I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in the reference text — without scanning for hours.
(source: am a literature student - UK open university)
I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a specific book (China Miéville's Kraken). It gave a plausible answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a quote using 'knackering' and it gave me a quote with the word 'knacking'. I asked it to put the quote into Harvard reference style which it did, but didn't provide a page number, which it said I'd have to look up myself.
I think relying on ChatGPT for an essay would be fairly frustrating, and if you used ChatGPT to develop your thesis, you could very quickly get a generic plagiaristic answer (based on the quotes everyone else used) rather than one than that captured your own response to the text, and which contained factual errors.
[Edit] It also said that "gods inhabiting USB sticks are presented matter-of-factly" in Kraken which is false (there are no mentions of USB). When I asked it for a quote to support its assertion, it replied "While the novel doesn't explicitly depict gods inhabiting USB sticks..."
Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT. In the same vein, I would imagine 'The City and The City' would end up with a bunch of half-hallucinated forum-posting and reviews regarding Disco Elysium.
> Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT.
Indeed. I'm doing a close reading of Kraken and have been amazed at the number of 'weird' entities and plot events that Miéville introduces [0]. It would be very easy to hallucinate a few more.
There are more than 100 passages in Kraken where Miéville names people, places and events that occur in other media or culture. For example, in a list of people associated with submarine technology, he throws in the name of the underwater stuntman [1] who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Again, it would be easy to hallucinate additional content.
[0] For example, a secondary character who was originally an ancient Egyptian burial slave-statue who went on strike in the afterlife, and in modern London is now the trade-union convenor for the Union of Magicked Assistants.
I didn't upload the text; I was trying to see what happened if one asked a question about a specific book, as if I was someone trying to do an essay in a hurry. I know the text quite well so could easily spot the hallucinated answers but someone with less knowledge might have been fooled. The experience reconvinced me not to rely on this specific LLM for help with my essays.
Well, you have to give the tool a chance. If it can’t even see the text you’re asking about, it’s going to
rely on whatever quotes and references it can crib together from reviews and blogs and comments.
Try it for a text that is in the training data, or the public internet, or can be put into the context window - then it might help.
Well, yes, I'm sure if I uploaded a full text and spent time on the prompts I could get better results, although these might be similar to other students doing the same thing, which might get me a plagiarism fail.
My point was that I would be very hesitant to rely on ChatGPT as an assistant in a real literature task. Many of the texts on my Eng Lit course are in copyright, as is all of the module material (the OU's course-specific textbooks). The hallucinations are a real show-stopper.
On the topic of hammers: "if you don't hold the hammer at exactly 2.6cm from the end of the handle and strike the nail with 6N of force at an angle of 58 degrees then of course you won't get a good nail strike into the wood. Oh and you must only use acacia sourced from the subtropics".
Give me a break, it's a hammer. This is a perfectly normal "use" of ChatGPT and a good example of how a literature student may opt to try and use AI to make their work easier in some way. It also conveniently demonstrates some of the shortcomings of using a LLM for this sort of task. No need to call them a dumbass.
OK, that last sentence would be incredible. I think this is tongue in cheek, but I was an English lit major so I feel the need to defend my honor. XD
I don’t think you’d do well in 400-level classes this way. English Lit isn’t as much of a joke as STEM students make it out to be[1]: it gets a lot harder than the bullshit 101/201 courses everyone is required to take. You’re supposed to try to be original in your analysis, and it has to be rigorously proven within the text itself.
Probably as a grad student you’d start arguing against other critics points, but not undergrad. I think that would hold for almost all schools because no one at that level in that field wants to hear from someone who doesn’t know how to analyze a text in the first place. It’d be like a high school student trying to tell you about software (or systems, network, data, etc.) engineering.
For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past contributions wouldn't work, either. If you’re arguing someone else’s analysis is wrong, you’re going to need to read and understand the whole thing. And if you’re just copying from AI, you’ll have a hard time defending your position.
Although, man, if you can understand the subtext of a book from listening to an audiobook *while gaming*, AND you have time to watch all the online lectures about a book!? I need to talk to you about time management, my friend!
1 -
I have been involved in so many forums and subreddits where people try to analyze books, comics, TV, or movies. Based on what I have seen come out of people there —- most of you MFers couldn’t pass 300-level classes.
People can’t analyze literature for shit, and I think it’s because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary analysis because high school and required college classes are junk. It’s actually really hard to read five novels in month, keep track of all the characters and plots and themes and so on, and understand all of them well enough to write a coherent argument. I saw so many kids in my major crying about their GPA getting tanked because they weren’t ready for rigorous analysis. FWIW, I was 25 as a Junior (third year of uni, in the US), and had spent the last few years reading exercise physiology papers while bored at work. Seeing real science changed my life, and I wanted to apply their level of rigor to my own analysis of any kind. It’s why I’m good at my job now, tbh.
You probably wouldn’t be arguing that previous critics are wrong but surely to get top marks you’d be expected to know what relevant literary criticism has already been published and then build on
that in some fashion. No doubt just reading that stuff would sharpen your own insights. AI should make it much easier to find the most relevant criticism and put it in context.
