more or less approved and encouraged, do I get in trouble for suggesting that it’s actually a bad idea?

I do wonder how this may all play out. If, egged on now by the university as well as by friends and social media, more and more students outsource their research to GenAI, we are going to see a marked drop-off in genuine understanding and analytical skills; does this then show up in lower marks (and what happens if students start appealing on the grounds that AI is being penalised rather than supported?), or does it get swept under the carpet, or do we in fact mostly lack the time to distinguish between GenAI bullshit and genuine understanding? Are students actually going to feel any clearer about what they should or shouldn’t do – keeping in mind that half of those I surveyed last year felt that any use of GenAI in assessment was cheating?

Other than loudly signalling that the university is onboard with the Future, I’m not sure that this guidance is actually going to solve any of the emerging issues. Half of me therefore thinks that I can leave it to others to do the shouting, with the material I’ve put together as ammunition. The other half notes how a socio-economic system that was already staring in the face of environmental crisis as a result of its energy use has now invented a way of wasting much more energy with the vacuous claim that this will then miraculously solve all problems including the ones it’s created itself – and this then gets me fired up to carry on yelling…

True

I’ve always used this blog partly as a convenient way of noting down passing thoughts and ideas that I might otherwise forget. For a while, I wondered whether social media might serve the same function, rather than laboriously cutting and pasting comments from threads in which I’d developed something potentially useful – but the search functions there get ever less functional, and my sense is that this blog probably now has a higher survival chance that the entire Ex-Twitter infrastructure, so long as I keep paying the bill, and therefore it would be a bad idea to rely on anything else…

And this idea does seem worth preserving for future reference – it would have been really good to include it in one or other of the pieces I’ve written over the summer, but I’ve missed the boat there. Perhaps I should produce yet another version of my guidance for academic colleagues on GenAI… In the meantime, credit for inspiration goes to Kellen Hoxworth (@kellenhoxworth.bsky.social):

Figuring out what is true or not is a space that humans are *vastly* superior to AI and machines. If you want educational tools that dispense with facts for “efficiency,” that’s what they offer.

My response:

I really like this as an explanation of what humanities education offers that GenAI doesn’t: the intellectual tools to discern and evaluate truth claims, rather than confident assertions that are indifferent to truth.

And I think this is right. The driving force of historiography, since Herodotus and Thucydides, has been to try to establish the truth about past events, separating it from lies and myths and self-serving stories, with a powerful sense of the difficulty of this enterprise. You can say the same about philosophy, and literary analysis, and the social sciences, and the hard sciences: the goal is not to produce something that looks merely looks truthy, but to try to get as close as possible to the actual truth. That may always be a matter of debate and/or perspective, but there’s a huge difference between a genuine, informed attempt at arguing for an interpretation, and producing something – or, having something produced – that merely imitates such an effort.

We’re back to the crucial point that, by the definition proposed by Harry Frankfurter, GenAI is a bullshitter; it is literally indifferent to the concept of truth. It is capable of generating true statements, but by accident, if its ‘averaging’ of what has been said about a topic happens to coincide with reality; it has no sense that some of its statements may be more or less well-founded or plausible than others. At best it offers a version of ‘what most people think’ – which, if you’ll excuse me using the same line two posts running, is pretty close to what Thucydides complains about, that ‘most people’ do not make the effort to enquire into the truth of the past, but simply accept whatever they’re told.

At least humans have the potential to seek out truth, and to recognise that perhaps this might be a good idea, even if mostly they don’t bother. GenAI makes no effort to enquire into the truth of anything, because it has no conception of truth, let alone the motivation or skills to seek it. Perhaps GenAI is not so much the transformative force about to bring forth a radically new age as a mere reflection of the present age of bullshit and populism. In either case, we need the intellectual tools and training to engage with this; to pursue truth, not truthiness.

Question..?

