How exactly is it inaccurate to say that LLMs facilitate linguistic homogenization and injustice? This has been demonstrated by Bender et al., as early as 2021, and others including Antonio Byrd, Alfred Owusu Ansah, and Carmen Kynard have written about how linguistic injustice is embedded in these technologies. What evidence refutes the claim Sano-Franchini shared? In what ways, did her talk evidence that she's "a year behind," as you suggested?
I too am interested in the research that refutes any of the claims in Prof. Sano-Franchini's speech.
Here are just a few in my recent bookmarks that support Prof. Sano-Franchini's take; it doesn't take long to find more. In addition to the scholars you've cited above...
--Here's an article from long ago (in today's terms) anticipating the bias problem: "A Framework for Understanding Sources of Harm throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle" https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.10002
The Composition and College Communication (CCCC) President is on the mark! Brava! That took courage.
"She complained that Generative AI had taken the work of writers and scholars unlawfully and that it was built upon the work of people who had never been compensated."
"I thought about those years she probably spent on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all those free blog sites... Does she think she should be compensated, but not all the companies she climbed up on her way to the podium?"
- False. We aren't talking about Tweets and Facebook posts (I don't patronize either one.) We're talking about scholarly journal articles and published books, in my case work that involved 15 years of research, writing evenings and weekends after teaching full time.
"The truth is this work belongs to all of us invested in linguistic justice."
- True! If we want to have any kind of justice for writers and artists, we need to stand up, as the Society of Authors and Authors Guild are doing.
"a book she was publishing with some academic friends and how she had founded an AI Resistance group. She even showed the QR code." Please share the code and link. And if you think she's going to "make a buck" on an edited academic book, you are in dream world. Writing this kind of book is a labor of love and dedication to the field. You could make more money delivering pizzas.
"It didn’t sound like justice as much as it sounded like the soft bigotry of low expectations."
- False. It sounds like she believes as I do in high expectations! We think writers have original thoughts to share, original insights they can communicate with their own words - not those stolen from other writers! And not those that the AI companies think they should use.
I can only go by what you shared here, but when I think of "justice" in the context of AI I think about the AI company tech titans who have thrown their allegiance toward authoritarians, and have remained silent as research, library, and education funds are eliminated, and as international students in the US are picked up on the streets and held in detention. Have you heard them say a word against these practices? Crickets (while they jockey for big government contracts and access to our data.)
"preparing our students for a future with AI. Or not." Yeah I'm in the "or not" camp.
The outrage over AI "stealing" creative works rests on a fundamental misconception: that true originality exists in the first place. Every text we write, every idea we express, builds upon centuries of accumulated knowledge and expression. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
This romantic notion of the solitary genius creating wholly original work has been thoroughly debunked by literary theory, yet it persists as the foundation of copyright law and academic gatekeeping. When the CCCC President decries AI for "taking work unlawfully" without compensation, she's reinforcing this myth while conveniently ignoring how human writers have always synthesized, remixed, and built upon existing works.
The language of "theft" presupposes ownership of ideas and expressions—a concept that becomes increasingly problematic in a networked world. The academic establishment that proudly defends this ownership model simultaneously benefits from unpaid peer review, knowledge locked behind paywalls, and exploitative publishing practices. This inconsistency reveals that the concern isn't really about fair compensation, but about protecting established power structures.
What truly threatens linguistic justice isn't AI, but the elitist notion that only certain forms of expression—those blessed by academic institutions—are valid. AI tools can democratize access to powerful communication, helping students from diverse linguistic backgrounds navigate the often-unspoken rules of academic discourse.
Rather than clinging to outdated ideas of originality and intellectual property, we should focus on teaching critical engagement with all tools available. Our students deserve educators who prepare them for reality, not those who retreat into comfortable fictions about how writing and knowledge creation have ever worked.
As scholars we justly recognize others by citing and referencing work we build upon. We name and give tribute to those whose ideas inspire us. Our readers can find and read the sources, and keep learning. I think this is the essence of forward momentum, whereas taking others' work and erasing their identities is old-school oppression. Because yes, taking something without permission or payment is pretty much the definition of theft.
