I’d like to say something about the MLA-4C’s AI and writing paper to which I am a signatory and which is being discussed on this website. I am speaking for myself here, not the task force as a whole. 🧵 1/ The report does not start from the premise that AI is “out there” and that it might or might not be a good idea for students to use it. The report starts from the premise that AI is already, so to speak, in the house, which is to say it’s in the software and the courseware. 2/

So we’ve had stochastic parrots 🦜 and blurry JPEGS, but I’m kind of amazed no one, at least in my corner of the world, has gone back to Knapp and Benn Michaels in “Against Theory,” first published in @CriticalInquiry in 1982. First though, before we got there, worth saying that there are passages in 🦜’s that ought to be red meat for any literary theory seminar. Eg.:

This is an intriguing experimental piece by @ibogost, which demonstrates what I think of as the soft textpocalypse: silent and invisible integration, rather than hostile takeover. theatlantic.com/technology/arc… Ian calls my piece “lurid,” and maybe it is. But we both land in exactly the same place: that’s Ian on the left, and me a day earlier on the right.

Unspoken in all the academic flutter about leaving Twitter is this simple truth: I’ve spent a decade and a half (!!) building reputation capital (to what end, you can judge) in this place. If I leave, NONE of that is portable. It is my labor, and I’m not abdicating it lightly. Put more plainly, social media profiles and platforms (in the individual sense of a platform) are not portable. Every time you go somewhere else you’re back to being that same bald egg. This is of course, by design. But it works, and we shouldn’t be ashamed to talk about it.

Thought sparked by a recent exchange w/ @Ted_Underwood: one reason, I think for the success and popularity of image generators over AI text generation is that we have a higher tolerance for what one might (with analogy to the visual arts) term abstract expressionism in pictures./ With the images generators, that which is not strictly photorealistic (not their strong suit) often appears merely stylized: “surreal,” or “like a Monet.” Or else just cool and weird./

Serious question: what is a better verb than “found” (or “discovered”) that acknowledges the full spectrum of labor and expertise but doesn’t also relegate the role of scholar/patron to an incidental?

https://twitter.com/evankutzler/status/1475231570005004291

True story. I once went to an archive hoping to learn what type of computer a very famous author had been using (yes, I *am* weird). Anyway, I had searched high and low, but it was a detail no biographer or critic had, apparently, thought to record. 1/

Herewith, a thread that is a kind of "reader's guide" to BITSTREAMS. It's a short book, yes, but still: different constituencies might benefit from a better sense of what's in there (and where). Here's the @PennPress catalog page for the general overview: upenn.edu/pennpress/book… The book is based on my 2016 Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Each "lecture" has been revised and expanded-- there's really only a passing resemblance to the originals. library.upenn.edu/about/exhibits…

#PSA “defining histories” are not written in the midst of an ongoing event. They are typically not written even within the first decade of the aftermath of an event.

For the non-academics in my feed, "critical" and "theory" are both commonplace modifiers for most any subject throughout the humanities and social sciences. So, this is really about banning discussion of race, racist histories, and racial justice from American schools. Just fyi. My own home fields play host to critical digital studies, media theory, critical bibliography, and textual theory. For example.