As Thucydides more or less said, many students do not trouble to enquire properly into things of the past, but readily accept any old rubbish that ChatGPT tells them… CUCD Bulletin has just published a piece by me on GenAI and classical studies teaching – the third in this summer’s trilogy on this theme, and they were kind enough to give me a few more words to play with, so I’m very happy with this one.

I’ve already had some interesting responses, and this post is prompted by comments from Robert Low (@RobJLow) on the Ex-Twitter – yes, I still check in there, despite everything, and this sort of engagement is basically why – a former maths lecturer now studying classics. Robert’s comment was that the humanities response to ChatGPT strongly reminded him of maths teachers’ responses some years back to WolframAlpha. Never heard of it – which tells you what sort of an EdTech pseudo-guru I am – but after a bit of research (this is a good summary from 2017) I see exactly his point. WolframAlpha offered (offers?) answers to questions, including complex maths problems, with high accuracy – and, most importantly, setting out the steps needed to solve the problem rather than just offering an answer, sidestepping the usual way in which teachers identified students who hadn’t actually done the work (and hence hadn’t actually understood the problem or learnt anything from trying to solve it).

Cue exactly the sort of consternation that we’re now experiencing about student learning, the integrity of assessment etc. – and a lot of familiar discussion to the effect that the genie is out of the bottle, teachers just have to accept this and work out how to incorporate it into their teaching. One repeated argument was that this is just like the introduction of cheap-ish scientific calculators decades earlier (brief flashback to my maths AO-level, when my calculator ran out of batteries and I had to resort to four-figure tables, which I was old enough to have learnt to use quite efficiently…) – it would free students from pointless mechanical tasks which can be done far more efficiently by computers and allow them to focus on properly understanding the maths, without any adverse consequences. In the case of WolframAlpha, its inventor, Stephen Wolfram, argued for a switch to ‘computational thinking’; what is now needed, he suggested, is support for students to learn how to frame questions so that they can be answered properly and reliably by computers.

I’m not sure how far the jury is out on this argument – or even about the idea that using calculators won’t have any adverse effects on student understanding – but obviously when it comes to humanities I am extremely nervous about the idea that knowledge and understanding can be properly developed via the ‘black box’ generation of text, however good students might get at prompt engineering; the obvious issue is whether they’ll ever have the critical skills necessary to evaluate the outputs properly. I guess we may find out.

But the idea of ‘computational thinking’, in the sense of developing good questions and framing them effectively, is perhaps rather helpful. After all, haven’t we, for many years, and long before the advent of GenAI, sought to set essay questions that are not too obvious and hence not easily found in an essay bank by googling the title – and at the same time ones that would encourage students to think analytically rather than just trotting out narrative and description? In responding to GenAI, perhaps we need not only to develop more challenging assessment tasks, but to take the next step of handing the framing of research questions over to the students – are THEY able to approach a topic in the right way, so that they can make best use of whatever resources seem appropriate (GenAI or not)? ChatGPT will certainly be able to write essay questions for them – but they’re likely to be even less interesting, original or current than its attempts at answering them.

I do already do something a bit like this in my final-year modules, where most students develop their own questions. Under pressure, I have always provided a few sample titles for students who insist that they have absolutely no ideas – and the answers to these are almost invariably much weaker than the ones from students who have pursued their own interests, though that’s over-determined. It is also the case that all these assessments are in two stages, with students writing a draft, getting feedback and then submitting a revised version – which means there is plenty of opportunity for them to modify their project to make it more viable and/or interesting, rather than having to gamble their whole mark on whether they’ve come up with a good idea.

That feedback-and-revision process is unlikely to be feasible in a lecture course of 100+ students, and likewise the provision of sufficient consultation hours to talk to everyone about their ideas and give them pointers – but still, throwing them in the deep end in a low-stakes first-year module, focusing from the start (not least in the lectures) on the skill of developing interesting and productive new questions on the basis of a decent amount of reading, could be productive – if one sets aside the enormous row that would doubtless erupt…

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th August 2024

Slept heavily, with extremely strange dreams – the combined result of several beers, a hefty Schmorbraten, and drifting off to sleep with ideas about the Bayreuth-set Krimi that A. has decided I need to write, for which I have at least the beginnings of a plot. At any rate the dream at various points included some sort of complicated negotiation with my mother about buying ingrediants and an extended chase sequence through ancient stone corridors and very Mitteleuropa woods, possibly involving some aliens. A unfortunately has slept very badly, again, and is feeling very delicate; we make plans for how to carve out a bit of peaceful alone time, despite being here with friends and so obligated to make a fair amount of conversation, in German.

