The Narcotized Text
Oct. 1st, 2025 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingLarge Language Muddle
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/
But a still graver scandal of AI — like its hydra-head sibling, cryptocurrency — is the technology’s colossal wastefulness. The untold billions firehosed by investors into its development; the water-guzzling data centers draining the parched exurbs of Phoenix and Dallas; the yeti-size carbon footprint of the sector as a whole — and for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.
We're now a month into the semester, and I'm working my way through my classes' first batch of reading responses. It's impossible to exaggerate how obvious the computer-generated essays are. How obvious, and how insulting.
I can do nothing about this, unfortunately. I send a brief but stern email, and then I move on. Thankfully, the majority of the students are still able to write a 400-word "essay," and it makes more sense to devote my limited attention to responding to their work instead of attempting to reason with (or enact punitive measures against) the students who simply copy and paste machine-generated text.
Still, it's frustrating. I wish my university allowed me to push back against such an obvious reliance on LLMs; but, just as this essay points out, that's not going to happen.
The spurious social-justice case sometimes made for AI tools — as field-leveling time savers for working or disadvantaged students, who are said to lack the “luxury” of reading and writing with their brains — augurs a still more dismal underside: a system of schooling further polarized between a privileged layer of small seminars and bespoke mentorship, and a vast corporate-backed lower order of luckless pupils whose instructors are reduced to little more than deputized Claude moderators.
"Claude moderators," by the way, are automated algorithmic content moderators. Basically, the essay is saying that the precariously employed underclass of university instructors are being forced into a position in which we're little better than AI ourselves.
This is an insulting way to put it, and the unsigned writers are using these terms because... Idk, they seem like insufferable litbros to be honest. What I mean is that they see the world in terms of a divide between "an educated elite" and "the luckless masses," which is a laughably false dichotomy.
There is in fact a lot of room between "elite" and "illiterate," and there's also a great deal of interesting work being done at the margins. When the authors champion "independent intellectuals," for example, I don't think they're talking about someone like me, who's run a literary book review blog for more than ten years precisely because my work is so consistently rejected by people like them.
So, to me, this essay isn't wrong, necessarily, but it demonstrates an onanistic obsession with intellectual privilege that runs counter to its stated goal of resisting the encroachment of LLMs into public discourse. As the market for writing shrinks due to lack of funding, building even higher walls around "the literary community" isn't effective praxis.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/
But a still graver scandal of AI — like its hydra-head sibling, cryptocurrency — is the technology’s colossal wastefulness. The untold billions firehosed by investors into its development; the water-guzzling data centers draining the parched exurbs of Phoenix and Dallas; the yeti-size carbon footprint of the sector as a whole — and for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.
We're now a month into the semester, and I'm working my way through my classes' first batch of reading responses. It's impossible to exaggerate how obvious the computer-generated essays are. How obvious, and how insulting.
I can do nothing about this, unfortunately. I send a brief but stern email, and then I move on. Thankfully, the majority of the students are still able to write a 400-word "essay," and it makes more sense to devote my limited attention to responding to their work instead of attempting to reason with (or enact punitive measures against) the students who simply copy and paste machine-generated text.
Still, it's frustrating. I wish my university allowed me to push back against such an obvious reliance on LLMs; but, just as this essay points out, that's not going to happen.
The spurious social-justice case sometimes made for AI tools — as field-leveling time savers for working or disadvantaged students, who are said to lack the “luxury” of reading and writing with their brains — augurs a still more dismal underside: a system of schooling further polarized between a privileged layer of small seminars and bespoke mentorship, and a vast corporate-backed lower order of luckless pupils whose instructors are reduced to little more than deputized Claude moderators.
"Claude moderators," by the way, are automated algorithmic content moderators. Basically, the essay is saying that the precariously employed underclass of university instructors are being forced into a position in which we're little better than AI ourselves.
This is an insulting way to put it, and the unsigned writers are using these terms because... Idk, they seem like insufferable litbros to be honest. What I mean is that they see the world in terms of a divide between "an educated elite" and "the luckless masses," which is a laughably false dichotomy.
There is in fact a lot of room between "elite" and "illiterate," and there's also a great deal of interesting work being done at the margins. When the authors champion "independent intellectuals," for example, I don't think they're talking about someone like me, who's run a literary book review blog for more than ten years precisely because my work is so consistently rejected by people like them.
So, to me, this essay isn't wrong, necessarily, but it demonstrates an onanistic obsession with intellectual privilege that runs counter to its stated goal of resisting the encroachment of LLMs into public discourse. As the market for writing shrinks due to lack of funding, building even higher walls around "the literary community" isn't effective praxis.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 08:32 pm (UTC)(I don't mean that everything has to be spoon-fed and exhaustively explained. But I feel like I have experienced a distinctly non-zero quantity of "literary fiction" where being impenetrable is the point, and....idk. It feels wrong to me. but what do I know.)
no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 10:26 pm (UTC)My apologies if I've told you this story before, but I once managed to get an academic article published simply by merging every three normal-sized paragraphs into one impenetrable mega-paragraph. The article kept being rejected by stupid
older male peerreviewers for stupid reasons; but, as soon as I formatted the text differently, it was accepted immediately with no editorial comments. Because apparently, impenetrable = intelligent. To this day I still can't believe that trick worked.no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 06:54 pm (UTC)