This is a post about humanity
As the summer winds down and the new semester approaches, I do wonder just how much time is left before the AI makes the traditional education system irrelevant if not defunct. To be clear, I'm neither a doom crier nor a prophet for its abilities, but I do converse, experiment, prompt, and push back on the various platforms -- Gemini, Claude, Chat-GPT, Perplexity. I've had discussions about astrology versus institutional religions, how capitalism and democracy are inherently incompatible, the similarities between pious behaviors such as head covering among the Puritans and Muslims, the role of lighthouses in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and certainly entertained the (pathetic) attempts at integrating things like logo design and branding into the mix (Canva inside ChatGPT).
This post is a response to none of that. This comes from the heart, which AI knows nothing about.
Rewatching The Penguin and at the end of the first episode, there's a cover song that definitely gave some Portishead vibes, but not nearly as impactful on that emotional level. So, I navigated over to YouTube, started with Glorybox, and was reliving the night I saw them in concert at The Hammerstein Ballroom -- my husband had bought me a ticket (one ticket) for my birthday. Maybe Portishead is a strange choice to go to by yourself, but I still remember watching the turntablism in awe and feeling Beth Gibbons' vocals pulse through my being. Confusing Roseland with Hammerstein (not even in the same city) I listened next to Roads, live at Roseland. About 15 seconds in, I lost it--I began sobbing, loudly, forcefully, a cathartic release of emotions that was completely unexpected, but also I understood that this was related to everything that's going on in our country coming to a head.
Sure, AI can provide a quick and simple analysis of the meaning of the lyrics, this has been going on for some time. But unlike a human, these tools have no emotion, no capacity for psychic catharsis, no ability to plumb the depths of our unconscious. It's quest for meaning goes no deeper than the text, and can't extrapolate (or fathom) what it feels like. And it made me sad that so many students now, instead of watching or listening or reading and actually feeling something about the material they're presented with, they bypass/short circuit /downplay their own humanity to find what they think is a good answer. [I'm not weighing in on whether it's easier or not]
But I know, for instance, when I screen a piece like "Slice" by Elizabeth Streb, that those who choose not to watch but simply ask the AI are missing out on that experience that engages our being, and you can tell by how they respond who didn't actually watch. I can't change that, but I can tell them what they're missing--the adrenaline, the astonishment, the manic sanity of it all--and no AI can do that like a human being.
The point here is that we must be careful in giving away these things, in giving up human expression to a machine that has none, and, once again, can never know what it feels like--zero emotional intelligence.
And according to AI, an entity with no or low emotional intelligence struggles to recognize and manage their own emotions, lacks empathy, and has difficulty understanding and responding to others' feelings. They may exhibit behaviors such as self-centeredness, poor listening, defensiveness, difficulty accepting feedback, inability to adapt, or frequent emotional outbursts.
Human expression belongs in the hearts of humans, not flying from our fingers over the keyboard through some prompt that can never live up to our own instinctual, primal, emotional, spiritual totality, that reduces everything to an empirical analysis. The singularity is still a sham, and this is one way we can still resist.
janainaart
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
dededos