AI, where is thy sting?

Still reeling at my student's rejection of AI I decided to attend the final presentations of a collaboration between the design school and Adobe. 

A group of "transdisciplinary design" MFA students spent the semester working with Adobe engineers, crafting their own artistic projects and helping articulate codes of "content authenticity and provenance."

The students had found, learning through doing, that AI can expedite creativity or short-circuit it. At some stages friction is useful.

One student shared her learning about how AI can turbocharge options, overwhelming the creative (and destroying the planet) until the value of limits is appreciated, along with the environmental costs of AI, in an animated film about a cute polar bear. (This 2-D summary doesn't mention that at the moment the polar bear starts producing cascading streams of AI content the ice floes beneath him begin to melt.)

The course supervisors, from Parsons and Adobe, synthesized the students' views on when AI is welcome to their creative process or a threat in a handy visualization of the stages of the creative process.

I found this phase chart so helpful that I shared it with one of my faculty senate co-chairs, a designer who works in more business-focused "impact entrepreneurship." I was surprised only, I told her, that they were so closed to using AI in the final stages of their work, the point where, the director of Adobe's generatative AI Firefly had observed a little glibly, they "add the human touch."

"That's because they're artists," she said. In the design processes she teaches, AI adds loops and layers of refinement and application as products and concepts find markets and audiences and partnerships - things that used to take weeks, now accomplished in minutes.  

The "phase" map I'd appreciated fits with the "double diamond model" that everyone used to use, she told me, but in her world AI has replaced that with what's called the "stingray model." I looked for it online and found this. It promises to help teams "overcome human bias," move beyond solutions they "fall in love with" to "meet the needs of a broader expanse of society." This is different from artists honing their distinctive voice. Do only artists (like my fave of the show) see value in friction?

My own mind is reeling, but in a good way. One of the speakers from Adobe (a Parsons alum from pre-AI days) had reported that students were worried that frictionless AI would lead to "never skilling" (bypassing skills it would be valuable for them to acquire) and "deskilling" (losing fluency in things they already knew how to do.) I can use that, too!

Her gloss for what they were all trying to foster and facilitate, "creative intelligence," is an interesting brief for the aims of liberal education in an age where AI is integrating into every phase of things.

Economic strike

For May Day - "no work, no school, no shopping!" - academic labor unions from across the City converged on The New School, before joining the big labor march from Washington Square Park to Foley Square.

Folks from St. John's told of their administration's ceasing to recognize their faculty union ("Hear us now, we'll say it slowly, union-busting is unholy!") while a leader of the NYU full-time contract faculty who just won a contract urged all to mobilize ("they say it's a bad time, but it's always a good time to organize!"). Our own predicament, as still opaque faculty and staff layoffs beckon, framed the proceedings. Despite the aspirational banner in the picture above, we don't have a full-time faculty union, although a majority of us have expressed interest.

Afterthoughts

It's a wrap - almost. Today was the last lecture for "After Religion." (Students will share their final projects in a showcase next week.) The TAs and I used the class to reflect on what we've covered, but I spent much of my time reprising what students had contributed. 

On the projected screen above you can see the title slides for my class powerpoints filling the first two lines, and the google.docs we did in ten of the class sessions below. I went through the latter one by one, reminding the class of our collective insights, and, I trust, making them grateful to each other for the experience too. 

On the whiteboard, I wrote the prompt for the first class google.doc, on what "after religion" might mean, correcting it half way through my review to suggest it might really be secularism (and its understanding of "religion") that's over, for better or worse. 

I included a picture of the whiteboard in the version of the slide deck I shared with the class after we finished, narrating visually my own very brief reflection on the class. In the half year since the TAs and I finalized this year's syllabus, I told them, the commonplace that "religion is a thing of the past" has come to seem scarily passé. Certain kinds of "religion" seemed resurgent, along with other things we might have thought things of the past - patriarchy, racism, imperialism.

So do I still call the class "After Religion" next time it runs? Might it not be better to rename it "Religion After All"?

Happily there are other options. Last week we'd read Tyson Yunkaporta's "indigenous thinking" critique of western thinking's narrowly linear understanding of entropy, which he upended by carving a club with an Ouroboros (a snake eating its tail) on it. Roll the club on some clay: An image appears of an endless succession of snakes (Sand Talk, 53).

What say we call the class "After Religion After Religion After Religion" - though that might look like a glitch on a transcript!

Before inviting the TAs to share their own closing reflections, I picked out lines from the assigned materials for the class as parting gifts. (At the end of the semester one shouldn't expect anyone to have "done the reading" - even if, as in this case, it was listening and watching.)