I'm an independent scholar. Naturally, you don't know me or my work, which is dedicated to mentoring others, opening up access to scholarly exchange, and to encouraging emerging, non-traditional scholars from around the world. My (free) newsletters are chock full of open-access resources for those who lack access to academic libraries with expensive databases. After 12 books with publishers, my next book will be open-access.
I am hardly a defender of the "academic establishment." But I am a defender of writers, and I believe our work should be respected. We should at the minimum have a choice about whether or not to give their work to tools that chop careful writing into bits that are mashed up with unedited garbage. They should have the right to choose whether to give their work to billionaires - people who have no problem paying engineers or lawyers, but somehow think writers should work gratis, and call that "justice."
We all have to make our moral choices.
I would rather stand on the shoulders of giants, who I can name and honor,
then on the backs of writers whose work is stolen, and made invisible.
Hope you'll take a look at the Substack @GrahamLovelace, to see what other writers and artists are saying on these topics.
Amen to everything you had to say, and this single sentence would have been worth the price of admission if there had been a price of admission. 👇
“I wanted to see this through, identify every ring in this macabre circus of well-insulated and privileged academese spilling from her throat in globules of effervescent bullshit.”
I couldn't agree more. It's truly shocking to me--and you're right, it WON'T age well. It's absolutely irresponsible for educators to ignore LLMs for a whole host of reasons (see my own substack), but it's practically sinister for the PRESIDENT of 4 Cs to deliver such a poorly researched and narrow-minded argument. Those who end up mastering AI will be light years ahead of those who demonize it. And they already are.
Exactly. The vitriol and unsupported claims are wild here. Informed refusal and ethical critique are not "ignoring." Most of us "know what it is and how to us [sic] it." Some of us are early adopters who have chosen to read and contribute to the research on its impacts. Some of us also work with educators and actually listen to their concerns. Some of us even do research on intellectual property, environmental impacts, privacy, and surveillance.
Bryan, MLA kept their logo on the 3rd White Paper on AI. It's a decent piece, but the CCCC leaders undercut their own members on the task force by pulling their support for the joint effort. Who would have thought MLA would be more forward-thinking than writing folks? But then the CCCC took a turn too far into identity politics in recent years. I'm probably going to let my membership lapse.
I missed the speech, but I did read her and her co-authors' accompanying blog post with a Quickstart Guide to Refusing AI.
While not as angry as you clearly are, I agree strongly that the CCC Chair's remarks represent a "well-insulated and privileged" position. Your point about how AI can help disadvantaged students likewise seems to have been missed on our tenured colleague.
Michelle, you are right that the current educational backlash is wrong-headed, although I do think that generative AI raises serious issues about personal authorship and attribution in writing classrooms. If you are interested, I’d really like to interview you for an AI-related book project - your work interests me. Feel free to contact me here @marthanichols or on Linkedin.
The way you describe your reaction to that presentation you sat through makes it seem again to any downsides to chart of AI for education. Can you confirm that? I see generative ai mostly as a being able to augment human users in their critical thinking but I also see the perils of the automation bias and ognitive offloading and the fact that these tools are not designed to improve the critical thinking of the user and more designed to get a job done. Curious to hear your thoughts on this!
Also, That presentation you had to attend reminded me of this famous story lol.
The historical piece you're referring to is the myth of Theuth (or Thoth) and King Thamus, which appears in Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus," written around 370 BCE. This story is one of the earliest and most influential critiques of writing in favor of oral tradition.