AI should also be able to help you gather evidence from the reference texts, because it can exercise reasonable judgement without any constraint on patience or access or time. Consider the recent social media sensation about the lady who got a PhD for analysing how smell factors into the fates of literary characters. AI can quickly find thousands of examples, and then filter them as desired.
You could even have the AI write essays for you - “analyse this novel through the lens of ____ theory” - where no literary criticism already exists to review. You could have it generate any number of such essays, applying theories/frameworks you might not even know, but want to understand better.
I think it’s possible to “read” an audiobook while doing something monotonous like walking, driving, or, yes, gaming. The lectures you probably have to treat like podcasts and just play them in the background and pick up some ideas.
//For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past contributions wouldn't work, either. If you’re arguing someone else’s analysis is wrong, you’re going to need to read and understand the whole thing. And if you’re just copying from AI, you’ll have a hard time defending your position.
QFT. It's like the Sparknotes scenario I outlined in my post above - what you get from this level of engagement isn't insight, least of all a debatable position, it's just a loosely cohesive bunch of table-quiz facts.
//People can’t analyze literature for shit, and I think it’s because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary analysis because high school and required college classes are junk.
Because most of what is being examined is passive/active voicings, brain-dead symbolism, and ham-fisted and dated metaphors as literary vehicles.
Even at University level there should be an emphasis on a 101 level course hammering home the importance of Critical Theory in Literary Criticism as a framework and approach for disseminating texts. Without a basic understanding of the cultural, historical, and ideological dimensions under which a text was conceived and published, you haven't a hope of climbing the foothills of Beckett, Camus, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Shaw...
> Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming
I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this would be like saying you've "watched" a movie because you had it on your second monitor while you were playing counter strike. There's a fundamental difference in hearing a book read to you and actually listening and engaging with the audio on a meaningful level. The latter requires focus, and you're not going to be able to do that if you're gaming away at the same time.
Put another way, why would someone who presumably loves reading bother studying literature if they don't actually care enough to pay attention to the books they supposedly loved?
I’ve listened plenty of audiobooks while driving or walking, why would I not be able to do the same while playing GTA?
The reason to do this is that just sitting in a chair ploughing through books gets very unappealing after a while. And there’s a lot of books to get through.
If you're getting what you want out of your reading then more power to you, but I think you'll find that devoting your full attention to what you're doing fundamentally differs from doing it in the background. Why play GTA when you could just listen and enjoy the book? What is GTA adding to that experience?
I think a lot of people, including, I presume, most who willingly choose to study literature, enjoy reading as an activity unto itself and so don't feel the need to add additional distractions. Not everybody finds sitting down and "ploughing through" (how disdainful a phrase!) a book unappealing.
A serious literature degree might prescribe a reading list of ~10 books per week. Some of it stuff you don’t even like but is “important context” or whatever. At a certain point it becomes a chore for anyone. You need to find ways to help you get through more.
The reading (listening) of course is not “in the background”. Maybe sometimes you’re distracted and have to skip back 30s and re-listen. Fine. If the game is too distracting, fine, play something simpler, or watch soccer, do chores, anything where the moment to moment continuity does not require effort to track, but still gives you some benefit.
To those that missed the joke - 'consuming' the classics is the antithesis of a liberal arts education. The value lies in the engagement, the debate, the Hegellian dialectic involved in arriving at a true grok level understanding of the text or topic.
It would be akin to reading the Sparknotes of Ulysses and being able to reference how it draws heavily on Homer's Odyssey, or utilises stream-of-consciousness narrative to great effect; and thinking that, as a result, you have the faintest understanding of the text, its conception, or its impact.
The OP almost hit on this with the 'Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford,Yale,MIT etc...'. Unlike coding bootcamps or similar, universities are not VOCATIONAL TRAINING - no matter how skewed towards that end-goal the American Economy is dictating such. As just about any Educator can attest, no amount of listening to youtube lectures will replace the University experience, nevermind the Oxbridge/Ivy League experience.
The pedagogical benefits are simply unrealisable from an AI prompt 'streamlining'- i.e. being forced to read and engage with topics outside of your comfort zone to maintain your GPA, engaging and working with people from a diversity of outlooks and backgrounds, benefitting from the 1:1 and small group sessions with the Academics who often wrote the literal book on the subject in question.
If the intersection of JSTOR and Machine Learning didn't reduce humanities to Cory Doctorow level script-kiddyism, the hoi polloi throwing prompts into a hallucinatory markov chain isn't likely to advance or diminish Academia anymore than the excess of 'MBA IN 5 DAYS!' or '...for Dummies' titles previously available.
I ask this as someone with a lot of respect for education and the Humanities: do the majority of Humanities students actually get this type of education?
Any conversations I've had with students or graduates of Arts, Literature, etc. indicates that their education was very much about consuming and regurgitating. Maybe the top 5% approach their studies the way you're describing but I've never seen anyone like that in the wild.
I’m not being satirical. And nowhere did I suggest that you don’t still read the actual text you’re studying. There are more ways to “engage” with literature than just going to seminars.