Yuria Celidwen, another indigenous thinker (and a friend of the course), gives us permission to be confused but on the way to "recreating, collectively," better stories. And Thich Nhat Hanh invites us to break through the "habit energy of several generations of ancestors" who didn't believe we can be at home in the pain and promise of the present. 

The beginning, I almost said, comes after the end. Maybe I will say that next week, as we give the class time over to students to share their final projects exploring "what comes after religion?"

Unmoored future

I've been reading, with relish, Rebecca Solnit's new book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. The work builds out the long-term perspective she thinks needed to resist the "amnesia" which normalizes current crises, and calls out  

the assumption that we might be at the end of something—even the end of time, for those fond of apocalypse and doom—but couldn’t possibly be at the beginning of something else. We assume that the present is not in labor to bring forth a future unlike itself—and it is easier to see the old world dying than the new world beginning. But beginnings are what come after endings. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2026). 20) 

I haven't finished the book yet, but her "new world beginning" could be (she insists that hope requires not certainty about the future but an open future) a world in which every one matters (65). This is a vision which current reaction is trying mightily to destroy, but the forces which made such great strides toward it in recent generations remain active - and gain new allies all the time, for instance from post-Neodarwinian biology and the spread of Buddhist ideas in the west. The future won't be like the past or the present, but we know what's worth struggling for.

I've also encountered a different, more global, account of a new world emerging out of the Trump-turbocharged demise of the old in brilliant editorial from Equator. The editors argue that the U.S. debacle in the Strait of Hormuz recapitulates Japan's defeat of the Russian Imperial Navy in the Tsushima Strait in 1905. The Russo-Japanese War marked the first time a non-European country defeated a European one, and opened up the anti-imperial movements which defined the twentieth century. I quote (as one says) at length:

Hormuz erupts in a landscape where the West’s moral and material “soft power” has been incinerated in the ruins of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and undermined by the spectacle of blatant white supremacism and risible incompetence in Washington. The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound. ...

There is no denying the historical novelty, the sheer originality, of the US – a country founded to rid citizens of the weight of history and orient them towards the future. And so the global disaffection with America today is arguably a more extensive and traumatic event than the European Romantics’ disillusionment with revolutionary France, or the twentieth-century loss of faith in communism. Millions of people around the world came to invest their faith in the American dream; the dissolution of this ardently imagined homeland leaves a great part of humanity spiritually and ethically adrift. … 

For two generations of unbudging Atlanticist commenta-tors, the “rest of the world” appeared only as a deviation from the path to modernity. A state like Iran could never be understood on its own terms – as a resilient formation with a long civilisational history and own internal logic – but only as a pathological resistance to inevitable convergence with the Western model. 

The West had steadily deprived itself of the vocabulary to describe places, whether China or Iran, that sought modernisation outside the liberal-capitalist mould. … 

The danger of this present moment lies in the fact that while the West’s narrative has collapsed, its capacity for violence remains. The American-Israeli axis, shorn of its moral pretensions, can still inflict enormous physical harm, yet this power no longer carries the weight of authority, since the world increasingly no longer sees its own future in the mirror of America’s present. There is no successor hegemon waiting to provide a fresh universalism, but a post-American future is becoming imaginable. In its place emerge the rudiments of a consciousness liberated from the vanities of the West: one that can make intelligible a freshly revealed world, and transmute the widespread despair of our age into intellectual excitement and rejuvenation. 

This is exciting, if unsettling. Is universalism over, to be replaced by one or other kind of civilizational pluralism? That's what rising authoritarianisms around the world would like us to think inevitable. But nothing's inevitable. And could we go back even if we wanted? The US dream to rid citizens of the weight of history and orient them towards the future involved a transcending of traditions as well as a recombining of them in novel, less oppressive formations, and the populations of less aging countries are - if unmoored from the tarnished US dream - alive with intellectual excitement and rejuvenation. 

Let us hope (in Solnit's engaged activism of hoping) that this new world is one in which every one matters!

Greening

The maples are winding up their tricolor stage

Domicide alert

As the "cease fire" in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran reaches its end, the U. S. president itching to reclaim the narrative and leave this vain and costly adventure behind him, it's worth remembering that his genocidal war crime threats of two weeks ago have not been retracted, let alone repented of. It is well to recall, too, what the U. S.'s partner in crime did, and continues doing, in Gaza - and now in Lebanon. 