In this myth, Socrates recounts how Theuth, an Egyptian god (whose sacred bird was the ibis), presented his invention of writing to King Thamus of Egypt. Theuth proudly claimed that his invention of letters "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."[3]
However, King Thamus rejected this claim, arguing that writing would have the opposite effect:
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom."[3][7]
The king further argued that people who rely on writing "will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."[3]
This myth encapsulates several key arguments against written word in favor of oral tradition:
1. Writing weakens memory by reducing the need to remember things internally
2. It creates a false sense of wisdom without true understanding
3. It replaces authentic knowledge with mere information retrieval
4. It lacks the dynamic, interactive quality of oral discourse
This critique contains a profound irony, as noted by some scholars, since Plato himself was recording these arguments against writing in written form[5]. The story highlights the tension between emerging literate culture and traditional oral methods of knowledge transmission in ancient Greece.
The myth of Theuth and Thamus continues to be relevant in discussions about technological transitions, from writing to digital media and artificial intelligence, all of which raise similar questions about how new information technologies might affect human cognition and wisdom[6][7].
My eyes are wet with tears from laughter and the irony of a complete disconnect from what is happening in this disruption of this general purpose technology. Thank you for writing this and thank you for being such a strong writer and advocate for students who are gonna need the tools and will benefit from our expertise as professionals and scholars to know how to use them wisely and usefully most of the time.
I always saw a fellow soul in you and your writing, Ruth! Yes, practicallity is what keeps us innovating. We are student focused and we want to make sure they have all the best tools to move forward.
Wow, this really fired me up, Michelle. We are surrounded by people with blinders on. They are not preparing students for the 21st Century, they want to put them in a hackney coach and send them down the line. My gosh it is like a horrific time machine that nobody wants to step into in my sphere. I am sorry you had to witness that, sorry for the sake of students and the fact they will not be made ready because of ignorance and shear ridiculousness. I am so over this kind of mindset or lack of it.
The most disheartening thing of all was when we were leaving and hearing all the excited chatter because she had given them all a reason not to innovate or grow. It was horrible.
I wish this were true, Carlo. I wish they were struggling. They aren't. They are actively ignoring what is going on and putting their fingers in their ears while they hum revolutionary tunes. This doesn't help our students. It's educational malpractice.
'She complained that Generative AI had taken the work of writers and scholars unlawfully and that it was built upon the work of people who had never been compensated. I thought about those years she probably spent on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all those free blog sites she likely used to spread the rhetoric of her greatness around, all those sites she never paid for. Did she think there was no reckoning, no payment required in the end? As early as 2010, my big data buds were telling me that data was the new oil, that all that stuff on social media was being scraped up. I didn’t know what it was being scraped for—but the message was clear: “If the service is free, YOU are the product.” Does she think she should be compensated, but not all the companies she climbed up on her way to the podium?'
Internet-based companies like Meta and free blog sites' public-facing story has been that they make their money on advertising, to which those of us who use those sites (often grudgingly) consent. I see no reason to spit vitriol at someone who choses to stand up for the intellectual property rights to which they and others are entitled, especially when it involved scraping for an undisclosed purpose. I find the justification that we all should have known bad things would happen when we shared our work with people on sites that had a disclosed revenue stream to be, at best, a reach, and at worse, a willful and disturbing misunderstanding of consent.
I'd also say that corporations are not people, Citizens United aside. There is a difference between picking a flower from a garden and running it over with a combine. Scale matters.
"She posited that GenAI is only one step from General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) and that AGI was in place to promote eugenics and white supremacy. I wanted to walk out, but I couldn’t look away. Her talk was like a wreck on the side of the highway. I was fascinated by the gruesome brutality and bloodletting, the shattered glass, the bent metal of her argument."
Fun fact: the stated goal of OpenAI has been AGI from the get-go. (And plenty of people working in AI, including Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun who fight about just about everything else, agree that LLMs won't get us there, and Professor Sano-Franchini agrees with them in the talk in that regard; she certainly isn't saying "AGI [is] in place.") Professor Sano-Franchini was articulating the connections - that she shares with many other scholars and writers - of the ideologies underpinning that goal of AGI. See, for instance, Gebru and Torres's famous article The TESCREAL Bundle, https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/, to which she refers. This isn't niche research; anyone working in AI and ethics knows about this article and the public discourse from many actors in Big Tech on which it is based.