Yes, it’s Festspielzeit in Bayreuth once again – quite a coincidence that last year’s performance was also on the 27th – and we’re back in our favourite hotel. Breakfast is as good as ever (except, A reports, the Teig for the waffle machine is a bit too thick), and conversation with M and C ranges over the doings of our various children – a bit of tension on their side, which we don’t push – the idiocies of Brexit and limited hopes to be had for the new Regierung, and the ghastly situation of Saxony in the impending regional elections with the rise of the AfD. I go to book our places in the shuttle bus up to the Festspielhaus for the afternoon, and have a pleasant chat with the owner about her 25th Jubiläum – with a very self-interested wish for twenty-five more years (A discovers next day that the real path to her heart is to ask about her bee-keeping).

The four of us wander into the centre of town together – I had been all set to be very German (that is to say, a variant of the Cordelia Chase principle that “tact is just not saying true stuff”) and insist on A and I heading off alone, but she had a burst of social conscience and also an intimation that C might want them to do their own thing anyway, which was in fact the case after barely half an hour. We look in various shops – not least in a fruitless search for somewhere selling the brand of jeans I like – and fail to find a suitable replacement for our favourite Konditorei which which has closed since last year (not to eat any cake, as breakfast still weighs quite heavily, but for future reference). We then go for a stroll under the trees in the Hofgarten, seeing a nuthatch and some dragonflies; we run into C and M again, walk together back to the hotel, and then reconvene for lunch at a place we haven’t tried before; quite fancy by Bayrisch standards, not bad though I would happily have omitted the vaguely sweet-sour sauce and fruit/vegetables from my grilled Lachsforelle (trying to eat quite healthily after quantities of pork products over the last couple of days; foiled by the chef’s over-generous applications of butter so I could have quite happily have had the fangfrische Forelle in Buttersauce to the same effect…).

Back to the hotel once again for leisurely shower and a bit of a lie down, before assembling for the shuttle bus to the Green Hill at three. Weather is glorious – clear skies, warm but not uncomfortably hot. It means that the areas around the Festspielhaus don’t feel too crowded, as everyone is walking around, looking at the gardens and generally enjoying themselves, rather than all huddling under the limited number of umbrellas. Lots of fun people-watching – the second wives seem to be especially obvious this year, markedly blonder and younger and more skimpily (but presumably expensively) dressed – and increasingly I also seem to have developed a very late-blooming interest in men’s fashion, so eyeing up ties (little to rival my Duchamp, though it was one of my subtler ones) and jackets (one rather nice glittery purple one, though I am undoubtedly too middle-aged and plump to carry something like that off, and too undemonstrative and stingy to contemplate trying). Some really scruffy characters – either a statement of artiness and contempt for material things, or their luggage perhaps got lost in transit – and one especially striking young man in shorts made from fluorescent safety clothing.

And so to Tannhäuser. I had heard great things about the production from my go-to Wagnerian’s blog, and it did not disappoint; the troupe of alternative performers, including Tannhäuser as a clown, driving around in Venus’s old van, with clever use of video to tell the story of why T decided to leave; the pilgrims travelling to Bayreuth, where T meets his old comrades in ordinary clothes with their performers’ access passes, and then the Wartburg song contest as a very conventional Wagner performance, with the video of the view from backstage now highlighting the artifice of it all; Venus and company breaking in via a ladder to the balcony at the front and hanging a banner with the youngish Wagner’s ‘Frei im Wollen! Frei im Thun! Frei im Geniessen!’ on it (which, of course, was actually there when we came out for the second interval). My big regret is that I hadn’t spent more time studying the text of the song contest, to have a stronger sense of what was being said, in order to understand properly what it might mean in this new framing – but who needs to be so serious when the action is juxtaposed with Katharina Wagner calling the police and police cars rushing up the hill to the Festspielhaus, and then policemen actually bursting onto the stage to arrest Tannhäuser?