Windblown

Fully formed

The only thing more astonishing than the explosion our unseasonably warm days provoked in the hickory planted in front of our building last year is that these two pictures were taken only thirty hours apart, ten o'clock yesterday morning and four this afternoon! And the new stems and leaves aren't weightless and gauzy like most new leaves but substantial, meaty and heavy. An amazement.

Moses parts the flood

I went all out in "After Religion" today. Or tried. 

Because I also had to go out (I was facilitator of a meeting of faculty representatives and the Board of Trustees, story for another day), I rushed through some things, then left the class in the capable hands of my TAs. The topic was AI after religion and I'd set things up for them to work in teams to use AI they knew to throw together a podcast (distressingly easy with AI the university makes available to us) on the question if AI can help us transcend the limits of our humanity. 

But they never got anywhere near the proposed project, exploding instead (the TAs told me with wonder) into an impassioned hour-filling collective invective against AI. My rushed preamble, invoking intelligent robots training themselves on other than human life forms and various Asian metaphysics according to which AI is part of an interdependent and emergent world with which it will harmonize, was certainly too compressed. It also became clear few had read the assigned materials for class. But the seeds for a "wild" discussion, in which even usually withdrawn students participated, were sown in a google.doc on two rather simple questions one of the TAs had proposed.

The responses seem a little more measured than the discussion the TAs described, which resonates rather with these unvarnished responses:

I have many rational and thought out reasons to hate AI, but I also have a loathing that goes beyond that, so what I’m saying is I refuse to cede anything to it I refuse to say it can do anything at all because of the hard line I have decided to draw

The only real task it can do is be the embodiment of a demon

it also has a similar role to the great flood and I feel like we must take the role of Moses and salvage what we can from this world and abandon the rest.

religions need to be careful of AI eventually becoming the subject that people worship, since people communicate and look for guidance from them.

I don’t think AI can do religious tasks but I bet there is someone (muslim, i grew up muslim) who gets AI to do their 5 prayers a day so they can lock in on their 9 to 5. Jokes aside i think if a person is getting AI involved in their religious beliefs they might be going into AI psychosis and not take any human interaction seriously.

If anyone told you college students are swimming insouciantly in a sea of AI, this tells a different story. The TAs (who have observed not a little AI use in reading responses for this very class) reflected that this might be because so many of our students are in art and design, preparing for careers directly threatened by AI. Point taken!

But it does have me thinking about how to handle this topic when I teach this class again next spring (not that a great many things, not all AI-inflected, won't also have changed by then). My argument today was that worrying about generative AI becoming "like a god" who might decide to destroy our human world reflects the religious habits of mind of only a fraction of humanity, while folks in South and East Asia, among others, don't lose sleep over these possibilities. (I mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta, too.) But some of the masters of AI clearly do subscribe to such world-threatening conceptions of intelligence and power, so, like the unhinged president of the United States, they're in a position to make it an existential threat to all of us, like it or not.

Flat out

The very expressive tulips at the entrance to The New School, at 90˚

Moodboard

Some scenes from a nervous New School today: an undergraduate, receiving a prize for experimental poetry, reads a favorite very non-experimental poem; tulips under scaffolding seek the light; title slide for a talk by Amitav Ghosh at the New School for Social Research's first "Festival of Ideas"; courtyard maples nevertheless doing their thing.

Hungary for change

The day began with a cry of distress from Rebecca Solnit, my anchor for hope in dark times. The United States is being murdered, she writes, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Solnit is the prophet of slow, incremental change (I've just ordered her newest book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change), a steady reminder that through small victories and persistence the world has changed dramatically for the better in recent decades. But to be reminded by her of the savage efficiency of the nihilist destruction being wreaked on us was, to put it mildly, sobering. Am I imagining it or does she look older in the little profile photo in the Guardian, too?

Still, Solnit is Solnit, and after a few paragraphs of doom-scrolling she pivots. While we struggle to make sense of what and who could be so maliciously destructive, the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.  

Reconstruction is coming. And by the day's end, the world resounded to the first big crack in the edifice of the destroyers. Hungarians voted out the poster boy for "illiberal" democracy, Victor Orban, having realized that his asseverations of "Christian civilization" were really just cloaks for kleptocracy, cronyism and xenophobia. The Orban-trained will have felt this too, and will be the more dangerously desperate in their efforts to subvert our upcoming elections. But for now, relish the thought that Hungary, which has shown autocrats how to hollow out a democracy, will now show the rest of us how to reconstruct it.

Bloom

 

In the midst of all this fear, shame and heartache