Calling her argument a wreck on the highway without any actual counterargument or research to speak back to her and the scholars she cites is lazy. I'd certainly ask for more from my own writing students.
Thank you for sharing this here. It's a bit appalling how some people in this comment section couldn't be bothered to verify whether or not this blog post accurately represents SF's work. (As you've noted: it doesn't.)
FWIW, The CCCCs was not all anti-AI— your workshop, some of the talks I went to, and the talk I gave, which was specifically about the need to pay attention to AI rather than refuse or resist it. https://open.substack.com/pub/payattention2ai/p/considering-current-ai-writing-pedagogies?r=m75ih&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
How exactly is it inaccurate to say that LLMs facilitate linguistic homogenization and injustice? This has been demonstrated by Bender et al., as early as 2021, and others including Antonio Byrd, Alfred Owusu Ansah, and Carmen Kynard have written about how linguistic injustice is embedded in these technologies. What evidence refutes the claim Sano-Franchini shared? In what ways, did her talk evidence that she's "a year behind," as you suggested?
I too am interested in the research that refutes any of the claims in Prof. Sano-Franchini's speech.
Here are just a few in my recent bookmarks that support Prof. Sano-Franchini's take; it doesn't take long to find more. In addition to the scholars you've cited above...
--here's "AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5
--Here's an article from long ago (in today's terms) anticipating the bias problem: "A Framework for Understanding Sources of Harm throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle" https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.10002
--Here's a recent piece by Melissa Warr, "Beat Bias? Personalization, Bias, and Generative AI " https://melissa-warr.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/BeatBias_Proceedings-1.pdf
--Here's a piece on linguistic justice: https://wac.colostate.edu/peitho/archives/v27n2/
These aren't the only or best. Just further evidence that the weight of scholarly research doesn't seem to be with Prof. Kassorla.
Whoa! What a cringe experience. One doesn’t have to be enamored of AI to understand how far off base her take is.
The Composition and College Communication (CCCC) President is on the mark! Brava! That took courage.
"She complained that Generative AI had taken the work of writers and scholars unlawfully and that it was built upon the work of people who had never been compensated."
- True! Gen AI has taken my work, and countless others, without my permission and without compensation. See my post Supply Chain of Writing Fools (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/11/20/guest-post-supply-chain-of-writing-fools/) and follow Graham Lovelace to learn more if this is news to you.
"I thought about those years she probably spent on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all those free blog sites... Does she think she should be compensated, but not all the companies she climbed up on her way to the podium?"
- False. We aren't talking about Tweets and Facebook posts (I don't patronize either one.) We're talking about scholarly journal articles and published books, in my case work that involved 15 years of research, writing evenings and weekends after teaching full time.
"The truth is this work belongs to all of us invested in linguistic justice."
- True! If we want to have any kind of justice for writers and artists, we need to stand up, as the Society of Authors and Authors Guild are doing.
"a book she was publishing with some academic friends and how she had founded an AI Resistance group. She even showed the QR code." Please share the code and link. And if you think she's going to "make a buck" on an edited academic book, you are in dream world. Writing this kind of book is a labor of love and dedication to the field. You could make more money delivering pizzas.
"It didn’t sound like justice as much as it sounded like the soft bigotry of low expectations."
- False. It sounds like she believes as I do in high expectations! We think writers have original thoughts to share, original insights they can communicate with their own words - not those stolen from other writers! And not those that the AI companies think they should use.
(See my post "Finding Your Voice in a Ventriloquist’s World – AI and Writing" https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/01/28/guest-post-finding-your-voice-in-a-ventriloquists-world-ai-and-writing/ and series on Originality https://open.substack.com/pub/janetsalmons/p/encourage-originality-create-a-culture?r=410aa5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false)
I can only go by what you shared here, but when I think of "justice" in the context of AI I think about the AI company tech titans who have thrown their allegiance toward authoritarians, and have remained silent as research, library, and education funds are eliminated, and as international students in the US are picked up on the streets and held in detention. Have you heard them say a word against these practices? Crickets (while they jockey for big government contracts and access to our data.)