C had come out of the first act in highly critical mode, especially of Ekaterina Gubinova’s performance as Venus; the rest of us tentatively offered the interpretation that this was deliberate acting (and one might say the same of Klaus Florian Vogt, whose Tannhäuser at times seemed deliberately harsh and unmusical, in contrast to the clearly pure and proper singing of the Minnesänger). She was very definitely not in the mood for a proudly camp performance from Venus and troupe at the bottom of the hill during the first interval, so sadly I caught only a glimpse of this – but we enjoyed a pleasant glass of Sekt instead (as ever, champagne for A). In the second interval, we suddenly noticed that Bayreuth has introduced free lockers (maybe they were there last year, but it was raining too much to notice…) – so next next we solve the problem of €20 glasses of champagne by bringing a bottle and a picnic…

I’m still thinking through the third act; easy to imagine what a challenge it is to reinterpret the whole ‘granted forgiveness as a result of the saintly woman dying’ thing outside a Christian context (actually still quite challenging within such a context…), harder yet to follow a coherent thread through the multiple striking, thought-provoking images on offer. Insistence on purity and high art leads to desolation and misery, Wolfram is clearly open to the other world (even if his motives are questionable at best) – but association with Venus and her ceaseless demand for acts of passionate rebellion leaves at least some mortals broken? I think the character I’m not yet grasping properly is Elisabeth – make sense of her, and the final act may fall fully into place. A thinks it’s all about Oskar, and purity of soul; I think the, or at any rate a, key theme is authenticity (which may be the same idea). But still tremendously powerful and moving, and we’re going to be thinking about this for months to come. A thinks it’s the best production of an opera she’s seen; I’d still go for Castorf’s Ring, but it’s definitely up there.

Again in contrast to last year, the journey back to the hotel is very straightforward; no rain, no arguments with the driver to let us onto the shuttle. We have a light meal and drinks, and I get the bat detector out to see if there’s anything interesting around – one common pipistrelle, flying energetically round the car park. We don’t have too late a night – bed by eleven, and more strange dreams.

Speak Like A Child

Efforts continue to foist GenAI on schools and universities. Are government and education management not only desperate to grasp the alleged possible savings, and feeling compelled by the waves of ‘this is the future there is no alternative’ hype, but also actually enthused by replacing teachers as far as possible with mindless automatons? The answer is that they probably are: it’s a promised land of consistency and predictability, ironing out all those annoying human foibles, and with an absence of pushback, let alone the sort of elaborate, articulate pushback associated with educated professionals. ChatGPT is not going to give you a ten-minute reiteration of the fundamental philosophical principles of liberal education as applied to the question of granting automatic student three-day essay extensions unless you ask it to.

It doesn’t feel entirely coincidental that I heard from a friend recently that her university will soon be issuing guidance on the appropriate tone to use when communicating with students. Obviously one should keep an open mind until it’s actually published, but my feeling is that the only real doubt is whether it will be more demoralising than infuriating or vice versa – the precise balance of condescension, banality and newspeak. And whether it will forbid excessive familiarity – “Hi Justin” rather than “Dear Mr Phelps” – or, more likely, mandate it.

Honestly, I’m torn between relief that I don’t have to worry about this stuff for two years and fear about how much of a dinosaur I will appear in two years’ time when I have to start speaking to students again. Certainly the days of asking them to address their emails properly – for future reference, in the unlikely event that any student reads this, I am perfectly happy with “Dear Neville” but not “Dear sir”, and “Hi sir” is anathema – are over, for fear of embarrassing them, or appearing offputtingly superior.

