Artificial Writing: a first evaluation

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LIKE every other domain of everyday life, education at all levels has been battered by digital technology even in places where it isn’t called for. Now the alarm has been raised about a new AI program, ChatGPT, which can be used, it is said, to write academic essays. A free trial version of the program was launched at the end of 2022, and gained a million subscribers in the first month. You give it a prompt in natural language and it returns a coherent and apparently cogent text. Before coming to a judgement about it, one should of course try it out, and my first impression is that its essay writing skills are stilted but it looks like it might make a useful research tool. Its great advantage, after trying it out with a few queries (called prompts), would appear to be its speed, which is much faster than using Google, and where Google delivers you a list of results which you then have to trawl through, here you get an immediate answer in formal, polite, and completely impersonal prose.  Read more

Archival Values: A report on losing a documentary archive

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Almost thirty years ago, I attended an international seminar at the Babelsberg film school in Berlin, the first time that teachers of documentary from west and east Europe met together to compare notes on pedagogical methods and values. On the second day, Klaus Stanjek, the seminar’s convenor, disappeared and returned later in the day with a van full of film cans. ‘Someone called from the other side of the city,’ he explained, ‘they said people at the old East German film school were about to junk their archive, so I just had to go and rescue what I could before it was too late’, and then he rushed off to get some more. I am put in mind of the episode because I now find myself forced to oversee the loss of an archive that I have myself built up over several decades and which then expanded considerably after I moved to the University of Roehampton in 2007. 

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‘High-profile figures criticise university’s plans for large cuts to arts and humanities…’

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As one of those referred to in this report by Times Higher Education (20.11.20) on cuts at Roehampton as having already taken voluntary redundancy, this new round of cuts (and more voluntary redundancies – I already know of some) is deeply disturbing. You might say I made a timely decision, but it was a personal one and I didn’t think I was leaving a sinking ship. Any university that shoots itself in the foot in this way will go on hobbling for a very long time.  Read more

On packing up my library

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Walter Benjamin wrote his delightful talk ‘Unpacking my library’ when he recovered his books after two years in storage. I turn to re-read it as I prepare to pack up my own far less impressive library in readiness to move house. The reason for the move is that I’ve given up my job as a part-time professor, and the reason for that arises from the calamity of coronavirus, not directly on myself but on the university.  Read more

Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

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Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.

Free Associations 78, 2020

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Chanan 334-1265-1-PB

 

Connectedness

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Remember six degrees of separation – the theory that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by a maximum of six steps? Also known as the six handshakes rule. Welcome to the world of coronavirus. This morning a healthy young friend who was due to come round this week emailed to say he won’t. He is self-quarantining because a friend of his who stayed overnight had begun to show symptoms.

On Friday I attended a workshop at the University of Leicester, where numbers were slightly depleted by two or three non-arrivals due to understandable reluctance to travel from abroad; two of them gave their contributions via internet – is this how things will now shape up?

We are living in an accelerated world of multiple forms of connectedness, which feed off each other and borrow each other’s imaginaries. Computers become infected with viruses too. 

Phone conversations with fellow members of the elderly-at-risk category. We agree that travel on the tube is to be avoided.

The media are busy generating a whole series of imaginary scenarios, stretching from the scientific to the fictitious. There are plenty of models to draw from. It seems that in France, sales of Camus’ The Plague have risen sharply. Perhaps we should all be reading Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But as Covid-19 gets closer, the feeling I have is of an impending disaster movie which is still in script stage, and with various options under consideration. Meanwhile the globalised world economy is already in serious trouble, and our idiot politicians don’t know which way to turn.

The cognitive map of a refugee

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Eleonas bis

At the bottom of this long, pitted and dusty road in Athens is the Eleonas refugee camp, located in a run down industrial estate. This is my only picture because we weren’t allowed to film or take photos inside the camp, which currently houses around 1600 refugees from many different countries, but mainly Afghanistan and Syria. More are expected.

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Filming the Greek Crisis

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Athens, 20 July 2015

Two weeks after the referendum in which the Greek people delivered an overwhelming No to Austerity, one week after the Syriza government nonetheless accepted the terms dictated by Brussels, many people in Greece feel either betrayed or confused or both. I’m in Athens with Lee Salter to film an episode for our new film, Money Puzzles, and attend an international conference called, hopefully, Democracy Rising, where some of the best brains of the academic left from Europe and North America have been trying to grapple with the contradictions which these unexpected developments have now thrown up, and relate them to the broader canvas of the anti-capitalist social movements that have emerged in the last few years around the world. It is not an easy brief, in part because of a degree of disconnection between the academic language of many of the panellists and the political need for plain-speaking. This disconnect is also part of the political blockage of the left that we all need to learn to overcome. We need to speak simple truth not only to power but also each other.

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Radical Film in Birmingham

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One of the notable features at the inaugural conference of the Radical Film Network in Birmingham last weekend was the mix of generations, from new blood to survivors from the days of the IFA (Independent Filmmakers Association) in the 1970s. Speaking as one of the latter, it was pleasing to find that what the comrades did back then has not been entirely forgotten, but more important, that this new initiative has a genuine sense of history, of historical inquiry, and is disposed to look to past experience both in order to commend what was achieved and to mull over its weaknesses.

But of course the political conjuncture of post-crash times is markedly different from those days, and there’s been a signal change in the political modus operandi. Read more