"preparing our students for a future with AI. Or not." Yeah I'm in the "or not" camp.
The outrage over AI "stealing" creative works rests on a fundamental misconception: that true originality exists in the first place. Every text we write, every idea we express, builds upon centuries of accumulated knowledge and expression. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
This romantic notion of the solitary genius creating wholly original work has been thoroughly debunked by literary theory, yet it persists as the foundation of copyright law and academic gatekeeping. When the CCCC President decries AI for "taking work unlawfully" without compensation, she's reinforcing this myth while conveniently ignoring how human writers have always synthesized, remixed, and built upon existing works.
The language of "theft" presupposes ownership of ideas and expressions—a concept that becomes increasingly problematic in a networked world. The academic establishment that proudly defends this ownership model simultaneously benefits from unpaid peer review, knowledge locked behind paywalls, and exploitative publishing practices. This inconsistency reveals that the concern isn't really about fair compensation, but about protecting established power structures.
What truly threatens linguistic justice isn't AI, but the elitist notion that only certain forms of expression—those blessed by academic institutions—are valid. AI tools can democratize access to powerful communication, helping students from diverse linguistic backgrounds navigate the often-unspoken rules of academic discourse.
Rather than clinging to outdated ideas of originality and intellectual property, we should focus on teaching critical engagement with all tools available. Our students deserve educators who prepare them for reality, not those who retreat into comfortable fictions about how writing and knowledge creation have ever worked.
As scholars we justly recognize others by citing and referencing work we build upon. We name and give tribute to those whose ideas inspire us. Our readers can find and read the sources, and keep learning. I think this is the essence of forward momentum, whereas taking others' work and erasing their identities is old-school oppression. Because yes, taking something without permission or payment is pretty much the definition of theft.
I'm an independent scholar. Naturally, you don't know me or my work, which is dedicated to mentoring others, opening up access to scholarly exchange, and to encouraging emerging, non-traditional scholars from around the world. My (free) newsletters are chock full of open-access resources for those who lack access to academic libraries with expensive databases. After 12 books with publishers, my next book will be open-access.
I am hardly a defender of the "academic establishment." But I am a defender of writers, and I believe our work should be respected. We should at the minimum have a choice about whether or not to give their work to tools that chop careful writing into bits that are mashed up with unedited garbage. They should have the right to choose whether to give their work to billionaires - people who have no problem paying engineers or lawyers, but somehow think writers should work gratis, and call that "justice."
We all have to make our moral choices.
I would rather stand on the shoulders of giants, who I can name and honor,
then on the backs of writers whose work is stolen, and made invisible.
Hope you'll take a look at the Substack @GrahamLovelace, to see what other writers and artists are saying on these topics.
https://substack.com/@glovelace/note/c-107995873
Amen to everything you had to say, and this single sentence would have been worth the price of admission if there had been a price of admission. 👇
“I wanted to see this through, identify every ring in this macabre circus of well-insulated and privileged academese spilling from her throat in globules of effervescent bullshit.”
Michelle, did anyone there oppose the speech?
No, actually, they did not. They did the opposite--they gave her a standing ovation. It was really reprehensible.
The anti-AI current among humanists is really rising.
It's because they don't know what it is and how to us it. They have been ignoring it, and now it is a boogie man.
I couldn't agree more. It's truly shocking to me--and you're right, it WON'T age well. It's absolutely irresponsible for educators to ignore LLMs for a whole host of reasons (see my own substack), but it's practically sinister for the PRESIDENT of 4 Cs to deliver such a poorly researched and narrow-minded argument. Those who end up mastering AI will be light years ahead of those who demonize it. And they already are.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157114380?source=queue
Or we do know, and reject it.
Exactly. The vitriol and unsupported claims are wild here. Informed refusal and ethical critique are not "ignoring." Most of us "know what it is and how to us [sic] it." Some of us are early adopters who have chosen to read and contribute to the research on its impacts. Some of us also work with educators and actually listen to their concerns. Some of us even do research on intellectual property, environmental impacts, privacy, and surveillance.