If you can’t get away with replacing your lecturers with GenAI, then you compel them to behave like GenAI, including a couple of extra specifications in their communication protocols. All staff must address the students according to acceptable parameters of sympathy and friendliness, with individual quirks permitted only insofar as they don’t hold any risk of upsetting any hypothetical student. Okay, knowing what our students really think of us is one of those things that most of us would rather leave unexplored, but I would like to imagine that they’re intelligent enough to grasp that my occasionally gruff aloofness does not actually preclude supportiveness. The unintelligible cultural references are a bonus, not a flaw to be debugged. And I think I do pretty well in suppressing occasional exasperation, or at any rate the expression of it – something which an express instruction never to speak critically of/to a student is unlikely to improve.

The teachers I remember most powerfully are those whose individuality shone through – who left us not just with knowledge and understanding but with the best anecdotes and the greatest capacity for humorous imitation. What really mattered was not how they spoke, or addressed students, but their knowledge and ideas and their capacity to bring those to life. I’m conscious that this sounds, at least in structural terms, very much like the sort of ‘I was beaten/fondled/humiliated regularly by my tutor and it never did me any harm’ arguments beloved of the It’s Woke Fascism And Political Correctness Gone Mad brigade, and this certainly isn’t a plea for lecturers to be permitted to be as offensive and unpleasant as they wish in the name of Freeze Peach. There is a substantial middle ground between ‘lecturers must have total carte blanche to enjoy/abuse their power’ and ‘wouldn’t it be good if all lecturers could be programmed to be safely anodyne in order to protect students from possible harm’ that is surely worth exploring.

The promise of an AI teacher is presumably that they are both completely individual, perfectly response to each student’s personal needs, and completely consistent and predictable in all cases. Humans can’t do either of these things fully – and the more they are consistent, the more that students will need to make some accommodation on their own part, to meet the teacher halfway rather than being an entirely passive recipient of perfectly tailored support. There is an argument to be made, at the least, that this is part of the learning process – that a teacher who is too perfectly responsive to the student might actually infantilise them, and limit their development. Our AI replacements may in due course need to be programmed to be a bit less accommodating, and/or the guidance for staff may need to focus less on how to talk to them and more on how to talk with them.

Song For Whoever

I don’t know how far the abridgement of books for the purposes of creating a newspaper feature has now been outsourced to machines, but whoever of whatever had the task of condensing Yuval Noah Harari’s thoughts on rise of AI for the Grauniad did a superb job in reproducing the distinctive, rather grating tone that led me to give up on Sapiens about a third of the way through. The unbearability of a concentrated version turns out to proportionate to the development of the argument rather than to actual word count, but I got far enough through the article to encounter the confident assertion that Generative AI is now producing original creative work in poetry and art.

Hmm. For rather specific values of ‘original’ and ‘creative’, not to mention ‘poetry’ and ‘art’. Is an uninspired literal representation of a prompt, reworking clichés according to the lowest common denominator of popular taste, ‘art’, unless it’s signed by Jack Vettriano? Is ChatGPT output poetic, or just poetish? Obviously the AI is not wandering lonely as a cloud, seeking to express ineffable experience and emotion in words, but is simply manipulating language under the influence of existing traditions and models of poetic discourse – so I suppose it depends on how Romantic one’s conception of poetry-wiriting is whether or not this is disqualifying.

This raises interesting questions. Do we focus on (what we know of) the process of generation and the nature of the generator, or on the resemblance of the generated text to whar we think poetry should look like? It occurred to me yesterday that the reader-response and reception theory people should be all over this. A text becomes ‘poetry’ when it is read as such, regardless of the original circumstances of its generation; meaning is realised at the point of reception rather than determined by original context or the imagined intentions of an ‘author’. Or does the typical literary theorist retreat to an insistence on metaphysical fictions such as authorship when faced with texts that were not directly produced by any human?

