Tag Archive for: Humanities

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

Pointless Obstacles

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If the death of one Margaret Thatcher has served to remind us that the present crisis has its roots back in the 80s on her watch, one of things that Thatcherism was responsible for was the corruption of the value of words. It may seem trivial compared to her other feats, but replacing terms like ‘passenger’ with ‘customer’, or calling Vice-Chancellors ‘Chief Executives’, was an important part of the conquest of the public sphere by neoliberal ideology. I’m reminded of this by having to grapple again with something I’ve written about before: the REF—on which the next round of university research funding depends and for which submissions are being busily prepared—and especially the new ‘impact’ agenda. The very word ‘impact’ has now become an odious one, emptied of its former richness of meaning, reduced to a code word with arcane referents. Read more

Against ‘Impact’

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The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates. Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals. However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about ‘impact’. So, she’d found out about the institutional regime of evaluation that now governs research and learned the lingo, but is this the game that applicants ought to be playing? Read more

Job Prospects

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These are not the best of times for people completing their doctorates and looking for academic posts, especially in fields like film studies, and when we recently advertised two jobs in the area at the university where I teach, we knew we’d have plenty of applicants. Even so, we were taken by surprise when the number totalled 190. Read more