I respect that very much.
Higher education seems increasingly divided over AI.
For some, yes. I'm astonished by how many haven't tried the tech.
Or how many think that having it write an email is "trying it."
Yes, or using it to search in a simple way.
The shift from publication to generation is a subtle one, and not everyone gets it - my notes here: https://aiandacademia.substack.com/p/living-in-the-generative-age
It’s also just the trajectory where the C’s have been headed for some time now. MLA is more nuanced about AI in first-year courses.
Oh interesting. I heard MLA had some fierce anti-AI panels.
Bryan, MLA kept their logo on the 3rd White Paper on AI. It's a decent piece, but the CCCC leaders undercut their own members on the task force by pulling their support for the joint effort. Who would have thought MLA would be more forward-thinking than writing folks? But then the CCCC took a turn too far into identity politics in recent years. I'm probably going to let my membership lapse.
I'm NEVER going to another CCCC conference again. It was horrible.
Do you know why CCCC split from MLA on this?
I missed the speech, but I did read her and her co-authors' accompanying blog post with a Quickstart Guide to Refusing AI.
While not as angry as you clearly are, I agree strongly that the CCC Chair's remarks represent a "well-insulated and privileged" position. Your point about how AI can help disadvantaged students likewise seems to have been missed on our tenured colleague.
In any case, I shared a few notes toward at rebuttal at my blog. https://iggyo.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-ccc-and-refusing-ai-rebuttal.html
Michelle, you are right that the current educational backlash is wrong-headed, although I do think that generative AI raises serious issues about personal authorship and attribution in writing classrooms. If you are interested, I’d really like to interview you for an AI-related book project - your work interests me. Feel free to contact me here @marthanichols or on Linkedin.
I'd love to have a chat, Martha!
The way you describe your reaction to that presentation you sat through makes it seem again to any downsides to chart of AI for education. Can you confirm that? I see generative ai mostly as a being able to augment human users in their critical thinking but I also see the perils of the automation bias and ognitive offloading and the fact that these tools are not designed to improve the critical thinking of the user and more designed to get a job done. Curious to hear your thoughts on this!
Also, That presentation you had to attend reminded me of this famous story lol.
The historical piece you're referring to is the myth of Theuth (or Thoth) and King Thamus, which appears in Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus," written around 370 BCE. This story is one of the earliest and most influential critiques of writing in favor of oral tradition.
In this myth, Socrates recounts how Theuth, an Egyptian god (whose sacred bird was the ibis), presented his invention of writing to King Thamus of Egypt. Theuth proudly claimed that his invention of letters "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."[3]
However, King Thamus rejected this claim, arguing that writing would have the opposite effect:
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom."[3][7]
The king further argued that people who rely on writing "will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."[3]
This myth encapsulates several key arguments against written word in favor of oral tradition:
1. Writing weakens memory by reducing the need to remember things internally
2. It creates a false sense of wisdom without true understanding
3. It replaces authentic knowledge with mere information retrieval
4. It lacks the dynamic, interactive quality of oral discourse
This critique contains a profound irony, as noted by some scholars, since Plato himself was recording these arguments against writing in written form[5]. The story highlights the tension between emerging literate culture and traditional oral methods of knowledge transmission in ancient Greece.
The myth of Theuth and Thamus continues to be relevant in discussions about technological transitions, from writing to digital media and artificial intelligence, all of which raise similar questions about how new information technologies might affect human cognition and wisdom[6][7].