At any rate, the almost total dependence of GenAI poetry on pre-existing texts means that it ought to provide copious material for exploring receptions of poetic material and traditions. No, the AI doesn’t advertise its borrowings or reworkings, and (we might assume) its frame of reference is potentially much wider than the typical poet, though liable to revert to the mainstream at every opportunity, but that just makes it more of a challenge… Again, the question of whether such borrowing is conscious and deliberate might be regarded as irrelevant; the end product is a reflection or refraction of the streams of cultural discourse either way.

There is surely also scope for applying the analogy in thr reverse direction: can the discourse around GenAI shed any light on the reception of classical antiquity? To take my favourite example of the modern reception of Thucydides, what are the speeches in that work if not ‘hallucinations’ in the sense of GenAI critique – unexpected aberrations from what readers would normally consider a proper historical text, which actually reveal how far the reading of Thucydides as a modern critical historian is a projection of our assumptions onto a text that was not in fact produced according to those rules? We are naturally inclined to focus on what feels familiar, to attribute sameness (modernity, humanity) to an ‘author’ which is actually alien and unknowable. Thucydides’ text is sufficiently historian-like that we label him a historian.

Obviously the strongest analogue for GenAI is Xenophon; trained on Thucydides’ text with access to data on contemporary events, resulting in something that looks superficially history-ish but doesn’t in fact offer a coherent, consistent or trustworthy account of anything…

Die Like A Dog

The first veterinary practice that I attended as a paying customer – it’s a bit disconcerting to realise that this was over quarter of a century ago – had a framed poem on the wall, amidst the adverts for bilingual puppy training and sheep-shearing services (this was in the depths of rural Ceredigion). I don’t remember it properly, but the gist was this: we will do our absolute best for your beloved pet, but sometimes the best thing you can do as their owner is let them go peacefully. Since I was regularly visiting with a cat who had developed a range of chronic digestive and behavioural issues apparently as a reaction to vaccination, and whose life expectancy seemed to be dramatically diminished as a result – though Boris remained happy and affectionate, albeit gormless and incapable of retracting his claws, for years to come – this brought me to the edge of tears every time, and it comes back to mind whenever one of his successors has started to fade.

It comes to mind this morning with the realisation, prompted by news stories about a vet strike in South Wales, that probably no vet practice today would ever display such a sign. On the contrary, in all likelihood we’re only a year or so away from signs to the effect of ‘Thinking of giving up hope? Bad, heartless owner! What do you need a second kidney for anyway?’ There is – as we’ve experienced in recent years – always another treatment that could be tried, always a new drug that might be worth a shot, more tests of greater specificity and sophistication, always the chance that an overnight stay under observation and with special food might make a difference. The fact that the animal cannot tell us properly how they feel, or describe their symptoms to help narrow things down, means that there are always so many further possibilities for treatment, where the success or failure of a particular treatment becomes part of the process of diagnosis of what the problem actually is – and of course we can’t adequately distinguish between looks that mean ‘please, make me feel better’ and ‘please, make it stop’ (and, yes, I know that both of those are anthropomorphic projection).

For many years, and a succession of cats with multifarious health issues, the encouragement always to try something else felt as if it was coming from a place of professional over-enthusiasm – veterinary medicine has advanced so far, this new drug or technique has just come on the market which we haven’t had a chance to try out yet… No, my sick cat is not your continuing professional development opportunity. But increasingly, as local practices are absorbed into ever-larger groups, cutting costs and consolidating services in the usual private equity manner – we changed practice last year because the old one moved its out-of-hours service to the edge of Bath, thirty miles and nearly an hour’s journey away – the impetus seems to be financial: soak the customer for as much as they can bear. Where there’s life there’s hope; where there’s hope there’s a continuing revenue stream.

Touch wood, all three of the current Morley cats seem fine – but since Buddy is twelve, the likelihood is that we’ll be facing the same dilemma in the next few years: forget my feelings, when is continuing treatment going to cause excessive misery without a significant chance of improvement? It would be nice, but is probably no longer feasible, to take the vet’s advice as wholly disinterested, without having to wonder if they are contractually obliged to keep up the profit margins.