davidgunkel.bsky.social
Professor - Northern Illinois University (USA). Award-winning author of the books The Machine Question, Robot Rights, Person-Thing-Robot, Of Remixology, and Deconstruction. https://gunkelweb.com
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Here's something to listen to while you read. It's the next big hit off the all accordion album "Weird AI" by The Big Dada Project. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBib...
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This way of reading and interpreting literature (though not "wrong") is also situated. It is the product of a particular modernist way of thinking about and making sense of writing. And it is precisely this "modern situation" that is examined and critiqued by Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.
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In a 2000 word essay, there's not much literary real estate to get into all of these important matters. The book "Communicative AI" @politybooks.bsky.social affords a bit more space and time for it, but even that might not be entirely insufficient.
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The movement of différance does not just apply to words; it is applicable to all forms of signification and all modes of representation. Difference and deferral is an infinite regress. There is nothing (of significance) outside these inescapable mechanisms of significance.
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The dictionary is a good illustration of différance: words have meaning not by reference to some external "transcendental signified"; they acquire significance in and by deferring to and differing from other words. When you look up the word "tree," you do not get a tree. You get other words
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There is no escape.
Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.
There is nothing outside the text.
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As am I.
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But I suspect that you do understand it insofar as you know how a dictionary works. #LLMs actualize this at scale.
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And here is how I have responded to your response on that platform:
"Your dictionary proves and actualizes in practice what structural linguistics had theorized. And #LLMs are the perfect (post)structuralist machine."
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Writing--whether human, machine or hybrid--is always undertaken in response to a prompt.
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I can play the role of literary plunger. Looking forward to it.
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Wow...really interesting and insightful reflections. And I think you might already be at least halfway to that essay in this thread. I will say that some of what you bring up is address in the book "Communicative #AI"; others are something I'm currently working on right now. More soon, I hope.
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Thanks...I look forward to checking it out. This'll be fun.
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Nice! Thanks for sharing that. And in the spirit of giving, I can provide you with this: gunkelweb.com/BigDada/
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Irony is dead.
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You offered an opinion about an article that you clearly misread and from which you expected something that was simply not there. You then followed that performance by passing judgment on and complaining about a number of books you have not read and clearly have no intention of reading. Brava.
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Yep...and yet another book that you will judge by the title without even reading the synopsis.
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I DO NOT PUSH FOR ROBOT PERSONHOOD.
THAT IS NOT MY ARGUMENT.
HOW MANY TIMES CAN I SAY THIS?
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You don't know the first thing about the "core of my argument," because you have not even read the argument. You are making assumptions based on titles and a quick read of one magazine article. You talk a good game about ethics and respect, but your actions speak undermine your credibility.
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I have researched this subject for over 2 decades. The results have been published in three peer-reviewed books from @mitpress.bsky.social on this excat subject. I refer you to these resources, but I cannot read them for you
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If you are going to comment on research that you have not read nor are familiar with, at least prompt #ChatGPT to do a summary for you. It's the least you could do.
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Are you really going to judge a book by its cover/title? In this book, I do a complete and grounded cost/benefit analysis of opportunities and challenges of expanding legal personhood to machines and argue--for numerous moral, legal, and political reasons--how and why this is a VERY BAD IDEA.
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Suffering is unfortunately a poor benchmark for making moral and legal decisions about who counts and what does not. This particular capacity or property of the individual has problems with determination, definition, and detection. Full analysis available (you guessed it) in the book.
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Curation is a creative force...just talk to a DJ. Or read all about it here: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546539/
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Sorry...don't know him.
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Great. I totally agree with you. What we need is a "moral upgrade"--though I call it a "New Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond." If interested you can get the book (the third in The Machine Question trilogy) as an open access title from @mitpress.bsky.social
bit.ly/Gunkel-PTR
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Thank you for these comments. I would say that both reading and writing have become (and maybe have always already been) a "curatorial art."
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No. This framing does the exact opposite. And many of the things you mention and value do in fact deserve much more than a footnote, which is why they are not relegated to the footnotes but are the subject of entire chapters.
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Correct...and all of that is fully developed in the book. At this point, we should just send you a copy. If you agree to do a review, the publisher will provide one gratis. You clearly are looking for more than what this one essay can possibly provide. But we do cover all of this in the book.
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Because the essay is not about "AI and authorship." It is about the "death of the author" as that idea was developed in 20th century literary theory and how that work can inform the way we make sense of and critique the technologies of the 21st century.
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It's a short think piece designed to motivate thinking and debate. It is not a text book for classroom pedagogy in the age of AI. Why do you assume that a 2000 word essay can only be successful if it is an entire curriculum for k-12 education? Yeah, that is needed. But this thing is not that.
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Please do read what has been written. "The death of the author is the birth of the critical reader." What replaces the old authority figure of the author is the reader. But not just any reader, a critically minded and informed reader. Cultivating critical thinking and reading is job #1 for education
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Again...these harms and their mitigation is part of what we do in the book. This short essay simply did not have the literary real estate to do EVERYTHING.
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This is one short essay. It cannot cover all of this in its 2000 words. My suggestion is that you get and read the book that it is based on. There we had 50,000 words to play with and therefore address number of these items.
www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
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These machines are not intelligent, they are not conscious, and they do not speak. Yet despite all this, the are able to generate legible sequence of words. This interrupts everything we knew or thought we knew about human language, requiring a full philosophcial reboot.
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Roland Barthes - Death of the Author (1967)
Michel Foucault - What is an Author (1969)
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology (1976)
Gatratri Chakravorty Spivak - In Other Worlds (1987)
Trinh T. Min-ha - Woman, Native, Other (1991)
Donna Haraway - Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991)
etc. etc. etc.
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I am not referring to to this at all. This is not an essay about or grounded in the research of early childhood education. That's not my field. This is an essay about literature, literacy, and literary theory.
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I never said "must end." Instead I lean on the literary critic Roland Barthes who announced the "Death of the Author" in his influential essay on the subject from 1967.
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Literary history, philosophy of literature, literary theory, semiology, history of communication, media studies, etc.
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The algorithm does not speak. It cannot speak, for it is not human.
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It is you who have made this declaration. I never wrote nor did I use the words "meaningless" or "oppressive."
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Again--even if your heart is in the right place--the available research on these subjects do not support these generalizations.