Citations:
[1] Socrates: Writing vs. Memory | ETEC540: Text Techologies https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept13/2013/09/29/socrates-writing-vs-memory/
[2] Toth and the King in Plato's Phaedrus - Bored Absurdist https://boredabsurdist.com/2024/01/03/toth-and-the-king-in-platos-phaedrus/
[3] Socrates on the Invention of Writing and the Relationship of Writing ... https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
[4] Thamus and Theuth - Phaedrus 274b–279b - John Uebersax https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/myths/phaedrus.htm
[5] Plato rejects writing by the mouth of Socrates http://www.antiquitatem.com/en/origin-of-writing-memory-plato-phaedrus/
[6] The Echoes of Theuth: From Writing to the Internet and AI http://www.fillipconsulting.com/2024/03/the-echoes-of-theuth-from-writing-to.html
[7] The Myth of Thamus and Theuth | Conversational Leadership https://conversational-leadership.net/myth-of-thamus-and-theuth/
[8] The Limits of Writing Theme Analysis - Phaedrus - LitCharts https://www.litcharts.com/lit/phaedrus/themes/the-limits-of-writing
[9] The Myth of Thamus and Theuth | Conversational Leadership https://conversational-leadership.net/blog/consequences-of-writing/
[10] Regardless of our feelings or opinions, we should not judge the past ... https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/vtl5tm/regardless_of_our_feelings_or_opinions_we_should/
[11] Plato's Argument Against Writing - Farnam Street https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
[12] The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing https://librarysearch.adelaide.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay/alma9927697184601811/61ADELAIDE_INST:UOFA
[13] Unintended Consequence - | Lapham's Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/future/unintended-consequence
[14] True Stuff: Socrates vs. the Written Word - Wondermark https://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/
[15] Thanos - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanos
[16] "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35201427
[17] Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing
[18] Writing the History of Memory - Bloomsbury Publishing https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/writing-the-history-of-memory-9780340991886/
[19] Memory as Narrative Power - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXGrySz6ETE
[20] View of Review of Mayer-Shonberger's Delete https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3493/3447
[21] Plato: Phaedrus - Socrates - English https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/plato/guide13.html
[22] Thamus - Plato: Phaedrus https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/plato/terms/thamus.html
[23] Phaedrus Summary and Analysis of Discussion of Writing: 274b-277a https://www.gradesaver.com/phaedrus/study-guide/summary-discussion-of-writing-274b-277a
[24] The Myth of Thamus and Theuth - Bearskin https://bearskindigital.com/2015/01/20/the-myth-of-thamus-and-theuth/
[25] Plato on Writing https://websites.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
[26] Thamus the Luddite: steepholm - LiveJournal https://steepholm.livejournal.com/335863.html
[27] The God Thoth and the Invention of Writing - Anthologia https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-invention-of-writing
[28] The Story of Thoth Symbol in The Shallows - LitCharts https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-shallows/symbols/the-story-of-thoth
[29] We're playing the role of King Thamus - Technocomplex https://technocomplex.substack.com/p/were-playing-the-role-of-king-thamus
[30] Historian - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian
[31] Historians and "Memory" - The Journal of early American Life https://commonplace.online/article/historians-and-memory/
[32] Excerpt from Technopoly http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/mcreynolds/phil201.7/technopoly.htm
[33] Plato on Writing https://people.umass.edu/sharris/in/e491ho/PlatoWriting.htm
[34] Socrates, Memory & The Internet | Issue 122 - Philosophy Now https://philosophynow.org/issues/122/Socrates_Memory_and_The_Internet
[35] [PDF] The Myth of Theuth, God of Writing -- excerpt from Plato's Phaedrus http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/unlocked/plato/plato-myth-of-theuth.pdf
I discuss that very myth in one of my past posts. Thank you.
Which post. Would like to read further! and which item are you classifying as myth?
Welp! How frustrating!!
It was extremely disappointing. I will never have respect for that organization again, nor will I ever be publishing any of my research there.
Wow! That’s quite an insane story. This kind of hatred of new technology is intensely hard to overcome or even face.
I am wondering when the Luddite Rebellion will rise. I'm picturing them hitting the sides of the big data warehouse with rollingpins and rakes.
My eyes are wet with tears from laughter and the irony of a complete disconnect from what is happening in this disruption of this general purpose technology. Thank you for writing this and thank you for being such a strong writer and advocate for students who are gonna need the tools and will benefit from our expertise as professionals and scholars to know how to use them wisely and usefully most of the time.
I'm so glad I made you laugh. I try to deal with my anger with humor. :)
I always saw a fellow soul in you and your writing, Ruth! Yes, practicallity is what keeps us innovating. We are student focused and we want to make sure they have all the best tools to move forward.
Wow, this really fired me up, Michelle. We are surrounded by people with blinders on. They are not preparing students for the 21st Century, they want to put them in a hackney coach and send them down the line. My gosh it is like a horrific time machine that nobody wants to step into in my sphere. I am sorry you had to witness that, sorry for the sake of students and the fact they will not be made ready because of ignorance and shear ridiculousness. I am so over this kind of mindset or lack of it.
The most disheartening thing of all was when we were leaving and hearing all the excited chatter because she had given them all a reason not to innovate or grow. It was horrible.
The struggle between embracing transformative change and protecting 'traditional' values, with students caught in the crossfire.
I wish this were true, Carlo. I wish they were struggling. They aren't. They are actively ignoring what is going on and putting their fingers in their ears while they hum revolutionary tunes. This doesn't help our students. It's educational malpractice.
I'm a little gobsmacked by this piece, which doesn't represent the talk particularly well (it's thankfully available for folks to read, and I recommend it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-LaO7oMoWFBcXgjoyylD0FRqrB1jQZMq9NttPfZOKY/). But I'm particularly at a loss to understand your point here:
'She complained that Generative AI had taken the work of writers and scholars unlawfully and that it was built upon the work of people who had never been compensated. I thought about those years she probably spent on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all those free blog sites she likely used to spread the rhetoric of her greatness around, all those sites she never paid for. Did she think there was no reckoning, no payment required in the end? As early as 2010, my big data buds were telling me that data was the new oil, that all that stuff on social media was being scraped up. I didn’t know what it was being scraped for—but the message was clear: “If the service is free, YOU are the product.” Does she think she should be compensated, but not all the companies she climbed up on her way to the podium?'
Internet-based companies like Meta and free blog sites' public-facing story has been that they make their money on advertising, to which those of us who use those sites (often grudgingly) consent. I see no reason to spit vitriol at someone who choses to stand up for the intellectual property rights to which they and others are entitled, especially when it involved scraping for an undisclosed purpose. I find the justification that we all should have known bad things would happen when we shared our work with people on sites that had a disclosed revenue stream to be, at best, a reach, and at worse, a willful and disturbing misunderstanding of consent.
I'd also say that corporations are not people, Citizens United aside. There is a difference between picking a flower from a garden and running it over with a combine. Scale matters.
Also, what?
"She posited that GenAI is only one step from General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) and that AGI was in place to promote eugenics and white supremacy. I wanted to walk out, but I couldn’t look away. Her talk was like a wreck on the side of the highway. I was fascinated by the gruesome brutality and bloodletting, the shattered glass, the bent metal of her argument."
Fun fact: the stated goal of OpenAI has been AGI from the get-go. (And plenty of people working in AI, including Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun who fight about just about everything else, agree that LLMs won't get us there, and Professor Sano-Franchini agrees with them in the talk in that regard; she certainly isn't saying "AGI [is] in place.") Professor Sano-Franchini was articulating the connections - that she shares with many other scholars and writers - of the ideologies underpinning that goal of AGI. See, for instance, Gebru and Torres's famous article The TESCREAL Bundle, https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/, to which she refers. This isn't niche research; anyone working in AI and ethics knows about this article and the public discourse from many actors in Big Tech on which it is based.
Calling her argument a wreck on the highway without any actual counterargument or research to speak back to her and the scholars she cites is lazy. I'd certainly ask for more from my own writing students.
Thank you for sharing this here. It's a bit appalling how some people in this comment section couldn't be bothered to verify whether or not this blog post accurately represents SF's work. (As you've noted: it doesn't.)
To be honest, this is a disgraceful and uncollegial screed. Most people would be embarrassed to think this garbage, let alone post it.
Hahahahahahaha